Shivendra Agrawal

About myself: I am a 4th year Ph.D. student at CU Boulder. I work in the CAIRO Lab under the supervision of Prof. Bradley Hayes. I am broadly interested in Accessibility, Human Computer interaction (HCI), Human Robotics Interaction (HRI), Computer Vision (CV), and Explainable AI. My research aims to create real-world Assistive Technology (AT) through an amalgamation of the above mentioned sub-fields. I am currently working towards creating a smart cane to assist people with visual impairment (PVI) to perform day-to-day tasks more independently.

Research Summary: Our first work in this series uses insights from psychology to detect socially preferred (chairs with high privacy and low intimacy) seats allowing them to participate in the nuances of seat selection in public places just like sighted people. The work was inspired by the findings of 1) Wang et al. who showed that finding seats in public places was the most important mobility task for the PVI, and 2) Staat and Groot who showed that people like to seat themselves in a way that optimizes for privacy and intimacy with strangers. Here are the relevant links for the project: Poster, Talk Video, Demo, and Paper. Our latest work aims to make a system that can assist with independent grocery shopping as shopping with sighted guide is prohibitive and often causes a loss of privacy. Here are the relevant links: Workshop paper, and Paper. Our system called ShelfHelp uses a novel computer vision algorithm to locate grocery items on the shelf and a novel fine-grain manipulation guidance algorithm that emulates a sighted guide over a video call and issues verbal commands such as “move a little bit to the left”, “move 6 inches up”, “move a foot forward”.

Other interests: When not working, you can find me playing tennis (~NTRP 3.0) or biking/running in the lovely city of Boulder. (Bonus) creek path Fall view through my bike. I also enjoy cooking in my free time and exploring local food and beverages. Minor-flex - I have more than 27 millions views on my Google Map contributions and have received a rather vibrant blue pair of socks from Google for my service.