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.

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

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

My email:

@cmu.edu

saiganes

Select Projects

FiberPrint: 3D Printing Mechanically Strong, Lightweight Carbon-Fiber Composite Devices with Embedded Electronic Function

Saiganesh Swaminathan, Kadri Bugra Ozutemiz, Carmel Majidi, and Scott Hudson

In proceedings of [CHI'19] (to appear)

[more coming soon]

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

Video

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

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 at various places in Europe such as the HCI lab at Hasso-Plattner Institut with Patrick Baudisch and Stefanie Mueller, Work Practice Technology group at Xerox Research, Analytics and Visualization (Aviz) lab at INRIA-Saclay with Pierre Dragicevic .

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

CV

Here is a link to my CV