Research Areas

User Experience Design and User-Centered Systems

By studying user behavior and attitudes, user experience design researchers gain insights on how to make products and platforms more effective for the people using them. 

Research Highlights

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Peter Brusilovsky Co-Organized Workshop at ACM Recommender Systems Conference

Dr. Peter Brusilovsky co-organized the 12th Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems, part of the 19th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 

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SCI Students Huao Li and Lucia Romero Alongside Professor Michael Lewis Win Best Paper Award at RSS Workshop

Huao Li (SCI '25G), Lucia Romero (SCI '26G), and Michael Lewis (Professor, Department of Informatics and Networked Systems, Intelligent Systems Program), alongside collaborators from CMU and USC, won the Best Paper Award at the RSS 2025 Generative Models x HRI (GenAI-HRI) Workshop. 

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Check out the most recent grants, research profiles, and more in our Research news section.

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Affiliated Faculty
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Dmitriy Babichenko, Clinical Professor

Dr. Babichenko's research interests include clinical decision support systems, use of serious games in higher and post-graduate education, and use of transformational games in healthcare.

Faculty Profile
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Peter Brusilovsky, Professor

Dr. Brusilovsky's research interests include Social Web, user modeling, adaptive information systems, intelligent tutoring systems, e-learning, and human-computer interaction.

Faculty Profile
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Panos Chrysanthis, Professor

Dr. Chrysanthis' research interests lie within the areas of mobile and pervasive data management, database systems, operating systems and real-time systems. 

Faculty Profile
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Raquel Coelho, Assistant Professor

Dr. Coelho's research - grounded in learning sciences principles and human-centered frameworks - is focused on theorizing about, supporting learning with, and learning about emerging technologies.

Faculty Profile
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Nadine von Frankenberg, Teaching Assistant Professor

Dr. von Frankenberg's research interests include ubiquitous computing, smart buildings, IEQ, human-in-the-loop control, digital health, and educational research.

Faculty Profile
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Na Du, Assistant Professor

Dr. Du's research interests include human-computer interaction, human factors in smart city technologies, human-centered computing, and user experience design.

Faculty Profile
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Rosta Farzan, Professor

In her research, Dr. Farzan seeks to understand, design, and implement socio-technical systems that empower individuals and groups to contribute to knowledge production and community building. 

Faculty Profile
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Aakash Gautam, Assistant Professor

Dr. Gautam's research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction, learning sciences, and community development. 

Faculty Profile
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Kuo-Ting (Tim) Huang, Assistant Professor

Dr. Huang studies the causes and consequences of the digital divide and the social, educational, and health impacts of technology use across the life course.

Faculty Profile
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Alexandros Labrinidis, Professor

Dr. Labrinidis' research focuses on user-centric data management for scalable network-centric applications, including web-databases, data stream management systems, sensor networks, and scientific data management (with an emphasis on big data).

Faculty Profile
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Michael Lewis, Professor

Dr. Lewis' research focuses on human interaction with intelligent automation. Since conducting research in modeling human operators for his dissertation, he has studied visualization- based control interfaces, human-agent teamwork, and most recently human-robot interaction.

Faculty Profile
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Yu-Ru Lin, Professor

Dr. Lin is interested in studying social and political networks as well as ways to understand network data through computation and visualization.

Faculty Profile
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Eleanor Mattern, Teaching Associate Professor

Dr. Mattern's teaching and research interests include archives and digital curation, community-centered information work, civic engagement, and information policy and ethics.

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Marcia Rapchak, Teaching Assistant Professor

Dr. Rapchak's research interests include information literacy, academic libraries, computer-supported collaborative learning, and critical librarianship.

Faculty Profile
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Erin Walker, Professor

Dr. Walker's research uses interdisciplinary methods to improve the design and implementation of educational technology, and then to understand when and why it is effective.

Faculty Profile