Jon Froehlich

Honor Dr. King’s legacy by helping create cities that work for everyone with Project Sidewalk. Using Google Street View, volunteers spot and label sidewalk accessibility issues, like missing curb ramps or obstructions, from anywhere in the world.

👉 Get started: scistarter.org/project-side...

Recruiting Ph.D. Students for Fall 2026 We are an interdisciplinary research group at the University of Colorado Boulder that uses design to understand and reimagine socio-technical systems.

Interested in accessibility, visualization, or data ethics? I'm looking for Ph.D. students to join @data-and-design.org at CU Boulder Info Sci in Fall 2026.

data-and-design.org/recruiting/phd

UMD CS is hiring in systems and data science, broadly construed (security definitely counts). Come work with us! www.cs.umd.edu/job/2025/jr1...

It makes me 😭

This is the way Mark! I am encouraging my 30 PhD students and 10 postdocs to draw straws on who can submit. Gotta hit that one million citation marker somehow!

Jon E. Froehlich Professor Froehlich’s academic webpage.

I am recruiting new PhD students this year in:

🌆 Urban Computing / GeoAI
🥽 Augmented Reality
🎨 Creativity Support Tools

Why join us? Work on state-of-the-art Human-AI research that has real-world impact at one of the top CS programs in the world.

Deadline: Dec 15
See: jonfroehlich.github.io

Change starts here Join over 500,000,000 people creating real change in their communities.

Seems a little unfair given the productivity of your lab. I think they should make exceptions for the very top scholars and cap it at a more reasonable ~50-100 papers. Probably a change.org opportunity here.

A screenshot of the OpenReview.net form that says "Submission Cap Confirmed" and "I understand that if I submit more than 25 papers, any submissions beyond the twenty-fifth will be desk rejected"

📢🚨Folks, you can only submit 25 papers this year to CVPR (25 submissions per author cap). So, please plan accordingly.

Join us at the UW Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. We are hiring tenure-track faculty positions. Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/174303

I’m thrilled to start my little book tour at the place where I wrote a good chunk of the book! 📚☕️👩‍💻

Makeability Lab - How to Videos How to Videos makeabilitylab.cs.uw.edu Thanks to Professor Liang He for recommending some examples

The CHI video 🎥 deadline is Sept 18th. To help, check out our lab's "How to Video" guide: docs.google.com/presentation...

We'd love to feature more videos, especially 30 sec previews. Don't be shy in promoting your own work! 🍿

Hahah. Indeed! The Google offices in Seattle are so beautiful. This is along the Burke Gilman bike/pedestrian trail along the canal, which connects to the Puget Sound. Feel very fortunate!

Who is this guy? And what's he doing in Google Street View?!

www.google.com/maps/@47.648...

Now fixed with new post. Thanks Nuno!

Makeability Lab - How to Figures How to figures makeabilitylab.cs.uw.edu

With the CHI deadline fast approaching, I'm resharing our lab's resource on making figures for HCI papers: docs.google.com/presentation...

New content suggestions always appreciated. Don't be shy to promote your own work!

Thanks. Will repost with fixed link!

Thank you Pedro. It has been an incredibly fulfilling project culminating and combining so many different parts of my prior work and built up expertise! 🙏

📄UIST'25 preprint: makeabilitylab.cs.washington.edu/media/public...
🚀 Project page: makeabilitylab.cs.washington.edu/project/stre...

On a personal level, this project was like a sabbatical dream 🦄, I got to reunite with @shaunkane.bsky.social (we first worked together in 2006), collaborate with some incredible Googlers including Alex Fiannaca, Nimer Jaber, and Victor Tsaran, and even write (lots of) code in Google's monorepo 🧑🏽‍💻.

Research challenges ahead:
🧠 Mental models of pedestrian navigation vs. inherent limitations of streetscape imagery
⚠️ Bias towards trusting AI output (even when wrong)
🎧 Interaction design difficulties in creating concise audio feedback
🌐 Improving spatial reasoning and multimodal AI for SV tasks

User feedback from our lab study with 11 blind users:
🚀 "This is a huge leap forward in navigation"
✨ "This is incredible"
😊 "This is going to make a lot of blind people very happy"

A key finding: users overwhelmingly preferred conversing with the AI Chat Agent about the scene & local geography

YouTube video by Jon E. Froehlich StreetViewAI: Making Street View Accessible Using Context-Aware Multimodal AI (30-Sec Preview)

I have had the incredible privilege to spend my sabbatical at Google Research. What have I been up to? Attempting to make Street View accessible to all! 🌍✨

StreetViewAI is a new, accessible street view prototype using context-aware, real-time AI & voice interaction.

youtu.be/wY_2vfDikkQ

The two-stage RampNet banner

We're launching RampNet, an open-source AI that helps detect curb ramps with near-human accuracy.

The most amazing part? The entire project was conceived of and led by high school student John O'Meara.

🧵 A thread on what we built and why it matters.

A screenshot of a visualization showing a globe; a purple streak runs across the northern Atlantic ocean and diffuses into a darker purple across Asia. A control panel on the left would allow the user to explore the map further.

A friend posted a photo, sunbathing from Scandanavia a little bit ago, captioned "60 degrees at 60 degrees!" That made me wonder how often that really happens -- where on earth is the temperature the same as the latitude, and how often? I answered that at danyel.github.io/degree-degree

Thank you Evan. A necessary labor of love. And most certainly a living document that evolves as I and my students continue to learn and grow (and the world changes).

📢 Breaking news: we have extended the Extended Abstract deadline for our ICCV AI+Accessibility workshop to Aug 6th. You've got this 💪🏽!

Send in those submissions: cv4a11y.github.io/ICCV2025/ind...

‘Extremely rare’: UW PhD computer science grads recognized with prestigious dissertation honors University of Washington computer science PhD graduates Ashish Sharma, left and Sewon Min. (Photos via UW) Two PhD graduates from the University of

#ICYMI, two #UWAllen Ph.D. graduates were recognized by @acm.org for their research in #AI #NLP: Ashish Sharma, senior applied scientist at @microsoft.com, and @sewonm.bsky.social, research scientist at @ai2.bsky.social and incoming faculty at UC Berkeley. www.geekwire.com/2025/extreme... #ThisIsUW

Trump Administration Live Updates: U.S. Suspends Visa Interviews for Foreign Students

This saddens me deeply. I have greatly benefited from working w/extraordinary international students; they have brought me & my lab incredible energy, ideas, & helped create some of the most gratifying & important breakthroughs in my career. They are in fear. Not OK! www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05...

This workshop is organized by Professors Yapeng Tian, Yuhang Zhao, @jonfroehlich.bsky.social and PhD students @chimichurrichu.bsky.social and Yuheng Wu.

Vision Foundation Models and Generative AI for Accessibility Workshop CV4A11y, ICCV 2025 Workshop

📢 We are delighted to announce our ICCV 2025 workshop on "Vision Foundation Models and Generative AI for Accessibility: Challenges & Opportunities"!

Two submission tracks: extended abstracts and full papers—the latter published in the ICCV workshop proceedings.

cv4a11y.github.io/ICCV2025/ind...