Willa Yang is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Chicago, advised by Dr. Ken Nakagaki. Willa is a maker, tinkerer, hardware lover, and home-improvement enthusiast. Her research aims to empower people to effortlessly and non-invasively augment and enrich their everyday environments. She pursues this by designing hardware systems for users to bring actuation, interaction, and intelligence into their everyday spaces. She stands for individual creativity, and for giving people the agency to make their environments work for them on their own terms in their own ways.

She has published her work in top Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) venues, including ACM CHI, UIST, and TEI, and has received a Best Paper Award, a Best Demo Award, a Best Demo Honorable Mention Award, and a Sony Research Award, with a US Patent pending.

Her work has been publicly exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry and the Ars Electronica Festival, and she has appeared on FOX 32 Chicago for a live on-air interview about her research. Her projects have also been featured by Tech Xplore, Hackaday, Hackster.io, Audacy, Yahoo Tech, etc.

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