HCIL 2019–2020 News Roundup

Looking back at a year of accomplishments.

Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash.

There is no doubt that 2019–2020 was yet another fruitful year for HCIL. Throughout the whole year, faculty, staff, and students in the HCIL have been receiving great news, from best research paper awards at top research venues to research grants and fellowships from both government agencies and industrial partners. These accomplishments show that the HCIL community is continually working hard and pushing the frontiers of research on Human-Computer Interaction.

As always, the success of HCIL wouldn’t be possible without the generous support from our sponsors. Below is a summary of all the excellent news and our sponsors for the year 2019–2020.

July 2019

Niklas Elmqvist and Jason Farman were promoted to full professors.

April 2019

Hanuma Teja Maddali received a Graduate Summer Research Fellowship Program from UMD graduate school.

August 2019

Niklas Elmqvist’s research project “DataWorld” received a National Science Foundation grant. This research aims to build an Augmented Reality framework that Visualizes Data in Everyday Settings.

Alisha Pradhan received a SIGCHI Student travel grant from ACM SIGCHI.

October 2019

Hernisa Kacorri was part of a team that received a Best Paper Award at the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) for their paper “Sign Language Recognition, Generation, and Translation: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.”

November 2019

Amanda Lazar & Emma Dixon received an Honorable Mention Award at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) for the paper “Safe Enough to Share: Setting the Dementia Agenda Online.”

Amanda Lazar, Kausalya Ganesh, Emma Dixon, Hanuma Teja Maddali, and Shaan Chopra received Best Presentation in Tech + Research at Technica 2019.

Alisha Pradhan received a Dr. Joan Giesecke Health Informatics Fellowship and Research Improvement Grant ($1050) from iSchool at the University of Maryland.

Jonathan Lazar received a Rachel Olivero Accessibility Innovation Award from the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland.

January 2020

Keith Marzullo & Paris Miri was part of a team that received Stanford eWear seed grant to study facilitating affect regulation in youth with autism spectrum disorder.

Yuhan Luo received the Outstanding Graduate Assistant (top 2%) Award from the University of Maryland.

February 2020

Jonathan Lazar received an Exemplary Researcher Award from the University of Maryland Research Excellence Celebration.

March 2020

Kyungjun Lee, Abhinav Shrivastava, and Hernisa Kacorri received a Best Paper Award at the IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) for their paper titled “Hand-Priming in Object Localization for Assistive Egocentric Vision.”

Emma Dixon received the Graduate Research Fellowship Program from National Science Foundation.

May 2020

David Weintrop was awarded the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Alisha Pradhan received a Graduate Student Award from UMD graduate school.

Yuhan Luo and Alisha Pradhan received a Research Improvement Grant from iSchool at the University of Maryland.

Research Sponsors

In general, research in the HCIL is partially sponsored by

• Adobe Research
• Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E)
• Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) at the University of Maryland
• College of Information Studies (iSchool) at the University of Maryland
• Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland
• Department of Defense (DoD)
• Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
• Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS)
• Federal Highway Administration (FHA)
• Google
• Institute of Museum and Library Services
• Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA)
• Maryland Transportation Institute
• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), ACL
• National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• National Library of Medicine (NLM)
• Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland
• Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland
• Spencer Foundation
• Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative
• UMCP & UMB — AI + Medicine for High Impact (AIM-HI) Challenge Award
• University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS)
• United States Air Force