Jeffrey P. Bigham
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jeffreybigham.com
Jeffrey P. Bigham
@jeffreybigham.com
4.7K followers 870 following 910 posts
Professor of HCII and LTI at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.

jeffreybigham.com
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"lockerroom talk"
November 12, 2025 at 6:22 PM
jeffreybigham.com
it happened, the vizwiz challenge surpassed the original vizwiz paper by citations --
Vizwiz grand challenge: Answering visual questions from blind people D Gurari, Q Li, AJ Stangl, A Guo, C Lin, K Grauman, J Luo, JP Bigham Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern … 1193 2018 Vizwiz: nearly real-time answers to visual questions JP Bigham, C Jayant, H Ji, G Little, A Miller, RC Miller, R Miller, ... Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and … 1153 2010
November 8, 2025 at 10:48 PM
jeffreybigham.com
in 2014, I bought 3 nest thermostats for my house, which cost like $600… 10 years later, google apparently can’t afford to keep the api running, but had offered me an option to pay $250 per thermostat that will do exactly the same thing as my old one #internetofshit
October 30, 2025 at 3:58 AM
jeffreybigham.com
i don't think my plane is gonna fit in this tiny little airport? what is that, an airport for ants?
visuazliation of my flight approaching denver, which for some reason has the plane an enormous size (bigger than all of denver)
October 29, 2025 at 10:22 PM
jeffreybigham.com
some beautiful fall weather for pittsburgh, which is showing off into the second week of october --
temperatures for the next five days range from 42 low to 67 high, sunny every day!
October 7, 2025 at 8:34 PM
jeffreybigham.com
#3 paper at #uist2025, by @mlam.bsky.social from her Apple internship, on Policy Maps, which is a visualization tool to help map out the unbounded space of LLM behaviors

Wednesday, 11:24am in Miami

www.cs.cmu.edu/~jbigham/pub...
Policy maps chart LLM policy coverage over an unbounded space of model behaviors. Here, an AI practitioner is designing a policy for how an LLM should summarize violent text. Policy map abstractions (right) allow the policy designer to interactively author and test policies that govern a model’s behavior using if-then rules over concepts. The designer can create any desired concept by providing a simple text definition to capture cases of model behavior. Our Policy Projector tool (center) renders cases, concepts, and policies as visual map layers to aid iterative policy design.
September 29, 2025 at 1:22 AM
jeffreybigham.com
#2 paper, paper by my student @yihaopeng.bsky.social, on Morae which is a web agent that is accessible to screen reader users, and also pauses when there are choices to be made

see a demo tonight/Monday, and the talk Wed 2:42pm, Sydney

www.cs.cmu.edu/~jbigham/pub...
Morae is an accessible user interface agent that proactively pauses automation at key decision points for blind and low-vision users to make choices. For example, when asked to “buy the cheapest sweetened sparkling water”, existing agents would automatically choose a product even if multiple items have identical prices. Instead, Morae pauses automation and presents relevant product differences (e.g., flavors, ratings) and allows users to choose based on their preferences. By proactively detecting and pausing when user input is necessary, Morae allow users to actively express preferences during UI automation.
September 29, 2025 at 1:20 AM
jeffreybigham.com
I have three papers at #uist2025 --
#1. StepWrite, how can we compose long-form text with speech -- works better than chatGPT and dictation

Tuesday, 2:54pm, Capri room

www.cs.cmu.edu/~jbigham/pub...
example of hands busy scenario, writing an email, by answering targeted questions generated by the LLM-powered system
September 29, 2025 at 1:17 AM
jeffreybigham.com
i'm at #uist2025 this week in beautiful Busan, Korea -- yesterday, i got to serve on the Doctoral Consortium panel, amazing to see the great work of 10 rising star students in technical HCI … and look at this amazing lunch! :)
an amazing bento box
September 29, 2025 at 1:13 AM
jeffreybigham.com
recognizing customer demand, or at least fake internet outrage, my research group has reverted our logo to the original. regardless of our logo, we have always remained committed to delicious homestyle HCI systems and accessibility research like my grandma used to make.
cracker barrel style logo with a guy that might kind of look like Jeff bigham sitting next to a beaker and a logo that says, "Big Lab"
September 8, 2025 at 8:55 PM
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gotta get some sunglasses
September 6, 2025 at 7:54 PM
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yes it is.
Business Insider 11 hours ago Vibe coding startup CEO says a computer science degree is no longer the 'entry ticket' to a career in tech
August 25, 2025 at 2:23 PM
jeffreybigham.com
highway is closed today, as a warmup to next summer when it'll be closed for a whole month… google maps is directing folks through the tiny winding neighorhood/park roads, "official detour" is nowhere to be found… already a mess on a sunday, can't even imagine how bad this is gonna be!
map of recommended detours through park
August 10, 2025 at 5:49 PM
jeffreybigham.com
tired: genAI is fine
wired: we need to build whole massive efforts to help ensure that genAI doesn’t tell people to eat rocks
inspired: let’s put AI in nuclear weapons, for some reason that we’ll figure out later
August 6, 2025 at 5:32 PM
jeffreybigham.com
100% -- as a quite seasoned runner, including in cities, there are many places where i will avoid the intersections, as weird as that might sound. cars can be MORE distracted at intersections than they are on the straight parts of the road.
But pedestrians navigating a landscape built for cars rightly perceive intersections as unsafe, too. On West Hudson, pedestrians who have pressed the button for a walk signal still must contend with fast-moving cars turning as they cross.
August 6, 2025 at 1:41 PM
jeffreybigham.com
i'm all in favor of calling out where tariffs are costing us additional money, but of course businesses are using them as another way to just sneak random undisclosed fees onto the final receipt … i guess it's for the shirt (or the glass i bought), not the actual run haha
tariff surcharge: $2.00
August 6, 2025 at 1:24 PM
jeffreybigham.com
a few things differentiate me from JD Vance, in addition to me having more appalachian bonafides than he does, … I grew up never questioning what was possible… so, when i achieved things, it seemed normal

I always thought this was the rural strength, he accepts it as a foregone weakness
Archived clip of Vance: I realized that in this new world, I was the cultural alien. I began to think seriously about questions that had nagged at me since I was a teenager: Why has no one else from my high school made it to the Ivy League? Why are people like me so poorly represented in America’s elite institutions? Why is domestic strife so common in families like mine? Why did I think that places like Yale and Harvard were so unreachable? Why did successful people feel so different?
August 1, 2025 at 1:19 PM
jeffreybigham.com
they should put these absurd requirements directly on the box, I don’t even have ONE capable adult…
July 12, 2025 at 10:14 PM
jeffreybigham.com
new nomination for "internet of shit" -- google is withdrawing support for my Nest thermostat (that works perfectly fine), but has kindly offered me the opportunity to pay $150 for a new one that will (ideally) do the same thing
=
Dear Nest Learning Thermostat owner, ‌ Thanks for making Nest a part of your home. We truly value you as a longtime customer. We want to make you aware of some upcoming changes that will affect our earliest thermostats, including those at Bigham House. Starting October 25, 2025, Google will no longer support the Nest Learning Thermostat (1st gen) introduced in 2011 and Nest Learning Thermostat (2nd gen) launched in 2012. Over the years, we’ve brought out newer thermostats with even more ways to help you save energy and stay comfy. As part of our ongoing efforts to provide the best possible smart home experience, we are transitioning our thermostat infrastructure to a new platform offering significant advancements in performance, reliability, and features that will greatly benefit our customers. Unfortunately, we’re not able to move our older thermostats to this platform. You’ll still be able to adjust the temperature, mode, schedules, and settings on your thermostat – and existing schedules should continue to work uninterrupted. However, your thermostat will no longer receive software or security updates, will not have any Nest app or Google Home app controls, and will not support other connected features like Home/Away Assist. See more details at our support website. To help with this transition and to show our appreciation for your loyalty, we’re offering you the option to upgrade to our newest and most advanced thermostat, the Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen), at a special price: $149.99 (MSRP $279.99).1 Please click here to redeem the offer through the Google Store (online only). Offer valid until November 21, 2025 (if you’ve already redeemed your offer, no further action is required).
July 9, 2025 at 9:33 PM
jeffreybigham.com
not entirely sure why i keep doing this to myself, but figured I could probably act like an AC… lol … also @barik.net promised me I wouldn't have to sit on a 6 hour PC meeting phone call where I have no opportunity to do anything and nothing is actually decided. didn't you Titus?
Jeffrey Bigham - Thank you for agreeing to act as a committee member for CHI 2026 Papers.
July 6, 2025 at 6:57 PM
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Come on Carol! (adventures in old signs)
carol never wore her safety goggles, now she doesn’t need them
June 21, 2025 at 1:58 PM
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ok, actually, this is much scarier …
June 5, 2025 at 8:11 PM
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ChatGPT is getting pretty good! Although, now we’re back to copy pasting probably, but I love how it guides them to describe what about the paper they like
June 5, 2025 at 2:04 PM
jeffreybigham.com
i voted!
Jeff with "I voted sticker"
May 20, 2025 at 1:15 PM
jeffreybigham.com
(somewhat random) nytimes op-ed linked to @hcii.cmu.edu's "Human-AI Interaction" course that i started long ago, as an example of the kind of things we should be teaching

and, sure, it's not a "bachelor program", but an individual course.

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/o...
First, we need to ensure workers are learning the skills employers are starting to demand. New approaches are emerging: American University’s Kogod School of Business is embedding A.I. across its curriculum and training faculty members to use A.I. tools, while Carnegie Mellon is offering an A.I. bachelor’s program in which students take classes on harnessing the power of A.I. to be “beneficial and useful for people.” Community colleges in Miami-Dade, Houston and Maricopa Community Colleges are joining in, starting a national A.I. consortium to align curriculums with work force needs and offer applied A.I. degrees backed by companies like Intel and Microsoft.
May 19, 2025 at 1:14 PM