CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute

Welcome, undergraduate researchers! Today we are kicking off our 10-week Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF REU) program.

We're excited to spend the summer with these talented undergraduates from around the country. They will spend the summer doing research with the HCII community in a variety of human-computer interaction subject areas, including educational technologies, accessibility, privacy tools, human-centered AI, data vis and the future of work, just to name a few.

This program is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Today we celebrate one of our favorite holidays: Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

The goal of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking, and learning about the future of digital inclusion and accessibility.

We thank Computing Services for bringing the CMU community together to explore how we can create more inclusive digital experiences. Highlights of today's event included:
🧑‍💻 hands-on workshops (on Neurodivergence & Emerging Technology and Accessible Content),
🎤 announcements from CMU leadership,
🔥 and "Who carries the torch?" an inspiring and personal keynote presentation by Lex Huth.
Lex (who holds a Master of Professional Writing from CMU) is a Minneapolis-based writer, speaker, and accessibility advocate whose work sits at the intersection of AI, emerging technology, and disability inclusion.

We hope you'll remember to join us next year on the 3rd Thursday in May to celebrate the next GAAD. Until then, let's keep building the future with accessibility in mind!

Visit our website to learn more about HCII's current accessibility and assistive technology work.
🔗 https://hcii.cmu.edu/research-areas/accessibility

Course Spotlight 📸 05-292/05-602: Learning in Museums

Student teams in the HCII & IDeATe Learning in Museums course recently presented their final exhibits at the MeetMe @ IDeATe end of semester projects showcase in the CUC Media Studio.

They developed their prototype and evaluation findings of concepts in response to the Exhibiting Emotions design brief and in collaboration with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.

Carnegie Mellon University HCII & IDeATe faculty were joined by the education and exhibits teams at the Children’s Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Rockman et al.. Thanks to the industry professionals for joining us to review and celebrate the students' work.

Congratulations to the Class of 2026 and best wishes to the nearly 100 graduate students who earned their master's degrees with us over the course of the year.

Join us in celebrating the students (now ) from these 2 graduate programs:
🎓 Master of Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI)
🎓 Master of Educational Technology & Applied Learning Science (METALS)

We'll see some of you back in the classroom this week for a strong finish on those Capstone projects!

📸: Huge thanks to Lorraine and Jenn, academic program managers, for the photos.
Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science

What draft? We're counting down the days until the next big event in Pittsburgh... !

Save the date for the next ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The theme is one near and dear to any Pittsburgher's heart -- bridges!

We can't wait to welcome the global HCI community to next year.

📅 When: May 10-14, 2027
📍 Location: Downtown Pittsburgh, PA, USA
▶️ Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyKljdJ3CJ4
🔗 Website: https://chi2027.acm.org

(Note: no sidewalks were blocked in the making of these images)

The ACM SIGCHI Awards and Recognitions highlight remarkable achievements in scholarship, service, mentorship and impact.

Congratulations to all of the 2026 ACM SIGCHI Awards recipients, including these awardees with ties to Carnegie Mellon and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII).

-Lorrie Cranor, director of CMU’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute and affiliated faculty with the HCII, received the honor of 2026 ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award. This award recognizes individuals for outstanding contributions to the study of human-computer interaction, and honors a lifetime of innovation, leadership, and influence in the field.

Three current HCII faculty joined the ACM SIGCHI Academy as part of the Class of 2026. The CHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction.
-Jeffrey P. Bigham, associate professor
-Laura Dabbish, professor
-Chris Harrison, associate professor

The awardees were recognized earlier this week at in Barcelona, Spain. Congratulations, all!

We're proud to share 9 more papers from . These papers with Carnegie Mellon University contributing authors received Honorable Mention awards, a distinction for the top 5% of papers. Congratulations, authors and teams!

Learn more about CMU's work coding greener websites, personalizing mindfulness activities, sharpening eye tracking accuracy, accelerating hands-on trade skills, and more!

🌱💻 EcoAssist: Integrating energy feedback into AI-assisted coding to help developers build greener websites without losing speed.

🔎🩺 Evidotes: A browser extension that augments peer health posts with scientific evidence and personal experience to support chronic illness patients through user-selectable lenses.

👁️🖥️ HiFiGaze: A new approach that uses screen reflections in the eye to significantly improve eye-tracking accuracy on consumer devices.

🧠🤝 LLMs in Behavioral Health Services: Exploring how AI can scale and support peer-run mental health services while preserving the trust and lived experience at the core of care.

🧘📲 MindfulAgents: Using an expert-aligned multi-agent system to deliver personalized mindfulness meditation and improve user engagement and mindfulness outcomes over time.

🔧🔒 Privy: A tool that helps non-privacy experts create high-quality privacy impact assessments for early-stage AI products.

🧜‍♀️💬 The Siren Song of LLMs: LLM Dark Patterns investigates how large language models may subtly steer, pressure, manipulate or mislead users through interaction design and conversational framing.

👩‍🏭🥽 WELDAR: Moving beyond simulation, WeldAR shows that in-situ augmented reality (AR) guidance during real-world practice can effectively support the learning and transfer of complex manual skills training.

🧗💡 Will They Try Again?: A large-scale EdTech field study of 164,000+ students and 17 million problems shows how different persuasive design strategies helped students persist after failure, and their effects added together without redundancy.

We would love to tell you more about all of these, but we're at the character limit! So, please visit our website where you can learn more and read these papers.
🔗 Details: https://hcii.cmu.edu/news/cmu-chi-2026

Three papers with CMU and HCII authors received Best Paper awards at CHI 2026. Learn more about making walls that move, automating accessible PDF metadata, and writing sticky stories for responsible AI work.

🤖🏛️ Towards Fluent Interaction with Cyber-Physical Architecture

What happens when your walls begin to move? CMU’s latest research on robotic environments reveals that preserving user autonomy in automated spaces requires new, modality-agnostic models of human intent.
Authors: + + +
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📝✅ iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility

iTagPDF automatically generates accessibility metadata (tags, reading order, and alt text) for academic PDFs by jointly modeling the PDF and its source.
Authors: +
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🍯📖 “I Don’t Think RAI Applies to My Model” – Engaging Non-champions with Sticky Stories for Responsible AI Work

We show how “sticky” AI-generated stories can help practitioners who think responsible AI doesn’t apply to them actually see why it does.
Authors: + CMU S3D
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Learn more on our website: https://hcii.cmu.edu/news/cmu-chi-2026

Highlighting CMU work at CHI 2026 🇪🇸
Carnegie Mellon authors from 12 different CMU departments contributed to 76 papers accepted to ACM CHI 2026. Our community members will be presenting papers, speaking on panels, presenting posters, receiving awards and volunteering throughout the conference.

We are proud to introduce a variety of human-centered work at CHI 2026, including:
🛠️ New tools and systems
🧠 New frameworks and taxonomies
☑️ New ways to audit tech
👥 New perspectives on social impacts and global communities
🆕 New advancements in Accessibility, Health, Design, and so much more, we can’t do it justice with one post... So, we'll post all week!

Visit our website to learn more about CMU’s work at CHI2026:
🔗 https://hcii.cmu.edu/news/cmu-chi-2026

The Association of Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems will take place April 13 to 17, 2026, in Barcelona, Spain. Stay tuned for more info and posts about the conference.