May 13, 2025 A central figure in Seattle’s human-computer interaction (HCI) community and beyond, Fogarty has made key contributions in accessibility, sensor-based interactions, interactive machine learning, and personal health informatics. He has played a pivotal role in founding and growing Design, Use, Build (DUB) — the UW’s cross-campus HCI alliance bringing together faculty, students, researchers and industry partners. “I am honored to be among the SIGCHI Academy Class of 2025,” Fogarty said. “I’m grateful for the amazing students and collaborators…
Category: AI Research
Articles about AI research being done by CREATE members and partners.
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…
CREATE awarded $4.6M for research on AI risks, opportunities for people with disabilities
September 10, 2024 For some time now, CREATE researchers have been exploring these pressing questions. And now, 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…
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…
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 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…
Winter 2023 CREATE Research Showcase
At the December 2023 CREATE Research Showcase, students from CSE 493 and other CREATE researchers shared their work with faculty, students, and community partners.
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…
Jennifer Mankoff, Director
CREATE Director Dr. Jennifer Mankoff’s research focuses on accessibility broadly speaking. “In doing this work, I emphasize values such as intersectionality, and perspectives such as disability studies. For example, in the domain of Deaf/Hard of Hearing (DHH) technology, I am exploring how people who are multilingual engage with communication technology. Another focus of my work is creating general tools so that anyone can use them, such as 3D printing, knitting, and other fabrication technologies. I have led the effort to better understand both clinical and do-it-yourself (DIY) stakeholders’ use of fabrication technologies, and developed better, more usable tools for production. Together, these can enhance the capabilities and participation of all users in today’s manufacturing revolution.”
Anat Caspi, Associate Director
CREATE Associate Director, Dr. Anat Caspi is interested in exploring ways in which collaborative commons and cooperation can challenge and transform the current economics of assistive technology and incentivize rapid development and deployment of ethically built accessible technologies. Her research focuses on engineering machine intelligent solutions for customizable real-time, responsive technologies in the context of work, play and urban street environments.
Leah Findlater, Associate Director
CREATE Associate Director, Dr. Leah Findlater is interested in how to create technologies that adapt to accommodate individual user needs and preferences, whether to improve basic interactions such as touchscreen text entry or more complex tasks such as working with machine learning models. My research goal is to ensure that the next generation of computing technologies are designed to meet the needs of the broadest range of users.
James Fogarty, Associate Director
CREATE Associate Director, Dr. James Fogarty’s broad research interests are in Human-Computer Interaction, User Interface Software and Technology, and Ubiquitous Computing. His focus is on developing, deploying, and evaluating new approaches to the human obstacles surrounding widespread everyday adoption of ubiquitous sensing and intelligent computing technologies.
Jon E. Froehlich, Associate Director
CREATE Associate Director, Dr. Jon E. Froehlich’s research focuses on designing, building, and evaluating interactive technology that addresses high value social issues such as environmental sustainability, computer accessibility, and personalized health and wellness.
Jacob O. Wobbrock, Associate Director
CREATE Associate Director, Dr. Jacob O. Wobbrock’s research seeks to scientifically understand people’s experiences of computers and information, and to improve those experiences through design and engineering, especially for people with disabilities. His specific research topics include input & interaction techniques, human performance measurement & modeling, HCI research & design methods, mobile computing, and accessible computing.