kailey shara is presented $45000 check the top award at nvc 2022

ATLAS PhD candidate Kailey Shara wins top award in NVC 2022

April 15, 2022

First-place New Venture Challenge winner, Chembotix, was awarded $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 and safer.

Robot turns to person entering the conversational group, even though she is not wearing a detectable hat like the other three members of the group.

ATLAS researchers' algorithm helps robots detect everyone in social gatherings

April 6, 2022

Imagine a world where robots flawlessly detect everyone in a conversation group and also greet the newcomers. Described in a paper published in the March proceedings of the prestigious International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '22), Hooman Hedayati (PhD computer science '20) and Daniel Szafir, assistant professor of computer science at UNC Chapel Hill and former ATLAS faculty member, proposed a method to overcome situations when conversational group (F-formation) detection algorithms fail.

Winners of Femal Founder's Night on a stage.

Chembotix and Digital Wellness win awards at NVC Female Founders Prize Night

March 22, 2022

​​Kailey Shara, an ATLAS PhD student and a member of the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, and her team, won third place and $1,000 for Chembotix robotic automation platform. Annie Margaret, teaching assistant professor with the ATLAS Institute, and her team, placed fourth with Digital Wellness x NoSo November.

Fiona Bell peels a bioplastic sample off of  glass

Fiona Bell: Intimacy between designers and materials leads to sustainability

March 4, 2022

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.

Shanel Wu  bends over by a log. Wu wove the vest she is wearing on a traditional 4-shaft floor loom, integrating digital air quality sensors for outdoor workers in polluted environments.

Shanel Wu: Designing e-textiles with sustainability in mind

Feb. 9, 2022

ATLAS PhD student Shanel Wu is tackling how to reduce the waste from the rapidly expanding e-textile industry by investigating design practices that make it easier to recycle or reuse electronics and the textiles in which they are embedded.

Purnendu

Touching Virtual Reality

Feb. 9, 2022

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.

An origami butterfly

Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation

Jan. 31, 2022

SIGGRAPH sat down with Purnendu, a PhD student in the ATLAS Institute and a researcher at Meta Reality Labs, to talk about his team’s SIGGRAPH 2021 Labs project, “Electriflow: Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation Using Soft Electrohydraulic Actuators.” The team's actuator technology strives to augment animation within physical books.

A Tinycade console with a hand gripping a "claw" controller

Tinycade empowers novices to design and build arcade-like games

Jan. 13, 2022

Limited by materials available at home during the pandemic, ATLAS PhD student Peter Gyory and a team of ACME Lab researchers developed Tinycade—a platform for DIY game controllers that anyone, including novices, can use to design and build arcade-like games using household materials such as cardboard, mirrors and hot glue.

Annie Margaret being interviewed by Denver Ch. 7 at the ATLAS Institute

Denver Channel 7 discusses the impact of social media on teens' mental health with Annie Margaret

Jan. 4, 2022

"It's not enough to tell young people to put their phones down," says Annie Margaret, an ATLAS teaching assistant professor who investigates ways to counteract the negative impact of social media on the mental health of teens. In a recent interview with Denver Channel 7 News, she talked about interventions for teens she's developing for a program to be launched over the 2022 summer break.

abigale stangl

ATLAS PhD alum leading effort to improve web image descriptions for the blind

Dec. 13, 2021

ATLAS PhD alumna Abigale Stangl explores how artificial intelligence can be used to generate image descriptions when alt text—the image descriptions intended to give people who are blind or have low vision a verbal description of online image content—is missing.

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