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Distributed interaction Design

Abdullah X. Ali

Jun 26, 2019
1 min

Distributed interaction Design

My Ph.D. dissertation work is about Distributed User-Driven Design. I am working to answer the following questions: 1. Can we get people from all over the world to help us design future technologies? 2. How can we deal with subjective design input at scale? 3. How good are these user-driven designs? I have formulated the Distributed Interaction Design process and built the CROWDESIGN Engine—an online research platform that enables technology creators to follow this design met

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Crowdlicit

Abdullah X. Ali

Feb 5, 2019
2 min

Crowdlicit

About End-user elicitation studies are a popular design method. Currently, such studies are usually confined to a lab, limiting the number and diversity of participants, and therefore the representativeness of their results. Furthermore, the quality of the results from such studies generally lacks any formal means of evaluation. In this paper, we address some of the limitations of elicitation studies through the creation of the Crowdlicit system along with the introduction of

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Crowdsensus

Abdullah X. Ali

Aug 6, 2018
1 min

Crowdsensus

About End-user elicitation studies are a popular design method, but their data require substantial time and effort to analyze. In this paper, we present Crowdsensus, a crowd-powered tool that enables researchers to efficiently analyze the results of elicitation studies using subjective human judgment and automatic clustering algorithms. In addition to our own analysis, we asked six expert researchers with experience running and analyzing elicitation studies to analyze an endu

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Dare Devil

Aug 2, 2018
1 min

Dare Devil

About I used Google glass to provide an authentication mechanism for logging in to online accounts on desktop computers. Research Areas Accessibility; Design; Wearables; Security. My Involvement This was a student research competition entry. I built a Google Glass app using the Android Development Kit in JAVA, a Chrome web browser plug-in and a PHP server to provide communications between the Glass app and the browser plug in. Affiliation University of Maryland Baltimore Coun

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Search+Dyslexia

Aug 2, 2018
2 min

Search+Dyslexia

About I was a research intern at Microsoft Research (MSR) last summer of 2017 mentored by Dr. Meredith Ringel Morris and Dr. Adam Fourney. I came aboard an existing project they had worked on to understand the needs of web searchers with dyslexia. I have done and published work in the past researching computer accessibility during my undergraduate and masters studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). I also have done work specifically with people with dys

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H4PLock

Aug 2, 2018
1 min

H4PLock

About H4PLock is a mobile lock screen which employs sequences of user-generated invisible gestures performed on one or more of four quadrants on a mobile screen. Research Areas Design; Security. My Involvement I developed a lock screen emulator Android app using the Android Development Kit in JAVA. I designed and ran user studies. I was the lead author on an iConference paper. Affiliation University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). Publication Ali, Abdullah; Kuber, Ravi;

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PINATA

Aug 2, 2018
1 min

PINATA

About PINATA is a Chrome browser plug-in which detects when users are having pointing difficulties, notifies them, and offer to adapt their browsing experience. Research Areas Design; AI; Accessibility. My Involvement I developed the Chrome plug-in using in Javascript. I set up a PHP server to handle storing users' pointing data and run them through a Weka classifier to identify pointing difficulty. I designed three different in-browser notification designs with varying degre

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Dytective

Aug 2, 2018
1 min

Dytective

About Dytective is a web-based game that detects the risk of having dyslexia. Research Areas Design; AI; Accessibility. My Involvement I designed and built the Dytective game with 18 different levels using HTML and Javascript. I set up a server running PHP and MySQL database to store data and export it for analysis to classify users performance patterns consistent with those of people with dyslexia. Affiliation Carnegie Mellon University. Awards 2016 UAE AI and Robotics for g

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MSR Internship work (Update)

Jan 5, 2018
1 min

MSR Internship work (Update)

The hard labor of my summer internship at Microsoft Research has paid off. Our paper titled "Understanding the Needs of Searchers with Dyslexia" was presented at CHI 2018 in Montreal. Our note titled "Assessing the Readability of Web Search Results for Searchers with Dyslexia" was presented at SIGIR 2018 in Ann Arbor, MI. Our work was highlighted in a Microsoft Research Blog Post. #News #All

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I presented my work at the HCOMP Doctoral Consortium in Quebec

Jan 5, 2018
1 min

I presented my work at the HCOMP Doctoral Consortium in Quebec

Last October I had the privilege of being accepted to the Doctoral Consortium at the AAAI HCOMP conference. I went to the beautiful Quebec city, and present my dissertation work on crowdsourcing elicitation design studies to a panel of amazingly talented people along with some other cool Ph.D. students. I also got to enjoy some wonderful views :) #News #All

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How I Learned to Code and Landed My First Research Job

Jan 5, 2018
4 min

How I Learned to Code and Landed My First Research Job

During my senior year of college, I was searching for some electives to satisfy my Information Systems degree requirements. The goal: Just graduate and get a job designing websites. You'll make like 80K doing it! Little did I know, that whole plan was about to change. I signed up for a course called Human-Computer Interaction Design. The professor teaching the class, Dr. Amy Hurst, kept talking to us about research and her cool lab where she's doing cool work with her cool st

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