Ten studies involving Dartmouth-affiliated researchers were accepted by the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (CHI2020).

Elizabeth Murnane

One of those, a narrative-based smartphone application that promotes physical activity by visualizing and tying together the progress of the user with that of the app’s main character, received a best paper award by the conference. The first author of the study, Elizabeth Murnane, will become the Charles H. Gaut & Charles A. Norberg Assistant Professor of Engineering at Thayer School of Engineering during the summer of 2020.

“Personal technology holds tremendous potential to help tackle public health challenges rooted in human behavior, but the conventional style of quantitative feedback most apps deliver is confusing and unmotivating for a majority of people,” said Murnane, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Human-Computer Interaction group at Stanford University. “Our research to develop data-driven stories shows the power of more richly qualitative approaches in positively shaping actions and attitudes.”

All of the Dartmouth technology presented to CHI2020 may be viewed at: home.cs.dartmouth.edu