Björn Hartmann


Photo by Alex Greenspan


News

June 2023: Jacobs Institute

After 7 years, I am concluding my term as faculy director of the Jacobs Institute on June 30, 2022. Eric Paulos will be the next director.

Contact info

Office: 417 Sutardja Dai Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-1760

Office Hours: TBD

bjoern@eecs.berkeley.edu
t: @bjo3rn
RSO: Amy Frithsen, frithsen@berkeley.edu

Materials

Curriculum Vitae, Recent Talk Info
Archived Faculty Application Materials, Advice for Current and Prospective Students

I am an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. I am broadly interested in tools to support human ingenuity, across a number of domains including design, programming and engineering. I am also interested in embodied cognition, especially in AR/VR. Methodologically, my group predominantly focuses on systems research: we contribute complex, working interactive systems that embody our research ideas and enable us to test specific hypotheses. However, I also appreciate (and we conduct) careful, controlled experiments. I hold the Paul and Judy Gray Alumni Presidential Chair in Engineering Excellence, was previously a Qualcomm Faculty Fellow and have received an NSF CAREER award, Sloan fellowship, and Okawa research award. My group predominantly publishes at the top HCI conferences UIST, CHI and CSCW. We also publish in more topic-specific venues like DIS, ICSE, VL/HCC, and Learning@Scale. Our work has received multiple best paper prizes at these conferences.

I am affiliated faculty in the Berkeley Institute of Design. Previously, from 2016-2023, I was the Faculty Director of the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. Prior to leading the Jacobs Institute, I co-founded the CITRIS Invention Lab, a lab equipped with many digital fabrication and rapid prototyping tools. The lab served as inspiration and testbed for many our research projects. I was also involved in the Swarm Lab. I spend time with great colleagues at the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Visual Computing Lab. I received my PhD from the Stanford Computer Science department in 2009 where I worked with Scott Klemmer (dissertation). I received an MSE in Computer and Information Science as well as Undergraduate Degrees in Digital Media Design and Communication from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002.

Thinking about applying for a PhD/Masters/Internship/PostDoc in HCI at Berkeley?
Do not email me directly about your application or request - I cannot respond to every message. Read this advice instead.

Undergraduate Cal Student interested in (Interface) Design?
Take a look at the Berkeley Certificate in Design Innovation which has many relevant courses across the university. The Jacobs Institute's courses page is a another helpful resource. In Computer Science, you should take CS160. If you did well and want to deepen your understanding of HCI research and practice, sign up for CS260B or CS294-84 (Interactive Device Design). If you have completed either of these courses with outstanding results, come to my office hours to talk about undergraduate research opportunities.

Preprints, Posters, Works in Progress

Papers

For a full list, see my profiles on: Google Scholar, ACM DL, or Microsoft Academic Search.

Teaching

Students & Collaborators

Advisees

PostDocs: Eddie Kim (co-advised with Sanjit Seshia)
PhD: Timothy Aveni (co-advised with Armando Fox), Peitong Duan, Shm Garanganao Almeda, James Smith, J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira
Masters:

Alumni

PostDoc: Elena Glassman (@Harvard) Gustavo Soares'17 (@Microsoft), David Mellis'16 (@Autodesk), John MacCallum'16 (@INRIA), Mozziyar Etemadi'14 (w/ Shuvo Roy, MD PhD, @Northwestern)

PhD: Jeremy Warner'23 (Dissertation, Research Scientist at Apple), Eldon Schoop'22 (Dissertation, Research Scientist at Apple), Bala Kumaravel'22 (Dissertation, Senior Research Scientist at Microsoft), Richard Lin'21 (w/ Elad Alon, Dissertation, Postdoc, UCLA), Andrew Head'20 (w/ M. Hearst, Dissertation, Faculty, UPenn), Amy Pavel'19 (w/ M. Agrawala, Dissertation, Faculty UT Austin), Will McGrath'19 (w/ P. Levis, Dissertation, Google), Valkyrie Savage'16 (Dissertation, Faculty, U Copenhagen), Peggy Chi'16 (Dissertation, Research Scientist at Google), Lora Oehlberg '12 (ME, w/ A. Agogino, Faculty, U Calgary), Kenrick Kin'12 (EECS, w/ M. Agrawala, @Oculus)

Master's: Nicholas Jennings'23, Cyrus Vachha'23 (@Princeton PhD), Kyu Won Kim'22 (MS Report, @Aurora Solar), Nidhi Kakulawaram'21 (MS Report), Stephanie Daffara'20 (MS Report, @Pixar), Kunal Chaudhary'19 (MS Report), James Smith'19 (MS Report, @Berkeley PhD), Corten Singer'18 (MS Report), Michelle Nguyen'16 (MS Report, @Trifacta), Alvin Yuan'15 (MS Report, @Shopkick), Manas Mittal'14 (@Google), Wei Wu'13 (@Yelp), Philipp Gutheim'12 (@MobileWorks,Google), Drew Fisher'12 (w/ D. Wagner, @AeroFS)

Secondary co-advising: Julie Newcomb (UW, primary: R. Bodik), Ben Zhang (EECS, primary: E. Lee), D Coetzee'15 (EECS, primary: A. Fox), Kurtis Heimerl (EECS, primary: E. Brewer), Shiry Ginosar (now PhD w/ A. Efros), Anand Kulkarni (IEOR, primary: J. Shewchuck, CEO @MobileWorks)

Undergraduates: Woojin Ko'21 (@Cornell PhD), Tomas Vega'17, Michelle Chang, Mitchell Karchemsky'18, Jingyi Li'16, Eldon Schoop'16, Claire Tuna, Mark Dhillon (@Madison MS), Matthew Chan (@Irvine PhD), Matthew Can (@Stanford PhD), Vidya Ramesh (@Stanford MS), Brandon Liu (@Square), Charlie Hsu (@Twilio), Kyu Simm (@LifeCheck)

External: Manuel Kallenbach'11 (RWTH Aachen, MS, w/ Jan Borchers), Denis Bouchinet'12 (Paris Sud, w/ Michel Beaudouin-Lafon)

Summer interns: Mary Beth Kery'13 (SUPERB, Wellesley, now @CMU PhD), Christie Dierk'13 (SUPERB, Elon, now @Berkeley PhD), Jasmine Jones'11 (SUPERB, UMBC, now @Michigan PhD), Kehontas Rowe'11 (SUPERB, Mills College), Bella Manoim'10 (SUPERB, Bard College)

In Memoriam

Tim Campbell, Floraine Berthouzoz, David Dornfeld, David Wessel.

Recent Collaborators

Maneesh Agrawala (Stanford), Paul Wright (Berkeley), Tapan Parikh (Berkeley), Alice Agogino (Berkeley), Ras Bodik (Washington), Armando Fox (Berkeley), Marti Hearst (Berkeley), Tovi Grossman (Autodesk), George Fitzmaurice (Autodesk), Jan Borchers (RWTH Aachen), Steven Dow (CMU), Yang Li (Google), Kurt Luther (CMU), Scott Klemmer (PhD advisor - Stanford), Tony DeRose (Pixar), Michel Beaudouin-Lafon (Univ. Paris), Wendy Mackay (INRIA), Lora Oehlberg (INRIA), Wesley Willett (INRIA), Mira Dontcheva (Adobe), Wilmot Li (Adobe), Gautham Mysore (Adobe), Dan Goldman (Adobe), Sean Follmer (Stanford), Loris D'Antoni (Madison), Rajeev Alur (UPenn), Mahesh Viswanathan (UIUC), Sumit Gulwani (MSR).