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Partnerships between universities and industry can yield important research and commercial breakthroughs. ATLAS professor Ellen Do has worked to cultivate relationships between CU Boulder and industry players, including as a member of the Pervasive Personalized Intelligence (PPI) Center, to support graduate students and enhance opportunities for commercialization of ATLAS research.

The , which recently concluded its tenure, was founded “with a mission of bringing industry and university talent together to solve the intelligence challenges faced by software and computer engineers in Internet of Things systems." It operated under the supervision of the National Science Foundation and included members from NEC, Intel and Trimble.

“It’s been such a good experience. We’ve learned a lot. Ellen Do and her team have helped to expand our thinking and encouraged us to explore new areas.” - Dr. Haifeng Chen, Head of Data Science Department at NEC Laboratories, and his colleague Kai Ishikawa, Principal Researcher (PPI Center event recap)

The PPI Center’s in Portland, OR, included a research poster session, and ATLAS students were honored with three of the four awards industry attendees voted on at the event. 

• Suibi Che-Chuan Weng, PhD student, won "Most Industry Ready" for Editing Reality: Empowering Users to Manipulate Reality through Addition, Erasing, and Modification with Speech to Prompt in Mixed Reality.
• Rishi Vanukuru, PhD student, won "Most Impactful" for Asynchronous spatial guidance using mobile devices and Augmented Reality.
• Ada Zhao, MS student, won "Most Impactful" for The WizARd and Apprentice: Augmented Reality Expert Capture for Training Novices.

2 more ATLAS PhD students participated: Krithik Ranjan presented PuppetGuide: Tangible Personalized Museum Tour Guides using LLMs and David Hunter presented Tangible Interaction with Object Detection and Large Language Models.

As for the experience participating in the PPI Center, Do says, “it is good to know that the industry is interested in supporting research and considers our research relevant.” She sees ways ATLAS could form partnerships within several industry sectors on a range of themes due to the multidisciplinary nature of the research conducted here.

Since their involvement in PPI started, Do and her team have had a series of meetings with mentors from global technology firms, discussing collaborative research opportunities.

Vanukuru is currently doing an internship at Microsoft Research Cambridge focused on spatial computing in its VR/AR group. Weng and Zhao are working on research in the ACME Lab this summer, extending the Editing Reality (and PuppetGuide), and WizARd and Apprentice projects with interns from the CU SPUR program. Zhao is also conducting a pilot study, interviewing laser cutter operating experts about how they would demonstrate operations and how they can annotate their demonstration using the WizARd prototype for novice learners. Hunter has embarked on an internship with Trimble this summer, while he and Ranjan are also working in the ACME Lab.

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ATLAS PhD Student Ruhan Yang passed her preliminary exam on August 4. Her work on her dissertation, "Paper Robot Building Kits: Present and Future," is overseen by Professor Ellen Do,  Professor Mark Gross and Assistant Professor Daniel Leithinger. 

Yang is a PhD student in Creative Technology and Design, advised by Ellen Do, director of the ACME Lab. Yang's research focuses on paper interaction and toy design. She enjoys crafting and wants to share the pleasure of it with more people. 

Yang has been working on designing educational toys and tools for many years, and she is the co-founder of , an award-winning startup education technology company. She hopes to bring opportunities to more children through her designs.

Yang earned a Master of Science in Creative Technology and Design and a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering, both from CU Boulder.

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ATLAS Institute PhD candidate Kailey Shara passed her comprehensive exam on August 8. Her work on her dissertation, "Designing New Hardware for Chemical Automation," is overseen by committee members Assistant Professor Carson J. Bruns, Professor Mark Gross, Daniel Szafir, assistant professor of computer science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Associate Professor Gregory Whiting and Professor Eric Bogatin.

ABSTRACT: This comprehensive exam proposal outlines our recent work to build new automation hardware for synthetic chemistry labs. Synthetic chemistry drives innovation in countless domains, ranging from life-saving pharmaceuticals to advanced materials for energy harvesting and space exploration. Accelerating the pace of organic synthesis has thus far been challenging to achieve through automation, but this goal is highly anticipated since organic synthesis is often the main R&D bottleneck for many projects. The proposal covers ongoing work in the design and construction of an all-in-one robotic platform for automated chemical synthesis. The goal is to reach a working prototype of a robot that can automatically complete an entire chemical synthesis. 

Originally from Montreal, Canada, Shara studied both chemistry and electrical engineering at Case Western Reserve University before joining the ATLAS Institute in 2018 to pursue her PhD. Advised by Carson Bruns, director of the Laboratory for Emergent Nanomaterials, her research focus includes the synthesis of artificial molecular machines, as well as engineering systems for laboratory automation. Her startup company, Chembotix, has won numerous awards including first place in the 2022  New Venture Challenge (NVC) championship. 

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ATLAS Institute PhD candidate Peter Gyory passed his comprehensive exam on August 18. His work on his dissertation, “Developing Tools to Support Approachable Game Controller Design,” is overseen by committee members, Professor Ellen Do, Associate Professor Amy Banic, Associate Professor Joel Swanson, Michael Rivera, Associate Professor (UC Davis)  and Professor Mark Gross.

During his exam, Gyory outlined his work in game controller design. His research goal is to expand tangible user interface research by exploring the design space of alternative controller (Alt Ctrl) games. In addition, Gyory wants to develop tools that make the creation of Alt Ctrl games more approachable for those without much physical computing experience. During his exam, Gyory showcased his projects, HOT SWAP and Tinycade, game controller platforms that can be reconfigured to support multiple games. He also outlined his planned work in developing an Alt Ctrl toolkit called "Beholder Observables," a platform implemented with computer vision that requires only a smartphone to use it.

"I hope my work will make physical computing more approachable to those without advanced fabrication tools," Gyory says.

Prior to working on his PhD, Gyory received a BS in Game Design and Development from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2016 and an MS in Creative Technology and Design from the ATLAS Institute.

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THING Lab

“EmotiTactor: Exploring How Designers Approach Emotional Robotic Touch,” authored by Ran Zhou, Harpreet Sareen, Yufei Zhang and Assistant Professor Daniel Leithinger, director of the THING Lab, won a Best Pictorial Honorable Mention award at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '22). Zhou, an ATLAS PhD student who was also the for DIS'22, presented the research during the Multisensory Design session.

Prior psychology findings show humans can communicate distinct emotions solely through touch, and in this work, THING Lab researchers hypothesize that similar effects might also be applicable to robotic touch. Their findings uncover that the "otherness" of robotic touch broadens the design possibilities of emotional communication beyond mimicking interpersonal touch. Bringing designers into the exploration of emotional robotic touch, the researchers discuss their design decisions and reflect on their insights. To enable designers to easily generate and modify various types of affective touch for conveying emotions (e.g., anger, happiness, etc.), the researchers also developed a platform consisting of a robotic tactor interface and a software design tool. When conducting an elicitation study with 11 interaction designers, they discovered common patterns in their generated tactile sensations for each emotion.The researchers also illustrated the strategies, metaphors, and reactions that the designers deployed in the design process.

Publication

Ran Zhou, Harpreet Sareen, Yufei Zhang, and Daniel Leithinger. 2022. EmotiTactor: Exploring How Designers Approach Emotional Robotic Touch. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1330–1344. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533487 .pdf  (June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia) [Best Pictorial Honorable Mention].
 

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Living Matter Lab/Unstable Design Lab

Exploring biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction, authored by Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Netta Ofer, Shanel Wu,Mary Etta West, Mirela Alistar and Laura Devendorf  introduced the DIS audience to biofoam, a water soluble and biodegradable material that can be made conductive.

During the DIS‘22 Multisensory Design session, lead author, Lazaro, an ATLAS PhD student, presented the team's biofoam research and demonstrated the unique opportunities the material brings to HCI communities.  Vasquez described the material in detail, including the process of making biofoam from scratch and fabricating the material into forms with handcraft techniques. She also presented two HCI-specific applications of biofoam and demonstrated the different life cycles of the material, all of which can be considered in the design process; biofoam can be cooked, molded, layered, extruded, dissolved and recooked.

Publication

Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Netta Ofer,Shanel Wu, Mary Etta West, Mirela Alistar and Laura Devendorf. 2022. Exploring Biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1525-1529. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533494 (June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia). 

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