First Impressions of Brown University’s HCI Reserch Lab

I met my mentor, Professor Huang, and some of the other REU and Ph.D students at the HCI lab. Everyone was so friendly. There, Professor Huang introduced me to cheeseburger, a digital cognitive therapy chat website that has a feature called the character or masked indicator. This indicator shows the other person’s texts in the form of #s as they type. Professor Huang was thinking what if there was another interface that kind of worked like google docs where one can see the other person’s message as they are typing (backspace and all). The concept was especially intriguing to me, and we utlimately decided to conduct a research study with different types of indicators to see how they would effect communication for my DREU program. For my first few tasks, I was assigned to find 5 clossest papers to SMS/DM style texting (texting indicators, show hidden characters while typing, full live typing) and to contact Z.I., the Ph.D student mentor whom I will be working with on this project. Unfortunately, I learned Z.I.’s return flight to the U.S. was delayed.

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