Microsoft Research @ CHI 2020
Location: Virtual
Microsoft Research blog
Behind the phone: The importance of human connections in improving mental health helpline technology
| Amit Sharma
Unaddressed mental health conditions are growing worldwide, with millions across the world living with different types of these conditions. The World Health Organization projects that depression may be the biggest contributor to a key indicator of the impact of disease by…
Fairness and interpretability in AI: Putting people first
At the 2005 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, researcher Hanna Wallach found herself in a unique position—sharing a hotel room with another woman. Actually, three other women to be exact. In the previous years she had attended, that had…
Beyond the prototype: Enabling the long tail of hardware devices
| Steve Hodges
Hardware is important, but it’s hard More than ever before, our society depends on an array of interactive devices. We need to provide input to computer systems throughout our day, whether at home, at work, or on the move. And…
Alt text that informs: Meeting the needs of people who are blind or low vision
| Meredith Ringel Morris
Image descriptions are vital to making digital content fully accessible to people who are blind or have low vision. However, as past research has shown, content authors often leave out these descriptions—also known as “alternative text” or “alt text”—for images…
Happy and productive at work: Predicting opportune moments to switch tasks and take breaks
| Shamsi Iqbal, Daniel McDuff, Mary Czerwinski, and Jaime Teevan
Consider the last time you struggled to complete a task at work. Perhaps you got stuck trying to solve a tricky problem, unable to break out of that unproductive state, or maybe you were so engrossed in an activity unrelated…
VROOM: Giving body to telepresence
| Brennan Jones
Editor’s Note: This post was written collaboratively by Brennan Jones, Sunny Zhang, Priscilla Wong, and Sean Rintel and told from the first-person perspective of Brennan Jones. One of my life missions is to connect people, and I’ve been pursuing this…
Bringing virtual reality to people who are blind with an immersive sensory-based system
| Ed Cutrell and Eyal Ofek
Virtual reality (VR) is an incredibly exciting way to experience computing, providing users with intuitive and immersive means of interacting with information that attempts to mirror the way we naturally experience the world around us. In the past few years,…
Extending the reach of care: Tending to patients using chat app technology
| Ding Wang
According to a report released by World Bank and the World Health Organization in 2017, there are nearly 4 billion people worldwide, that’s half of the world population, who lack access to essential healthcare. Although delivering high-quality patient-centered care is…
Data-driven insights for more effective, personalized care in online mental health interventions
| Anja Thieme and Danielle Belgrave
Increases in the occurrence and global effect of mental illness have made the prevention and treatment of mental health problems a public health priority. To address the need for more access to mental health treatment, digital psychotherapy programs, such as…