Interactive Computing Personal Statement Examples

What excites me about research is that great visionaries like Doug Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, etc., have had huge impact on the lives of people in developed countries. For example, Engelbart envisioned most elements of modern computing like the mouse, live video conferencing, text processing, etc much ahead of their time (20-40 years before). Unfortunately, despite these great visions, the benefits and joy of interactive computing remains largely inaccessible to people who are most marginalized in the world, e.g., people living in developing regions, people living with disability, etc.

I am interested in looking at how interactive computing can impact the lives of people in developing regions, where resources are scarce and people are just beginning to interact with computational devices. This problem space lies at the intersection of HCI and ICTD

There may be two

I took one aspect of interactive computing namely sensemaking and helped three different user groups (makers[1], turkers[3] and blind people [2]) to reap benefits out of it.

In my first project in the Analytics and Visualization lab (AVIZ) at INRIA in Paris, I investigated how to equip makers with design tools to build personal data displays such as physical visualizations (Fig 1b). Unlike traditional visualizations, they offer several benefits such as being tangible, always “on” and in the context of makers and artists they help them communicate meaning and elicit reflection on data. Crafting them however is a laborious challenge involving a chain of tools hindering makers from their workflow and iterative processes. We analyzed their workflow, identified design challenges and built MakerVis [1] as a tool to support their entire design workflow starting from data processing till final object fabrication (Fig