Björn Hartmann is an associate professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is broadly interested in tools to support human ingenuity, across a number of domains including design, programming and engineering. I am also interested in embodied cognition, especially in AR/VR. Methodologically, my group predominantly focuses on systems research: we contribute complex, working interactive systems that embody our research ideas and enable us to test specific hypotheses. However, he also appreciate (and we conduct) careful, controlled experiments.
He holds the Paul and Judy Gray Alumni Presidential Chair in Engineering Excellence, was previously a Qualcomm Faculty Fellow and have received an NSF CAREER award, Sloan fellowship, and Okawa research award. His group predominantly publishes at the top HCI conferences UIST, CHI and CSCW. The group also publish in more topic-specific venues like DIS, ICSE, VL/HCC, and Learning@Scale. Their work has received multiple best paper prizes at these conferences.
He is affiliated faculty in the Berkeley Institute of Design. Previously, from 2016-2023, he was the Faculty Director of the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. Prior to leading the Jacobs Institute, he co-founded the CITRIS Invention Lab, a lab equipped with many digital fabrication and rapid prototyping tools. The lab served as inspiration and testbed for many our research projects. He was also involved in the Swarm Lab.
He spends time with great colleagues at the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Visual Computing Lab. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2009 from Stanford University where he worked with Scott Klemmer (dissertation). He received an M.S.E. in computer and information science as well as undergraduate degrees in digital media design and communication from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002.
UC Noyce Initiative project
In collaboration with Sanjit Seshia from UC Berkeley, Yasser Shoukry from UC Irvine and Cathra Halabi from UCSF, Hartmann will create a personalized home-based rehabilitation platform using the latest advancements in Mixed Reality technology to enable clinicians to precisely tailor patient assessments and interventions through their UC Noyce Initiative project, “ScenicMR: Personalized, Privacy-Preserving, Mixed-Reality Platform for Home-Based Patient Rehabilitation.”