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Ayanna Seals

Ayanna Seals

HCI Researcher

UX Designer

UX Strategist

Human-Computer Interaction Research Assistant | Ph.D. Candidate at NYU

About

Ayanna Seals is a researcher and designer who is passionate about creating solutions within the fields of health, wellness, and civic technology. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at NYU, previously receiving her B.S. in Communication Media from North Carolina State University and her M.S. in Integrated Digital Media from NYU.

As a Technology Consultant at OneSource she develops and integrates methodologies to enable small businesses to thrive while providing resources and support to aspiring entrepreneurs. She has done work for various companies and institutions, including OneSource, New York University, North Carolina State University, Bloomberg Associates, and News Corp.

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Research Interests

human computer interaction, augmented reality, self-focused attention, self-regulation, behavior change

Projects

UbiQomix: Human-Computer Interaction for Personal Omics


UbiQomix: Human-Computer Interaction for Personal Omics

HCI, Information Design, Health Information

Funded by the NSF, and in collaboration with Open Humans, we investigate how to design effective interaction techniques to empower nonexpert users to engage with and make sense of their personal omic information.

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SONYC: Sounds of New York City


SONYC: Sounds of New York City

HCI, Citizen Science/Participation, Public Health

Sonyc is a novel cyberphysical system that consists of a hybrid, distributed network of sensors deployed in the NYC that makes use of cutting-edge machine listening methods to constantly provide a rich description of their acoustic environment. My team is researching and developing the citizen science and 311 reporting application.

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Transforming Disclosures: Retirement Savings


Transforming Disclosures

HCI, Information Design, Financial Education

This project explores infomative interactive design extensions for online retirement savings platforms and their effects on consumer behavior and decision making.

Decentra


Decentra Apps

Affordable Housing, P2P, Online Collaboration

Decentra Apps are a collection of web applications that enable and increase the scalability of peer-to-peer owned and managed affordable housing.

Publications

Seals, A., Nov, O., Otiono, J., Shaer, O. Ball, M. Investigating Pathogen Trails as a Design Strategy to Combat Invisible Health Dangers in Everyday Environments. Workshop on Emergent Data Trails at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2020.

Dove, G., Seals, A., Nov, O. Socially-Informed Sorting for Guiding Personal Finance Choices. Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2020.

Cartwright, M., Salamon, J., Seals, A., Nov, O., Bello, J.P. Investigating the Effect of Sound-Event Loudness on Crowdsourced Audio Annotations. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2018 [pdf]

Cartwright, M., Seals, A., Salamon, J., Williams, A., Mikloska, S., MacConnell, D., Law, E., Bello, J.P., Nov, O. Seeing Sound: Investigating the Effects of Visualizations and Complexity on Crowdsourced Audio Annotations. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 1(2): Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing 2017, 2017. [pdf]

Education

  • Ph.D. in Technology Management

    2016 - Present

    Advisor: Oded Nov

    New York University Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, NY

  • M.S. in Integrated Digital Media

    2014 - 2016

    Thesis: Decentra, discovery and management software for decentralized affordable housing.

    Thesis Advisor: R. Luke DuBois

    New York University Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, NY

  • B.A. in Communication Media

    2010 - 2014

    North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC

Experience

  • Research Assistantship

    2016 - Present

    Projects: UbiQomix, SONYC, & Transforming Disclosures

    New York University Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, NY

  • Technology Consultant

    2015 - Present

    OneSource Consulting, New York, NY

  • Adjunct Instructor

    September 2017

    Course: Game Design for Citizen Science

    New York University Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, NY

  • Teaching Assistantship

    September 2015

    Course: Developing Assistive Technology

    New York University Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, NY

Contact

  • LocationBrooklyn, New York
  • Websiteayannaseals.com
  • Emailayannaseals(AT)nyu(DOT)edu