Lab News
ECL member, Nicole, successfully passed her PhD proposal on March 10th. Nicole's ongoing work is looking at how VR can contribute to testing and simulating real life situations as they relate to law enforcement and she is currently investigating the ARTEMIS tool for understanding perceptions of VR. We are very proud of her and look forward to seeing more of her work! Congratulations Nicole!
ECL founder Dr. Beth Mynatt and ECL member, Toma Zubatiy recently presented a paper based on their work in pivoting a Mild Cognitive Empowerment program to online engagement during the COVID pandemic at the ACM GROUP 2022/23 conference in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. The work was done in collaboration with the Cognitive Empowerment Program at Emory. During their talk, Dr. Mynatt spoke about the challenges of the pivot to online and how they navigated those challenges to continue the work while adhering to public health guidelines. The co-authors on the paper were Kayci Vickers, Salimah LaForce, Sarah Farmer, Jeremy Johnson, Matthew Doiron, Aparna Ramesh, Brad Fain and Amy Rodriguez. The insights from the paper talk generated a lot of interest from the community and we look forward to continuing our association with GROUP. Congratulations Dr. Mynatt and Tamara! Read the full paper here .
ECL member, Niharika, recently presented a paper based on her team's work with older adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment and their usage of Conversational Assistants at ASSETS 2022 in Athens, Greece in the last week of October. The paper also won the Best Paper award at the conference! The work was conducted under the supervision of our faculty advisor, Dr. Beth Mynatt, and was in collaboration with the CEP at Emory University. The work was a result of a 20-week longitudinal study conducted with the CEP dyads investigating how their medication practices can be supported by Conversational Assistants such as the Google Home. The results were promising and the team looks forward to continue working and iterating on their findings. Other ECL members that were part of the team were - Tamara, Jiachen, Brian, and Kunal. We are so proud of the team! Here is the link to the full paper .
Tamara won the excellence in AI/ML Leadership Award by the Chattanooga Technology Council on Friday. To know more about the Chattanooga Technology Council, visit this. Congratulations Tamara, we are so proud of you!
ECL members Aditi Bhatnagar, Taylor Scavo and Phoebe Tan recently graduated from the Masters of Science in Human-Computer Interaction program and Jiachen Li from the Masters of Science in Digital Media program at Georgia Tech! Aditi, Phoebe and Taylor will begin their full-time industry jobs soon and Jiachen will continue on to her PhD studies at Northeastern University in the coming Fall! We are so proud of them and wish them all the luck in their post-grad adventures!
ECL lab member Nicole has a new IEEE Southeast paper titled "A Framework for XReality Serious Games" ! The paper presents a framework for developing data driven Serious Games for research purposes. Check out the paper here . Congratulations Nicole!
We're happy to announce that our awesome lab members and Emory collaborators Tamara Zubatiy, Agata Rozga, Kayci Vickers, and Breanna Carter have been awarded an external seed grant titled "Scaling the Impact of the CEP Google Home Research Program into the Community". We're so excited to see their work going forward and congratulate them on the grant!
We are so delighted to inform that our very own, Elizabeth Mynatt , is soon going to be begin her appointment as the new Dean of the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, starting January 2022. We are excited to see her take over this prestigious role and wish her all the luck in her new journey! We also look forward to charting our shared future together with an ECL sister lab at Northeastern soon! Congrats Beth!
A team of Georgia Tech researchers has won a five-year, $20 million grant from NSF to build intelligent systems that support aging. The grant’s co-PI is our very own Elizabeth Mynatt, director of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) at Georgia Tech—IPaT’s expertise in technology for “aging in place” will play a key role in the funded research program.
The award builds upon decades of work at Georgia Tech, both in artificial intelligence, and — through IPaT— understanding the technological needs of older adults. The new systems will be tested with Georgia families through existing programs, including the Emory-Georgia Tech Cognitive Empowerment Program, which is also currently the research focus for multiple projects in ECL.
The ACM recently published an article on the importance of federally funded IT research and the long term economic impacts of this funding. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, led by our very own Beth, traces the investments since the mid-1990s alongside the evolution IT innovations. And as noted in the article, "It's important to note this is not just about the past; it continues to be a great investment."