Hello, I'm DJ!

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, also affiliated with the School of Information and Michigan Medicine. My research lies in human-computer interaction, with a focus on accessibility and auditory interfaces.

I am best known for my work advancing sound accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing people, where I design, deploy, and study human-AI systems that make auditory information perceptible and usable in everyday settings. Building on this foundation, I now examine how people interact with AI as it moves beyond screens into real-world devices and environments. My work centers on interpretive continuity in interactive systems—how users recover from breakdowns and maintain a coherent understanding of AI in everyday life. Through this work, I design and study systems that instantiate these ideas across accessibility, healthcare, and consumer technologies such as hearables and smart home devices (see lab wesbite for projects).

These systems have been deployed in real-world settings and are used at scale. The SoundWatch app for sound awareness on smartwatches has been downloaded by over 4,000 users, and our indoor navigation system for blind and low-vision users has supported over 100,000 interactions in museums across India. Our clinical communication tools are being deployed at Michigan Medicine, and work pioneered for people with atypical speech is now integrated into iOS as a built-in feature across iPhones. My work has also informed real-time captioning systems used in industry.

I completed my PhD at the University of Washington and my MS at the MIT Media Lab, and have worked at Microsoft Research, Google, and Apple. My research is supported by Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Meta, Samsung, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the William Demant and Oberkotter Foundations. It has also been recognized with the SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award (2023), the Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant (2021), and the CRA–Microsoft Trustworthy AI Fellowship (2025).

For more information, see my CV, lab website, or Google Scholar page, or contact me at profdj [at] umich [dot] edu.