Jon Froehlich, OSCUR’s PI at the University of Washington and the Microsoft Endowed Professor at UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, visited UIC’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory to give a Human-AI Interaction Seminar in EVL’s Arcade.

His talk, “Always Another Mountain: Persistence, Pushback, and the Pursuit of Research That Matters,” was a career retrospective told through stories of rejection, pushback and wrong turns, from wearables and AI for health tracking to home sensing and AR for STEAM learning. It culminated in his decade of work on Project Sidewalk, which combines crowdsourcing and AI to assess the accessibility of sidewalks, and closed with reflections on systems-driven research in the AI era.

Photo: Jon Froehlich presenting Project Sidewalk’s crowdsourced labeling of sidewalk accessibility on the Arcade display wall. Electronic Visualization Laboratory.