When she graduates in May, Christina Brant hopes to use the skills she’s developed as an architecture and human-computer interaction major to design user experiences — physical, digital or both. Her recent first-place finish in the Walt Disney Imagineering “Imaginations” competition could make achieving that goal a whole lot easier.

Started in 1992, Imaginations challenges teams of students from universities across the U.S. to showcase their skills and talents by designing a Disney-related project. This year, the teams were tasked with selecting a large, densely populated urban environment and designing an experience that temporarily or permanently transformed the city for the enjoyment of its residents and visitors.

Brant and teammates John Brieger (senior, computer science), Angeline Chen (junior, communications design) and Matthew Ho (fifth-year senior, architecture) began their project not buy jumping right into the design, but by setting goals that would guide their whole process.

“First, we set the overall goal of creating an experience that someone wouldn’t be able to encounter in their lifetime,” Brant said. The team also focused on the notion of cultural exchange, and looked for a solution that would push its limits. They landed on the concept of antipodes — two locations literally across the world from each other. In this case, Bangkok and Lima, Peru.

Their project, aptly titled “Antipode,” takes the form of a two-week cultural-exchange festival that unfolds simultaneously in each country. The team created a backstory, in which two children long ago stumbled upon magical whispering tress — one each in Bangkok and in Lima. The trees allow the children to talk to each other from opposite ends of the globe, and they grow up sharing their lives. Eventually, though, the trees fill up with memories and stop working.

The Antipode Festival celebrates The Great Stumps — remnants of the magical trees that are converted into stages in each city to host cultural performances, and opening and closing ceremonies. At the closing ceremony, the Great Stump sinks into itself to become a portal between Lima and Bangkok, where guests can communicate with their counterparts from the other side of the world.

The students collaborated to create the backstory and characters for their project, and submitted a presentation to Disney Imagineering in November that contained original images and photomontages of their experience. They were named one of the six finalists in December, and earned an all-expense-paid trip to Walt Disney Imagineering the last week in January to present their work to a panel of Imagineering judges. The teams also went behind the scenes to see what makes Walt Disney Imagineering — and Disneyland — tick.

“We’ve been socializing with Imagineers, learning what they do and seeing projects. It’s been awesome,” Brant said. “It’s been interesting to see the collaborative process and how things work.”

At the end of the week, the CMU team took first place based on criteria Disney Imagineers use to critique their own work: the team’s ability to collaborate across different disciplines and backgrounds; mastery of their individual skills; whether the project provides an engaging guest experience; understanding of the local and tourist market in the chosen location; the ability to tell a compelling and engaging story; and knowledge and passion for the Disney brand and Walt Disney Imagineering. They’re the third consecutive CMU team to finish in the top three, but the first to win it all.

In addition to earning a cash prize, the CMU team members gained practical knowledge of design and multidisciplinary collaboration during their process.

“I learned how to work with people who had different backgrounds and skill sets, and how those can be melded into an overall proposal or product,” Brant said of the experience. “When people have diverse backgrounds and experiences, you have different opinions and ways of viewing things. And I think that really challenges and pushes the project further.”

For Brant and her teammates, that collaborative style could pay off in a big way, as Disney Imagineering uses Imaginations as a platform for scouting the next generation of creative and innovative thinkers for possible internships with the company. And what better way to design experiences — physical, digital or both — than as a Disney Imagineer?

Jodi Forlizzi, associate professor of human-computer interaction and design, has been named to the CHI Academy — an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the HCI field. Each year, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction elects five to seven new academy members whose efforts have shaped the discipline and the industry. Members are selected based on cumulative contributions to the HCI field, impact on the field through development of new research directions and/or innovations, influence on the work of others, and participation in the ACM SIGCHI community.

Forlizzi’s work in the field of interaction design ranges from understanding the limits of human attention to understanding how products and services evoke social behavior. She designs and researches systems ranging from peripheral displays to social and assistive robots and the interfaces that control them. Forlizzi has also applied her design research thinking to new research topics including big data, healthcare, and service design.

Forlizzi joins four current HCII faculty members who belong to the CHI Academy: Professor Scott Hudson, Hillman Professor of Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction Sara Kiesler, Herbert A. Simon Professor of Human-Computer Interaction Robert E. Kraut, and Professor Brad Myers. Former HCII Professor Bonnie John the late Randy Pausch are also CHI Academy members.

Justine Cassell, the Charles M. Geschke Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and co-director of The Simon Initiative, has taken on additional responsibilities as the university’s Associate Vice Provost of Technology Strategy and Impact.

In an email to faculty, Provost Mark Kamlet said Cassell’s duties as associate vice provost will include strategy and outreach efforts related to the Global Learning Council as well as university-wide efforts that fall broadly within the area of human-computer interaction.

The Global Learning Council, chaired by President Subra Suresh, is a component of The Simon Initiative. The GLC is a distinguished group of thought leaders from across the globe who are committed to the use of science and technology to enhance learning.

VizWiz, led by Professor Jeff Bigham of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, answers questions that people who are blind or visually impaired have about the things around them. Users take a photo, ask a question, and receive answers back quickly from people on the web (the crowd). VizWiz leverages color identification, text recognition, and recognition of objects seen before, but automatic methods are limited to a small subset of questions in practice. The bulk of remaining questions are answered by humans, e.g. “is there a rash on my baby’s head,” “what number is on this credit card,” serving as challenges for computer vision. The VizWiz living laboratory illustrates the utility of deploying working crowd-powered systems to understand target domains via deployable Wizard-of-Oz. On-going work is using VizWiz to explore how people may volunteer their friends for microtasks they care about on social media.

In an early morning phone call on Tuesday, an Apple executive congratulated Duolingo founder Luis Von Ahn on the Oakland company’s designation as 2013 App of the Year — and warned him to secure company servers for a new onslaught of business.

Not long after, Apple announced publicly that the language learning software app was the editor’s choice for the iTunes App Store 2013 App of the Year.

The free iPhone app, described in the computer giant’s app store as “fantastically well-designed and easy to use,” beat out San Francisco-based photo editing app VSCO Cam and San Francisco-based educational game Endless Alphabet.

Mr. Von Ahn, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, reported a definite increase in activity following the announcement.

But despite the push from Apple, an influx of new users isn’t exactly new to the company this year.

Duolingo has seen its user base soar from 3 million in May to 16 million in December.

He said the designation from Apple was particularly notable because it made Duolingo the first education app to take home App of the Year and also the first non-Silicon Valley based company to take home the prize.

(excerpt of Deborah M. Todd’s article for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette)