COMP 150-02 Accessible and Assistive Computing

This course will focus on developing accessible and assistive computational systems. That is, systems that are usable by and helpful to users with disabilities. In addition to learning about accessible and universal design (for example for web accessibility) we will also discuss computational approaches to providing assistance to human users: sensing their behaviors, modeling their goals and plans, and intelligently choosing appropriate (including socially appropriate) actions. We will study these challenges through a series of case studies on state-of-the-art approaches to these problems, from web accessibility and universal design to socially assistive robotics.

This course requires some prior programming experience and an exposure to basic algorithms (ME 80 OR (COMP 15 and COMP/MATH 61) OR grad standing), and will focus on the practice of designing accessible and/or assistive systems, with a small project and skill-building through homework assignments and exams.