Hi there!! My name is Prayag and I am a first year graduate student at School of Information at University of California, Berkeley. I am doing my Master's in Information Management And Systems. My focus is on HCI and Interaction Design.
I am also working as a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) at the School of Computer Science where I help teach the undergraduate course on User Interface Design. Last semester I was a GSI for the undergraduate course on Computer Networks.
Before coming to Cal I was working as an HCI researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) with the Ubiquitous Interaction group (Uix).
My undergraduate is in Computer Science and I love to build stuff. My areas of interest includes Mobile HCI, Multimodal Interaction, Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) and Crowdsourcing.
MobileWorks is a crowdsourcing platform which aims to provide employment to people at the bottom of the pyramid using mobile phones. The platform allows people who earn less than $1.5/day to do simple tasks on cell-phones providing companies and developers access to a flexible, on-demand, human intelligence.
MobileWorks was the co-recipient of the first prize in the ICT4D design competition organized at School of Information at UC Berkeley. It was the second prize winner in the Big Ideas @ Berkeley grant and tied for the third place at the UC wide Citris big ideas competition.
MobileWorks Inc. has since turned into a San Francisco based start-up with me acting as the CTO and co-founder.
Euclide playing the Jumping Game.
Euclide is an automated puppet installation to play games with children when they visit the Museum of Science in Naples, Italy. In this video, the puppet asks the kids to jump and when it senses the jump, the pupper changes it’s costume.
Designed for a group interaction with Italian kids. This is a demo of the showcase developed for the CALLAS project. The installation is to be installed in the Citta della Scienza museum in Naples. This is one among 5 games that we designed and developed.
I consulted for Inkling Inc. as a part of our Needs and Usability Analysis class to create a better social learning platform for their electronic textbook reader application for the iPad. The new interaction techniques were designed for greater privacy control for the users and a better management of their online groups.
Euclide (pronounced eU-clee-day) is a multimodal puppet installed in the Science Museam at Naples, Italy. Euclide plays different traditional games with the children such as the game of ‘Red Light / Green Light’ when they visit the Museum of Science in Naples, Italy. The puppet senses your motion and your closeness to the screen. The puppet also listens for certain key-words in your speech and creates a rich interaction based on the audio and video signals.
I was the programmer and designer for the installation which was part of the EU funded Research project named CALLAS
Sunoh was a project I did for my under-graduate thesis. Sunoh is a system which allowed students with hearing disabilities to listen to classroom lectures and interject teacher with questions using speech-to-text technology. It was an embedded system to be installed in every class room and was connected to a media server. It connected to the teacher over a bluetooth headset and students could connect to it over wi-fi.
The project hardware was sponsored by Microsoft and won me top grades in thesis evaluation at my school. The report we submitted for Microsoft Embedded Challenge can be downloaded from here.
