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2026 ATLAS student award winners announced

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:34:41 +0000

2026 ATLAS student award winners announced Michael Kwolek Wed, 04/15/2026 - 11:34

ATLAS awards recognize undergraduate and graduate students in our Creative Technology & Design programs who demonstrate remarkable qualities, such as academic excellence, innovative thinking, research efforts, leadership, community mindedness, creativity and/or technical performance.

Our winners exemplify the ATLAS ethos, bridging engineering skill, creative prowess and a sense of community. They are curious, passionate, and persistent in their pursuit of discovery and understanding of the world around them.

A special shout-out to two students, Josie Armstrong and Henry Nguyen, who received awards from the College of Engineering and Applied Science this year for their exceptional work. Josie earned the Academic Engagement Award and Henry earned the Community Impact Award.

ATLAS Undergraduate Student Awards

Josie Armstrong – Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award

Josie Armstrong is graduating from �鶹��Ƶ with a BS in Creative Technology & Design and a BA in Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts (Production Track). For the past two years, Josie has worked as a Learning Assistant (LA) for coding and web design courses at the ATLAS Institute. As an LA, Josie found a passion for teaching and pedagogy, and now researches LA pedagogy and program structure under Dr. Anthony Pinter. Through their research and work as an LA, Josie hopes to support future generations of students and LAs at the ATLAS Institute.

Josie has found a home like no other in the CTD program. They value the collaborative and welcoming environment highly, and they prioritize contributing to that environment as a student and an LA. Josie’s capstone project is a digitally integrated web-based tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) that combines their experience in game design, web design, and book design. In their free time, they enjoy crocheting, reading, raising houseplants, and occasionally throwing darts. After graduating from �鶹��Ƶ, Josie will be pursuing a JD at the University of Chicago Law School, where they intend to focus on media/technology IP and data privacy law.

Lily Dykstra – Distinguished Student Award

Lily Dykstra graduates summa cum laude from CU’s College of Engineering and Applied Science with a Bachelor of Science in Creative Technology and Design (CTD) and a certificate in User Experience. As a student and in life, Lily approaches challenges with radical flexibility and an open mind, always eager to explore everywhere creative processes can lead. She has specifically focused on product and hardware design of various materials, applications and utilities. Both on Boulder’s campus and abroad during her semester in Florence, Lily’s studies have attended to the substance, construction, and history of various art and design forms. This was highlighted during her work in the second classroom iteration of “Hacking the Apocalypse,” in which she helped her group make an automated greenhouse sensitive to potential future water and food scarcity concerns.

The combination of Lily’s unique experiences has afforded her a varied, innovative, and socially conscious perspective of the creation of material products in contemporary and historical society. During Lily’s time with CTD, she has served as an ATLAS ambassador and as a learning assistant for two core CTD courses, Image and Form. Throughout her work, she has enjoyed supporting her peers to bring their ideas to life, teaching everything from Photoshop and animation to 3D modeling and physical fabrication. To round out her CTD curriculum, her senior capstone tackles the topic of accessibility in baking. Lily and her team put together an assistive baking device that helps those with limited mobility in their hands with small baking measurements. While her future is undecided, she is eager to embrace the hugeness, beauty, and glorious uncertainty of the world. She knows she will create a vivid and meaningful life in which CTD’s teachings will continue to support and guide her creative innovations.

Sam Jarzembowski – Distinguished Student Award

Sam Jarzembowski graduates magna cum laude from CU’s College of Engineering and Applied Science with a major in Creative Technology and Design (CTD), a minor in Engineering Management, and a certificate in User Experience. During his time in CTD, Sam concentrated his studies in user experience design. He completed a UX audit for the FlyDelta app, redesigned the Denver Zoo’s ticketing experience, and created a parking guidance device in the form of an interactive stoplight. All of these projects, along with the rest of the CTD curriculum, fostered his passion for interaction design and a blend of physical and digital design. For the past two years, Sam has served as a Learning Assistant (LA) for ATLS 2200, one of CTD’s core courses that teaches web design and development. He has thoroughly enjoyed his time in the classroom guiding students through assignments, answering questions, and providing feedback on their work. Sam is immensely grateful for the opportunities that the ATLAS Institute, the CTD program, and the University of Colorado Boulder have provided him.

For his senior capstone project, Sam worked alongside two team members to create Measurely, an assistive baking device. Measurely combines an automated ingredient dispenser, scale, control panel, and web app to make baking more accessible to those with limited hand mobility or dexterity. His role included interaction design, user testing, and programming. This fall, Sam will be attending graduate school to further his education and gain more experience in his field. He will focus on human-centered design and how people interact with both physical and digital experiences.

Jordyn Rabinowitz – Distinguished Student Award

Jordyn Rabinowitz graduates summa cum laude from �鶹��Ƶ’s College of Engineering and Applied Science with a Bachelor of Science in Creative Technology and Design (CTD), as well as minors in space and engineering management. Throughout her time at ATLAS, she has combined technical creativity with a strong commitment to teaching, mentorship, and building accessible learning experiences.

At CU, Jordyn serves as head learning assistant for Image (ATLS 2100), where she leads lab-style recitations, supports first-time coders, and helps manage a large instructional team. She also works in the Helio Lab, leading workshops in areas such as VR, AR, CAD, photography, and digital media. In addition, she contributed to STEM education through video production for NCWIT Teach Engineering, creating educational content for K–12 classrooms.

One of Jordyn’s most meaningful ATLAS projects was helping rebuild the Image course’s VR/WebXR unit, transitioning it from Glitch to GitHub. By writing student-facing onboarding guides and improving the setup process, she helped reduce technical barriers for beginners and make creative coding feel more approachable and accessible.

She is known for her thoughtful leadership, low-floor/high-ceiling teaching approach, and ability to make technical concepts engaging for a wide range of learners.

Outside the classroom, Jordyn is also a climbing coach and mentor. Her current capstone project, Surge Harness, is a wearable resistance system designed to help climbers train movement control and stability safely while climbing. Starting this summer, she will attend UC Irvine’s Master of Arts in Teaching program to prepare to become a secondary mathematics teacher, continuing her interest in the intersection of education, technology, and hands-on design.

Lindsey Trussel – Distinguished Student Award

Lindsey Trussell graduates from the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science with a major in Creative Technology and Design and a minor in Creative Writing. She has served as a Learning Assistant for Computational Foundations 1 (ATLS 1300) and Web (ATLS 2200), supporting students in developing foundational skills in programming and web development. Lindsey also collaborated with faculty to co-design Pedagogy 2, a course that prepares ATLAS students for teaching roles as Learning Assistants, reflecting her sustained commitment to mentorship and education.

Lindsey is an active presence in the BTU Lab, where she regularly assists peers, troubleshoots complex projects, and offers thoughtful, detail-oriented feedback across disciplines. Her approach to both teaching and making is grounded in patience and persistence, allowing her to carefully work through technical challenges.

Her creative work explores the intersection of analog audio systems, physical computing, and interactive design, with a focus on manufacturing and fabrication practices. For her senior capstone, she is developing a guitar pedal that maps live audio signals to DMX lighting effects, translating sound into responsive visual environments.

Lindsey’s interdisciplinary practice integrates poetry with visual media and fabrication, combining written language with physical form. Across her work, she demonstrates a strong commitment to craftsmanship, collaboration, and the creation of expressive, carefully constructed experiences.

Joseph Yoder – Distinguished Student Award

Joe Yoder graduates from CU’s College of Engineering and Applied Science with a bachelor’s degree in Creative Technology and Design (CTD), maintaining a 3.96 GPA. He is the third member of his family to pursue a CTD degree, following his two sisters, who also graduated from the program.

Joe’s senior capstone project, RotoClimb, is a climbing wall with holds that rotate to different angles using motors and custom controls, changing the difficulty of routes without manually resetting the wall. The project explores how rotating holds can expand training possibilities for all levels of climbers, while demonstrating hands-on prototyping and engineering design.

Joe also contributed to EcoSort, an AI-powered waste sorting robot. EcoSort was designed to help public spaces like universities improve recycling accuracy and reduce waste contamination. The complete business pitch won 1st place out of 11 teams in Joe’s business minor capstone competition. In addition to technology focused builds, Joe enjoys woodworking, memorably building an optical illusion cutting board made from three contrasting hardwoods that was featured in the ATLAS Expo 2025.

Outside of school, Joe has spent the past 10 months working at Mountain Sun Pub & Brewery as a line cook and server, and was recently promoted to shift lead manager. At work Joe has developed strong teamwork, communication, and leadership skills in a fast-paced environment. After graduation, Joe is seeking a full-time position to continue his radical creativity and strong work ethic.

ATLAS Graduate Student Awards

Krithik Ranjan - Outstanding Graduate Student Award

Krithik Ranjan graduates with a PhD in Creative Technology & Design at the ATLAS Institute and �鶹��Ƶ’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Krithik is a designer, researcher, and educator passionate about imagining and developing innovative technologies to support people’s creative technology interactions. In his research, he develops and studies environments for creating and learning with computers that support open-ended creativity and tinkering across domains. His dissertation promotes deeper material engagement in computing technologies that leverage physical craft materials to offer expressive, explorative, and playful means for creativity that are low-cost, low-barrier, and learner-driven in diverse formal and informal educational environments.

Krithik has designed a number of novel technologies towards this goal, such as toolkits for creating animations from drawings on paper, creative science simulations, intuitive physical computing platforms, and tangible toolkit and curriculum for AI literacy. As a graduate student in ATLAS, he has served as a Teaching Assistant (TA) for Object (ATLS 3300) and Computational Foundations II (ATLS 2270), and formally and informally mentored a number of graduate, undergraduate, and high school students on research, thesis, and course projects. Krithik was also a finalist for the 2026 Three Minute Thesis competition (3MT) at �鶹��Ƶ. Moving forward, he plans to continue to design and research technologies for enabling meaningful, maker-driven, and material-rich computational interactions for makers of all ages.

Caitlin Littlejohn – Distinguished Student Award

Caitlin Rai Littlejohn graduates from CU’s College of Engineering and Applied Science with a Master’s in Creative Technology and Design (CTD): Social Impact. Her work sits at the intersection of design and technology, and community-centered problem solving, with a focus on making complex systems more accessible and equitable.

During her time in the program, Caitlin has collaborated on interdisciplinary projects addressing both environmental and social challenges. As the lead designer on ClimateThreads: Patterns in Air. Stories in Data., she contributed to branding, user experience, and visualization for a multimedia platform that translates air quality data into accessible, tactile formats, highlighting environmental inequities across the Denver-Aurora region. In partnership with AdventHealth, she contributed to user experience research for NurseWell, conducting interviews, identifying key gaps in nurse retention, and developing research-informed concepts and solutions to address these challenges, with pathways toward implementation. Additionally, Caitlin partnered with Denver Public Library’s IdeaLAB to redesign internal observation processes that support more effective program evaluation and user insight. Her work is grounded in a thoughtful, user-centered approach that prioritizes accessibility, storytelling, and meaningful impact.

For her practicum, Caitlin is developing and leading ATLAS’s inaugural pre-collegiate summer program, a studio-based experience engaging high school students in creative technology, design methodologies, and collaborative problem-solving. Through this work, she continues to expand her passion for mentorship and education.

Following graduation, Caitlin plans to apply her interdisciplinary background to expand equitable access to STEAM education in underserved communities through the development of community-centered makerspaces.

Klara Nitsche – Distinguished Student Award

I’m Klara Nitsche, a Master’s student on the Creative Technology and Design track. At ATLAS, I’ve had the pleasure of serving as an LA for two courses and a research collaborator in the ACME lab studying human-robot-interaction. I also branched out and joined the HIRO lab in the department of computer science, furthering my technical knowledge of robots and seeing where creativity can support robotics. In the graduate program I hosted tours, social events, and on-campus outreach as an ATLAS social recruiter and designed, documented, and advertised events at the B2 Blackbox Theater.

My experiences have culminated in a couple projects I feel proud of here, most notably a communal handwritten typeface called ‘Code of Conduct’ and my MS thesis: edible robots. My work was always about studying novel interactions between humans and materials, but my time at ATLAS has given me the tools to create these interactions myself. I’m excited to continue exploring these themes and research interests after graduation as I continue studying the field of human-robot-interaction!

Harsita Rajendran – Distinguished Student Award

Harsita Rajendren (she/her) is a master’s student in Creative Technology and Design (CTD) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work focuses on animation and motion design, with an emphasis on storytelling and human-centered experiences.

At ATLAS, Harsita has explored how animation can be used as a tool for communication and empathy. One of her key projects includes a hyperhidrosis awareness campaign, where she created an animated piece to shed light on a condition that is often overlooked yet deeply impacts daily life. She also developed an advertising campaign centered on first-time travelers, highlighting the unspoken social expectations and challenges newcomers face when navigating unfamiliar environments. Through these projects, she aims to make complex or overlooked experiences more visible and relatable.

Her approach combines animation with insights from UI/UX and human-computer interaction, allowing her to design work that is both visually engaging and psychologically informed. As an empathetic observer, she pays close attention to subtle human behaviors and emotions, translating them into meaningful visual narratives.

In addition to her creative work, Harsita has served as a physics peer mentor at the Student Academic Success Center, where she supported more than 30 first-generation undergraduate students. Through teaching and mentorship, she developed a deeper understanding of how individuals learn differently and the importance of adaptable, student-centered approaches.

Her capstone project is a choice-based interactive game that explores the idea of self-love as an active process of growth and self-accountability. Moving forward, Harsita aims to deepen her expertise in animation while continuing to explore motion design within interactive and user-centered contexts.

Katherine Rooney – Distinguished Student Award

Kate Rooney is a graduate student in Creative Technology and Design (CTD) at the ATLAS Institute, with a background in mechanical engineering. Her work sits at the intersection of engineering, design, and human experience, shaped by projects that span extreme environments and immersive technologies.

During her time at ATLAS, Kate designed and built an environmental system to support sustainability in Antarctic field camps and led the design and build of an interactive water education exhibit and topographical table for CIRES in Alamosa as part of the We Are Water project. She also developed a raycast-based system for the B2 Black Box, which continues to serve as a reference for immersive interaction within ATLAS.

Kate’s thesis project, Earth Contours, explores immersive terrain visualization through both a mobile app experience and a full-scale installation in the B2 Black Box. The project reimagines how people engage with landscapes, transforming geospatial data into intuitive, interactive, and visually compelling experiences that foster curiosity and connection to the natural world.

Kate’s approach blends technical rigor with creativity, using design to make complex systems tangible and human-centered. She has taken on leadership roles in student projects, mentoring teams and guiding interdisciplinary collaboration, while also engaging with CU’s startup community. She has especially valued the ATLAS community and maker spaces, where collaboration and experimentation bring ideas to life.

She is excited to build a career that spans engineering, design, and immersive experience across various environments and industries to create meaningful, impactful work.

Elizabeth Saunders – Distinguished Student Award

Elizabeth Saunders earned her master’s degree in Creative Technology and Design (Social Impact Track) from the University of Colorado Boulder’s ATLAS Institute, graduating with a 4.0 GPA.

At ATLAS, she served as the sole learning assistant for Aesthetics of Design, a 120-person hybrid course bridging the ATLAS Institute and the Mechanical Engineering Department. She also contributed as a student researcher with CU’s Sustainability Research Initiative under Dr. Jane Zelikova, launching Sustainability on Tap—a monthly speaker series bringing sustainability research into local breweries and fostering accessible, community-driven conversations that inspire action.

No course influenced Elizabeth’s thinking more than Zack Weaver’s Hacking the Apocalypse series, which shaped the guiding instinct behind her work: not just how to create something, but for whom—and what happens when it fails. Elizabeth applies this mindset through a blend of human-centered design and systems thinking, developing solutions that are equitable, resilient, and grounded in tangible, real-world impact.

This approach is evident in her practicum project: a LiDAR-based iOS foot scanning app developed with SCARPA. The app guides users through a 3D capture process to generate personalized ski boot recommendations, enhancing fit, safety, and accessibility while minimizing return-related emissions. Elizabeth also served as project manager for Give5 Mile High, a citywide volunteer platform in Denver, from conception to launch.

When she wasn't in the grad lab or the BTU, Elizabeth was outside—volunteering for Eldora ski patrol, coaching adaptive rowing, cycling, and alpine skiing, and logging over 200 ski days.

She came to ATLAS with a head full of ideas, a love for the outdoors, and a conviction that technology could do more good in the world. She leaves with the skills, the people, and the proof that it can—and the passion to continue building a more equitable and sustainable future.

College of Engineering & Applied Science Graduating Student Awards

Henry Nguyen – Community Impact Award

Creative Technology & Design taught me the importance of community and diverse perspectives gained through meaningful connections. A fellow graduate mentored me in my early years, showing me firsthand the creative freedom and remarkable people this program cultivates.

What I'd want prospective students to know about ATLAS is that it's a place where the mix of tech, art, and design opens doors to ideas you never knew you had, all while fostering a community of people who genuinely inspire one another.

Josie Armstrong – Academic Engagement Award

The biggest lesson I took away from my time as a CTD student is to try everything and put in 100%! The process is the point, and I've grown so much by trying, stumbling, and trying again. I think that's something that is uniquely possible and encouraged in CTD.

To future students, you will have so many opportunities to find and build community in your time at CU. Try as many of them as you can—you just might find something life-changing among those opportunities.

Over a dozen ATLAS students are recognized for their achievements this year.

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Shared reality: Exploring VR-like environments with your smartphone

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:59:38 +0000

Shared reality: Exploring VR-like environments with your smartphone Michael Kwolek Wed, 04/01/2026 - 09:59

Michael Kwolek

Virtual reality (VR) devices offer great potential for immersive communication and interactivity. But so far, it turns out few of us want to put on a clunky headset to make those possibilities come alive.

What if we could have a similar feeling of being in the room with a friend or colleague halfway around the world by using an everyday smartphone or tablet?

ATLAS PhD researcher Rishi Vanukuru builds tools to do just that.

“We're always going to be separated from family, from friends, from colleagues, and I think we can do better than just waiting for technology to advance in the next five or 10 years,” Vanukuru explained. “We can do more with the devices that we all have, that we're all familiar with, and use them to improve the experience of remote interaction today.”

He also aims to address access to these tools in his work, noting, “There's a divide between video calls that are widely available but not spatial, and augmented and virtual reality headsets that offer spatial interaction but are not widely accessible. My work bridges that gap using everyday technology to allow for more spatial interactions.”

Vanukuru is a member of the ACME Lab, directed by Professor Ellen Do. It is a space particularly conducive to this kind of research. He related that in the ACME Lab, “a key through-line through all of our work is building tools to help people be creative. The way that I interpret that is that for me, collaboration is one of the best amplifiers for creativity. What can we do to make better tools to help people be collaborative and therefore be more creative?”

A sense of space

The three-dimensionality of a room, the tactile nature of objects in that space, the ability to interact with those objects—these features create a sense of immersion we feel in well-executed virtual environments. Typically, though, you need a VR headset and additional controllers to experience these things.

But our smart devices also have lots of sensors—for tracking motion, location, light, depth, biometrics and more. Vanukuru explores ways those sensors can be used to bring the immersive qualities of VR to everyday video calls.

Vanukuru stated, “My hunch has been that we can do a lot more with devices that we all carry around, like phones and tablets. My work [aims] to maximize the potential of these devices for spatial collaboration in everyday contexts.”

For example, imagine your car has broken down on the side of the road. You might call an expert to talk you through a possible solution, but if you don’t know much about what’s under the hood, you will likely be hard-pressed to make the fix. With Vanukuru’s technology, dubbed DualStream, the caller can transmit a live 3D rendering of the car to an expert, who can then point to specific parts directly, improving the sense of shared presence over a standard video call.

“His work shows that we do not need expensive, specialized hardware to experience meaningful, embodied collaboration. Instead, we can use the sensors already in our pockets to transform how we share and interact within remote spaces,” said Do.

The importance of partnership

This research has been supported in part by an ongoing partnership with Ericsson Research, which explores at the forefront of information and communications technology.

“A lot of this work has been helped by this active collaboration that we've had with Ericsson Research, both in Silicon Valley in California and with researchers in Sweden,” Vanukuru said. “For three years now we've had biweekly weekly meetings with them where they've been giving inputs on the work and how it might progress.”

Professor Do elaborated on the importance of such relationships, saying, “Partnering with industry leaders like Ericsson Research is vital because it enables our academic prototypes, such as DualStream or Shared Reality, to be tested against the technical realities of global networking and communication standards. This collaboration has not only resulted in high-impact research on network-adaptive AR, but also directly contributed to international standards (like ITU-T P.1321), ensuring our innovations have a clear pathway to real-world deployment.”

Vanukuru concluded by noting, “Being at ATLAS has given me the space to question dominant narratives around what technology can or should be. It has also given me the freedom to use design as a means to explore alternate possibilities, and see what we can do with technologies that are already familiar to us and how we can use them to do more in the present.”

Studying Mobile Spatial Collaboration across Video Calls and Augmented Reality

Authors: Rishi Vanukuru, Krithik Ranjan, Ada Yi Zhao, David Lindero, Gunilla H. Berndtsson, Gregoire Phillips, Amy Banić, Mark D. Gross, Ellen Yi-Luen Do

Abstract: Mobile video calls are widely used to share information about real-world objects and environments with remote collaborators. While these calls provide valuable visual context in real time, the experience of interacting with people and moving around a space is significantly reduced when compared to co-located conversations. Recent work has demonstrated the potential of Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) applications to enable more spatial forms of collaboration across distance. To better understand the dynamics of mobile AR collaboration and how this medium compares against the status quo, we conducted a comparative structured observation study to analyze people's perception of space and interaction with remote collaborators across mobile video calls and AR-based calls. Fourteen pairs of participants completed a spatial collaboration task using each medium. Through a mixed-methods analysis of session videos, transcripts, motion logs, post-task exercises, and interviews, we highlight how the choice of medium influences the roles and responsibilities that collaborators take on and the construction of a shared language for coordination. We discuss the importance of spatial reasoning with one's body, how video calls help participants "be on the same page" more directly, and how AR calls enable both onsite and remote collaborators to engage with the space and each other in ways that resemble in-person interaction. Our study offers a nuanced view of the benefits and limitations of both mediums, and we conclude with a discussion of design implications for future systems that integrate mobile video and AR to better support spatial collaboration in its many forms.

ATLAS PhD researcher Rishi Vanukuru studies ways to make everyday video calls more tactile and immersive.

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Exploring the ethics of AI: Can we use tools like ChatGPT consciously?

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:57:39 +0000

Exploring the ethics of AI: Can we use tools like ChatGPT consciously? Michael Kwolek Tue, 02/24/2026 - 09:57

Michael Kwolek

As adoption of AI tools speeds up on campuses worldwide, students, faculty, and staff may be tempted to simply adopt-and-go. But it pays to consider the ethical implications of how we approach such technologies.

Nikolaus Klassen, business analyst at Google, teaches Applied AI Ethics for undergraduate and graduate students at the ATLAS Institute. With a PhD in classics and work in data processing and reporting, Klassen’s career has zigzagged between the humanities and the tech world.

We discussed the ethical implications of AI tools and how students are thinking about them. This conversation was lightly edited for space and clarity.

If you were to distill the concept of AI ethics to a few major themes in our current moment, what would they be?

I think AI ethics specifically—and tech ethics more generally speaking—is often presented as a trade-off: You can use this tool for free, but we'll invade your privacy. For me that's the core of the problem, because very often it's not easy to break out of this trade-off.

Do you look at utilitarianism, at the consequences, or do you set up unbreakable rules? Again, it’s almost like a trade-off.

So my core approach to AI ethics and tech ethics in general is: How can we ask better questions and find better frameworks that will bring us beyond this simple trade-off between the good and the bad?

Is there a way to offer people better choices and to offer choices in a way that [helps us] make good decisions? Instead of letting our privacy be invaded all the time and giving away our data because the defaults are set up in a certain way, how can we dig deeper and find more root causes of bias in the data?

For me, ethics is more about how can I use these frameworks to expose structural problems and maybe make them better? Alleviate the problems or solve them where possible, rather than just accept that they're part of this bad trade-off.

Key ethics concepts

Utilitarianism - The theory that the most moral action is the one that maximizes good and minimizes suffering for the greatest number of people.
Deontology - The theory that there are absolute moral obligations that must be followed regardless of consequences, exceptions, or potential benefits.
Moral licensing - A phenomenon in which people justify an immoral action after having previously done something good.
Law of the instrument - A cognitive bias toward over-reliance on a familiar tool for solving problems, regardless of suitability.
Choice architecture - A deliberate design of a tool or environment that influences how people make decisions without directly restricting choice.

Why do you think your AI Ethics class is so popular among ATLAS and non-ATLAS students?

I think students are pretty concerned about AI. Is it going to take away all the jobs? It seems to for entry-level jobs, so there is a direct impact. And I see students honestly grapple with how they should use AI in their own studies.

People frame it as: Is AI my crutch or is it a good tool that I'm using?

It's not like this is an abstract academic phenomenon. If you're going through your surroundings with open eyes, you can see bad impacts of unethical AI usage, so I think this is very concrete and applicable for students.

What do you hope students take away from spending a semester considering the ethical implications of AI technology?

For me it's really all about the questions—I want students to have a toolbox of questions they can ask and to teach them when they see a phenomenon not to just take it at face value. Be it a technology, an app, a use case, whatever their friends are using. To say, “Hold on a minute, let me ask some questions here,” and give them good questions to ask. To say, “How can I dive deeper into a problem?” and understand the root cause or the assumptions that are hidden here and sharpen these analytical tools to cut through the noise.

How do you think about AI in general? A tool? A platform? A way of life?

As humans, we experience these gateway transitions where we change something and then open up a new world. Agriculture enabled cities and civilizations and division of labor with all the bad and all the good [associated with that]. We suddenly could finance full-time poets and musicians and spend more resources on meaning making and culture.

Then you have the mechanical engine and the revolution that came with it. We have a lot more mobility today. We don't have to work so hard. Our life expectancy has basically doubled since then. It has enabled all kinds of different ways of living.

I think AI is probably going to be the same. The amount of information that we have in the world today is far beyond what humans can process. Because there's so much information around, it's hard to cut through it. For better or worse, we need technology to help us process it. We cannot do so on our own anymore. I think this will be the next gateway.

Most likely we will go through a valley like we did after the agricultural revolution and the mechanical revolution with unemployment rising or people being more and more hooked on digital technology. I feel like this is happening whether we want that or not.

The speed of change feels unprecedented. How does ethics apply to a phenomenon that is evolving so quickly?

I don't think it's ever going to be too late to make AI more ethical. If you think about the industrial revolution, the life of workers got so much worse when they started to work in the factories than it was when they were working in the fields. It took 50 or 100 years or so to rectify that. And within that comparatively short time span, the life of workers was better than the life of farmers. And we probably have stronger social ethics today than we had in the 18th century, so I don't think it's impossible for AI to do that. I would expect it to happen.

Want to learn more? Check out our follow-up story Using AI ethically: 6 tips for bringing AI tools into learning and work.

As tech advancements speed up, consider how best to incorporate AI tools at school and work.

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Minds in rhythm

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:33:16 +0000

Minds in rhythm Michael Kwolek Tue, 11/11/2025 - 09:33

Michael Kwolek

Imagine the cacophony of a conversation in which everyone talks, listens and responds at the same time.

Trained musicians performing together can make a similar set of sensory inputs and brain activity truly resonate. Though a feature of the human experience for thousands of years, interbrain synchronization when playing music is not well understood.

As a member of the Brain Music Lab, ATLAS PhD student Thiago Roque has developed novel techniques for studying these nuanced dynamics with the aim to expand our understanding not only of musical performance, but also of human-to-human collaboration and connection more broadly.

In his teens, Roque fell in love with music while beginning to develop his engineering skills. “I always wanted to be an engineer because I wanted to understand how things work, mostly toys and mechanics, electrical stuff,” he said, “but at that point, I also wanted to understand music.”

When he got his first electronic keyboard, he realized, “An electrical engineer designed this to make music, so I realized that I could connect both things.”

After earning BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering at University of Campinas in Brazil, Roque came to study with Grace Leslie at Georgia Tech, then transferred to �鶹��Ƶ when Leslie opened her Brain Music Lab in the ATLAS Institute.

“Thiago has been a really integral part of the Brain Music Lab,” Leslie noted. “A lot of that has to do with his engineering background—it's rare to find graduate students who have the musical sophistication to be working on these projects and can rise to the occasion when it comes to developing custom technology for the research questions that we have.”

Studying brains in motion

Analyzing brain activity in moving bodies is surprisingly challenging—standard EEG data is captured in subjects who remain still.

Roque has studied how dancers’ brains sync when they perform together, using his electrical engineering background to develop ways to improve the quality of EEG data in moving subjects.

To compensate for all the action involved, he sewed motion sensors into the EEG caps and modified hardware to read neck and eye movement to improve data quality. This led to more ambitious plans with an even higher degree of difficulty.

The string ensemble experiment

Having dreamed for years of being able to analyze a string quartet performing a piece of music, Roque explained, “we needed all the equipment to be precisely synchronized, so we had to design this hardware that sends triggers and synchronizes everything. I designed and assembled the printed circuit boards myself.”

He spent months incorporating off-the-shelf EEG equipment, accelerometers and other sensors with custom-designed components to normalize the data and sync it between all the musicians.

The next step was finding a quartet willing to participate in the experiment. Luckily, �鶹��Ƶ’s College of Music—across the street from the ATLAS Institute—is home to several student quartets, including the ensemble that ultimately agreed to participate.

Roque said, “We wanted to work with students here because we know they will have regular rehearsals. They will have just met each other at the beginning of the semester, so they are new to it. We are planning to measure them at the end of the semester so we can see the progress, how they develop.”

The research team

This project has not been a solo gig. Daniel Ethridge, Daniel Llamas Maldonado and Sophia Mehdizadeh from the Brain Music Lab—as well as several master’s and undergraduate students—have been instrumental in executing the string quartet research.

An interdisciplinary performance

For Roque, the ATLAS Institute offers several unique elements that make this type of research possible. “It's an interdisciplinary environment that fosters challenging research with high risks but potentially high payouts, and it's a very creative place,” he noted.

“Thinking about the University of Colorado, I had this opportunity to enroll in this triple PhD program. I'm getting a PhD in creative technology and design, neuroscience and cognitive science.”

Leslie explained how this research fits into the Brain Music Lab’s larger mission: “While we are focusing on technology and developing new technology and studying how humans interface with it, what sets us apart is our focus on the really human element to it.”

The next movement

Roque aims to continue studying this young quartet to determine if their brain activity syncs more thoroughly as they continue to perform together. He would also like to study graduate musicians and seasoned professionals to learn how interbrain coupling may change based on the experience level of the musicians.

Expanding the scope

Brain Music Lab director, Grace Leslie, recently performed a solo improvisational piece, Inside the Tank, in the B2 Black Box Theater, integrating EEG headset and body sensors.

The lab team also outfitted several audience members with EEG monitors, giving Roque additional data to study the physiological responses of those experiencing live music.

Roque also looks forward to bringing this technology to the stage. Plans are in the works for a string quartet performance in the spring semester with a huge visualization of live physiological data to give the audience a sense of the musicians’ synchronization.

“A lot of it is developing this technology that we hopefully can use in the future to continue to study musical group dynamics,” Leslie said, “but there's also this human-computer interaction application where he's done some of the foundational research to show that we can develop brain-computer interfaces that can be social.”

This research may reveal insights as to how human connection and collaboration work. Over time, it could lead to tools and techniques to improve our ability to sync with each other when working on complex tasks—whether that means performing in a string quartet, playing a team sport or simply holding a nuanced conversation.

ATLAS PhD student studies how brain activity syncs when musicians perform together.

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�鶹��Ƶ graduate student named a Google PhD fellow

Michael Kwolek — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:02:04 +0000

�鶹��Ƶ graduate student named a Google PhD fellow Michael Kwolek Mon, 10/27/2025 - 10:02

Hye-Young Jo of computer science and the ATLAS Institute will be using the funding to research human-computer interactions.

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Building robots, building connections

Michael Kwolek — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 21:41:53 +0000

Building robots, building connections Michael Kwolek Thu, 10/23/2025 - 15:41

On a Tuesday afternoon at a Denver public school, a group of elementary students gather around tables piled with Lego bricks, laughing and chatting as they carefully follow instructions to assemble their creations. A few minutes later, they’re chasing a small robot car around the classroom, laughing as it bumps along the floor.

Scenes like this are familiar to Casey Hunt, a PhD candidate at the ATLAS Institute. Each week, Hunt visits four Denver public schools as part of a collaboration with Inspire to Learn and Imagine, helping K–5 students explore engineering and coding through Lego robotics.

The after-school program uses the Lego WeDo 2.0 ecosystem—a kid-friendly robotics kit that empowers young learners to build moving creations and program them with simple code. “The goal isn’t just to teach them mechanics or coding, it’s to give them space to build, test and problem-solve together,” Hunt explained. “They take a lot of ownership over their creations, and that’s really fun to watch.”

Hunt facilitates each club session, helping students work through the weekly project, teaching basic engineering concepts and encouraging teamwork. All four schools tackle the same project each week, but students always find ways to make it their own—like the pair who built a sidecar for their minifigure passengers, then raced it gleefully across the library.

“It’s so fun to see them take pride in their creations,” Hunt said. “They find ways to make each build reflect their personalities or friendships, and I love watching them put their own spin on the designs.”

Beyond the joy of seeing students bring their ideas to life, the program aligns closely with Hunt’s academic pursuit. Her research focuses on how materials can teach people through making, drawing on constructionist learning theories. “I’m interested in how these ideas from education can be adapted to participatory design, building with communities,” Hunt said. “In Lego club, I get to watch how kids naturally negotiate, share ideas and make design decisions together—it’s a different context, but very similar to the collaboration I study.”

Hunt reflects on how these young learners engage with core STEM skills: reading and following design instructions, iterating when things don’t work and collaborating with peers to solve problems. “Their approach is actually a lot like my undergraduate students, just at an age-appropriate level,” she noted.

For ATLAS, programs like this reflect a broader commitment to community engagement and inclusive STEM education. The institute’s partnership with Inspire to Learn and Imagine extends its impact beyond the university—fostering creativity, curiosity and confidence in the next generation of makers.

By connecting university researchers with local classrooms, outreach efforts like the Lego club not only support young learners but also give graduate students meaningful teaching and mentorship experiences outside the lab.

“This kind of work shows how our research and expertise can ripple outward,” Hunt said. “It’s a reminder that what we study in the lab connects to real people—and real joy—in the community.”

ATLAS PhD candidate Casey Hunt brings STEM learning to local classrooms with Lego robotics.

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Minority Report-inspired interface allows us to explore time in new ways

Michael Kwolek — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 14:48:13 +0000

Minority Report-inspired interface allows us to explore time in new ways Michael Kwolek Fri, 09/26/2025 - 08:48

Michael Kwolek

Imagine a scene—a bird feeder on a summer afternoon, the dark of night descending over the Flatirons, a fall day on a university campus. Now imagine moving backwards and forwards through time on a single aspect of that setting while everything else remains. One ATLAS engineer is building technology that lets us experience multiple time scales all at once.

The Proteus Team

David Hunter developed Proteus with expertise from ACME Lab members Suibi Weng, Rishi Vanukuru, Annika Mahajan, Ada Zhao and Leo Ma, and advising from professor and lab director Ellen Do.

Brad Gallagher and Chris Petillo in the B2 Center for Media, Arts and Performance provided critical technical support to make the project come alive in the B2 Black Box Studio.

“Proteus: Spatiotemporal Manipulations” by David Hunter, ATLAS PhD student, in collaboration with his ACME Lab colleagues, allows people to simultaneously observe different moments in time through a full-scale interactive experience combining video projection, motion capture, audio and cooperative elements.

The project was shown through the creative residency program in the B2 Center for Media, Art and Performance at the Roser ATLAS Center. Housed in the B2 Black Box Studio, the project team used 270-degree video projections, a spatial audio array and motion capture technology, creating an often larger-than-life way to explore many different time scales at once. Simultaneous projections highlighted the lifecycle of a bacteria in a petri dish, a day in the life of a street corner on campus, and weather patterns at a global scale among other vignettes.

This tangible manipulation of time within a space can feel disorienting at first. It takes a while to adjust to what is happening, a unique sensation that has an expansive, almost psychedelic quality. But it may also have practical applications.

We spoke to Hunter about the inspiration behind Proteus, possible use cases and what comes next.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Several people can explore different moments in time simultaneously.

Tell us about the inspiration for Proteus.

There are scenes and settings where you want to see a place or situation at two distinct time frames, and for that comparison to not necessarily be hard-edged or side by side. You want it to be interpolated through time, so you can see patterns of change in space over that time.

Describe the early iterations of this project.

It was originally a tabletop setup with projection over small robots, and you could manipulate the robots to produce similar kinds of effects. There was a version running with a camera giving you a live video feed, but we switched it to curated videos as it was easier to understand what was happening with time manipulation. You're potentially making quite a confusing image for yourself, so the robots gave you something tangible to hold on to.

How did it evolve into the large-scale installation it is now?

We thought it would be interesting to see this at a really large scale in the B2, and the creative residencies made that possible. That's when we moved away from robots and it was like, “Well, how would you control it in this sort of space?”

I took a projection mapping course last semester and worked on a large-scale projection, but then we changed it to hand interaction—gesture-based in the air, kind of like “Minority Report.”

As you closer or farther from the screen, you change the time scale of part of the scene.

How do you describe what takes place when people interact with Proteus?

The key is interaction—people can actually control the time lapse. Usually, time lapses are linear, not two dimensional, and we don't have control over them. Here, you can focus on what interests you across different time periods, or hold two points in time side by side to see patterns and relationships as they change across space and time. This also enables multiple visitors to find the things they are interested in; there isn't one controller of the scene, it is collaborative.

What are some of the use cases you’ve thought about for this technology?

Anything with a geospatial component—a complex scene where many things are happening at once. You might want to keep track of something happening in the past while still tracking something else happening at another time.

You can use these portals to freeze multiple bits of action or set them up to visualize where things have gone at different points in time and space.

It's always been about collaboration—situation awareness where lots of people are trying to interrogate one image and see what everyone else is doing at the same time.

Then there’s film analysis: Can we put in a whole movie and perhaps you can find interesting relationships and compositions around that? This could be a fun way to spatially explore a narrative, too.

We're also looking at how it could be used for mockup design. Let's say you're prototyping an app and you have 50 different variations. You could collapse those all into one space, interrogate them through “time,” then mix and match different portions of your designs to come up with new combinations. It also works with volumetric images like body scans, where we swap time for depth.

What are the creative influences that drove the visual style of the piece?

I've long been interested in time lapses, like skateboard photography where multiple snapshots are overlaid on the same space as a single image.

There's all this work by Muybridge and Marey, who invented chronophotography. That's how they worked out that horses leave the ground while they run.

David Hockney did a ton of Polaroid work. There's a famous one of people playing Scrabble, shot from his perspective. All these different Polaroids are stuck down next to each other, not as a true representation of space but as a way of capturing time within that space—breaking the unity of the image.

Khronos Projector by Alvaro Cassinelli kicked off this research sprint and prompted me to look back at my interest in time and photography.

Several time lapse videos are projected simultaneously on the Black Box Studio's 270-degree screen.

Proteus is controlled with an app on a mobile phone modified to work with motion capture.

It does force your brain to work in a way that it is not used to, which is a really cool thing to happen in a creative sense but also in a technical sense.

We aren't used to seeing anything with non-uniform time. Whenever we're watching a video, we want to find a point in the video, then we see the whole image rewind or fast forward. Of course that makes sense in a lot of situations, but there could be interesting use-cases for interactive non-uniform time.

What makes ATLAS an ideal place for this type of research?

There's all the people, whether it's research faculty who are interested in asking questions like, “How can we make a novel system or improve research that's going on in this area?” Or it's super strong technical expertise, which is like, “Let's have a go at making this work in a projection environment.”

What’s next for the Proteus project?

At the moment, I can only compare by changing the time on a region of space and I can compare a region of space against another region at different times. But it might be interesting to be able to break the image and say, “Actually, I want to clone this region and see it from a different time period.” Can I reconstitute the image in some way?

Experience Proteus during Research & Innovation Week

Proteus will be running in the B2 Black Box Studio as part of:

ATLAS Research Open Labs
Roser ATLAS Center
October 10, 2025
3-5pm
FREE, no registration needed

ATLAS PhD student David Hunter researches novel ways to interact with different moments in time across a single video stream.

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New research explores tinkering as a key classroom learning method

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 16:21:34 +0000

New research explores tinkering as a key classroom learning method Michael Kwolek Wed, 07/16/2025 - 10:21

Michael Kwolek

When kids tinker in the classroom, they get to build many useful skills from computing to collaboration to creativity and more.

Krithik Ranjan, PhD student and member of the ACME Lab, studies low-cost forms of human-computer interaction that enable more people to explore their creativity through technology. And tinkering plays a big part in that.

Ranjan presented his work at Constructionism 2025 conference in Zurich, Switzerland, which explores how constructionist ideas can inspire advancements in learning technologies and methodologies. He filled us in on what he presented.

Tell us about your research focus.

I've been trying to build ways for people to create with technology in a more open-ended, tinkering-friendly way. Tinkering is a way to learn where you can explore, you can experiment, you can playfully interact with things to learn a concept, whether it is computer science, physics, astronomy or anything like that.

Can you describe the intention behind your paper on “The Design Space of Tangible Interfaces for Computational Tinkerability”?

There are two elements to it. One is the tangible side where the idea is that you're interacting with computational elements in the physical space, either stuff like paper or robots or different components that you can put together. And the other aspect is computational tinkerability, that playful open-ended aspect about creating something computationally.

I want to understand how people have previously developed design spaces, which is this concept of a framework to understand what people have done, what it means, and how we can analyze and categorize different types of projects in that space. I reviewed 33 different projects to figure out: What are kids tinkering with? What are children making? And how are they making it?

This project was from the perspective of a designer to inform future designers who are going to create such interfaces and projects.

What did you discover in conducting this research?

We figured out there is a range of how tinkerable or how expressive an interface can be, so we try to categorize that based on a “spectrum of tinkerability.”

The other important takeaway is the idea of expanding beyond code. There's so much work, both commercially and in research, around enabling students to code. But a lot of researchers also found that this line-by-line type of programming is also a bit discouraging to students from underrepresented groups. So there's a lot of work in expanding the ways you can create with computers to not just rewrite lines of code to program or make a game or make a 3D model. But more diverse ways that suit different interests.

Who might be the audience for this research and what might they do with it?

The goal was to categorize this space so people can refer to it and design based on that. The audience is other researchers and designers of interfaces for learning with computers. Based on the implications, they can better design ways that students learn by making [tools] more expressive, more open-ended, learner-driven, and catering to different interests instead of just code or just one type of way to interact.

A lot of your work is focused on using simple materials that are more accessible to students all over the world. How might this research help educators expand the tools they have access to for students?

In practical situations like classrooms and formal learning centers, there are always constraints with resources, with the number of people, with the kind of things you can get access to. And quite often we might find that projects, interfaces and tools in the market are usually one-off and they are a couple hundred dollars or more. So I was trying to look at these projects in terms of the kind of materials they use and how they enable people to interact with the material.

There are some projects like [ATLAS PhD] Ruhan Yang's Paper Robots and a couple other projects that we looked at where the focus was DIY-based interfaces that educators can fabricate themselves for their classrooms. These projects stressed on publishing the plans and instructables and stuff like that online so that anybody can use them to build these interactive interfaces themselves.

And part of this was also using platforms that are already available. Arduino, Microbit and Raspberry Pi are commonly used electronic platforms in education for many different purposes. There's a way to make these interfaces more accessible if you use those existing platforms instead of making custom electronics.

How does a student who uses your Cartoonimator tool, for example, learn in the process of figuring out how to use and then make animations?

This idea of tinkering and learning by making is based on these learning philosophies of constructionism. The idea is that you're learning by building artifacts, building mental models yourself instead of being instructed by somebody else.

A big part is the idea of being stuck and then trying to work through the problem, trying to figure out what's wrong, what needs to change and get something working. This way of learning is focused on the learner's motivation.

What's next for this research?

Cartoonimator is one example where I looked at these principles about expanding beyond code and working with more accessible materials to build an interface that's open ended and tinkering-friendly for learning something like animation.

I'm looking further at how we can engage students with physical computing using paper, because that is more accessible, easier to expand on and gives you this space of creative exploration that you may not usually have with devices.

If you're new with technology, you might be afraid of breaking something apart, but that's really a core part of tinkering, so I'm looking at how paper-based interfaces can foster the idea.

PhD student Krithik Ranjan analyzed 33 student learning tools and developed a “spectrum of tinkerability” that offers designers new ways to think about teaching computational skills.

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ATLAS community presents new research on interactive systems at DIS 2025

Michael Kwolek — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 17:14:27 +0000

ATLAS community presents new research on interactive systems at DIS 2025 Michael Kwolek Thu, 06/26/2025 - 11:14

The 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS) in Madeira, Portugal, features work from ten ATLAS community members representing three labs. This year’s event has five focus areas: Critical Computing and Design Theory, Design Methods and Processes, Artifacts and Systems, Research Through Design, and AI and Design with an overall theme around “design that transcends human-centered perspectives.”

ATLAS researchers study a broad range of topics, from human-computer interaction to biomaterials to woven forms.

Ellen Do, professor and ACME director, explains what connects the work our community is presenting at the conference: “I think all of the papers and presentations we have are on designing interactive systems. Some of the systems could be physical, some could be digital, some could be human-and-people, human-and-physical objects. So I think the theme about interactive systems and how you make systems interactive, what kind of user experience or human experience or immersive experience with the object or system or even the ecosystem, or the human communication system—I think that's all there.”

ATLAS research at DIS 2025

"Chaotic, Exciting, Impactful": Stories of Material-led Designers in Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Gabrielle Benabdallah, Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez (ATLAS PhD student), Laura Devendorf (ATLAS Unstable Design Lab director, associate professor), Mirela Alistar (ATLAS Living Matter Lab director, assistant professor)

This paper explores the dynamics of interdisciplinary collaboration between designers, scientists, and engineers through ten stories as told from the perspective of material-led designers. These stories focus on material-led designers working in contexts like biodesign and smart textiles, where novel materials, fabrication methods, and technology often intersect, requiring cross-disciplinary collaboration. By including perspectives from designers within and adjacent to HCI, the study broadens the understanding of interdisciplinary teamwork that combines scientific, technical, and craft-based expertise. Our analysis highlights how designers navigate challenges like differing terminologies, epistemic hierarchies, and conflicting priorities. We discuss strategies such as material prototypes, attitudes of inquiry and openness, switching lexicons, and the value of interdisciplinary contexts. This research underscores designers as “translators” who mediate epistemological tensions, use tangible artifacts to communicate, and articulate possible applications. This research contributes ten stories as narrative resources for understanding strategies and fostering interdisciplinary spaces within HCI.

Towards Yarnier Interactive Textiles: Mapping a Design Journey through Hand Spun Conductive Yarns
Etta W. Sandry (ATLAS PhD student), Lily M. Gabriel (ATLAS undergraduate student), Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez (ATLAS PhD student), Laura Devendorf (ATLAS Unstable Design Lab Director, associate professor)

The ability to create a wide and varied set of interactive textiles depends on the materials that one has available. Currently, the range of yarns that can be used to bring interactivity to textiles is greatly limited, especially considering the diversity available in non-conductive yarns. This pictorial traces a design journey into hand spinning that seeks to address this limitation and contributes samples of techniques and materials that could be used to create conductive yarns along with reflection on design methods that enabled us to explore a wider range of aesthetic expressions. We advocate for an approach that reconnects with the textiles in e-textiles, embraces divergence, and prioritizes the material as the driver of a design concept. We offer pathways for readers and researchers to continue this exploration within varied domains and practices.

Connect! A Circuit-Driven Card Game
Ruhan Yang (ATLAS PhD alum), Ellen Yi-Luen Do (ATLAS ACME Lab director, professor)

Hybrid physical-digital games often rely on screen-based interactions, which can detract from their tactile nature. We introduce Connect!, a card game that integrates paper circuits and real-time LED feedback, enabling players to construct functional circuits as part of gameplay. Unlike traditional hybrid games, Connect! embeds feedback directly into physical components while preserving material interaction. We conducted a user study comparing gameplay with and without electronic feedback. Our findings suggest that real-time feedback not only increased engagement but also altered players' behavior, encouraging rule exploration and emergent play. Our work contributes to tangible interaction and game-based learning, demonstrating the potential of low-cost electronics in enhancing interactive experiences.

Connect! game cards

From Data to Discussion: Interfaces for Collective Inquiry and Open-Ended Data Creation
David Hunter (ATLAS PhD student)

Data can enrich our understanding of the world and improve our society. However the datafication of our society comes with challenges for empowering communities. In designing systems for recording and representing data, a theme has emerged of these interfaces as the site of conversations and sense-making, and the participatory nature is valuable beyond the data itself. This insight has led me to investigate tools and experiences that enable open-ended data creation and exploration as a grounding for discussion and prompting action. The goal is to design interfaces and systems for exploring places and futures through data, to empower communities and supporting civic participation, learning and making, situational awareness, and scenario planning. In this pictorial I present five ongoing research projects investigating these ideas.

How to Data Walk

Knitting with unknown trees: assembling a more-than-human practice
Doenja Oogjes, Ege Kökel, Netta Ofer (ATLAS PhD alum), Hsiang-Lin Kuo, Jasmijn Vugts, Troy Nachtigall, Torin Hopkins (ATLAS PhD alum)

In this pictorial, we explore alternative ways of knowing urban trees through a more-than-human lens. Using a municipal tree dataset, we focus on “unknown” trees—entries unclassified due to error, decay, or absence—highlighting the limits of quantification and fixed knowledge systems. Urban trees, while critical for ecosystems, are often shaped by technological interventions (e.g., GIS, IoT sensors, AI diagnostics) that prioritize their utility over other expressions. We engage in knitting as a material inquiry to foreground nonhuman agencies and relational entanglements. Through reflective shifts and compromises, this project questions normative design practices, seeking to amplify nonhuman participation. We make two contributions. Firstly, we offer insights into fostering alternative, relational engagements with urban ecologies. Secondly, we reflect on our process of surfacing and working with agentic capacities, articulating guidance for other design researchers. Through this, we advocate for fragmented approaches that embrace complicity and complexity in more-than-human design.

Designing Interfaces that Support Temporal Work Across Meetings with Generative AI
Rishi Vanukuru (ATLAS PhD student), Payod Panda, Xinyue Chen, Ava Elizabeth Scott, Lev Tankelevitch, Sean Rintel

Temporal work is an essential part of the modern knowledge workplace, where multiple threads of meetings and projects are connected across time by the acts of looking back (retrospection) and ahead (prospection). As we develop Generative AI interfaces to support knowledge work, this lens of temporality can help ground design in real workplace needs. Building upon research in routine dynamics and cognitive science, and an exploratory analysis of real recurring meetings, we develop a framework and a tool for the synergistic exploration of temporal work and the capabilities of Generative AI. We then use these to design a series of interface concepts and prototypes to better support work that spans multiple scales of time. Through this approach, we demonstrate how the design of new Generative AI tools can be guided by our understanding of how work really happens across meetings and projects.

Members of three ATLAS labs show how interactive technology can create possibilities for new means of productivity, data analysis, creativity and play.

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Bruns & Leslie research cybernetic human advancement with New Frontiers Grant

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 21:31:49 +0000

Bruns & Leslie research cybernetic human advancement with New Frontiers Grant Michael Kwolek Tue, 06/17/2025 - 15:31

Michael Kwolek

From implantable devices like pacemakers and brain interfaces to smart wearables, humans are fast becoming more cybernetic than we might realize.

Implanted devices tend to have higher fidelity and functionality than wearables, but require extremely invasive surgery. Smart tech is lower-cost and easy to use, but can be uncomfortable while offering limited functionality.

What if there was a middle ground, a set of technologies that allowed for the best of both worlds? Such solutions could enable people to achieve peak performance in a range of physical and mental activities, simplify ongoing health monitoring, and help those with mobility challenges control the devices that support their daily lives.

Seamless Skin Integration of Brain/Body-Computer Interfaces for Cybernetic Human Advancement

Project: Seamless Skin Integration of Brain/Body-Computer Interfaces for Cybernetic Human Advancement

Planning Phase Award: $50,000

The �鶹��Ƶ New Frontiers Grant Program is designed to foster groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research projects with the potential for high impact. “High impact” projects may include the potential for significant advancements in knowledge, problem-solving or innovation that exceeds incremental progress and creates new paradigms of understanding.

With support from the Research & Innovation Office (RIO), the Colleges of Arts & Sciences, Engineering & Applied Science and the School of Education, New Frontiers is open to any eligible �鶹��Ƶ faculty member.

A surprising partnership

Researchers at the ATLAS Institute are working on just that through a unique collaboration toward what they call “cybernetic human advancement.”

Carson Bruns, associate professor (ATLAS Institute, Mechanical Engineering), and Grace Leslie, associate professor (ATLAS Institute, College of Music), have partnered to study ways to create the functionality of an implantable device with the ease of a wearable.

The project was kickstarted with funding from �鶹��Ƶ’s New Frontiers Grant Program.

This 12-month Planning Phase Award, funded through the Research & Innovation Office (RIO), supports project planning and initial data collection for two lines of inquiry.

Real life sci-fi

Cybernetic humans may sound like science fiction, but such technology is very much a reality. Bruns explains, “When we hear the word ‘cyborg,’ we think of a cyberpunk half-robot. But there are really common examples of body-integrated technology like cochlear implants for the hearing impaired or lens replacements for vision-impaired people or cardiac pacemakers for people who have heart conditions.”

He elaborates, “We're going to continue to integrate our bodies with technology more and more. And we'd like to contribute our own piece to this movement to ensure that it's done in a safe and ethical way, and also because we think it's exciting and there are tremendous potential benefits. So we decided to call this domain ‘human enhancement’ as opposed to ‘cyborg’ or ‘cybernetic.’”

The skin as interface

It’s possible the next generation of wearables will not look like the watches and rings we currently see in the market.

Bruns says, “One of the things I do in my lab is try to use the skin as the interface for these human enhancements. These technologies that we're going to merge with the body, I think the skin is really the best for that because it's the least invasive place to put a permanent implant. You usually don't even need a doctor or a hospital if it's small enough. You can just tattoo it, and that's something that almost anybody can do safely. So it's very convenient if you're going to permanently implant some technology in your body to make it be a tattoo.”

For example, you wouldn’t want to wear an EKG monitoring cap on your head all day, but if you could get tattooed with conductive materials that connect to a simple device, that could allow for continuous brainwave monitoring without ongoing discomfort.

Seeking key collaborators

The core team seeks a few more key members during this initial research phase. Carson details what expertise they seek:

Ethicist: “There are a lot of serious ethical questions about these types of technologies. We are actively looking for somebody to be a part of this and inform our team and do their own research on the ethics of this space.”

Circuits expert: “We would [also] like a circuits expert. They might be an electrical engineer—somebody who really knows how to optimize this kind of hardware. I have the expertise to make a special kind of conductive material to build the device and once you have the signals, Grace is really good at doing stuff with those. But in between those two, we need that person who can take the material and construct the exact circuit we want to get the best signal.”

Performance enhancing tattoos

Leslie is excited about the possibility of applying her expertise in neuroscience to studying wearables to enhance athletic performance. “We want to work with the CU football team to develop this augmented football player concept using control theory to figure out what the best type of feedback would be to get them in the right state. The really quick decision making they have to do for who to pass to and when, and the movements that they take, will all be optimized.”

In lieu of starting right away with permanent tattooing, the team aims to design with an even more common application in mind.

Leslie continues, “We're thinking of this being almost like a temporary tattoo. Printing a whole circuit board onto that sticker and then any components that we need to add. So it becomes this all-in-one [device] on the surface of the skin. It would be a combination of, on Carson's side, the ability to think of a completely different form factor for a circuit that involves the skin—it isn't just some standalone device that we then try to attach to the human. And then from my lab’s side, the idea of how you can provide meaningful stimulus and feedback in a way that doesn't require a screen.”

Getting into the flow

Leslie hopes to apply her background in music and audio to create novel sensory stimuli like sounds and haptic feedback (little vibrations similar to what is used in a mobile phone) in place of a screen to help guide people toward achieving a “flow state” of peak performance in a range of activities.

Leslie says, “Haptic feedback is the educational tool that helps you learn what that feels like to be in that state. The principle of biofeedback [is] that eventually if you've practiced it enough, you can reach it without the feedback and then it creates lasting changes.”

Big ideas from new connections

The initial idea for this project started when ATLAS PhD students Joshua Coffie (in the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab) and Daniel Llamas Maldonado (in the Brain Music Lab) found mutual interest in their respective research areas. Llamas Maldonado explains, “We were in the Research Methods class together, and I thought his research was really cool. We just started talking and thinking we could do something together.”

This spark speaks to the importance of fostering opportunities for cross-pollination on campus that can be supported by RIO grants.

From there, the conversation expanded to Leslie and Bruns, who catalyzed the idea by applying for the New Frontiers Grant program. This spark speaks to the importance of fostering opportunities for cross-pollination on campus that can be supported by RIO grants.

With concurrent lines of research, the key will be to focus the research in this initial phase. Leslie concludes, “It's easy to think of science fiction scenarios, but the hard part is coming up with concrete experiments to run that will be really self-contained and controlled, and that are going to prove the things that we need to prove to build the larger concept. And that is also the fun part.”

Nanomaterials and neuroscience researchers aim to build brain/body interfaces that enhance performance, improve health monitoring and support mobility.

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Image source: Adobe stock