Jon E. Froehlich (U of Washington)- Always Another Mountain: Persistence, Pushback, and the Pursuit of Research That Matters
Abstract: A good idea, but not a tenure-level idea.”
“Don’t open source that…”
“That’s not HCI!”
We all have interactions that stick with us, comments that lodge indelibly in our brains and echo back at random (and often, the worst) moments.
In this career retrospective, I share lessons learned from 20+ years building computing systems for societal problems, told through stories of rejection, pushback, and wrong turns. I will cover early work in wearables and AI for health tracking, home sensing and visualization for environmental sustainability, and wearable construction kits and AR for STE(A)M learning. The talk culminates with our decade+ work on Project Sidewalk (https://projectsidewalk.org)—aimed at combining crowdsourcing and AI to digitize and assess the accessibility of every sidewalk in the world—and, ultimately, to transform how digital maps support people safely walking, biking, and rolling.
I will close with a few reflections on doing systems-driven research in this AI era.
Speakers
Jon E. Froehlich
Jon E. Froehlich is the Microsoft Endowed Professor at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, a Sloan Fellow, ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Awardee, and co-founder of Project Sidewalk (now in 12 countries and 50+ cities). He directs the Makeability Lab—building Human-AI systems for accessibility, sustainability, and education—and teaches CS courses that explore the materiality of computing and the ever-changing relationships between humans, bits, and atoms.
