In June, former INIT Lab PhD student and TIDESS project member Nikita Soni (now a tenure-track assistant professor at UIC) presented our lessons learned in our TIDESS work related to interface design for interactive map-based datasets at a workshop on… Read More

INIT Lab undergraduate student Ailish Tierney has been a member of the lab and the TIDESS project since the Fall of 2019. Academic year 2021-2022 was her senior year and we are proud of her for getting accepted into the… Read More

In Spring of 2022, the INIT Lab had its first two undergraduate research assistants complete their senior theses! While we have had a long history of including undergraduates in our research, some of whom have led projects, first-authored papers, and… Read More

The INIT Lab has been collaborating with Dr. Kathryn M. Ross at UF in the Department of Clinical & Health Psychology on a clinical trial of an mHealth app for supporting weight loss and weight loss maintenance (for more, see… Read More

Former INIT Lab undergraduate research assistant Julia Woodward is first-author on a recent paper on her dissertation work that appeared at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’2022), held in person in New Orleans in May… Read More

The INIT Lab is supporting a new project, being funded by DARPA and led by Ruiz HCI Lab director and project PI Dr. Jaime Ruiz, on how to design more effective intelligent agents for real-time AR-based (augmented reality) task guidance.… Read More

This past year, the TIDESS team was also able to publish some of our findings relevant to science learning for adults and children in the International Journal of Science Education: Part B: Communication and Public Outreach (IJSEB). Our paper is… Read More

The INIT Lab and TIDESS project are proud to announce that our work appeared at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in Fall of 2021! This paper reported our investigations into how groups of users (including both adults… Read More

Fall 2021 saw INIT Lab PhD student Nikita Soni successfully defending her dissertation work “Designing Interactions for Multi-touch Spherical Displays to Support Collaborative Learning in Museums” on October 14th! Defenses remained virtual this past year for safety and convenience during… Read More

In a previous tweet from 2020, INIT lab director Lisa Anthony shared the news that we were collaborating with UF Health researchers, including Dr. Mamoun Mardini from UF College of Medicine’s Department of Aging & Geriatric Research, to investigate the… Read More

Recently, the INIT Lab learned that one of our collaborators, Dr. Danielle Jake-Schoffman, from UF’s College of Health and Human Performance (HHP) in the Department of Health Education & Behavior, has received an NIH-sponsored R21 grant called “FamilyFit: Promoting Family-Based… Read More

In previous posts, we noted that the goal of the POSE project is to understand how children perform motions (i.e., their motion qualities) so we can improve automatic recognition of children’s motions. To accomplish this goal, we began by investigating… Read More

I am excited to share that the our poster “Romadoro: Leveraging Nudge Techniques to Encourage Break-Taking” was accepted to the 34th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST). In our poster, we present a Chrome plugin designed to… Read More

INIT Lab PhD student Aishat Aloba made us proud and defended her dissertation work “Tailoring Motion Recognition Systems to Children’s Motions” on June 18th! While we are emerging slowly from COVID-19 restrictions, the defense was held virtually for safety and… Read More

Check out our recent blog post on the UF IFAS blogs website!

In 2020, the INIT Lab collaborated with the Ruiz HCI lab, in particular lead Ph.D. student author Julia Woodward, on a study to understand how well Fitts’ Law and FFitts’ Law applies to children’s touching behaviors on touchscreen devices. This… Read More

The INIT Lab and Ruiz HCI lab at UF have a new NSF grant, in collaboration with Dr. Tempestt Neal and Dr. Shaun Canavan at USF, to pursue a project to understand users’ mental models of continuous (passive) authentication in… Read More

Dr. Alex Shaw graduated with his Ph.D. and moved on from the INIT Lab in Spring 2020. We are pleased to share that a survey paper Alex produced as part of his dissertation work has recently appeared in the Interacting… Read More

The INIT Lab and the Ruiz HCI Lab have been collaborating with Dr. Kathryn Ross in the College of Public Health and Health Professions at UF to investigate research questions related to Mobile Health (mHealth) applications on the MyTrack+ project… Read More

As part of our TIDESS project, we have been investigating ways in which children and adults interact with interactive spherical displays. As such, we have been porting our tabletop prototype [1] (Figure 1) onto a physical spherical display [2] (Figure… Read More

We are pleased to share that our paper “Examining the Link between Children’s Cognitive Development and Touchscreen Interaction Patterns” was accepted as a short paper to ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI). The INIT Lab and Ruiz HCI Lab… Read More

Hello! This fall (2020), I wrote and submitted an application for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). There is a lot of information about the NSF GRFP available on the main NSF page as well as… Read More

As outlined in a previous blog post of mine, undergraduate research experience can be a rewarding experience for an individual. It can give students more experience working in a team environment and improve their confidence for example. In this post… Read More

Former INIT Lab PhD student Jeremiah Blanchard is continuing to wrap up publication of his final dissertation-related studies and data analysis. We are proud to announce that he has recently had a paper accepted to the upcoming ACM Special Interest… Read More

In previous posts, we have discussed our ongoing work on the TIDESS project related to understanding how children and adults interact and learn from science data visualizations around large interactive surfaces.  For my dissertation work, my plan is to focus… Read More

In our previous posts, we have noted that the pose project aims to understand how users articulate gestures to improve whole-body gesture recognition algorithms. As a first step to enable this understanding, we investigated the variations in how users move… Read More

The INIT Lab and Ruiz HCI Lab have a joint paper to appear at the upcoming ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), which will be held as a virtual event in October of 2020. The work behind this paper… Read More

The INIT Lab and TIDESS team are proud to report that we’ve recently published a paper in the Research in Science Education journal, entitled “Ocean Data Visualization on a Touchtable Demonstrates Group Content Learning, Science Practices Use, and Potential Embodied… Read More

On April 22, 2020, I completed and passed my Ph.D. thesis proposal defense with the help and support of my thesis committee members. The main aim of my thesis proposal is to explore how to design gestural interaction techniques for… Read More

Check out our remote video presentation for our CHI’2020 paper on the TIDESS website!

Today, the INIT Lab is proud to announce that PhD student Jeremiah Blanchard defended his dissertation work “Building Bridges: Dual-Modality Instruction and Introductory Programming Coursework” this afternoon! We held the defense virtually due to the ongoing COVID-19 restrictions. Jeremiah’s committee… Read More

In my previous post, I mentioned that I have been able to observe the process of running user studies with younger children and have started assisting in person with my teammates, Alex Shaw and Ziyang Chen. After observing the process… Read More

Check out our recent blog post on the TIDESS website!

In a previous post, we discussed the process of calculating interrater reliability (IRR) on qualitatively coded data using Cohen’s kappa. However, there are many different tests that can be used to calculate IRR, depending on the type of qualitative coding… Read More

This week was a big one for the INIT lab! Two PhD students, Aishat Aloba, and Nikita Soni, both in the UF CISE Human-Centered Computing (HCC) PhD program successfully defended their dissertation proposals! Aishat’s topic is centered around whole-body interaction… Read More

In a previous post, we discussed the process of analyzing qualitative data using a codebook and codes. A code is a word or phrase that helps define a piece of qualitative data as belonging to a category to help draw… Read More

The INIT lab is proud to share that PhD student Alex Shaw defended his dissertation work “Automatic Recognition of Children’s Touchscreen Stroke Gestures” earlier today! Due to the ongoing COVID-19 restrictions, we held the defense virtually. Alex’s committee members were… Read More

Our paper presenting what we can learn from children and PE teachers in the formative design of exergames, titled “Toward Exploratory Design with Stakeholders for Understanding Exergame Design” was accepted as a Late-Breaking Work in CHI 2020: the SIGCHI Conference… Read More

As I was not able to present my paper (Dual-Modality Instruction and Learning: A Case Study in CS1) at SIGCSE 2020 due to travel restrictions and social distancing directives, I prepared a video presentation which can be watched at the… Read More

As a member of the INIT lab, I’m writing today’s blog post about the qualitative coding of research data. Depending on the type of data, research data can be analyzed either quantitatively or qualitatively. Researchers use quantitative approaches (e.g., means,… Read More

I have noticed undergraduate students get involved outside of the classroom to develop skills that the classroom setting cannot teach. This gives students the chance to develop professionally and make their resumes more diverse and appealing for the path they… Read More

Since my last post about our study, the Cognitive Development and Touchscreen Interaction project has gone through several rounds of study recruiting and running. We have recruited our participants from many interested local families with children aging between 4 to… Read More

The cognitive development project, which is related to the Understanding Gestures project, is one of the projects in which I have been taking part since joining the INIT Lab. As introduced in the previous post,  the goal of the project… Read More

Check out our recent blog post on the TIDESS website!

INIT Lab PhD student (and full-time UF CISE lecturer) Jeremiah Blanchard‘s latest paper on hybrid blocks- and text-based programming environments for introductory computing classes at the college level has been accepted to the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science… Read More

In a previous post, I mentioned that we were working on selecting a representative set of motions from our Kinder-Gator dataset [1] to help us test recognition of whole-body motions. We have since designed a toolkit to visualize this representative… Read More

Both formal and informal educational venues such as classrooms and public science centers are increasingly using touchscreen interfaces for differing sizes and form factors such tablets, multi-touch flatscreen tabletops, and interactive spherical displays for learning purposes [1,2]. With this shift… Read More

A few weeks ago, the UF Department of CISE held their 2nd annual Halloween decorating contest! The INIT and Ruiz Labs participated again this year and the theme was “Haunted Movie Theatre,” in which your favorite scary movie characters come… Read More

INIT Lab PhD student Jeremiah Blanchard recently attended the VL/HCC 2019 conference in Memphis, TN, to present his paper: “Effects of Code Representation on Student Perceptions and Attitudes Toward Programming,” which was announced in a previous blog post here. At… Read More

In previous posts, we have discussed our ongoing work on understanding the differences between child and adult motions to improve recognition of children’s motions. My paper, “Tailoring Motion Recognition Systems to Children’s Motions”, was accepted to the 2019 International Conference… Read More

The INIT Lab is happy to announce that PhD student (and full-time UF CISE lecturer) Jeremiah Blanchard‘s work has been accepted for publication at the upcoming VL/HCC conference: the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages & Human-Centric Computing. The conference will… Read More

Over the course of the last few weeks, I had my first experience of running a user study with younger children, particularly children age 6 to 7 from PK Yonge Blue Wave After School program. My PhD mentor, Alex Shaw,… Read More

At the recent Interaction Design & Children (IDC) 2019 conference, INIT Lab Director Dr. Lisa Anthony gave a crash course in quantitative research methods, and how to apply and adapt them to child-computer interaction. Topics covered include: the types of… Read More

The INIT Lab, in collaboration with Dr. Pamela Wisniewski from the University of Central Florida (UCF) has been working on a project whose aim is to understand the real-world interface design practices of developers of children’s mobile touchscreen apps. We… Read More

Check out our recent blog post on the TIDESS website!

The INIT Lab has its first paper on usable privacy and security! In a collaboration with UF FICS (Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research) faculty member Dr. Patrick Traynor, INIT Lab director Dr. Lisa Anthony contributed to a paper investigating the… Read More

As part of our ongoing studies with the PufferSphere spherical interface, the TIDESS team has decided to create a prototype that implements many of the same features present in our tabletop prototype, which we’ve discussed previously. This will allow us… Read More

Since I joined the INIT lab, I have been working on preparing a study related to the Understanding Gestures project. The goal of the project is to examine the relationship between previous findings about children’s touch and gesture interactions and… Read More

Check out our recent blog post on the TIDESS website!

Check out our recent blog post on the TIDESS website!

For five years, the INIT lab (and our past and present collaborators!) was engaged in an NSF-funded research project to study physical dimensions of children’s touchscreen interaction use, e.g., what happens when they try to acquire onscreen targets or make… Read More

Over the past months, I have continued my work on the understanding gestures project by working on developing a set of new articulation features based on how children make touchscreen gestures. Our prior work has shown that children’s gestures are… Read More

In a previous post from a few years ago, we mentioned that our findings on the Pose project established that there were perceivable differences between child and adult motion. Our next steps were to quantify what these differences actually were. As… Read More

In our previous post, we mentioned that we published the Kinder-Gator dataset, which contains the motions of 10 children and 10 adults performing motions in front of the Kinect.  Currently, we are exploring recognition of whole-body motions in the dataset. Since we… Read More

Check out our recent blog post on the TIDESS website!

Check out our recent blog post on the TIDESS website!

As part of the ACM SIGCHI 2018 conference, INIT Lab director Lisa Anthony helped co-organize a ‘special interest group’ (SIG) session on child-computer interaction. This SIG is organized by some of the child-computer interaction research community every year. This year,… Read More

Recently, we posted about a paper that Lisa co-authored with long-time collaborators, Radu-Daniel Vatavu and Jacob O. Wobbrock, that appeared at MobileHCI’2018. The paper presented some optimizations for our well-known $P gesture recognition algorithm to make it feasible to run… Read More

On May 29, I completed and passed my PhD dissertation proposal defense. The proposal defense process can vary widely among institutions and even among departments in the same institution, so in this post I outline the process I followed in… Read More

We are proud to be able to say that our lab has had a paper accepted to the upcoming ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) 2018 conference! This paper presents an analysis of children interacting around a large… Read More

This summer, I have been working on a project related to the $-family of gesture recognizers. The $-family is a series of simple, fast, and accurate gesture recognizers designed to be accessible to novice programmers. $1 [1] was created by… Read More

The TIDESS Team has been investigating the natural and intuitive ways users interact with spherical displays by continuing to prototype on the PufferSphere. In my understanding as a new member of the team, the TIDESS project primarily aims to investigate… Read More

I just completed my qualifying exam and in this blog post, I will detail what I think I learned from the qualifying exam (quals) process. In the CISE department at UF, the qualifying exam is the first milestone used to… Read More

And now for something a little different! The INIT Lab has long been conducting research on how children’s physical capabilities (e.g., motor skills development) affects their interactions with touchscreen devices like iPads and smartphones. Other researchers, like Alexis Hiniker and… Read More

We are excited to announced that there is a new member of the $-family of gesture recognizers! A paper on a new super-quick recognizer optimized for today’s low-resource devices (e.g., wearable, embedded, and mobile devices) that I (Lisa) co-wrote with… Read More

I am pleased to be able to say that I was recently honored with the UF Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering Faculty Advising/Mentor of the Year Award for 2017-2018. This award focuses on undergraduate research and mentoring, an activity which… Read More

In a previous post, we discussed conducting a study in which we used the Kinect to track the motions of ten children and ten adults performing whole-body gestures, for example, wave your hand and jumping jacks. From this study, we… Read More

In the INIT Lab, we focus on natural user interaction for children. Many of these modalities, such as touch, gesture, and speech, involve some type of recognition process to understand what the user input is. To determine how accurate a… Read More

The INIT Lab Kids Pose project has had a poster paper accepted to the upcoming Eurographics conference, to be held in Delft, The Netherlands, in April 2018. This project is a collaboration with the Jain Lab, directed by Dr. Eakta… Read More

In the last update, we were analyzing the data collected from the physical education (PE) teachers’ focus group sessions using affinity diagramming. Recently, we have extracted themes for the design of motion-based exertion games based on this affinity diagram, similar to… Read More

We are pleased to share that our paper “Using Co-Design to Examine How Children Conceptualize Intelligent Interfaces” has been accepted to the upcoming ACM SIGCHI 2018 conference, to be held in April in Montreal, Canada! The first author is our… Read More

Check out our recent blog post on the TIDESS website!

Last spring, I participated in a project in a game design course. The project involved transforming a board game, previously designed by the University of Florida Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants, to a mobile game. The objective of the… Read More

In our last post, we shared that we had a paper accepted to the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) 2017, to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, UK. The paper was titled “Comparing Human and Machine Recognition of Children’s… Read More

In a previous post, we discussed our ongoing work on studying children’s gestures. To get a better idea of the target accuracy for continuing work in gesture recognition, we ran a study comparing human ability to recognize children’s gestures to… Read More

The Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering Department of the University of Florida sponsored several students to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration this past October 4th – 6th in Orlando, FL! Several INIT members were able to attend (Dr. Lisa… Read More

This summer, I was accepted as a participant in the ICER2017 Doctoral Consortium. It was a fantastic experience! The ACM partially funded my trip through a travel reimbursement, so I was able to attend the ICER2017 conference in Tacoma, WA,… Read More

It’s been a long time since my last update, so there’s lots to cover! As a recap, I have been investigating hybrid environments, which provide multiple representations of the same code. In particular, I’ve been looking into Pencil Code, which… Read More

In previous posts, we have discussed our ongoing work on improving recognition of children’s touchscreen gestures. My paper, “Human-Centered Recognition of Children’s Touchscreen Gestures”, was accepted to ICMI 2017’s Doctoral Consortium! The paper focused on my future research plans as I… Read More

The TIDESS team has begun qualitative analysis on the data we collected from the tabletop user study to try to characterize the processes of how people learn from data visualizations on interactive tabletop displays. We collected both audio and video recordings, as well as logs… Read More

In our previous update, we were in the process of conducting affinity diagramming sessions to walk the data collected from our focus group sessions with children. Based on our affinity diagram, we extracted themes and brainstormed design ideas for the… Read More

In my last post, I talked about themes, screen size, proportions, and looking at other lab’s websites to understand what our site should have. The new website is complete. In my last post, I talked about themes, screen size, proportions,… Read More

We are currently continuing our work in gesture recognition by studying how well humans can recognize children’s gestures. We will compare human recognition rates to the rates of the automated recognition algorithms we used in our previous work. This will help us… Read More

In our previous post on this project, we discussed getting design input from children for designing intelligent interfaces such as speech, gesture, and touch. We are collaborating with Jason Yip from University of Washington on this project. Jason is the… Read More

The INIT lab is updating their website by moving from Drupal to WordPress. Our purpose is to increase awareness of the research we conduct here at UF. Drupal uses blocks and modules whereas WordPress has a greater access to themes… Read More

Check out our recent blog post on the TIDESS website!

In the last blog post, I wrote about how we completed our study – of a summer camp in which kids learned how to make games in Scratch – and how we were analyzing the data. We’ve completed that analysis… Read More

In our previous update, we presented our demo prototype of a motion-based exercise game to children ages 5 to 10 for feedback during three focus group sessions. The prototype presented was used as a design probe to help children understand… Read More

Check out our recent blog post on the TIDESS website!

In a previous post on the MTAGIC project, we presented results of a study that found that interface complexity (simple, abstract interface vs. complex interface) affected children’s performance of some touch interactions and did not affect gesture interactions on smartphone… Read More