Me in the New York Times ... sorta

not really

I was really in the video, they featured in the New York Times article… I was an actor for a demo of a wearable microphone jammer - I’m the guy in the blue shirt (fun fact - I had to wear the blue shirt to cover up a minions t-shirt underneath)!


I was a RA for Professor Lopes’s HCI lab at the time, and they just needed an actor to talk and demonstrate the jamming capabilities of the device. I also participated in a user study with the wearable jammer, and I was impressed with how well the device worked. All four of us (the participants) would have a continuous conversation, and the recorded audio was unrecognizable.

The wearable jammer was a collaboration between the Human Computer Integration Lab and Sand Lab at UChicago. I’m not going to just re-explain the contents of the article, so feel free to read it on the NYT website. If you want a better understanding of how the device works - I highly recommend reading the paper!

I think both lab’s research are interesting, and I really recommend reading some of their other research such as Trigeminal-based Temperature Illusions, Preemptive Action: Accelerating Human Reaction using Electrical Muscle Stimulation Without Compromising Agency, or Latent Backdoor Attacks on Deep Neural Networks