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About Us

We design, build, and evaluate interactive systems to support accessibility.

A Research Lab at CSE, University of Michigan

Our long-term vision is to make the world accesssible for everyone, everywhere. We believe in this vision because accessibilty affects everyone, not just people with disabilities. We all find conversations difficult to hear in noisy bars, doorbells inaudible over a vacuum cleaner running, or may miss a phone ringing on a train. In future, we believe that every information and technology will be accessible by default.

Our current focus is on "sound" and we are studying systems that deliver sound information in alternative ways—using visual or haptic feedback or through enhanced audio. A key aspect of our research is the focus on the user—we follow a thorough design process to understand our users' concerns, build technology systems to address those concerns, and deploy and study our systems with the users in their natural environments. We publish research work in the most prestigious human-computer interaction venues such as CHI, UIST, and ASSETS; seven of our past publications have been honored with awards. We also especially care about deployment: our systems have been publicly released (e.g., one has been used by over 100,000 disabled users) and have directly impacted products at Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

Recent News

Feb 14: Professor Dhruv Jain honored with SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award
Jan 30: Professor Dhruv Jain honored with William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award
May 26: SoundWatch featured in CACM Research Highlights!
Jan 21: Our paper on Non Verbal Sound Detection for Disordered Speech was accepted to ICASSP 2022!
Nov 19: Our paper on a personalizable sound recognition system was accepted to CHI 2022!

Our Team

Headshot of Dhruv Jain
Dhruv "DJ" Jain

Dhruv "DJ" Jain

Assistant Professor, Computer Science & Engineering (Lab head)
Headshot of Jeremy Huang
Jeremy Huang

Jeremy Huang

Masters Student, School of Information
Headshot of Emily Tsai
Emily Tsai

Emily Tsai

Masters Student, School of Information
Headshot of Mansanjam Kaur
Mansanjam Kaur

Mansanjam Kaur

Masters Student, School of Information
Headshot of Yifan Zhu
Yifan Zhu

Yifan Zhu

Masters Student, Computer Science & Engineering
Headshot of Rue-Chei Chang
Rue-Chei Chang

Rue-Chei Chang

PhD Student, Computer Science & Engineering
Headshot of Hriday Chhabria
Hriday Chhabria

Hriday Chhabria

Undergraduate Student, Computer Science & Engineering
Headshot of Andrew Dailey
Andrew Dailey

Andrew Dailey

Undergraduate Student, Computer Science & Engineering
Headshot of Elijah Bouma-Sims
Elijah Bouma-Sims

Elijah Bouma-Sims

PhD Student, Carnegie Mellon University (Collaborator)
Headshot of Anhong Guo
Anhong Guo

Anhong Guo

Assistant Professor, Computer Science & Engineering (Collaborator)
Headshot of Michael M. McKee
Michael M. McKee

Michael M. McKee

Associate Professor, Michigan Medicine (Collaborator)
Headshot of Lorrie Faith Cranor
Lorrie Cranor

Lorrie Cranor

Professor, Carnegie Mellon University (Collaborator)

Publications

A t-SNE low dimensional cluster visualization of lots of short mouth sounds

Sound Actions

Non-Verbal Sound Detection
Commercialized on iPhone and iPad (Try it out)
ICASSP 2022: PAPER | TALK
A close up shot of a person attending a 10-person video conference on a laptop.
AWARD

Lab Openings

Prospective PhD students: We are hiring PhD students for Fall 2023 with the following set of skills: (1) those with prior HCI and user study experience to lead projects focused on Deaf/disabled population, or (2) those with prior applied ML experience around sound and audio, but who also can build HCI systems and run independent HCI focused projects (through conducting user studies, collecting data, and evaluating end-to-end systems). If you think you fit any of these skills, please send DJ an email at profdj [at] umich [dot] edu with a brief justification of your skill set (e.g., through relevant research experience), a list of projects in the lab that you are interested in, and your CV.

Undergraduates/Masters students: Please complete this form and we will reach out to you!

Postdocs: Please send Professor Dhruv Jain an email with your reasoning for pursuing a post-doc position, a draft of your dissertation, and your CV.