Jeffrey Bigham

Jeffrey P. Bigham is an Associate Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University His work is at the intersection of human-computer interaction, human computation, and artificial intelligence, with a focus on developing innovative technology that serves people with disabilities in their everyday lives. Jeffrey received his B.S.E degree in Computer Science from Princeton University and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington. From 2009 to 2013, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester where he founded ROC HCI. For his innovative research, Dr. Bigham has won a number of awards, including the Microsoft Imagine Cup Accessible Technology Award, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award for Technology Collaboration, the MIT Technology Review Top 35 Innovators Under 35 Award, and Best Paper Awards at ACM ASSETS, UIST, and WSDM. In 2012, he received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Over the past few years, my group has been building and deploying crowd-powered technology to support blind people in their everyday lives. Leveraging the crowd has allowed us to create technology far more intelligent than can be done with computer vision currently, and has resulted in both useful tools for blind people and led to interesting insights about what technology might actually be useful. For instance, our mobile application VizWiz has answered more than 70,000 general visual questions, providing an unprecedented look at what blind people actually want to know about. In this talk, I will overview key results, discuss the current directions we are pursuing, and outline how crowd-powered approaches may serve as scaffolds for developing future automatic technology.