Breakfast Talk: Digital Fabrication for the Other 99%

Personal fabrication has the potential to change how we think about the physical objects around us, by making things that align with our personal needs. However, few people benefit from the advantages of this technology. To make it relevant for the other 99% of people, we need to share and make much more relevant objects.

In this talk, Prof. Thijs Roumen will demonstrate how to partially overcome this problem by building on the work of others to increase complexity and usefulness of fabricated objects.

Biography

Thijs Roumen is Assistant Professor in Information Science and Computer Science at Cornell Tech, NYC where he directs the Matter of Tech lab. He completed a PhD in Human Computer Interaction in the lab of Patrick Baudisch, Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. He received his MSc from the University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg in 2013 and BSc from the Technical University of Eindhoven, Netherlands in 2011. Between his master's and PhD, he worked at the National University of Singapore as a research assistant with Shengdong Zhao. His research interests are in personal fabrication, digital collaboration and enabling increased complexity for laser cutting. His papers have been published as full papers in top-tier ACM conferences CHI and UIST. He serves on several program committees including ACM CHI and UIST.