Computer Science Ph.D. students Andrew Bragdon, Jesse Butterfield and Trevor O’Brien recently received fellowships from the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program, a prestigious and highly competitive program. Andrew is interested in human-computer interaction broadly, and in particular, developing methods of making computing tasks more fluid, natural and cognitively lightweight. His recent work improves the approachability of gesture-based interfaces. He recently presented “GestureBar: Improving the Approachability of Gesture-based Interfaces” at the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Jesse’s proposed plan of research is to design graphical models for coordinating teams of robots ...