Varsha Koushik
PhD Comp Sci '22
Computer Science
vasr6678@colorado.edu

Varsha is a third-year year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science. She is advised by Shaun Kane, and her research focuses on accessible smart home devices, exploring accessible ways to support people with cognitive disabilities to interact with smart home devices.

For more information about Varsha, view her LinkedIn page. Alumni pages are not always updated after graduation.​

 

 

Publications

  • Varsha Koushik and Shaun K. Kane. 2019. "It Broadens My Mind": Empowering People with Cognitive Disabilities through Computing Education. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 514, 12 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300744  (Glasgow, UK – May 4-9, 2019).
  • Varsha Koushik, Darren Guinness, and Shaun K. Kane. 2019. StoryBlocks: A Tangible Programming Game To Create Accessible Audio Stories. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 492, 12 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300722 (Glasgow, UK – May 4-9, 2019).
  • Shaun K. Kane, Varsha Koushik, and Annika Muehlbradt. 2018. Bonk: accessible programming for accessible audio games. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 132-142. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3202185.3202754 (Trondheim, Norway — June 19 - 22, 2018).

 

In the news

combined portrait shots of carson bruns and ellen do
Ellen Yi-Luen Do and Carson Bruns win graduate school awards for outstanding mentorship

May 4, 2022

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.

Person at podium delivering a speech to an audience at the three-minute thesis competition
Varsha Koushik takes first place and Anthony Pinter is a runner-up in Three-Minute Thesis Contest

Feb. 21, 2022

Varsha Koushik, an ATLAS affiliated PhD student and a member of the Superhuman Computing Lab, won the Three-Minute Thesis Competition. Anthony Pinter, an incoming teaching assistant professor (starting fall 2022) in the ATLAS Institute and a PhD candidate in information science at the University of Colorado Boulder, was a runner-up.

A collage of the eight PhD students who won Graduate School awards.
Eight ATLAS researchers receive Graduate School awards

May 18, 2021

ATLAS PhD students Katie Gach, Keke Wu, Fiona Bell, Kailey Shara and Sasha Novack, and Affiliated PhD students Gabrielle Johnson, Dreycey Albin and Varsha Koushik recently received graduate school awards.