DFA’s Sproutel team meets President Obama

I am so proud of Design for America’s Hannah Chung and Aaron Horowitz of Sproutel who were one of 32 companies invited to exhibit at the first White House Demo Day to promote diversity in entrepreneurship. Obama held their robotic teddy bear, Jerry the Bear, who said “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”
Check it out:

Joining Northwestern Initiative for Manufacturing Science and Innovation (NIMSI)

I am honored to have been asked by Associate Vice President for Research, Dr. Jian Cao, to join Northwestern Initiative for Manufacturing Science and Innovation (NIMSI) aims to facilitate the translation of ideas to impact both mass production of products and emerging hyper-customized and personalized manufacturing. It will do so across the broad spectrum of design integration, material innovation, novel processes, computational methods, human-machine interface, logistics, economic and employment analysis, and more.

Work in Progress on a Mobile Crowdsourcing System accepted at CHI

Congratulations to our Delta Lab students, Emily Harburg and Youngsong Kim for their Work In Progress acceptance at CHI titled “CrowdFound: A Mobile Crowdsourcing System to Find Lost Items On-the-Go” 

CrowdFound allows users to input lost item descriptions on a map and then sends notifications to users passing near tagged areas. To assess the system’s efficacy, they conducted interviews and user testing on CrowdFound. Their results show that users were able to find lost items when using a combination of the notification, map, and item description features. In addition, users were willing to deviate off path to look for lost items, particularly when exercising. Their findings also suggest socio-technical features to promote more effective on-the-go crowdsourced help on microtasks. This research builds CHI’s understanding of physical crowdsourcing as a tool for solving societal problems and suggests broader implications for utilizing mobile crowds.