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Celebrating 2022
As the year draws to a close, we've gathered a handful of our most popular stories from the past year. Here's to an even more successful 2023!
Read More links to a selection of 12 stories from the past year
Can music heal? This artist and researcher wants to find out
Electronic musician, flutist and researcher Grace Leslie believes that music touches something deep in the human brain—a hardwired need, perhaps, to sit around a fire or in a concert arena and feel connected to the people around us. Humans have been making music for longer than we’ve lived in cities and grown crops. “In most cultures, it’s used to draw people together,” she says.
ATLAS professor Carson Bruns wins award for organic chemistry laboratory automation
The National Science Foundation has awarded ATLAS assistant professor of mechanical engineering Carson Bruns and collaborators Alessandro Roncone and Dan Szafir a $1.8M grant to investigate the automation of chemistry lab work. Funded by NSF’s Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier initiative, the project, titled “RoboChemistry: Human-Robot Collaboration for the Future of Organic Synthesis,” will develop collaborative mobile robots that assist chemical R&D workers in order to reduce their mental and physical workload while enhancing safety and efficiency.
Read More about carson bruns research automation of chemistry laboratory work
Visual artist and longtime ATLAS faculty member Joel Swanson earns tenure
Beginning this year, ATLAS faculty member Joel Swanson is promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure in the Herbst Program for Ethics, Engineering and Society.
ATLAS welcomes Anthony Pinter—a data scientist whose specialty is love
The ATLAS Institute is delighted to welcome Anthony Pinter, whose work focuses on web development, computational thinking and programming, and how data represents us, our lives and the worlds around us.
How to turn throwaway cardboard into a DIY arcade game
Like many people across Colorado, Peter Gyory spent the height of the COVID-19 pandemic sitting at home with nothing to do. Then the ATLAS-based PhD candidate and game designer looked around his apartment: “I was surrounded by cardboard. I thought: ‘How could I make a game out of that?’”
ATLAS research front and center at DIS’22
Researchers from ATLAS Institute's Unstable Design, THING, Living Matter and Superhuman Computing labs presented four papers, including three that received Honorable Mention awards, at the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '22), held virtually, June 13-17.
The challenges of user testing made "easy"
In a paper she will present later this month at the Human Computer Interaction International Conference, recent CTD graduate Elsy Meis proposes Dashboard Zero, an approach to user testing that is both simple and immediate.
ACME Lab @ACM C&C
Researchers from ATLAS Institute’s ACME Lab will present one pictorial and two Graduate Student Symposium papers at the 14th ACM Creativity & Cognition (C&C), which will take place June 20-23 in Venice, Italy. The theme of this year's conference is "Creativity, Craft and Design."
Read More article about ACME Lab papers at the 2022 ACM C&C Conference
New summer classes empower performance community to use cutting-edge technologies
After rebounding from a major flood with vibrant new leadership and a new toolbox of performance technologies, the ATLAS Institute’s B2 Center for Media, Arts & Performance now offers more varied and interesting opportunities to artists, engineers, creative technologists and performers than ever before. This summer, B2 offers introductory classes on how they work.
Read More about classes that teach performers how to use B2's new state-of-the-art equipment
ATLAS@CHI2022
ATLAS researchers presented six published works and two workshops at the 2022 ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), the world’s preeminent forum for the field of human-computer interaction. Included in the published works, Mirela Alistar’s Living Matter Lab authored two papers, one of which received a Best Paper Honorable Mention award. The conference, commonly referred to as “CHI,” was held hybrid-onsite April 30-May 6, 2022 in New Orleans.
ATLAS PhD candidate Kailey Shara wins top award in NVC 2022
First place winner, Chembotix, came away with $45,000 for its work on speeding up the pace of chemistry research and development. Making molecules in current laboratory settings is typically time-consuming and dangerous; Kailey Shara's automation makes the process faster, safer and ultimately more productive.
Touching Virtual Reality
Normally virtual surfaces cannot be felt because they aren't there. But at Reality Labs Research at Meta, (previously known as Facebook), ATLAS PhD Student Purnendu is researching soft, wearable devices–such as wristbands, rings or gloves –that could enable tactile sensations in virtual/augmented reality environments.