Our Mission
To bridge university students and end users into accessibility and technology careers by connecting them with academic researchers and industry leaders.
Our Advisory Council
Jeff Bigham
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. His research combines computation and crowds to make novel deployable interactive systems, and ultimately solve hard problems in computer science. Many of these systems are designed with a deep understanding of the needs of people with disabilities to be useful in the everyday lives of people. 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 been a Visiting Researcher at MIT CSAIL, Microsoft Research, and Google[x]. He is the co-founder and CEO of Legion Labs, LLC, a company founded to commercialize crowd-powered technologies for people with disabilities. Awards for his work include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Microsoft Imagine Cup Accessible Technology Award, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award for Technology Collaboration, the MIT Technology Review Top 35 Innovators Under 35 Award, and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
Amy Hurst
Amy Hurst is an Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Computing in the Information Systems Department at UMBC. She studies accessibility problems and builds assistive technologies. Amy is especially interested in how tools she builds can empower others to “DIY” and build their own assistive technologies. She is currently working with a number of wonderful people in the prototyping and design lab (“the pad”) at UMBC, and has been a member of the Baltimore Node hackerspace since 2010. Amy received her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the HCII at Carnegie Mellon in 2010, and a BS in Computer Science at Georgia Tech.
Klaus Miesenberger
Klaus Miesenberger is Head of Institute Integriert Studieren at the University of Linz, Austria. He has participated in over 80 R&D projects related to IT-based Assistive Technologies, eAccessibility and Design for All. He chairs the working group “Computer Science with/for People with Special Needs” of the Austrian Computer Society. He organises ICCHP (International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs). He is member of the scientific and professional societies IFIP, working group 13.3 (HCI and People with Special Needs), OCG, AAATE (past president), ACM and FEDORA. He is the founder and the chair of the international association “International Computer Camps”, organising annual computer training events for blind and visually handicapped students (more than 1700 students from more than 30 countries since 1993). He is co-founder of the association UNIABILITY, the organisation of professional counsellors for students with disabilities or chronic diseases at universities in Austria. He set up and chairs the Regional Competence Centre IT for People with disabilities (KI-I) for the Regional Government Upper Austria. He is also founder and chair of board of the association BookAccess, responsible for access to school books for school children in electronic form in co-operation with authors and publishers and general management. His work is documented in more than 180 peer-reviewed publications.
Mike Paciello
Mike has been a pioneer and influential figure in the accessibility industry for more than two decades. He wrote the first book on web accessibility and usability (Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities), and has since achieved many notable milestones. Mike is co-chair of the United States Federal Access Board’s Telecommunications and Electronic and Information Technology Advisory Committee (TEITAC), co-founder of the International Committee for Accessible Document Design (ICADD), and was recognized by President Bill Clinton for his contribution to the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. Mike has been featured in numerous publications including the Washington Post, Boston Globe and New York Times. He was also invited by the United Nations to speak at the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (G3ict).
Andreas Stefik
Andreas Stefik is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He completed his Ph.D. in computer science at Washington State University in 2008 and also holds a bachelor’s degree in music. Stefik’s research focuses on computer programming languages and development environments, with an emphasis on how competing language designs impact people in practice. He won the 2011 Java Innovation Award for his work on the Sodbeans programming environment and is the inventor of the Quorum Programming Language. His work is funded predominately through the National Science Foundation, most recently through the AccessCS10k alliance.
Our Board of Directors
Stanley Lam – Chair
Stanley Lam joined Project Possibility in 2007 as a volunteer at the first SS12, and has contributed ever since. He led its European expansion in 2011-2014 and now chairs the Board of Directors. He is a committee member and reviewer for the International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs, the University of Linz Young Researcher Consortium and Michigan State University Making Learning Accessible Conference. He previously worked as a strategy and data analytics consultant on projects for clients including MasterCard, Stanford University, Houston Public Utilities, the World Bank and the international law firm Baker & McKenzie. Stanley holds degrees from the University of Southern California-Marshall School of Business and the London School of Economics.
Sean Goggin – Vice Chair
Sean Goggin is the Technologies Manager at the Center on Disabilities at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). At the Center on Disabilities, Sean oversees all matters of technology, from Alps touch pads to Zebra printers. He also coordinates technologies for the Annual International Technology and Person with Disabilities Conference. Sean co-edits the Journal on Technology & Persons with Disabilities, overseeing the publication’s accessibility. He also serves on the Accessibility Working Group at CSUN, which guides the campus on accessibility and accommodation as new technology and teaching methodologies are adopted. Sean has a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from CSUN.
Sina Bahram
Sina Bahram (@SinaBahram) is an accessibility consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), an accessibility firm whose clients include high-tech startups, Fortune 1000 companies, and both private and nationally-funded museums. Sina is also a doctoral candidate in computer science at North Carolina State University. His field of research is Human Computer Interaction (HCI) focusing on multi-modal approaches for eyes-free exploration of spatial information. As a recognized expert in accessibility, Sina enjoys collaborating with both colleagues in the field and individuals of diverse professions to devise innovative and user-centered solutions to difficult real-world problems. In 2012, Sina was recognized as a White House Champion of Change by President Barack Obama for his work enabling users with disabilities to succeed in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. In 2015, the international accessibility community recognized Sina as an Emerging Leader in Digital Accessibility at the annual Knowbility Community Heroes of Accessibility Awards.
Steve Lee
Steve Lee (@SteveALee)is Co-Founder and Programme Lead of OpenDirective, which provides accessibility development and consultancy services. OpenDirective enables innovative solutions for end users, with an emphasis on the elderly, those with dementia and the low digital literacy. Steve is Founder of OATSoft, the world’s first open source software repository dedicated to assistive technology. He created PowerTalk, an open source program which speaks text for presentations running in MS PowerPoint. He is an invited expert at W3C Cognitive Accessibility Task Force, board member of SchoolForge and member of the British Computer Society Disability Group, and also consortium member of both the EU FP7 project Cloud4All and thematic network ATIS4All. He is an active participant in many accessibility communities around the world including Mozilla, Apache Wookie, GNOME, IAccessible2, and Ubuntu.
Prateek Tandon
Prateek Tandon has been involved with Project Possibility since its beginning, helping lead some of the first SS12s as well as developing several of Project Possibility’s first projects. He is the principal developer of the Autonomous Robotic Helper Backpack and Lunar Tabs projects and has contributed code to many more. He is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Diego working in the department of psychiatry on machine learning methods for understanding the genomic basis of neural disorders. In 2015, Prateek defended his Robotics PhD thesis at Carnegie Mellon University on Bayesian Aggregation, a machine learning framework for identifying variation in very noisy data applied to scientific domains such as radiation spectrometry. He also holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering/Computer Science from the University of Southern California.