Organizers

Jeff Higginbotham

University at Buffalo

Jeff is a professor in the Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences at the University at Buffalo and has been the director of the Communication and Assistive Device Laboratory since 1991. His research centers on how individuals with movement impairments, such as those with cerebral palsy or motor neuron disease, interact with others using their bodies and augmentative communication technologies. A significant focus of his work involves examining how the slow production of augmented speech impacts interaction timing and how communication partners adapt to the increased demands on attention, vigilance, memory, and other cognitive resources.

He is currently a co-principal investigator on Project Open, a federally funded project studying composition delay and repair in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). He also serves as the principal investigator for Project Converse, sponsored by the Engelke Family Foundation, which focuses on researching and developing conversational AAC technologies. His lab is currently dedicated to advancing an AI-enhanced AAC "Talker."

[more about Jeff]

Francesco Possemato

University of Groningen

Francesco is Assistant Professor in Language and Social Interaction at the University of Groningen / Center for Language and Cognition Groningen. By using the methods of Multimodal Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, his research addresses language and social interaction in a variety of contexts. Francesco has worked on the Conversational Interaction in Aboriginal and Remote Australia (CIARA) project (Macquarie University-University of Melbourne-University of Queensland), and as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Communication and Assistive Device Laboratory (CADL) - Department of Communicative Disorders and Science (State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo). Francesco has published on ‘atypical’ interaction, language and cognition in interaction, pragmatic typology, and Italian L2 teaching and classroom interaction.

Jenna Bizovi

University at Buffalo

Jenna is the Assistant Director at the Communication and Assistive Device Laboratory at the University at Buffalo where she leverages her expertise in research management, cross-functional collaboration, and process improvement to drive meaningful advancements in assistive technology. With an MBA and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering, she is an accomplished research and operations professional with a strong background in team leadership, healthcare innovation, and data analytics. 

Dr. Seray Ibrahim is a Postdoctoral Researcher at King’s College London, Department of Informatics. She brings interdisciplinary training from speech and language therapy, human computer interaction and multimodal discourse to research how the design and use of digital technology shapes social interaction. Through her work, she has made contributions to designing digital supports for in-person social interaction that involves children and augmentative and alternative communication devices, and separately, parent-child interventions that can promote positive mental health.

Dr. Eva Szekely is an assistant professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. She holds a MSc in Speech and Language Technology from Utrecht University and a PhD in speech technology from University College Dublin. Her primary research interest lies in modelling spontaneous speech phenomena in conversational TTS. She is PI of three research projects, two of which introduce a novel research methodology that uses modifiable spontaneous speech synthesis to study how listeners perceive and evaluate speakers based on their voice and speaking style. Her latest project aims to develop self-supervised approaches for modelling conversational dynamics.

Dr. Michael Clarke is a speech and language therapist and assistant professor in the Department of Speech Language Hearing Science, San Francisco State University, USA.  His area of professional interest is in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). His research in AAC is motivated by questions arising from clinical practice, and he has a particular interest in better understanding and supporting interpersonal interaction between children using AAC strategies and tools and their communication partners (https://slhs.sfsu.edu/inter-aaction).

Graham Pullin is a designer and Professor of Design and Disability at DJCAD (Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design) at the University of Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom. Here he co-founded Studio Ordinary, a meeting of critical disability studies and design research.

As part of the Wellcome Trust collaboration Imagining technologies for disability futures and with Darryl Sellwood, Kevin Williams and Lateef McLeod who use AAC, we have co-authored a manifesto for alternative futures with AAC. And we are prototyping new interactions with speech technology with AAC user Jamie Preece.

A mid-career PhD, '17 ways to say yes', explored a lack of expressive tone of voice in AAC. Critical objects including Six Speaking Chairs were created to provoke discussion across disciplines and with people who use AAC about a quality that even phoneticians struggle to define.

The manifesto Design meets disability (Japanese edition: O'Reilly, 2022; English edition: MIT Press, 2009) argues for more diverse and radical sensibilities to be combined. It builds on Graham's experience leading an interdisciplinary studio at the design group IDEO and, before that, engineering an assistive robot arm.

Dr. Antonia Krummheuer is a sociologist with a special interest in the analysis of embodied interaction and the use and design of (interactive) technologies in and for interaction, such as robots and AI. Her theoretical background is rooted in the interpretative paradigm of sociology, especially ethnomethodology and practice theory, which she combines with insights from the field of technology studies, disability studies, organization studies, and participatory design.

Stephanie Valencia, PhD, is a Human-Computer Interaction researcher and an assistant professor at the College of  Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Stephanie builds accessible technologies that are grounded in behavioral theory, co-designed with people with disabilities, and deployed to users for impact. Her research focuses on designing for accessibility and conversational agency when using assistive technologies such as augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices that support communication for users with motor and speech disabilities. Stephanie uses participatory design to explore how different design materials such as AI and non-anthropomorphic robots can be used to create agency-increasing AAC systems and builds and deploys these systems to evaluate their impact. Stephanie received her PhD and MS in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Biomedical Engineering from EIA and CES university in Colombia. She has been awarded a Postgraduate Fellowship at the Yale School of Medicine, the MIT Technology Review Top 35 Innovators Under 35 Award in Latin America, and the Ada Lovelace fellowship from the Open Source Hardware Association.