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From AI to material artifacts: ATLAS researchers explore many forms of human-computer interaction at DIS 2026

Michael Kwolek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:54:40 +0000

From AI to material artifacts: ATLAS researchers explore many forms of human-computer interaction at DIS 2026 Michael Kwolek Mon, 06/08/2026 - 11:54

Michael Kwolek

Generative ghosts; co-creation with AI in physical environments; activism and justice; a robotic social dance game for children with cerebral palsy; tides; quilt making; the relationship between stories and material artifacts. The ATLAS community engages in a far broader range of human-computer interaction research than many people realize.

Over a dozen ATLAS researchers will have their work represented at this year’s ACM Designing Interactive Systems conference in Singapore, June 13-17, 2026, for over 600 registered attendees. The conference team reviewed 1,154 papers and accepted 248.

The theme of the event this year seeks to look beyond interaction. “In the face of climate change, pandemics, economic and political instability, and the accelerating pace of emerging technologies, the responsibilities of designing interactive systems have expanded well beyond the scope of traditional human-computer interaction.”

ATLAS professor Ellen Do is a conference general co-chair and doctoral consortium co-chair for this year’s conference. She noted, “Not surprisingly, there are a lot of papers on AI and virtual systems (AR, VR, XR) in the program. We can see researchers tackling how we co-create with Generative AI with mixed or extended reality, music, robots or cultural heritage, but also how these technologies impact our everyday lives in conversations, information seeking, education, banking, communications, exercises, and healthcare.”

“True to the legacy of DIS, the trend is very much about keeping interactive systems tangible, embodied, and deeply contextualized in physical spaces,” Do continued. “The conference's workshops and papers reflect a heavy emphasis on material learning and ‘digital/material craft.’ The program shows a strong push to move interactive systems out of isolated lab environments and contextualize them in complex, messy, physical ecosystems.”

Do concluded by saying, “The ATLAS presence at DIS 2026 shows how our research spans both deep technological innovation and profound human experience. ATLAS isn't just speculating about the future of interactive systems; our students and faculty are physically building it.”

Papers

Designing Conversations with the Dead: How People Engage with Generative Ghosts [Honorable Mention]

Jack M Manning, Daniel Sullivan, Dylan Thomas Doyle, Anthony T. Pinter, Jed R. Brubaker

We examine how people experience two choices in the design of generative ghosts, AI systems that are trained on data of the dead: representation, where an AI speaks about a deceased person in the third person, and reincarnation, where the AI speaks as the deceased in the first person. Through a qualitative user study with 16 participants, we explore how each shaped authenticity, affect, and risk. Reincarnation was preferred for its immediacy, but participants shared fears of over-reliance. Representation was preferred for engaging with memory over conversational presence, though participants often ignored this distinction, engaging in dialogue despite third-person framing. Across both modes, participants privileged affective resonance over factual fidelity. We conclude by showing how factors such as tone, language, and conversational rhythm -- factors unique to the user's memory of the deceased -- shape interactions with generative ghosts, and argue that those interactions are always collaborative.

Jack Manning Q&A

Jack Manning (BS-CTD, MS INFO) enters the Information Science PhD program in Fall '26 co-advised by Jed Brubaker (Associate Professor, INFO; ATLAS affiliate) and Anthony Pinter (Assistant Teaching Professor, ATLAS). This is his first published paper.

How does your generative ghosts research advance our understanding of how we interact with digital technology?

Our participants worried about generative ghosts the way many of us worry about new technologies, concerned for others more than themselves. They feared a grieving friend or family member might become too attached to the AI, leading to an unhealthy grieving process, even as they described their own experience as positive.

What does it mean to you to be able to present your research at DIS?

I get to take something I find genuinely interesting, do the work alongside brilliant people here at CU, and contribute to a body of work I've drawn inspiration from throughout this process.

Conceptual framework of in-situ co-creation in Editing Reality. The figure illustrates a broader co-creation ecology involving multiple users, a generative system, and the physical environment.

Editing Reality: Designing In-Situ Co-Creation with Generative AI in Mixed Reality

Suibi Che-Chuan Weng, Shih-Yu Ma, Sawyer Reinig, Pritalee Kadam, Ada Yi Zhao, Amy Banić, Ryo Suzuki, Ellen Yi-Luen Do

We present Editing Reality, a mixed reality system that enables in-situ co-creation with generative AI directly within physical environments. Rather than treating generation as a one-shot command, the system supports embodied and iterative creation through speech, sketching, and direct manipulation, allowing users to generate, modify, erase, and retexture real-anchored virtual and reconstructed scene elements in place. Using a Research Through Design approach, we investigate how co-creation unfolds through iterative system development, a formative workshop, and expert review. From this process, we articulate a set of designerly framings that characterize in-situ co-creation as a negotiated, spatial, and temporal practice shaped by previews, accumulation, waiting, embodied evaluation, and learning the system as a spatial actor. We instantiate these ideas in a working system and report expert feedback highlighting both its creative potential and its design implications. Our work contributes a conceptual lens for understanding generative AI in mixed reality not as a one-shot automation tool, but as part of an embodied, situated creative process.

Temporary Living Rooms at the 2018 “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” Hackathon.

Making Space for Joy in Community-Engaged Equity-Oriented Work in HCI [Honorable Mention]

Ricarose Roque, Jaleesa Trapp, Alexis Hope

Within the HCI community, there has been increasing attention to address issues of injustice through participatory and community-engaged approaches. In addition, researchers who conduct this collaborative work with marginalized groups are sharing the institutional vulnerabilities, challenges, and harms that can impact their well-being and their work. In this paper, we argue how the HCI community can learn from the knowledge and strategies of activists who engage in collective action and movement work. In particular, we discuss the role of joy in participatory, community-engaged, and equity-oriented work. Through testimonial authority, we present stories to describe the importance of cultivating joy, how we design for joy, what joy looks like in our work, and how joy can be a sustaining force for researchers and collaborators alike. We end with implications for HCI design and research work with marginalized communities.

Demos

User testing Chory Cloth Bot with children with cerebral palsy.

Chory Cloth Bot: A Robotic Social Dance Game for Children with Cerebral Palsy

Priyanka Balasubramaniyam, Casey Lee Hunt, Brad Gallagher

As children with cerebral palsy grow, they tend to become more socially isolated while their motor and gait skills often decrease or plateau. Thus, exploration of an interaction that assists the children be social and mobile is a critical area for development. This study brings an established approach to assistive technologies for children with Cerebral Palsy--robotics--to a new context, providing social comfort. We adapt evidence-based methods of providing social comfort, dance therapy and cooperative game design, to create Chory Cloth Bot, a robotic social dance game. Then, we present results of user tests of the Chory Cloth Bot prototype with 9 children with cerebral palsy ages [6 - 17], including preliminary findings that suggest increased motivation and social awareness among participants.

Workshops

Multispecies Response-ability in More-than-human Design Practice: Fabulation with Tides

Jiwei Zhou, Raphael Kim, Iohanna Nicenboim, Anton Poikolainen Rosén, Fernanda Soares da Costa, Netta Ofer, Serena Pollastri, Heidi Biggs, Doenja Oogjes, Bahareh Barati

This workshop invites participants with diverse backgrounds to imagine stories with tides, to explore response‑ability - a notion used by Donna Haraway to cultivate the capacity to respond with other species. As more HCI communities begin to engage with multispecies, we seek to move beyond “responsibility” as a solely human moral property towards relational and reciprocal ways of designing-with them. When the entities we "study" begin to respond to one another, their interactions evolve in ways we cannot fully predict, inviting design practice to stay open and caring for these shifting relations. Using tides as a spatial‑temporal site of inquiry, we will use speculative fabulation to imagine what multispecies response‑ability might look like in place and collectively develop practical guides for examining and incorporating it into design practice.

Patchwork Knowledge: Documenting Material Learning in Human-Computer Interaction

Karen Anne Cochrane, Fiona Bell, Georgia Loewen, Eldy S. Lázaro Vásquez, Phillip Gough, Ali Mazalek

In this workshop, we explore how material knowledge is taught, learned, and disseminated within HCI research. Through the activity of creating a quilt, the workshop compares how different forms of knowledge circulation—such as tutorials, oral instruction, mentorship, workshops, and community-based collaboration—relate to one another. We invite researchers, educators, designers, and practitioners to engage with themes including pedagogical forms of material knowledge; learning trajectories; tacit, sensory, and biological knowledge in making, care, and maintenance in material practices; access and participation in fabrication; and the design of pedagogical artifacts. Workshop activities revolve around creating quilt patches using different dissemination practices and assembling them into a collective quilt based on similarities and differences in how material knowledge is shared. Through these activities, the workshop aims to explain teaching methods, compare how knowledge is shared, and guide the creation of a simple toolkit for recording material processes.

Stories and Artifacts: Exploring Narrative and Material Practices in Design Research

Eldy S. Lázaro Vásquez, Gabrielle Benabdallah, Doenja Oogjes, Samuelle Bourgault, Sylvia Janicki, Heidi Biggs, Mirela Alistar, Kristina Andersen

This workshop focuses on cases where stories and material artifacts (e.g., swatches, and prototypes) become closely intertwined. Artifacts carry traces of labor, skill, and collaboration, while stories emerge from encounters with materials and practices. Although stories and artifacts often co-exist in HCI and design research, their entanglement as ways of articulating knowledge is not always foregrounded, shaping how design work is shared and understood. Participants will submit and share 2-4 page position stories alongside an artifact or representation. Through small-group discussion and zine-making, the workshop explores how stories are told with and through artifacts, the voices and choices involved, and what vocabularies emerge when stories and materials are brought together. The main outcome is a co-produced Glossary of Design Stories, a zine-based resource for design and HCI researchers that assembles entries from participants’ thing–story pairs to surface relations, vocabularies, and voices that may not easily appear in conventional academic accounts.

The ATLAS community aims to move interactive systems out of the lab and into complex, messy, physical ecosystems.

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ATLAS assistant professor Ryo Suzuki wins CAREER award to study generative AI and augmented reality interfaces

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:05:21 +0000

ATLAS assistant professor Ryo Suzuki wins CAREER award to study generative AI and augmented reality interfaces Michael Kwolek Tue, 06/02/2026 - 10:05

Michael Kwolek

Assistant professor Ryo Suzuki (ATLAS Institute, Computer Science) has won a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, the organization’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty. This provides a grant of $665,349.00.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program supports faculty “who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.”

Suzuki, who earned his PhD in Computer Science at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and runs the Programmable Reality Lab at ATLAS, focuses his research on evolving AI interfaces away from 2D computer screens to augmented reality-based systems (AR) that can engage with and respond to the physical environment.

The objective of his CAREER proposal is “to establish, design, and study Generative Augmented Reality (Gen AR).” He is pursuing a new class of AR interfaces that leverages generative AI to analyze context from the real world and generate contextually appropriate content, which is then embedded in the user’s AR view.

“What excites me most about Gen AR research is the possibility of moving AI beyond screens and into the physical world where people actually learn, work, repair, build, and create,” Suzuki said. “Instead of asking people to translate text or images from a screen into action, Gen AR can generate guidance, visualizations, and interactive content directly in the user’s real environment.”

Suzuki’s Augmented Physics research, for example, uses machine learning to create interactive physics simulations from textbook diagrams without the need for programming.

Another project, Guided Reality, led by Ada Zhao (Computer Science PhD student; ATLAS Creative Technology & Design MS ‘25; co-advised by professor Ellen Do), is an automated AR system that creates dynamic visual guidance based on step-by-step instructions, making it much easier for first-timers to operate a new device.

Other projects coming out of the Programmable Reality Lab include AI-powered map animations and storytelling, an AR-powered sketching and animation tool, and a tool for prototyping AR interfaces.

Suzuki’s research could have profound effects on how we interact with the world, with a particular emphasis on learning. He noted, “I plan to expand access to Gen AR development by enabling users—including students, educators, and non-experts—to author and interact with intelligent, context-aware AR content.”

A pipeline of Suzuki's preliminary work.

To catalyze this, he hopes to deploy a Gen AR toolkit in university classrooms, “transforming the prototyping process and empowering students to create AR applications for education, training, and creative work.” He also plans to design a course on AR and AI to empower �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder students to apply Gen AR in their own work.

“In the next year, this award will help us build the core technical foundation for Gen AR, including the system architecture, early prototypes, and initial studies around how people use AI-generated AR content. It will also support students in my lab as we begin turning this research vision into working tools and applications,” Suzuki explained. “Over the next 3-5 years, I hope this project will establish Gen AR as a new research direction at the intersection of augmented reality, generative AI, and human-computer interaction. Beyond individual prototypes, the goal is to create open tools, design principles, and educational materials that other researchers, students, and developers can build on.”

A key theme at ATLAS is the development of tools and expansion of access to technology to help people become active participants, builders and problem solvers.

Suzuki plans to release all data, toolkits, and sample applications as open source, accompanied by public documentation and tutorials so other researchers, designers and creators can explore and build on these technologies.

Industry partners will also play a key role in this line of research as well. Suzuki aims to collaborate with Google, Adobe and Fujitsu Research to one day translate lab research into real-world products that impact our everyday lives.

Suzuki has a “long-term vision of transforming everyday environments into intelligent, interactive spaces that augment human thought and creativity.” He says, “Over the next 5–10 years, I aim to grow my Programmable Reality Lab into a leading hub for research at the convergence of AR and AI.”

Suzuki develops ways to integrate augmented reality and large language models for more seamless human-AI interaction.

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder graduate student named a Google PhD fellow

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

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder 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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Textbook diagrams come to life with �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder AI tool

Michael Kwolek — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 16:23:20 +0000

Textbook diagrams come to life with �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder AI tool Michael Kwolek Thu, 12/05/2024 - 09:23

Ryo Suzuki, ATLAS assistant professor and director of the Programmable Reality Lab, has created an AI tool that can make static textbook images move on the page.

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Textbooks come alive with new, interactive AI tool

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 19:18:55 +0000

Textbooks come alive with new, interactive AI tool Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/01/2024 - 13:18

ATLAS assistant professor, Ryo Suzuki, makes textbooks more interactive with AI-powered tools that turn diagrams into effective simulations for more personalized and immersive learning.

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From AI to material artifacts: ATLAS researchers explore many forms of human-computer interaction at DIS 2026

Papers

Designing Conversations with the Dead: How People Engage with Generative Ghosts [Honorable Mention]

Editing Reality: Designing In-Situ Co-Creation with Generative AI in Mixed Reality

Making Space for Joy in Community-Engaged Equity-Oriented Work in HCI [Honorable Mention]

Demos

Chory Cloth Bot: A Robotic Social Dance Game for Children with Cerebral Palsy

Workshops

Multispecies Response-ability in More-than-human Design Practice: Fabulation with Tides

Patchwork Knowledge: Documenting Material Learning in Human-Computer Interaction

Stories and Artifacts: Exploring Narrative and Material Practices in Design Research

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ATLAS assistant professor Ryo Suzuki wins CAREER award to study generative AI and augmented reality interfaces

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�鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder graduate student named a Google PhD fellow

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Textbook diagrams come to life with �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder AI tool

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Textbooks come alive with new, interactive AI tool

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder graduate student named a Google PhD fellow

Textbook diagrams come to life with �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder AI tool