Aidan Engleka earned a bachelor’s degree in human-centered design and development (HCDD) from the College of IST in 2023. More than a year later, the research he contributed to as an undergraduate student has been published.
The paper, “Professors Need Not Be Just a Pretty Face: How Faculty Directories Can Decrease the Opportunity for Bias and Better Support Users by Directly Providing Semantic Information,” appeared in the July 2024 issue of Interacting With Computers. Engleka co-authored the journal article with IST Professor Frank Ritter, director of the Applied Cognitive Science (ACS) Lab.
“In my lab, we see a problem and recruit interested students using a variety of sources of support — internship, free time, class project,” Ritter said. “We examine the problem, write a report and check if it could be applied more widely by submitting for publication.”
In this case, the problem Ritter wanted to work on arose when he was looking for specific collaborators for two different projects but found that such individuals were hard to find because many university websites listed only faculty names and not their research areas. Ritter recruited Engleka, who expressed interest in applying cognitive science to human-computer interaction problems in the real world.
“I started working with Dr. Ritter as an intern and continued as a research assistant,” Engleka said. “When he first mentioned this project, I thought it was a great opportunity to look at differences in design patterns as an early undergrad.”
Ritter and Engleka examined 275 university faculty directories and found that most website designs better support users seeing what the faculty look like rather than their academic interests. They argued that by providing only pictures, universities unintentionally promote the choice of faculty members by appearance instead of their accomplishments and talents.
Ritter and Engleka met often to draft the paper, and Engleka did enough of the work to be a co-author. No small feat for an undergraduate student.
“Working on this early in my undergraduate career helped me succeed in my HCDD classes,” Engleka said. “It was great to work one-on-one with Dr. Ritter to learn how to develop good research. I learned a lot from him and others in the ACS lab and continue to apply those lessons to my work now.”
Engleka currently serves as an associate developer at Groundswell.