Spring 2026 CHCI@VT Distinguished Speaker: Jeffrey Bigham (CMU / Apple)

CHCI@VT Distinguished Speaker, Jeffrey Bigham, will speak about his research on Friday, February 6, 2026, at Gilbert Place Room 2124 from 11:00am to 12:00pm ET. The in-person event includes a remote attendance option via Zoom.

Revisiting 8 Grand Challenges in Accessibility in the Age of AI

Accessibility poses a range of deep technical challenges. At their core, many of these challenges require building systems that can perceive the world and interpret it well enough to communicate information through alternative modalities for people with disabilities.

In this talk, I revisit several classic grand challenges in accessibility that I have worked on in my career - both to gauge how far we’ve come in light of rapid advances in AI, and also to reflect on the new challenges that are revealed once some of the old challenges are solved.

Bio

Jeffrey Bigham is an Associate Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction and Language Technologies Institutes in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Director of Human-Centered Machine Learning at Apple. He builds systems that advance how people can responsibly work with machine learning to do interesting and useful things. This has taken on a variety of focuses throughout his career—he has worked on applications in accessibility for disabilities, used crowdsourcing to power a wide variety of real-time systems, and most recently thought about how to design responsible and useful experiences using generative AI. Much of Jeffrey’s work focuses on accessibility because he sees the field as a window into the future, given that people with disabilities are often the earliest adopters of AI.

Jeffrey received his B.S.E. degree in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2003 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2009.

He has received the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2014), the MIT Technology Review Top 35 Innovators Under 35 Award (2009), and the NSF CAREER Award (2012).