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UCLIC Research Seminar Series
Title
Abstract
Computing has revolutionized how we process and interact with data today, unfortunately, these capabilities are constraint to the digital realm and cannot yet be applied to physical matter. For instance, today, we can already quickly update the appearance of a digital photo by applying a filter or adding and removing elements. However, updating physical objects in the same way is not possible today. In this talk, I will show my research group's latest developments that bring us closer to a future in which physical objects are as reprogrammable as data is today. As a first example of this, I will show our research on a new reprogrammable material that can be applied to the surface of physical objects and that allows them to change their appearance within a few minutes. This allows us to update the color of clothing, shoes, and even entire rooms in the same way as we can update a digital photo today. I will then show additional developments that extend this concept to further integrate computing capabilities into physical objects, show our research on how we can print functional objects in one go without the need for assembly, and demonstrate how we can create unified prototyping environments that support engineers and designers in fabricating new types of physical objects.
Lab Website: https://hcie.csail.mit.edu/
Personal Website: stefaniemueller.org/
Biography
Stefanie Mueller is the X-Career Development Assistant Professor in the MIT EECS department joint with MIT Mechanical Engineering and Head of the HCI Engineering Group at MIT CSAIL. For her research, Stefanie has received an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, and was also named a Forbes 30 under 30 in Science. In addition, Stefanie's work has been awarded several Best Paper and Honorable Mention Awards at the ACM CHI and ACM UIST conferences, the premier venues in Human-Computer Interaction. Stefanie has also served as the Program Chair of the ACM UIST 2020 conference and was a Subcommittee Chair for ACM CHI 2019 and 2020. At MIT, Stefanie served as a Program Co-Chair for the MIT EECS Rising Star Workshop in 2018 and is currently serving as the Head of the Human Computer Interaction Communities of Research (HCI CoR) at MIT CSAIL.