Organizers
Our organizing committee includes scholars from a diverse set of disciplines and expertise with a common interest in family-centered design. Their backgrounds include research topics such as education, privacy, family health informatics, human-robot interaction, child-computer interaction, AI, AR/VR/MR, and smart-home devices.
Bengisu Cagiltay is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Computer Sciences program with a Ph.D. minor in Human Development and Family Studies. Her research focuses on designing social companion robots tailored to the needs and preferences of children and families. She explores how these technologies can be used to improve families’ lives, facilitate their routines, and support connections.
Hui-Ru Ho is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, with a second Master degree in Computer Sciences. Her research focuses on designing social robots that collaborate with parents or caregivers to enrich learning experience for children.
Kaiwen Sun is a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Michigan, School of Information. Her research focuses on understanding and supporting children's privacy and safety needs in the context of smart home technologies through a family-centered approach balancing parental control and child agency. She received Meta Research Ph.D. Fellowship Award in 2022 for the Privacy and Data Use research area.
Zhaoyuan "Nick" Su is a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate in the Informatics department at the University of California, Irvine. They conduct research in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-supported Cooperative Work, and Health Informatics. Their research explores the interactions of healthcare participants—including children, caregivers, and healthcare providers—with health information systems and health data through a socio-technical lens. Their work has been published in ACM CHI, CSCW, Interaction Design and Children, Foundations and Trends® in Human-Computer Interaction, Journal of American Medical Informatics, and American Medical Informatic Annual Symposium.
Yuxing Wu is a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate at Indiana University Bloomington, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, with a Ph.D. minor in Family HCI. Her research examines the routines, roles, and tensions in shared everyday family experiences to support the dynamic, changing health, social, and educational goals of parents and children in domestic technology design.
Olivia Richards is a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information. Her research in family informatics examines the tensions between children's health and well-being in technology design. Her work has been published in the Journal of American Medical Informatics (JAMIA), ACM SIGCHI, CSCW, and DIS.
Qiao (Georgie) Jin is a fifth-year Computer Science Ph.D. candidate from Grouplens Research Center at the University of Minnesota. Her research is centered around leveraging AR/VR/MR technologies to enhance remote education, foster collaboration, and facilitate social connections, particularly for children. Her work is primarily published in CHI, IDC, and CSCW.
Junnan Yu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Design at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Residing at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Learning Sciences, and Design, his research mainly focuses on studying and designing creative technology-mediated learning experiences for children, investigating the roles that social context plays in supporting such learning, and innovating design research in educational contexts. His current projects revolve around promoting computing education to young children in playful ways, designing gender-inclusive and culturally responsive STEM learning media, as well as understanding and facilitating productive family joint media engagement. Some of his research and design practices also go beyond learning contexts and extend to broader CCI and HCI research, such as reflecting on HCI research methodologies and addressing emergent technology-related challenges in people’s everyday lives.
Jerry Alan Fails is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Boise State University. He enjoys helping students learn the fundamentals of computer programming and user-centered design. His general area of research is Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on designing technology with and for children. He has designed technologies with and for children using participatory design methods for the last 20 years. As part of his research he directs an intergenerational design team called Kidsteam. The team consists of young children (ages 6-11) and adults who work together as partners to improve and design new technologies. He cares deeply about the ethical concerns surrounding children’s involvement in the design process and how data collected about children is utilized. His current projects focus on seeking to support children as they search for information online, understanding privacy and fear within family contexts, supporting children’s privacy and security needs online, expanding methods of designing technologies with and for children (and families) to online, hybrid, and in-person modalities at the local and global scale.
Jason Yip is an Associate Professor at the Information School and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research examines how technologies can support parents and children learning together. He is a co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation Cyberlearning project on designing social media technologies to support neighborhoods learning science together. He is the director of KidsTeam UW, an intergenerational group of children (ages 7 – 11) and researchers co-designing new technologies and learning activities for children, with children. Dr. Yip is the principal investigator of a Google Faculty Research Award project that examines how Latino children search and broker online information for their English-language learning parents. He is a senior research fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.
Jodi Forlizzi is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the School of Computer Science. She is responsible for establishing design research as a legitimate form of research in HCI that is different from, but equally as important as, scientific and human science research. Jodi has advocated for design research in all forms, mentoring peers, colleagues, and students in its structure and execution, and today it is an important part of the HCI community. Her current research interests include designing human-robot interaction as a service and human-AI collaboration in the domains of eldercare, accessibility, service work and labor, and overall wellbeing.