On the web

Visit Erik's personal web site.

Biographical Sketch

Erik Pukinskis, of Storrs-Mansfield, CT, obtained a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Psychology from the University of Connecticut in 2003 with honors.  His honors thesis was a project measuring quantitatively the usability of Kavanah, a medical information retrieval application.  He founded the UConn chapter of The Daily Jolt and devised several innovative marketing methods which drew up to 4000 students a day to the site. 

He completed his M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction Design at Indiana University in 2006.  Under the advising of Yvonne Rogers he created Sheepsville, an interactive educational game for the Mitsubishi DiamondTouch Table and used his prototype to study how the Table changes group interactions in an educational setting. He was a finalist with Team Meeteetse in the 2005 SIGCHI Student Design Competition for the design of a community photo sharing system for senior cititzens.  His current research goal is to identify new ways to bring some of the power programmers wield to non-programmers.  He has built two such prototypes: BusyBodies, a 3D game that lets players arrange simple robots into powerful configurations, and Underbelly, a sequence alignment tool that helps biologists explore how alignment algorithms work under the hood. 

In the summer of 2006, he will be redesigning the AbiWord word processor to work on MIT’s $100 Laptop as a part of Google Summer of Code, and in the fall, he will begin a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego in the Distributed Cognition/HCI Lab.  

Advisor

The Window in the Box project was avised by Yvonne Rogers. From her web site:

"I am a professor in the School of Informatics and the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University. I am also an adjunct professor of Cognitive Science. I research and teach in the areas of HCI, CSCW and ubiquitous computing.

"My research focuses on augmenting and extending everyday learning and work activities with interactive technologies that move "beyond the desktop". This involves designing enhanced user experiences through appropriating and assembling a diversity of technologies including mobile, wireless, handheld and pervasive computing."