Sensory Perception & Interaction, Research Group

Prof. Maja Matarić visits SPIN

SPIN held a demo session for Prof. Maja Matarić. Thank you for attending! 

SPIN students receive UBC CS awards!

Congratulations to all SPIN graduate students who have recently won departmental awards!

• Rubia Guerra - Maria Klawe Service Award (2026)
• Devyani McLaren - Student Community Building Award (2025, 2026)
• Tommy Nguyen - Graduate Teaching Assistant Award (2026)
• Rocco Ruan - Student Community Building Award (2026)
• Preeti Vyas - Graduate Teaching Assistant Award (2025)

SPIN Student Rocco Ruan receives graduate TA Award!

Congratulations Rocco!

SPIN student Rubia Guerra receives Maria Klawe Service Award! 

The Maria Klawe award recognizes community service within the department. Congratulations Rubia!

Congratulations to Dr. Laura Cang on her graduation and department awards!

Laura graduated with a PhD, her thesis is titled From devices to data and back again: a tale of computationally modeling affective touch. You can read her thesis here. 

Laura also received a graduate TA award and a Student Community Building Award. 

Congratulations Laura! 

MUX Research Group Demo's work to Scott Hudson and Pam Briggs

The MUX Research group held a demo session for visitors Scott Hudson and Pam Briggs. Thank you to our visitors for attending! 

Touchable Comfort Objects Demo presented at Haptics Symposium

Karon and Preeti presented a poster and interactive demo at the Haptics Symposium Cross-Cutting Challenge on Frontiers of Softness in Science and Engineering. The topic was "The Role of Softness in Touchable Comfort Objects, from a Diversity of Toucher Perspectives". Attendees interacted with a interactive visualization dashboard to access the dataset (n=137) collected through the TCO survey and provided feedback on how they see this dataset to be useful for them and how can the research team focus the analysis.
 

SPIN showcases ongoing research projects to visitors from the Honda Research Institute 

In collaboration with Pourang Irani at UBC Okanagan, SPIN students demoed a variety of current projects. Thank you to our visitors! 

Welcome to Visiting Researcher Mirella Hladky!

Mirella visits SPIN in September and October 2023. She is a researcher in the Affective Computing Group (https://affective.dfki.de/) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Her background is psychology and affective computing and she specializes in emotion analysis and modeling. She supports SPIN in the TouchTales and Happraisal project. Welcome Mirella! 

Welcome to new SPIN Student Rocco Run! 

Rocco is starting in the PhD-track program, working on the ESSbots project. He previously completed a BASc in Engineering Science at the University of Toronto, specializing in robotics. Welcome Rocco!