Zhanat Makhataeva, a researcher at ISSAI and a PhD student at the School of Engineering and Digital Sciences of the Nazarbayev University, attended the ACM CHI 2023 Conference in Hamburg, Germany from April 23 to April 28. Prior to the conference, from August to November 2022, Zhanat completed a 12-week research fellowship at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, where she collaborated with a team of talented interns, engineers, designers, researchers, and scientists under a mentorship. Zhanat was the first student who received this fellowship from Kazakhstan.
During her time at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, she contributed to the development of “Scene Weaver,” a virtual reality prototype designed for blind users and those with low vision. At the Interactivity Session of the CHI 2023 Conference, Zhanat and her Microsoft team presented a demo of their work, “Scene Weaver”.
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The Conference annually brings together researchers and practitioners from all over the world and from diverse cultures, backgrounds, and positionalities, who have as an overarching goal to make the world a better place with interactive digital technologies.