Contact Information

• Jennifer Hyde
• jdt...@cs.cmu.edu

I completed my PhD in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. I was advised by Jessica Hodgins and Sara Kiesler.

My interests are in human-computer interaction, education, and therapy. For my thesis, I worked on improving interactive animated characters intended for use in education and therapy. I focused my investigation on evaluting the standard animation practice of exaggerating character facial expressions. I found that small differences in facial motion can create important differences in the inferences of viewers and the trust that people have in animated characters. My dissertation research empirically demonstrates that the common practice of exaggerating animated characters does not have its desired effect when applied to realistic characters that are intended for educational and therapeutic applications.

In the past I have worked on improving audio CAPTCHAs so that they are easier for humans and harder for computers to pass. The new audio CAPTCHAs have the added benefit that they transcribe difficult audio as users solve them, i.e. the audio reCAPTCHA. Check out my paper regarding my analysis of the security of three popular CAPTCHAs. You can read about the audio reCAPTCHA here!