Post-doctoral fellowship in accessibility and crowd computing

Carnegie Mellon University

The Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University is recruiting a post-doctoral fellow in computer science or related disciplines to support a new research project on crowd-based cloud accessibility improvement and analysis.

Cloud computing platforms provide access to information, social experiences and work, but many people have difficulty using or accessing them. Web accessibility has lagged far behind in comparison to the rapid pace of innovation in online services. An accessible web can provide study opportunities, work opportunities, opportunities for participation in government and social connections.

To address the gap between online services and accessibility, this project proposes to leverage crowd workers so as to rapidly scale up our ability to assess and correct accessibility problems while keeping costs low.

There are three areas of opportunity in this research:

(1) Develop methods for involving crowd workers in micro decisions about accessibility in order to create a human-driven automated tool that can produce a truly accurate assessment of the severity and presence of accessibility problems on a website

(2) Develop a better understanding of what constitutes a severe problem and the extent to which this is a task driven question. Investigate methods for determining error severity, the portion of the page/content affected, the types of tasks that would be affected, and so on.

(3) Develop methods for involving crowd workers and novel visualization in creating reports about accessibility problems that are useful not only to web designers, but also to people with disabilities who are trying to decide which websites would be useful to them

An ideal post-doctoral fellow will have interests and skills blending machine learning, crowd computing, interface and visualization development and evaluation, experimental design, and an understanding of both individual and distributed (social) cognition. The candidate must have a PhD in cognitive psychology, computer science, HCI, information science, communication or a related discipline. The post-doctoral fellow would be supervised by Jeffrey Bigham and Jennifer Mankoff at Carnegie Mellon University.

There will be opportunities to take courses at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh that support advanced research skills (e.g., crowd computing, information visualization, assistive technology, specialized statistics, research methodology classes, machine learning). The fellowship is for one year with the possibility of renewal for up to two more years.

Interested candidates should send a personal statement describing career objectives, background and experience along with a CV in Word or pdf format to Marian D'Amico <marian@cs.cmu.edu>. Have at least two references also directly send their letters to this address, with your name in the subject line.

Questions about the position should be addressed to Jeffrey Bigham <jbigham@cs.cmu.edu>.