Michael Rivera
- Assistant Professor
- HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
- DIGITAL FABRICATION
- ATLAS INSTITUTE
- COMPUTER SCIENCE
Michael Rivera is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the ATLAS Institute. He directs the Utility Research Lab—a highly interdisciplinary group that invents and investigates digital manufacturing technology by combining materials science, computational fabrication, and sustainable design practices. Michael has published award-winning articles on digital fabrication processes and interactive systems at premier human-computer interaction venues, including ACM CHI, UIST, DIS, and IMWUT. His research has been featured in popular national news venues such as NPR’s All Things Considered, Ars Technica, and CBS News. He is a former NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellow. He earned his Ph.D. at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, where he engineered additive manufacturing materials and processes for soft and sustainably-designed interactive objects.
Projects
Publications
Xin Wen, Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, and Michael L. Rivera. 2024. "Exploring a Software Tool for Biofibers Design". In: Adjunct Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST Adjunct '24). (Pittsburgh, PA, October 13-16, 2024).
Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Mirela Alistar, Laura Devendorf, and Michael L. Rivera. 2024. Desktop Biofibers Spinning: An Open-Source Machine for Exploring Biobased Fibers and Their Application Towards Sustainable Smart Textile Design. In: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), (Honolulu, HI, May 11–16, 2024).
S. Sandra Bae, Takanori Fujiwara, Anders Ynnerman, Ellen Yi-Luen Do, Michael L. Rivera, Danielle Albers Szafir. 2023. "A Computational Design Pipeline to Fabricate Sensing Network Physicalizations". In: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (October 2023).
Michael L. Rivera, S. Sandra Bae, Scott E. Hudson. 2023. “Designing a Sustainable Material for 3D Printing with Spent Coffee Grounds”. In: Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’23) (Pittsburgh, PA, July 10–14, 2023).
Krithik Ranjan, Peter Gyory, Michael L. Rivera, Ellen Yi-Luen Do. 2023. “Cartoonimator: A Low-cost, Paper-based Animation Kit for Computational Thinking”. In: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC '23) (Chicago, IL, June 19-23, 2023).