HCI Seminar - Jeff Bigham - Revisiting 7 Grand Challenges in Accessibility

Abstract:
Accessibility poses a range of deep technical challenges. At their core, many of these challenges require building systems that can perceive the world and interpret it well enough to communicate information through alternative modalities for people with disabilities. In this talk, I revisit several classic grand challenges in accessibility that I have worked on in my career - both to gauge how far we’ve come in light of rapid advances in AI, and also to reflect on the new challenges that are revealed once some of the old challenges are solved.

Bio:
I am an Associate Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction and Language Technologies Institutes in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Director of Human-Centered Machine Learning at Apple. I build systems that advance how people can responsibly work with machine learning to do interesting and useful things. This has taken on a variety of focuses throughout my career – I have worked on applications in accessibility for disabilities, used crowdsourcing to power a wide variety of real-time systems, and most recently thought about how to design responsible and useful experiences using generative AI. Much of my work focuses on accessibility because I see the field as a window into the future, given that people with disabilities are often the earliest adopters of AI. I received my B.S.E degree in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2003, and received my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2009. I have received the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2014), the MIT Technology Review Top 35 Innovators Under 35 Award (2009), and the NSF CAREER Award (2012).

This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/96747264729.