November 22, 2024 Dr. Alexandra (Sasha) Portnova, who was a postdoctoral research with CREATE in 2022-24, was interviewed about those experiences as a NIDILRR-funded fellow and about her work in rehabilitation research. In the National Rehabilitation Information Center interview, Portnova spoke about the value of the CREATE ARRT fellowship in transitioning from the overwhelming life as a Ph.D. student into a faculty career. Currently, Portnova is a research scientist in the Neuromechanics & Mobility Lab, directed by CREATE associate director…
Category: RESEARCH
News about research from CREATE faculty and partners and peers.
Not just a wheelchair: Disability representation in AI
November 19, 2024 CREATE Ph.D. graduate Kelly Avery Mack led research that investigated how AI represented people with disabilities. Specifically, Mack’s team wanted to know if AI-produced images and image descriptions perpetuated bias or showed positive portrayals of disability. The team included four research scientists from Google Research: Rida Qadri, Remi Denton, new CREATE Advisory Board member Shaun K. Kane, and Cynthia L. Bennett, Ph.D., UW Human Centered Design and Engineering. Examples of positive disability representation in AI-generated images where…
HuskyADAPT Mini Hackathon: Adaptive Solutions
November 18, 2024 This month, CREATE’s ARRT postdocs postdocs and HuskyADAPT students partnered with our partners King County Library Systems (KCLS) and Washington Assistive Technology Act Program (WATAP) to put on an impressive and successful hackfest. The goal was to design adaptations to everyday challenges for people with disabilities. All six teams came up with innovative solutions. No prizes were given out, but the best “prize” is that there is a plan to further develop the most feasible solutions and give…
Mobile 3D printer can autonomously add accessibility features to a room
October 29, 2024 Built on a modified consumer vacuum robot, MobiPrint can automatically measure a room and print objects onto its floor to add accessibility features, home customizations, or artistic flourishes to the space. The prototype was built by a research team in the Makeability Lab. The team, led by CREATE Ph.D. student Daniel Campos Zamora and CREATE associate director Jon E. Froehlich, customized a graphic interface that lets users design objects that the robot has mapped out. The team…
CREATE at ASSETS 2024: Papers & Workshops
September 25, 2024 If we missed any CREATE research, please email Liz Diether-Martin with the details. Awards ASSETS 2024 Best Paper Award:Engaging with Children’s Artwork in Mixed Visual-Ability FamiliesArnavi Chheda-Kothary, Jacob O. Wobbrock (CREATE associate director), Jon E. Froehlich (CREATE associate director) ASSETS 2024 Best Demo Award:Touchpad Mapper: Examining Information Consumption from 2D Digital Content Using Touchpads by Screen CREATE Ph.D. alumni Ather Sharif and Venkatesh Potluri, Jazz Ang (CREATE Master’s student), Jacob O. Wobbrock (CREATE associate director), Jennifer Mankoff (CREATE Director) Papers…
Ability-Based Design Mobile Toolkit: Developer Support for Runtime Interface Adaptation
Despite significant progress, most apps remain oblivious to their users’ abilities. To enable apps to respond to users’ situated abilities, CREATE researchers developed the Ability-Based Design Mobile Toolkit (ABD-MT). ABD-MT integrates with an app’s user input and sensors to observe a user’s touches, gestures, physical activities, and attention at runtime to measure and model these abilities, and to adapt interfaces accordingly. With the goal of optimizing user interfaces to better suit users’ abilities, earlier systems attempt to create the “optimal”…
CREATE awarded $4.6M for research on AI risks, opportunities for people with disabilities
September 10, 2024 CREATE will be leading a Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on participatory, assistive, inclusive, and responsible use of AI technology, funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), a program of the Administration for Community Living, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The interdisciplinary team of researchers involved with this RERC come from the College of Engineering, the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, the Information School, Disability Studies, and…
Feldner team funded to study health outcomes
September 9, 2024 The collaboration, including researchers from the UW Department of Rehabilitation, the UW iSchool, and the University of Pittsburgh, is funded by a 5-year, $3.2 million NIH R01 grant — the first funding of its kind from the NIH to support ableism and health disparity research. “The long-term goal of this work is to reduce disparities and maximize participation, health, and quality of life in partnership with people with mobility disabilities. This work will leverage our team’s multidisciplinary…
CREATE researchers find ChatGPT biased against resumes that imply disability, models improvement
June 24, 2024 This is the takeaway from CREATE Ph.D. student Kate Glazko, who got curious when she noticed recruiters posting online that they’d used OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools to summarize resumes and rank candidates. Advised by co-author and CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff in the Allen School, Glazko studies how GAI can replicate and amplify real-world biases — such as those against disabled people. So how might such a system, she wondered, rank resumes that implied someone had a disability?…
Breaking Barriers with an Emotion Translator: A Glimpse into the Future of Communication
June 20, 2024 Autistic individuals can face difficulty navigating social and emotional interactions, leading to exclusion, misunderstandings, and stress. CREATE faculty member Annuska Zolyomi presented research at CHI 2024 that seeks to tackle these difficulties through a novel approach. Zolyomi, an assistant professor of Computing & Software Systems at UW Bothell, and co-author Jaime Snyder, an Associate Professor at the UW Information School, asked autistic adults to imagine futuristic technology that could translate emotions just as spoken languages are translated. The result was a…
Anat Caspi speaks at White House panel on AI in Transportation
June 17, 2024 CREATE associate director Anat Caspi spoke on ‘Mapping, Visualizing, and Building the Future’ as part of a White House panel on AI in Transportation. Focused on developing a national transportation infrastructure observatory and an accompanying application ecosystem, the panel gathered innovators in transportation, aiming to align end users, researchers, entrepreneurs, and federal agencies while addressing privacy, cybersecurity, and policy challenges. Dr. Caspi highlighted the Taskar Center’s pioneering work on AI and transportation, particularly through the Transportation Data…
CREATE Papers and Presentations at CHI 2024
This is a work in progress as there are many papers and presentations from CREATE researchers at CHI 2024, the ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. We appreciate your patience! For a list of all papers from UW researchers, see DUB’s roundoup. Papers A Virtual Reality Scene Taxonomy: Identifying and Designing Accessible Scene-Viewing Techniques Rachel L. Franz, UW Information School (iSchool); Sasa Junuzovic, Microsoft; Martez E Mott, Microsoft. An Emotion Translator: Speculative Design by Neurodiverse Dyads Annuska…
Empowering users with disabilities through customized interfaces for assistive robots
March 15, 2024 For people with severe physical limitations such as quadriplegia, the ability to tele-operate personal assistant robots could bring a life-enhancing level of independence and self-determination. Allen School Ph.D. candidate Vinitha Ranganeni and her advisor, CREATE faculty member Maya Cakmak, have been working to understand and meet the needs of users of assistive robots. This month, Ranganeni and Cakmak presented a video at the Human Robot Interaction (HRI) conference that illustrates the practical (and touching) ways deploying an…
CREATE AI+Accessibility Hackfest – Winter ’24
March 6, 2024 – post-event update In March 2024, CREATE gathered with industry and community partners for a hackfest to explore and invent the future of AI and Accessibility. The event featured invited speakers Heather Nolis, Ian Stenseng, and Shaun Kane and exciting workshops on building custom GPT and creating accessible Jupyter notebooks. See the full lineup of brainstorming, hacking, and presentation sessions. The 3-day hackfest attendees included those with no experience in coding or hacking, others with advanced experience in…
Wheels in motion: Improving mobility technologies for children
February 28, 2024 Being able to easily get from the house to the playground affects how long and how often children use an adapted ride-on car, according to a study, Off to the park: a geospatial investigation of adapted ride-on car usage, published by CREATE Ph.D. student Mia Hoffman with CREATE associate director Heather A. Feldner, who is the lead researcher on the project. Their research demonstrates the importance of accessibility in the built environment and that advocating for environmental…
ARTennis attempts to help low vision players
December 16, 2023 People with low vision (LV) have had fewer options for physical activity, particularly in competitive sports such as tennis and soccer that involve fast, continuously moving elements such as balls and players. A group of researchers from CREATE associate director Jon E. Froehlich‘s Makeability Lab hopes to overcome this challenge by enabling LV individuals to participate in ball-based sports using real-time computer vision (CV) and wearable augmented reality (AR) headsets. Their initial focus has been on tennis….
Winter 2023 CREATE Research Showcase
December 12, 2023 Students from CSE 493 and additional CREATE researchers shared their work at the December 2023 CREATE Research Showcase. The event was well attended by CREATE students, faculty, and community partners. Projects included, for example: an analysis of the accessibility of transit stations and a tool to aid navigation within transit stations; an app to help colorblind people of color pick makeup; and consider the accessibility of generative AI while also considering ableist implications of limited training data….
UW News: How an assistive-feeding robot went from picking up fruit salads to whole meals
November, 2023 Training a robot to feed people presents an array of challenges for researchers. Foods come in a nearly endless variety of shapes and states (liquid, solid, gelatinous), and each person has a unique set of needs and preferences. A team led by CREATE Ph.D. students Ethan K. Gordon and Amal Nanavati created a set of 11 actions a robotic arm can make to pick up nearly any food attainable by fork. In tests with this set of actions,…
Off to the Park: A Geospatial Investigation of Adapted Ride-on Car Usage
November 7, 2023 Adapted ride-on cars (ROC) are an affordable, power mobility training tool for young children with disabilities. But weather and adequate drive space create barriers to families’ adoption of their ROC. CREATE Ph.D. student Mia E. Hoffman is the lead author on a paper that investigates the relationship between the built environment and ROC usage. With her co-advisors Kat Steele and Heather A. Feldner, Jon E. Froehlich (all three CREATE associate directors), and Kyle N. Winfree as co-authors,…
UW News: Can AI help boost accessibility? CREATE researchers tested it for themselves
November 2, 2023 | UW News Generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an AI-powered language tool, and Midjourney, an AI-powered image generator, can potentially assist people with various disabilities. They could summarize content, compose messages, or describe images. Yet they also regularly spout inaccuracies and fail at basic reasoning, perpetuating ableist biases. This year, seven CREATE researchers conducted a three-month autoethnographic study — drawing on their own experiences as people with and without disabilities — to test AI tools’ utility for accessibility. Though researchers…