MICHAEL NEBELING

I'm an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, where I lead the Information Interaction Lab. We study the next generation of user interfaces, as well as the methods and tools to create them. With the goal of making interfaces easier to use and to create, our research benefits both users and designers, and allows more users to be designers.

Previously, I was a Visiting Researcher in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich.

Curriculum Vitae

Research at the University of Michigan (2016-)

Please find out more on the Information Interaction Lab web site.

Below are some first prototypes from our first semester of research so far:

  • XD-AR: an augmented reality platform that we are developing for multi-user multi-device augmented reality experiences that allow users to "edit" the physical world in realtime
  • 3D Lab: virtual and physical 3D models of our lab environment that we are using to design new forms of natural user interfaces and cross-device interactions for both users in the lab and users participating remotely
  • Surface Pad: initially conceived as a sketching interface that can work with new kinds of input devices, we are currently exploring how the interface can be extended to easily import and blend content from the digital and physical worlds

Research at Carnegie Mellon University (2015-2016)

Using my Swiss NSF mobility grant at CMU, I investigated ways of orchestrating multiple devices and crowds to enable complex information seeking, sensemaking and productivity tasks on small mobile and wearable devices. I also contributed to the Google IoT project led by CMU. This work led to three papers at ACM CHI 2016:

  • WearWrite: a wearable interface enabling smartwatch users to orchestrate crowd workers on more powerful devices to complete writing tasks on their behalf (CHI'16 paper, CHI'16 talk, UIST'15 demo, tech report on arXiv)
  • XDBrowser: a new cross-device web browser that I used to elicit 144 multi-device web page designs for five popular web interfaces leading to seven cross-device web page design patterns (CHI'16 paper, CHI'16 talk)
  • Snap-To-It: a mobile app allowing users to opportunistically interact with appliances in multi-device environments simply by taking a picture of them (CHI'16 paper)

Research at ETH Zurich (2009-2015)

Beyond Responsive Design

  • XCML: a domain-specific language that tightly integrates context-aware concepts and multi-dimensional adaptivity mechanisms using context matching expressions based on a formally-defined context algebra (WWW journal article)
  • jQMetrics: an evaluation tool for web developers and designers to analyze web page layout and perform measurements along a set of empirically derived metrics (CHI 2011 paper, jQMetrics project site)
  • The Adaptive Guardian: an application of an adaptive layout template with support for automatic text and media scaling, multi-column layout and higher-quality media content (The Adaptive Guardian project site)

Adaptation to Touch and Multi-touch

  • jQMultiTouch: jQuery-like toolkit and rapid prototyping framework for multi-device/multi-touch web interfaces providing a unified method for the specification of gesture-based multi-touch interactions (EICS 2012 paper, jQMultiTouch project site)
  • W3Touch: an evaluation tool for web designers to assess the usability of web interfaces on touch devices as well as a toolkit for automating the adaptation process to different touch device contexts based on simple usability metrics (CHI 2013 paper, W3Touch project site)

Crowdsourcing Design and Evaluation

User-Defined Multimodal Interactions

  • Kinect Browser: a new multimodal web browsing system designed based on a replication of Morris's Web on the Wall guessability study (ITS'14 paper)
  • Kinect Analysis: both a method and a tool for recording, managing, visualizing, analyzing and sharing user-defined multimodal interaction sets based on Kinect (EICS'15 paper)

Cross-Device Interfaces

  • MultiMasher: a rapid prototyping tool for cross-device applications supporting mashing up multiple web applications and devices and integrating them into a new cross-device user experience (WISE'14 paper)
  • XDStudio: an authoring environment for cross-device user interfaces supporting interactive development on multiple devices based on a combination of simulated authoring and on-device authoring (CHI'14 paper)
  • XDKinect: a toolkit for developing cross-device user interfaces and interactions using Kinect to mediate interactions between multiple devices and users (EICS'14 paper)

Personal Information Management and Cloud Storage

  • PIM Light: a study on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom developing the process of engineering personal information management tools by example (AVI'14 paper)
  • MUBox: a system introducing multi-user aware extensions for working in teams on top of personal cloud storage solutions such as Dropbox (CHI'15 paper)

Selected Publications

For the full list of publications, please check Google Scholar and DBLP.

    Go to top


    Visit my research lab!


    Visit the MISC research group!

    News and Events

    June Getting ready for my four summer interns. And, back on the CHI Engineering PC for 2018. Looking forward to your submissions!

    May CHI 2017 in Denver with Max, Brian, and former CMU colleague, Nikola Banovic. LOL! Presented XDBrowser 2.0 and my #HCI.Tools position paper on Playing the Tricky Game of Toolkits Research.

    March/April Max Speicher joining my lab as Research Fellow, Brian Hall as PhD Student, and Erin McAweeney as REMS Fellow. Exciting! Also won an ESSI grant!

    February Invited to the #HCI.Tools workshop at CHI for my position paper Playing the Tricky Game of Toolkits Research.

    January Teaching SI 582 Intro to Interaction Design this spring.

    2016

    December XDBrowser 2.0 accepted to CHI'17.

    November Giving XDUI tutorial and attending RoomAlive toolkit tutorial at ISS'16. Meeting my former ETH Zurich colleagues Fabrice Matulic and Maria Husmann. A lot of fun!

    September Starting as Assistant Professor at UMSI. Setting up the Information Interaction Lab. Teaching SI 482 Interaction Design Studio. A first!

    August Wrapping up my Swiss NSF Advanced.Postdoc Mobility fellowship at CMU. Had a great time. Many new friends for life. Thanks for the support!

    June Organizing the EICS'16 XDUI workshop (proposal). XDUI tutorial accepted to ISS'16.

    May Accepted Assistant Professor position at UMSI. Attended CHI'16 in San Jose, CA. Participated in microproductivity and cross-surface workshops. Led Systems@CHI lunch. Chaired end-user programming session. Presented WearWrite (video) and XDBrowser (video).

    January-May Invited talks at TU Munich, Yale, Virginia Tech, Indiana-Purdue, UMSI, UW CSE (video), Adobe Research, and Google.

    April Joined HCOMP'16 PC.

    March Bluewave accepted to EICS'16.

    January Accepted to CHI'16 microproductivity and cross-surface workshops.

    2015

    December Attended CHI'16 PC meeting in San Jose, CA. Three papers accepted: WearWrite, XDBrowser, Snap-To-It. Also received a new Swiss NSF research grant.

    November Attended UIST'15 in Charlotte, NC. Presented WearWrite demo.

    October Joined EICS'16 PC.

    September CHI'16!!!

    August WearWrite demo accepted to UIST'15. Joined IUI'16 and AVI'16 PCs.

    July Published WearWrite tech report.

    June Co-chaired EICS'15 and co-organized XDUI workshop. Joined CHI'16 PC.

    May Attended CHI'15. Received Honorable Mention for MUBox. Participated in mobile collocated interactions workshop and presented my SNSF project. Chaired session on multi-device interaction.

    March Kinect Analysis and XDSession accepted to EICS'15.

    February Started working at CMU HCII.

    Contact

    You can reach me by email via nebeling@cmu.edu.

    If you are interested in my work, please feel free to follow me on Twitter @michinebeling.