Saiganesh Swaminathan

Sai Ganesh Swaminathan

I'm currently a Ph.D. Student at Carnegie Mellon University at the Human-Computer Interaction Insitute, advised by Scott Hudson. I am part of the Devlab.

Over the past few years, I have worked a wide range of topics, building systems in domains such as interactive digital fabrication, crowdsourcing and visualizations. My core research interests has always been to invent novel interactive tools and systems that expand human capabilities in interesting ways.

In my PhD research, I've focused on additive manufacturing of printed electronics. Specifically looking at processing innovations that enable a new class of multi-functional composites for designing custom interactive electronic devices and assistive technologies.

My email:

@cmu.edu

saiganes

About

I joined the graduate program of CMU on August 2016.

In the past, I completed my masters in Europe studying at both Technische Universität Berlin and Université Paris-Sud . While in Europe I worked as a research assistant in Aviz (Analytics and Visualization Lab) with Pierre Dragicevic and at HCI lab in HPI (Hasso-Plattner Institute) with Patrick Baudisch and Stefanie Mueller.

After my masters, I moved to Technologies for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India where I worked with Bill Thies and Ed Cutrell as a Research Fellow.

Select Projects

WearMail: On-the-Go Access to Information in Your Email with a Privacy-Preserving Human Computation Workflow

Saiganesh Swaminathan, Raymond Fok, Fanglin Chen, Ting-Hao (Kenneth) Huang, Irene Lin, Rohan Jadvani, Walter S. Lasecki, Jeffrey P. Bigham

In proceedings of [UIST'17] (Paper)

Email is more than just a communication medium. Email serves as an external memory for people—it contains our reservation numbers, meeting details, phone numbers, and more. Often, people need access to this information while on the go, which is cumbersome from mobile devices with limited I/O bandwidth. In this paper, we introduce WearMail, a conversational interface to retrieve specific information in email. WearMail is mostly automated but is made robust to information extraction tasks via a novel privacy-preserving human computation workflow. [more coming soon]

Paper

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Slides

Linespace: a sensemaking platform for blind

Saiganesh Swaminathan, Thijs Roumen, Robert Kovacs, David Stangl, Stefanie Mueller and Patrick Baudisch

In proceedings of [CHI'16] (Paper)

For visually impaired users, making sense of spatial information is difficult as they have to scan and memorize contents before being able to analyze it. Even worse, any update to the displayed contents invalidates their spatial memory, which can force them to manually rescan the entire display. Making display contents persist, we argue, is thus the highest priority in designing a sensemaking system for the visually impaired. We present a tactile display system based on a 3D printer that is designed with this goal in mind. [more coming soon]

TurkBench: Rendering the Market for Turkers

Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Jutta K. Willamowski,Saiganesh Swaminathan, and David B. Martin

In proceedings of [CHI'15] (Note)

Crowdworkers face a numerous challenges in turking in online labor markerts. We built a tool TurkBench that provides workers with a personalized market visualization and session management to help them navigate the market efficiently.[more coming soon]

Paper

Supporting The Design and Fabrication of Physical Visualizations

Saiganesh Swaminathan, Conglei Shi, Yvonne Jansen, Pierre Dragicevic, Lora Oehlberg, Jean-Daniel Fekete.

In proceedings of [CHI'14] (Full paper)

An increasing variety of physical visualizations are being built. However, crafting them remains a laborious process and demands expertise in both data visualization and digital fabrication. We present the MakerVis prototype, the first tool that integrates the whole workflow, from data filtering to physical fabrication.[more coming soon]

Paper

Video

Slides

Show work in progress

CV

Here is a link to my CV