Our work in human-centered computing explores and enhances the ways in which people and communities engage with and experience technology.
Our research considers the personal, educational, cultural, and ethical implications of innovation. Drawing upon techniques from human-computer interaction, learning sciences, sensing and more, we aim to maximize the potential benefits of technology while minimizing potential harms to individuals, groups and society.
Research Groups & Labs
Tsvetshop
Tsvetshop researchers aim to develop practical solutions to natural language processing problems that combine sophisticated learning and modeling methods with insights into human languages and the people who speak them.
Makeability Lab
The Makeability Lab specializes in Human-Computer Interaction and applied machine learning for high-impact problems in accessibility, computational urban science, and augmented reality.
Faculty Members
Centers & Initiatives
Transportation Data Equity Initiative (TDEI)
The Transportation Data Equity Initiative (TDEI) aims to enhance the quality and accessibility of travel services by building open source data collection and vetting tools, transportation data digital infrastructure, and governance frameworks that enable public-private data sharing and interoperability. The TDEI is a project sponsored by The Complete Trip, an ITS4US Deployment Program.
Taskar Center for Accessible Technology (TCAT)
TCAT harnesses the power of open-source technology to develop, translate, and deploy accessible technologies, and then sustain them in the hands of communities. Housed by the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering, TCAT centers the experience of people with disabilities as a lens for improving design & engineering, through participatory design practices, tooling and capacity building.
Highlights
Allen School News
Feng envisions the work of LLMs as a collaborative endeavor, while Pang is interested in advancing the conversation around unintended consequences of these and other emerging technologies. Both were recently honored among the 2024 class of IBM Ph.D. Fellows for their innovative research.
Allen School News
Zhang develops social computing systems that can help online platforms be more democratic instead of top-down, and more customizable as opposed to one-size-fits-all. Her efforts were commended by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which recognized Zhang among its 2025 class of Sloan Research Fellows.
Allen School News
Curless and Heer were selected by their peers in the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions that are transforming science and society — from 3D reconstruction and computational photography, to human-centered data science, visualization and interactive machine learning.