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UCLIC Research Seminar Series
Title
Abstract
AI-based accessibility tools hold tremendous potential to counter everyday disabling experiences with computing technologies and the physical world—from personalizing how a device interprets each user's input to amplifying a user's sensory abilities with additional information. In this talk, I will first highlight the promise of AI-based accessibility by covering our work with augmented reality sound and captioning technologies for d/Deaf and hard of hearing people. I will then turn to challenges and risks—such as social acceptability, privacy, fairness, and the accessibility of the underlying models themselves—that need to be addressed before such tools can and should be broadly adopted.
Relevant Papers
Findlater, L., Chinh, B., Jain, D., Froehlich, J., Kushalnagar, R., & Lin, A. C. 2019. Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals' preferences for wearable and mobile sound awareness technologies. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-13.
Jain, D., Ngo, H., Patel, P., Goodman, S., Findlater, L., & Froehlich, J. 2020. Soundwatch: Exploring smartwatch-based deep learning approaches to support sound awareness for deaf and hard of hearing users. In The 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, 1-13.
Biography
Leah Findlater is an Associate Professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington (UW). She is also an Associate Director at UW's Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE) and leads an accessibility-focused research team in Apple's Human-Centered Machine Intelligence group. Prior to joining UW in 2017, she was a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park andan NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the UW Information School. Her research is in human-computer interaction, specifically in accessible technologies and the human side of human-centered machine learning. Her PhD is in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia. She has over 90 publications in top scientific conferences and journals and has received 14 best paper awards or nominations from ACM CHI, IUI and ASSETS. She has received an NSF CAREER Award and her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, Google, Microsoft, Adobe and Mozilla.