Talk: Augmenting Reality to Support People with Low Vision in Daily Tasks (Watch)

Abstract: How can advances in computer vision and augmented reality help people with visual impairments? In my research, I study the experiences of people with visual impairments and design applications to help them overcome challenges. I’ll present two augmented reality applications that my students and I designed for people with low vision, who have a visual impairment that falls short of blindness. The first application help the user find product in a grocery store and the second helps her navigate through the built-environment. Both applications show how computer vision and AR can be leveraged to augment the user’s perception and support fundamental visual tasks.

Bio: Shiri Azenkot is an Assistant Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in the Information Science field at Cornell University. She is also on the faculty at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. She is broadly interested in human-computer interaction and accessibility. Professor Azenkot’s research focuses on enabling people with disabilities to have equal access to information via mobile and wearable devices. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2014, where she was awarded the Graduate School Medal, an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and an AT&T Labs Graduate Fellowship. She also holds a B.A. in Computer Science from Pomona College.