乐播传媒

Imagine a world where robots flawlessly detect everyone in a conversation group and also greet the newcomers. Described in a paper published in the March proceedings of the prestigious International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '22), Hooman Hedayati (PhD computer science '20) and Daniel Szafir, assistant professor of computer science at UNC Chapel Hill and former ATLAS faculty member, proposed a method to overcome situations when conversational group (F-formation) detection algorithms fail.

鈥嬧�婯ailey Shara, an ATLAS PhD student and a member of the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, and her team, won third place and $1,000 for Chembotix robotic automation platform. Annie Margaret, teaching assistant professor with the ATLAS Institute, and her team, placed fourth with Digital Wellness x NoSo November.

ATLAS PhD student Fiona Bell is passionate about sustainability; her doctoral dissertation tackles how to reduce waste through encouraging intimate relationships between designers, the materials they use and the artifacts they develop. In recognition of her work, Bell recently received financial support to help complete her thesis through a Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

ATLAS PhD student Shanel Wu is tackling how to reduce the waste from the rapidly expanding e-textile industry by investigating design practices that make it easier to recycle or reuse electronics and the textiles in which they are embedded.

Normally virtual surfaces cannot be felt because they aren't there. But at Reality Labs Research at Meta, (previously known as Facebook), ATLAS PhD Student Purnendu is researching soft, wearable devices鈥搒uch as wristbands, rings or gloves 鈥搕hat could enable tactile sensations in virtual/augmented reality environments.

SIGGRAPH sat down with Purnendu, a PhD student in the ATLAS Institute and a researcher at Meta Reality Labs, to talk about his team鈥檚 SIGGRAPH 2021 Labs project, 鈥淓lectriflow: Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation Using Soft Electrohydraulic Actuators.鈥� The team's actuator technology strives to augment animation within physical books.

Limited by materials available at home during the pandemic, ATLAS PhD student Peter Gyory and a team of ACME Lab researchers developed Tinycade鈥攁 platform for DIY game controllers that anyone, including novices, can use to design and build arcade-like games using household materials such as cardboard, mirrors and hot glue.

"It's not enough to tell young people to put their phones down," says Annie Margaret, an ATLAS teaching assistant professor who investigates ways to counteract the negative impact of social media on the mental health of teens. In a recent interview with Denver Channel 7 News, she talked about interventions for teens she's developing for a program to be launched over the 2022 summer break.

ATLAS PhD alumna Abigale Stangl explores how artificial intelligence can be used to generate image descriptions when alt text鈥攖he image descriptions intended to give people who are blind or have low vision a verbal description of online image content鈥攊s missing.

ATLAS recently released a new video that celebrates the ACME Lab and its commitment to designing technologies to support creativity. Directed by Professor Ellen Do, the lab researches computational tools for design, creativity, cognition, tangible and embedded interaction, and computing for health and wellness.