UCLIC Welcomes Three New Staff Members!

UCLIC is very pleased to announce the arrival of three new academic staff who will be joining the department in July 2020. UCLIC will become one of the largest groupings of Human-Computer Interaction researchers in the world!

Sriram Subramanian is joining UCL from the University of Sussex where he currently holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies on novel interactive systems. His Chair and ERC Advanced grant are on the design and fabrication of new types of sound modulators with a specific emphasis on creating innovative displays, haptics and audio devices. He is primarily interested in the interplay of physical science, engineering and computation to design new and novel user-experiences. One example of such a design is the use of several hundreds of tiny ultrasonic speakers to create the sense of touch through air. This work led to the formation of Ultrahaptics www.ultraleap.com a Bristol-based haptics company that recently acquired Leap Motion to create one of the largest spatial interaction companies. Before joining Sussex, he was a Professor of Human-computer Interaction at the University of Bristol and prior to that a senior scientist at Philips Research Labs in Netherlands. He holds an undergraduate in Physics, Masters in Electrical Communication Engineering and PhD in Industrial Design.

Marianna Obrist is Professor of Multisensory Experiences and, before joining UCL, she was head of the Sussex Computer Human Interaction (SCHI 'sky') Lab at the School of Engineering and Informatics at the University of Sussex. Her research ambition is to establish touch, taste, and smell as interaction modalities in human-computer interaction (HCI). Her research is mainly supported by an ERC starting grant. As part of her research, she developed a novel scent-delivery technology that was exhibited at the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2019 and 2020 in Davos. Supported by an ERC proof-of-concept, this technology is now commercialised through OWidgets Ltd, a University start-up she co-founded in 2019. Before joining Sussex, Marianna was a Marie Curie Fellow at Newcastle University. She was selected Young Scientist 2017 and 2018 to attend the WEF in China, and become an inaugural member of the ACM Future of Computing Academy (ACM-FCA) in 2017. More recently, Marianna was appointed as a Visiting Professor at the Burberry Material Futures Research Group at RCA and spent the summer 2019 as a Visiting Professor at the HCI Engineering Group at MIT CSAIL. More details on her research can be found at www.multi-sensory.info.

Diego Martinez Plasencia Diego Martinez Plasencia was a Lecturer of Interactive 3D graphics at the School of Informatics at the University of Sussex. His research ambition is to create multi-modal interactive systems that allow users to see, hear and feel virtual 3D content in a seamless manner, without any attachments or additional devices (e.g. glasses, gloves). His research involves a combination of 3D display approaches, HCI and applied physics to enable interactive systems, such as multi-view tabletop systems or multi-modal particle based displays (PBDs). His work has been supported by FET and EPSRC and he is currently leading a UK-China Research-Industry Partnership aimed at advancing PBD systems and showcasing them in permanent, large-scale public exhibitions. His work has been demonstrated at international forums, such as Festival della Sciencia or Founders Forum, and received extensive media coverage in ITV, CNN, Discovery Channel, BBC Click or Sky News. Before joining Sussex, he was a research associate at University of Bristol and assistant lecturer at UCLM.