Amy Pavel
Email apavel@cs.cmu.edu
Twitter @amypavel
Publications Google Scholar
CV
Carnegie Mellon University
HCII, Accessibility@CMU
Postdoctoral Fellow
Apple, Inc., AI/ML Research
Research Scientist
Archived job materials
Research · Teaching
I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University (supervised by Jeff Bigham) and a Research Scientist at Apple. I received my PhD from the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. I was advised by professors Björn Hartmann at UC Berkeley and Maneesh Agrawala at Stanford, and my doctoral work was supported by an NDSEG fellowship. I've previously been supported by a department EECS Excellence Award and a Sandisk Gold Fellowship.
In the summer of 2018, I served as the lecturer for CS160, the UC Berkeley user interface design and development course. Here is the course website.
I'll be joining the faculty of University of Texas, Austin as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science starting in January 2022! If you are a prospective graduate student or postdoc, please get in touch!
Research Highlights
Research Summary
My research leverages the connections between communication mediums (e.g., spoken audio, multiple video sources, text transcripts) to enable people to fully participate in and better work with digital communication. As a systems researcher in Human-Computer Interaction, I embed machine learning technologies (e.g., NLU, NLG) into new human interactions that I then deploy to test. Using my systems, remote content creators more effectively collaborate, video authors efficiently create accessible descriptions for blind users, and instructors help students to learn and retain key points. To inform future systems that capture what is important to domain experts and people with disabilities, I conduct and collaborate on in-depth qualitative (e.g., AAC communication, memes) and quantitative studies (e.g., 360° Video, VR Saliency). My long term research goal is to make communication more effective and accessible to all.
Conference Papers
Yi-Hao Peng, JiWoong Jang, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Amy Pavel
The ACM Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI 2021).
PDF | 30s Video | Presentation (5 min) | Presentation Transcript
Xingyu Liu, Patrick Carrington, Xiang "Anthony" Chen, Amy Pavel
The ACM Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI 2021).
Prakhar Gupta, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Yulia Tsvetkov, Amy Pavel
Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Accepted to NAACL 2021).
Stephanie Valencia, Michal Luria, Amy Pavel, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Henny Admoni
The ACM Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2021).
Amy Pavel, Gabriel Reyes, Jeffrey P. Bigham
ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2020).
Cole Gleason, Stephanie Valencia, Lynn Kirabo, Jason Wu, Anhong Guo, Elizabeth J. Carter, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Cynthia L. Bennett, Amy Pavel
ACM Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2020).
Jaylin Herskovitz, Jason Wu, Samuel White, Amy Pavel, Gabriel Reyes, Anhong Guo, Jeffrey P. Bigham
ACM Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2020).
Cole Gleason, Amy Pavel, Himalini Gururaj, Kris M. Kitani, Jeffrey P. Bigham
ACM Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2020).
Stephanie Valencia, Amy Pavel, Jared Santa Maria, Seunga (Gloria) Yu, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Henny Admoni
The ACM Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI 2020).
Cole Gleason, Amy Pavel, Emma McCamey, Christina Low, Patrick Carrington, Kris M. Kitani, Jeffrey P. Bigham
The ACM Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI 2020).
Cole Gleason, Amy Pavel, Xingyu Liu, Patrick Carrington, Lydia Chilton, Jeffrey P. Bigham
ACM Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019).
Prakhar Gupta, Shikib Mehri, Tiancheng Zhao, Amy Pavel, Maxine Eskenazi, Jeffrey P. Bigham
SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2019).
Vincent Sitzmann*, Ana Serrano*, Amy Pavel, Maneesh Agrawala, Diego Gutierrez, Belen Masia, Gordon Wetzstein
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (VR 2018).
Project Page | Code | Video
Amy Pavel, Björn Hartmann, Maneesh Agrawala
ACM 30th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2017).
Amy Pavel, Dan B Goldman, Björn Hartmann, Maneesh Agrawala
ACM 29th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2016).
Amy Pavel, Dan B Goldman, Björn Hartmann, Maneesh Agrawala
ACM 28th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2015).
Kurt Luther, Jari-lee Tolentino, Wei Wu, Amy Pavel, Maneesh Agrawala, Brian P Bailey, Björn Hartmann, Steven Dow
The 18th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2015).
Amy Pavel, Colorado Reed, Björn Hartmann, Maneesh Agrawala
ACM 27th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2014).
Thesis and Technical Reports
Amy Pavel
PhD in Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley
Advisors: Bjoern Hartmann and Maneesh Agrawala
Additional committee members: Eric Paulos, Abigail De Kosnik
Amy Pavel, Floraine Berthouzoz, Björn Hartmann, Maneesh Agrawala
Berkeley EECS Technical Report and Poster Presentation (TR 2013, TECHCON 2013).
Posters and workshops
Kundan Krishna, Amy Pavel, Benjamin Schloss, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Zachary Lipton
AAAI Workshop on Health Intelligence (W3PHIAI 2020 Workshop Paper).
Christina Low*, Emma McCamey*, Cole Gleason, Patrick Carrington, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Amy Pavel
The 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019 Poster).
Kurt Luther, Wei Wu, Amy Pavel, Jari-lee Tolentino, Maneesh Agrawala, Björn Hartmann, Steven Dow
The 18th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2014 Demo).
Work
Postdoctoral Fellow — Carnegie Mellon University
Advisor: Jeffrey P. Bigham January 2019 - PresentResearch Scientist — Apple
Group: Accessibility/ML ResearchJuly 2019 - Present
Graduate student researcher — UC Berkeley
Advisors: Björn Hartmann, Maneesh Agrawala Committee: Eric Paulos, Björn Hartmann, Maneesh Agrawala, Abigail de KosnikAugust 2013 - December 2018
Undergraduate research assistant — UC Berkeley
Advisors: Maneesh Agrawala, Björn Hartmann, Floraine BerthouzozMay 2011 - May 2013
Research intern — Adobe Research, Seattle
Advisor: Dan GoldmanMay 2014 - August 2014, May 2015 - August 2015
Teaching
Instructor — UC Berkeley
CS 160: User interface design and developmentSummer 2018
Graduate Student Instructor (TA) — UC Berkeley
CS 160: User interface design and developmentSummer 2017
Project Advisor — UC Berkeley
NWMEDIA 190: Making Sense of Cultural DataFall 2017
Instructor (Workshop) — UC Berkeley
CS Kickstart, intro CS for incoming freshmen womenSummer 2012