July 18, 2024

(Dr. Smit Desai)

I completed my PhD at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This marks the end of my 8 year journey at UofI. I could not have wished for a better environment in which to progress. For those interested, kindly check out my dissertation, “Designing Metaphor-Fluid Voice User Interfaces.”

July 10, 2024

(CUI’24)

I was gutted to miss CUI’24 in Luxembourg this year. Still, I am grateful to Mateusz Dubiel for presenting our work on the possibility of using non-human metaphors (e.g., calculator, encyclopedia) to design voice user interfaces and how they compare to human metaphors (e.g, analyst, doctor). Full paper here Examining Humanness as a Metaphor to Design Voice User Interfaces. This work was done during my research visit to the University of Luxembourg and is the final chapter of my dissertation. I was also one of the co-organizers of two brilliant workshops at CUI’24: Voicecraft: Designing Task-specific Voice Assistant Personas and EduCUI: The First International Workshop for Conversational User Interfaces in Education.

April 14, 2024

(CHI’24)

I presented my TOCHI paper, “Metaphors in Voice User Interfaces: A Slippery Fish,” at CHI’24 in Hawaii. Working on this paper with Prof. Twidale was truly a remarkable experience that changed the way I thought about research. This paper started as a 2-page provocation and, over three years, turned into a deep dive into metaphors, touching fields like cognitive linguistics and psychology. Could not be prouder of this work. I was also the main organizer of CUI@CHI 2024: Building Trust in CUIs—From Design to Deployment.