Lead Researchers

The research project is a collaboration between the Psychology Department and CS department at CMU.

Anthony Tomasic
Senior System Scientist at Carnegie Mellon

Anthony Tomasic received an undergraduate degree in CS from Indiana University, and a PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University. His thesis invented novel methods for improving information retrieval search response time and throughput performance. Upon receiving his Ph.D., Anthony led a research team at the Institut National de Research in Informatique et Automatique (INRIA). His team created the federated database DISCO for data integration. Anthony then spent three years with various internet.bomb start-ups in Silicon Valley before moving back into research at CMU. In 2009, Anthony received an MBA from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. His research now focuses on applied machine learning, mixed-initiative interfaces, and databases.

Erik Thiessen
Professor of Psychology and Director, Infant Language and Learning Lab

My research explores learning in infancy and childhood. When we think about the differences between what infants and adults know, it's apparent that infants need to acquire a tremendous amount of information. This is especially apparent in language, where any utterance might present infants with an opportunity to discover auditory regularities such as phonotactic or prosodic patterns, word forms and word meanings, and syntactic regularties about how to combine words. How do infants master all of this complexity? What learning mechanisms are available to infants, and what are the constraints on these mechanisms

Susanne Burger
Senior Scientist/ata Collection Manager, InterACT Center

Susi was previously a lecturer and research associate at the Department of Phonetics and Speech Communication, University of Munich. She is primarily interested in phenomena of spontaneous and communicative speech. She has organized, collected and coordinated several monolingual, multilingual and multimodal speech databases for both national and international projects (including speeches at the European Parliament). She has developed standards for the transcription of spontaneous speech data and speech annotation tools and has evaluated various ASR systems. More recently, Susi has turned her attention to multi-modal projects (i.e., media involving video, audio, text and speech). Susi received her MA in Phonetics, Psycholinguistics and Mediaevistics at the University of Munich, Germany in 1992.

Amy Ogan
Assistant Professor of Human Computer Interaciton at CMU

She is an educational technologist focusing on ways to make learning experiences more engaging, effective, and enjoyable. Her training spans many disciplines, with undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Spanish, and a Ph.D. in HCI supported by a fellowship from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). She has since been named a Rising Star in EECS by MIT, received the McCandless Early Career Chair, and been awarded the Jacobs Early Career Fellowship to study the use of educational technologies in emerging economies. She has been a visiting researcher at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and has conducted field research on the deployment of educational technology internationally. her research is supported by the National Science Foundation, Google, and the Simon Initiative.

The Research Team

Design + HCI | 2019

Prototyper, web developer, and lab assistant

Marisa Lu
UX Engineer

Full Time

Recruits and manages lab participants, research assistants, and tests.

Kristen Boyle
Lab Manager

PH.D. | Psychology + Neuroscience

How can technology enrich the learning experiences of children?

Cassie Eng
PIER Research Fellow

CS | 2020

Mobile App Developer. Available at szyou@andrew.cmu.edu

Stephanie You
Research Programmer

Alumni

Information Systems + HCI | 2017

"...I loved learning to read as a child but recognize not all children have the same opportunities"

HCI, Drama, Video & Media Design | 2017

"I'm interested in developing technologies that disrupt current social systems..."

Michael James
Interaction Design Researcher

Information Systems + HCI | 2017

"...immersing myself in various cultures to improve user experience withinx technology across the world."

Yeon Sookim
Interaction Design Researcher