HCDE PhD student Murtaza Ali is working to address the challenge of conducting thorough literature reviews in the research field, where researchers need to review and understand large amounts of information in a limited time.

Ali has developed BeadPlots, a new visualization designed to help researchers efficiently extract meaningful insights from academic papers. BeadPlots works by representing different sections of a research paper along a vertical axis, with each section displayed as a horizontal line.

With support from an HCDE Doctoral Research Grant, Ali is conducting a user study and documenting participants’ comprehension of research papers and their use of BeadPlots, compared to those without access to BeadPlots. Ali’s eventual goal is to establish BeadPlots as an effective visualization tool to aid researchers in conducting efficient literature reviews, and as a result, support the production of groundbreaking research across multiple fields.

HCDE PhD student Meena Muralikumar is working to uncover the challenges and needs of User Experience practitioners working with technically complex design materials like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). AI and ML are rapidly advancing, but prior research has found that designers struggle to design with AI and ML, and they are often considered new applications distinctly different from other technologies. Muralikumar is conducting interviews with UX designers and researchers about what challenges they face in effective ideation, prototyping, and testing for AI and ML products and what they would need to overcome it. Muralikumar’s research also seeks to understand issues of fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics (F.A.T.E) and aims to enable UX practitioners to better address biases learned by AI and ML models.  

With support from an HCDE Doctoral Research Grant, Muralikumar has been able to compensate interview subjects with an honorarium. The data and results she collects from this initial study will inform her dissertation proposal and future research.

HCDE PhD candidate Kenya Mejia is working to understand and address systemic barriers to diversity and inclusion within the field of engineering. Mejia’s research aims to move beyond just increasing diversity numbers in engineering education and instead focuses on creating inclusive environments where all students have equitable access to resources and feel a sense of belonging. By studying the power dynamics within co-design sessions, where students and faculty collaborate to develop inclusive pedagogical practices, Mejia seeks to identify the subtle ways power is exercised and inform the creation of frameworks to address these dynamics.

With support from an HCDE Doctoral Research Grant, Mejia is conducting a series of workshops with students and faculty, and is able to compensate them for their time. According to Mejia, this compensation is critical because this work requires emotional labor and care work, both of which often go unnoticed. Through this work, Mejia aims to contribute to the understanding of power as a systemic phenomenon that can be reproduced or disrupted by individuals. By connecting individual interactions to larger systemic issues, Mejia hopes to support inclusion efforts and systemic change in engineering education.

HCDE PhD student Adam Hyland is working to document the history of how different engineering communities of practice collaborated to standardize floating-point arithmetic on computers. This standardization had a significant impact on numerical computing in the 1990s and 2000s, influencing various fields such as spreadsheet calculation, multimedia communication, citizen science, and computer graphics. Through studying the process of standardization, Hyland aims to gain insights into engineering collaboration and the construction of engineering knowledge.

With support from an HCDE Doctoral Research Grant, Hyland was able to visit the University of California, Berkeley, to make connections with members of the community of engineers who worked on the floating point standard. Hyland attended a dedication ceremony honoring the work of Professor Emeritus William Kahan, the primary architect of the standard, and discovered new contacts for future interviews. By combining archival research and oral history interviews, Hyland aims to make novel contributions to the collective understanding of multi-organizational engineering collaboration.