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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 $1.2M grant to investigate the automation of chemistry laboratory 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.
Electronic musician and music cognition researcher Grace Leslie joins ATLAS faculty
ATLAS and the College of Music welcome Grace Leslie, an electronic musician and music cognition researcher committed to harnessing the expression granted by new music interfaces to better understand the link between music and emotion.
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.
ATLAS welcomes Professor Sheng-Fen “Nik” Chien as visiting scientist and scholar
ATLAS welcomes Professor Sheng-Fen “Nik” Chien, who joins us as a visiting scientist and scholar for the fall semester. Chien explores computational intelligence and experience design as a means to stimulate human creativity.
Read more Sheng-Fen Chien joins ATLAS as a visiting scientist and scholar
Unstable Design Lab announces open call for third experimental weaving residency
ATLAS Institute's Unstable Design Lab, directed by Laura Devendorf, will host its third experimental weaving residency this spring to develop techniques and open-source resources that support collaboration and innovation across the fiber arts and engineering communities. New this year, the lab will actively work to grow community at the intersection of craft and technology through inviting interested parties to a series of experimental weaving talks.
Read More article about the Unstable Design Lab's third experimental weaving residency
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
Ellen Yi-Luen Do and Carson Bruns win graduate school awards for outstanding mentorship
Praised by their graduate students for their scientific competence, work ethic, creativity and compassion, two ATLAS professors received Outstanding Faculty Mentor awards from CU Boulder’s Graduate school on May 3, an honor bestowed this year on only 18 faculty members campus-wide.
Read More article about ATLAS professors receiving Outstanding Faculty Mentor Awards
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.
Fiona Bell: Intimacy between designers and materials leads to sustainability
ATLAS PhD student Fiona Bell is passionate about sustainability; her doctoral dissertation tackles how to reduce waste through encouraging intimate relationships between designers, the materials they use and the artifacts they develop. In recognition of her work, Bell recently received financial support to help complete her thesis through a Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
Purnendu's research at Meta brings touch to VR/AR environments
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.
ACME Lab: Creating technologies to support creativity
ATLAS recently released a new video that celebrates the ACME Lab and its commitment to designing technologies to support creatives. Directed by Professor Ellen Do, the lab researches computational tools for design, creativity, cognition, tangible and embedded interaction, and computing for health and wellness.
High-tech tattoos may help prevent skin cancer
Carson Bruns, assistant professor and director of the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, and his research team are collaborating with the CU Anschutz Medical Campus to test a tattoo ink that’s completely invisible—and could lower the risk of skin cancer, much like a “permanent sunscreen. At the same time, Bruns and doctoral student Jesse Butterfield, a researcher in Bruns' Laboratory for Emergent Nanomaterials, have launched a company called Chromopraxis that will soon sell the first commercially available, color-changing tattoo inks.