Speaker Bio
I am an Assistant Professor at University of Michigan’s School of Information (UMSI). In 2021, I co-founded the Accessibility, HCI, and Aging (AHA!) lab across the School of Information, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and STAMPS School of Art & Design. I also hold affiliate positions in the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC, pronounced “escape”), the Digital Studies Institute (DSI), the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging (MiCDA), and the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI). My research has been funded by the NSF, Google, NIH, and the Retirement Research Foundation. I have also worked at Google as a visiting researcher and Microsoft Research, Facebook, and IBM Research as a user experience researcher. I was awarded a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan and hold a Ph.D. in Technology and Social Behavior from Northwestern University, M.S. in Human-Centered Computing from UMBC, and B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.
Towards accessibility and inclusion for all
Robin Brewer, University of Michigan
Thursday 24th April 2025. 14:00-15:00 GMT. Online.
This talk on Human-Computer Interaction is at the intersection of social computing and accessibility. I ask how we can best represent disability and older age in systems. I design, build, and study systems to better support technology use (and non-use) by older adults and people with vision impairments. Most recently, I have investigated the role of accessible voice communities through voice assistants and Interactive Voice Response tools and how these technologies support or do not support social and informational needs. My research team of postdocs and students are also working on projects related to obfuscation and AI visual access, care platforms and labor, memory and digitization, older age and digital harms, accessible large language models, and mitigating information uncertainty in conversational technologies.