Prof. Chew named Research Area Director for Human-Centered Sciences
Prof. Elaine Chew, a key IMSC investigator, has been named IMSC's Research Area Director for Human-Centered Sciences, succeeding Prof. Skip Rizzo, who has recently joined USC's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT).
"I am honored to be offered this position, and I look forward to serving the Center in this new capacity." she said. "Prof. Rizzo's energy and passion for his work and practical experience in clinical psychology have left a unique and indelible mark in human factors at IMSC. His shoes will be hard to fill."
Prof. Rizzo will continue to work collaboratively with IMSC researchers in his new position at ICT.
Prof. Chew brings expertise and experience in the human-centered sciences area through her work in music perception and cognition.
Two of her projects are MuSA.RT (Music on the Spiral Array. Real Time), an interactive music visualization system, and ESP (Expression Synthesis Project), a driving interface for rendering expressive performances from deadpan MIDI files. Both systems were created using IMSC's Software Architecture for Immersipresence (SAI) in collaboration with Prof. Alexandre François.
For IMSC's Distributed Immersive Performance (DIP) project, Prof. Chew is developing metrics for measuring the psychophysical and perceptual effects of musical interaction over distance to determine the thresholds for usability and bottlenecks to improved human interaction in remote collaborative environments. DIP is developing a system to facilitate musicians performing together over the Internet.
This year Prof. Chew received a prestigious Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation's program in Human-Computer Interaction for her proposal entitled, "Performer-Centered Approaches to Computer-Assisted Music Making."
Prof. Chew has been a key IMSC investigator since she joined the USC faculty in 2001 as an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering.
She earned her Bachelor's degree in Mathematical and Computational Science and in Music from Stanford University and holds a Master's and Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Prof. Chew is also an award-winning pianist. She is a Fellow of Trinity College, London, in piano performance and specializes in contemporary classical music.