Biography
Orit Shaer is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College and a co-director of the Media Arts and Sciences program. She also directs the Wellesley College HCI Lab. Her research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) focuses on tangible, tabletop, and mobile interaction as well as on computer-supported collaborative learning. Her current projects include the design and evaluation of a tabletop user interface for genomic research , and the development of computational tools for enhancing innovation in bio-design. Dr Shaer is a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER Award. She received her PhD and MSc in Computer Science from Tufts University. She has been a research fellow in the Design Machine Group at the University of Washington and in the University College London Interaction Center. Previously, she served as a system engineer at Orbotech Ltd, where she led an interdisciplinary development team.
Dr Shaer serves as a Chair (with co-Chair Chia Shen) of ACM Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2012. She also co-chairs the TEI 2012 Graduate Students Consortium. She has served as a program co-chair of TEI 2010 and has also been a program committee member for several other top HCI conferences, including CHI (2012), ITS (2011), UIST (2010), TEI (2007, 2008, 2011), and CADUI (2008). She organized the CHI 2008 workshop on User Interface Description Language for Next Generation User Interfaces and served on the program committees of several other workshops.
Videos
News
January 2012, NSF awarded a CAREER Award for our project "Advancing Innovation in Bio-Design through Reality Based Interaction".
January 2012, Chia Shen and I will chair the ACM Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2012 . We will host the conference in Cambridge, MA, November 11-14 2012.
December 2011, our paper on Phylo-Genie: Engaging Students in Collaborative ‘Tree-Thinking’ through Tabletop Techniques was accepted to the ACM CHI 2012 conference.
November 2011, our iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) competition team has won both Gold Medal and Best Software Project awards. check out our award winning project.
October 2011, my CS320 TUI students have won 2 prizes at the ACM UIST Student Innovation Contest. Check out these award winning projects: TUI.TAR (first place for creativity) and Where is Bo Peep(second place for usefulness).
August 2011, Our abstract on G-nome Surfer: a Tabletop Interface for Collaborative Exploration of Genomic Visualizations was accepted for BioVis 2011
June 2011, I moderated and presented in Mass High Tech's Emerging Technology Forum on Superhero tech
May 2011, our panel on "What if undergraduate computer science was taught in an all-female classroom? Lessons learned from the all-female classroom and how to translate into the coed environment" was acceppted to the Grace Hopper Celebration 2011.
April 2011, a joint team of the WCHCI lab and Boston University focuses this summer on creating novel bio-design automation tools coupled with creative human computer interfaces. We will compete in the Software Tools track of the iGEM competition.
April 2011, CS220 Human-Computer Interaction students have presented their projects: iPhone applications for the Wellesley community. Click here to see the projects.
March 2011, I read an excerpt from The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman for the What Wellesley's Reading podcast program.
February 2011, two papers were accepted to the ACM CHI workshops on "UI technology and educational pedagogy" and "Embodied interaction: theory and practice in HCI".
December 2010, our paper on Enhancing Genomic Learning through Tabletop Interaction was accepted to the ACM CHI 2011 conference.
December 2010, CS320 Tangible User Interfaces students have presented their projetcs. Click here to see the projects: from Superheros to the solar system.
December 2010, our paper Art App-reciation: Fostering engagement and reflection in museums through a social mobile application, was accepted for the Museums and the Web 2011 conference.
October 2010, the Wellesley College HCI Lab has a new website. Click here to learn more about the HCI lab: ongoing research, team, and oppurtunities for students.
September 2010, our research proposal on "Enhancing Genomic Exploration through Reality-Based Interaction" has been awarded funding from the NSF IIS division.
August 2010, the WCHCI Lab summer research students shared their results with the community at a poster session celebrating the end of the Wellesley College Summer Research program.Click here to read about summer research topics at Wellesley.
August 2010, our research on increasing engagement in museums through social mobile applications is featured in the Boston Globe. Click here to read the article.
May 2010, CS220 HCI students presented their projects - iPhone applications for the Wellesley community. Click here to see the projects.
March 2010, a survey paper about Tangible User Interfaces: Past, Present, and Future Directions that I co-authored with Eva Hornecker was accepted for publication in the journal of Foundations and Trends of Human-Computer Interaction.
February 2010, Our paper on Leveraging Gesture and Voice Data to Improve Group Brainstorming for accepted as a Work in Progress paper to the ACM CHI 2010 conference.
January 2010, Our paper on G-nome Surfer: a Tabletop Interface for Collaborative Exploration of Genomic Data was accepted to the ACM CHI 2010 conference.
December 2009, CS349 TUI students presented their projects on the Microsoft Surface and LilyPad Arduino. Click here to see the projects.
July 2009, Our paper on a Specification Paradigm for the Design and Implementation of Tangible User Interfaces was accepted for publication in the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI).
March 2009, Honda R&D sponsors a User Interface Design Competetion for Wellesley Students enrolled in CS249: Human-Computer Interaction.
January 2009, I serve as a Program Co-Chair for TEI 2010,the international conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction.
August 2008, I am co-editting an ACM TOCHI special issue on User Interface Description Languages for Next Generation User Interfaces, with Rob Jacob, Mark Green, and Kris Luyten. Submissions are due November 7th 2008.
July 2008, Our paper on Teaching Tangible Interaction in Practice will appear in AIEDAM Special Issue on Tangible Interaction for Design , Spring 2009.