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Interaction with the Physical World

Advances in low- and no-power sensing, communication and interaction technologies offer new possibilities for blending digital innovation with our physical environment. 

From gesture recognition that allows people to interact with objects in new ways, to low-power sensors that collect and transmit data about temperature, air quality, urban accessibility and more, our researchers are tapping into the potential of computation to transform how we experience the world around us.


Research Groups & Labs

Street scene overlaid with color-coded object recognition labels for depicted car, bicycle, vegetation, utility pole, and manhole cover

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.

Professor Dieter Fox and a student demonstrate a remote operated robotic arm attempting to pick up a block

Robotics and State Estimation Lab

We are interested in the development of computing systems that interact with the physical world in an intelligent way. To investigate such systems, we focus on problems in robotics and activity recognition.


Allen School Faculty

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Assistant Professor

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Centers & Initiatives

The Science Hub supports a broad set of programs — including fellowships for doctoral students, collaboration among researchers and support for collaborative research events — designed to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and engineering in the Seattle area.

The mission of the UW Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE) is to make technology accessible and the world accessible through technology. By bringing together researchers from across the campus, CREATE harnesses the diverse expertise necessary to realize a more just and equitable technological future, one that overcomes existing barriers and ensures new ones do not arise.

Highlights


HearingTracker

A technology known as semantic hearing developed in Allen School professor Shyam Gollakota’s lab could let users create acoustic bubbles, isolate chosen voices, and control individual sounds in their environment.

Fast Company

Allen School professor Jon Froehlich talks about how Project Sidewalk empowers communities by crowdsourcing data on pedestrian infrastructure, from curb ramps to broken pavement, to improve accessibility.

UW News

A team led by Allen School professor Vikram Iyer and Ph.D. student Zhihan Zhang published a paper in Nature Electronics describing a system that can assemble life cycle assessments, or LCAs, for electronic devices in about a minute with the help of AI agents.