12. Chu Li: on accessibility of urban design, Project Sidewalk, and global efforts to improve urban access

Hi everybody, this is Gears of Progress. I'm perfect place to learn about research and rehab engineering and assistive tech. I'm your host, Sasha at Postdoc at the University of Washington and this is episode number 12. Today in my postdoc studio, finally in person, we have Tuley, she's a PhD student in Makeability Lab that is led by Dr. John Froelik and her work is focusing on advancing urban design through interactive technology. So welcome in too. Thank you, thank you so much for inviting me onto the podcast. I'm generally honored to be here. I feel like in terms of research, I might be just the least experienced person ever got invited onto this podcast. So I'm really flattered to be here. Don't worry, I always say to everyone, especially brand new PhD students, you need to always remember that you are the expert of whatever you're studying and no one knows more than you do of that particular field, just because we're so focused. On little things. So you are the expert of whatever we're going to be talking about today. So I'm excited to talk to you about specifically the intersection of urban design and accessibility. I haven't had anyone on this podcast who works at this intersection, but this is something that's been fascinating me and especially your perspective of living across countries. That's another thing we're going to touch upon for sure, because I'm also not originally from the state so I can talk about the issues of urban design elsewhere. And before we begin, I feel like the very perfect place to start is to tell the audience what is urban science as what I saw. I believe on your personal website. So what is urban science? How did you get interested in it? Because that's where you started basically your bachelor degree all the way in China in that field. And why do you believe urban science is important? Urban science to me is very broad. It's anything that's related to urban planning, to urban design. Urban planning is sort of the process of designing and organizing where cities and parts of cities should go. And to make them a better place for people to work, to live, to play. And I also involves thinking about how to use land effectively, where to build homes, business, schools, and parts, and how to create transportation systems like roads, bike paths, public transit. That makes it easy for people to get around basically. And so urban planners have to consider a lot of factors such as how to make cities environmentally sustainable, how to support cities, economical development, and then how to ensure that communities are inclusive and serve the needs of all their residents. So I basically started out being an urban planning student in China doing my bachelor's. So urban planning in China is a little bit different than here in the US. Also, so basically it's a very design heavy program on at least the program that I went to. We took similar courses as architecture students for the first three years. So your design studios are the most important thing out of all the courses that you take. And it was, it's a five year program. I was not until the, I would say the last two years that we started to learn more things about urban science like urban sociology, urban history, zoning, and sustainable development, things like this. So at the time, although I had limited research experience, I was very passionate about design. Design was the one thing that I was very sure that this is something I want to do for the rest of my life. So that's why I pursued my master's degree in urban design and architecture in Columbia University in New York. And after I graduated, I worked as an urban designer in Chicago for two years. And then surprisingly, after two years, I did already see myself doing the same work for the rest of my life. And it was at a time when a lot of the architecture designers were transitioning into UX design. So at the time, I was still passionate about design itself, but it's just the way that the architecture firms work. And also the really bad work and life balance and everything out of together sort of made me consider other options. So I moved to Canada, I went back to school again, did another master degree in information science. Master's in information science with the concentration in UX design. So it's actually a very funny journey. So I started school in Toronto in 2019. And I was enjoying the program. I guess I didn't realize how much I missed school. I missed learning about new things until I went back to school. And then what happened was in 2020, so just a few months after I started the new program, the pandemic hit. I remember I was in the interviewing phase for Google Summer Internships when they just canceled the whole program. So now there was not a lot for me to do. I've ran out of my options to take courses in my own department in the information school. This is why I actually started looking for courses in the computer science department. And I'm not sure if anyone has told you about this, but I feel like the pandemic was a perfect time for me to learn programming, to learn how to code. I feel like watching online lectures, tutorials and going back over and over again to the places that I didn't understand was a very effective way of learning how to code for someone like me who's been educated in design for all these years. So I still remember the first course I took in computer science was called Human Computer Interaction. It was taught by Toby Grossman. He's a great professor. And then later on I joined his lab as a research assistant. It was also a very fortunate opportunity because when I was taking that course, I had no idea how to write JavaScript. And then there was one assignment that required a decent amount of coding in JavaScript. So I basically went to every office hour I can to ask questions. And then surprisingly I made friends with the TA and then he thought I had a really interesting experience of going through this whole like switching career paths, going back to school again. The later on when there was a research opportunity in the lab, he also knew that I was looking thinking about doing a PhD, thinking about doing research. So he reached out. And then I ended up in Toby Grossman's lab as a research assistant. And then there I worked on my sort of first HCI project. And I was seriously thinking about like applying to a PhD. I was very interested in doing research. I think the time at the lab really like transformed me. I feel like it was a very satisfying experience if talking to like-minded people, collaborating on things that I feel like would really impact the world. I feel like I've never had that experience while I was working on my previous jobs. So and then as I was trying to apply for a PhD, people start talking about John, John for like- and then people would say that his lab would be a really good research fifth for me because of project sidewalk. And unfortunately at the time, why of Toby's PhD student was John's master student back in Maryland a few years ago. So he connected it dots and then that's how John and I started talking. I applied to the program and then here I am. That was pretty good. So I was going to comment one thing. Well, first thing is that you're not the first person that I'm carrying. Learn programming from scratch during pandemic. I feel like that was probably the most ideal opportunity for that being stuck at home. The second thing I absolutely love and this is why I enjoyed doing this podcast. I really enjoy hearing that when people choose the path of passion, things get connected pretty fast. The dots are just kind of like they're being laid out right in front of you as you're making steps towards it. And the path just kind of, I don't know, want to say magically, but almost magically shows itself. So this is awesome and I really love the interconnectedness of the academic research in general. I feel like, you know, someone knows someone and then you're almost like I feel like two, three handshakes away from the person that you want to reach. So this is perfect. So you did this while turn of switching gears from urban design to computer science. You're back into urban design, but looking at it from the HCI or human computer interaction perspective, the computer science perspective. How did you connect those dots and what was it like, kind of almost returning back to the beginning, but just from a different perspective? Right. So, yeah, I guess this is what I actually talked about in my whole PhD application essay. So I still remember I started writing the first sentence of my application essay was I want to do a PhD in HCI because I want to design better cities. And then I had this whole reflection on when I was working as an urban designer in Chicago. It was very at first it was like my dream job. I would wake up really happy every day going to work. But later on, I had this daily struggle of not really knowing what I'm designing is the right thing. Like it was a struggle for me to find a rationale behind my design. I didn't have the means or the opportunity to talk to the people who will be potentially using the space that I'm designing. Or there's also a lack of, I would say, computational approach and tools to visualize. Or just to like predict the design impacts of what we're actually doing. And I guess it's also because I'm not the type of very talented artistic designers who can just come in and be very comfortable with whatever they're designing. So I had this struggle, I would say, towards the second year of my design career. And so I felt like I needed education. I needed education on more ways to find out like how other people design things. At the time it wasn't even cities. I really wanted to see how people approached design from the technology side. To see if there were other ways of approaching design than just being sitting in your office designing things based on the best practice that was established empirically by people who worked in the film. But I always had this attachment to cities. I've lived in eight different cities throughout my life so far. And I really like observing people, just living cities, how they use the space, how they walk around. And I guess it's because I've navigated like very unfamiliar environments since I was little. I know how it feels like to be excluded. I always want to contribute to the efforts that make cities and environments more welcoming, more inclusive. So when I was doing my master program in information science at the University of Toronto, I graduated. I landed on a job at Samson as a project designer. I feel there was something missing. There was something that I could put all the knowledge and skills that I picked up along the way into better use. And I still want to contribute to the efforts of building better cities. So I guess this is how after a very circuitous way, I finally decided that this is the thing I wanted to do. I want to contribute to the intersection of HCI and urban design. Yes, I was pretty great. Before we dive into your work at the intersection of accessibility, inclusion and urban design, I wanted to ask you about your experience. You moved across a bunch of different cities in Asia, Europe, North America. What did you notice about the state of urban accessibility in this place? How are they similar? How are they different? What were your observations? This is their interesting question. I was born at a very remote city in northwest China, Karl Lundjol. There are no four-dose hemp-pool noodles. You can get them on the app, actually. It's a very remote city. It's in fact in one of the poorest provinces in China. And I went with six years old. My mom decided to do a PhD. She decided to do it in Ireland in Dublin. So when she was starting her postdocs, the whole family moved to Dublin. And it's also where I did half of my elementary school. And now when my mom finished her postdoc, there were better research opportunities for her in China. So the whole family moved back. So after we moved back to China, we decided to move to Wuhan. So I used to have to explain where Wuhan is to a lot of people. And now I don't have to. For better for worse. So it's where I did my high school. My as on my undergrad. And then when I was in undergrad, I had this opportunity for an exchange program at Ryerson University in Toronto. Now I believe it's called the Toronto Metropolitan University. And then later on, I moved to New York for my grad school. I moved to Chicago because I had a job offer there. I moved back to Canada for school. And I moved to Seattle for school, again. So here are sort of like the list of the cities I've lived in. And then in terms of urban accessibility, I felt it varies not only across countries, but it varies across even different cities. Like for example, I would say in New York, the sidewalks, now in terms of quality, but the coverage of sidewalks are much better if you compare to even like the suburbs of Seattle. So it's really about where the people are living, how the city was formed. Like it's very interconnected to the way that the city is built, the history of the city. For example, through one of my research projects, I learned that in the Northern neighborhoods of Seattle, there is a lot of missing sidewalks. And the way that this happened was because during the 1950s and 60s, Seattle went through like a very quick phase of city expansion. And then so these neighborhoods were from King County. They were not originally in Seattle. So they were from other parts of King County and at the time, King County did not require developers to build sidewalk infrastructure when they developed a piece of land. So this resulted in the massive like missing sidewalks, all the Northern neighborhoods and it's not even being fixed right now. And then I guess in terms of in China, I would say in general, I've left China for like 10 years now. I don't really know the current trend, but I would say there's still not a lot of awareness given to people traveling in wheelchairs. I would say the New York built cities and sidewalks, they would have pretty good infrastructure, but the older ones were like even in like more remote places. The sidewalks are missing or they're missing curb ramps. And Europe is a different story. I was just in Lisbon with my partner for over spring break. And then the I would say the sidewalk coverage is definitely so much better than any city I visited in North America. The problem is everything is cobblestone. And I don't know how it will feel for someone traveling on wheelchair. And it also really depends on the wheelchair itself. I've seen I've actually like paid close attention to see if there were people traveling on wheelchair on cobblestones. And unfortunately I saw someone electronic scooter and that was it. So it's really different. Like it's there's a braze bathroom of problems across different countries and cities. Yeah. Yeah. The intersection of accessibility and urban design has been on my mind for a while because I always ever since I became a mom, you know, pushing strollers everywhere around and then noticing where there are no curb cuts, where there are no sidewalks, where there's or uneven grounds has become such an issue and I always think back to, so I grew up in Kazakhstan and the idea of requiring curb cuts or requiring ramps for any public place that might be in need of like being accessed by a person with a disability or even, you know, people pushing strollers with their kids is not even on people's minds. So I always wonder, what does it take? I mean, I feel like, you know, it's something at the moment that it's, a lot of it is engraved in culture. Like, you know, the idea of accessibility is still not as big as it should be in America but it's been on people's minds for a while. Not in the parts of where I'm from for sure and I wonder how long it would take or what it would take to really get there. So, yes, I'm really excited to continue talking with you about your work in this. So the biggest project you're on is Project Sidewalk, which is a really big project that's undertaken by multiple labs at the University of Washington. So can you give the audience an overview of what Project Sidewalk is about and then what are the parts of Project Sidewalk that you're working on? Okay, awesome. Yeah. So Project Sidewalk is an open source crowdsourcing tool that enables online users to identify and label sidewalk features and problems through Google Street View. So we collect sidewalk feature information including curb ramps, missing curb ramps, surface problems, obstacles, missing sidewalks, and then also I think we added crosswalks and pedestrian signal as the two new labels. And then so Project Sidewalk has been around since 2012. So since its initial deployment in DC, we have deployed in 20 additional cities across eight different countries, including US, Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Netherlands, and then we also have native language support, English, Spanish, German, Mandarin, and Dutch. So altogether, over 13,000 users have audited 17,000 kilometers of streets contributing to over 900,000 of labels. So we believe that this is the largest open sidewalk accessibility data set in existence. So I guess a lot of people may wonder why is this important? Why are sidewalks important? Why is collecting data about sidewalk features important? So I guess sidewalks are, as you mentioned, they're critical infrastructure. They help people who are on wheelchairs, who are on bikes, who are on strollers, crutches. And then for people with disabilities, they really play a crucial role in supporting their independence, like physical activity and overall quality of life. But as we all see city streets and sidewalks, they're often not accessible. And then the problem is not only a lack of accessible sidewalks, but also a lack of data on where the sidewalks are inaccessible. So I guess that's why Project Sidewalk was built in the first place. So Project Sidewalk has this sort of two-fold vision. So we want to develop a scalable data collection method for acquiring sidewalk accessibility information. And then we use a combination of like crowdsourcing, computer vision, and online maps. And also we want to use the collected data to design, develop, and evaluate a novel set of navigation mapping tools for accessibility, as well as to events urban science. Okay, awesome. So what is your part on Project Sidewalk? So since I started my PhD, I've worked on three different projects. Around Project Sidewalk, I'm currently working on my fourth project. So I can start them talk to them about them one by one. So actually this started the summer before I started my PhD. At the time, John and I started talking and he pitched this idea to me and invited me to work on a workshop paper together. So the paper was about like sidewalk equity in Seattle. So we really want to explore the relationship between sidewalk quality and other socioeconomic factors. So we used Project Sidewalk, the data that we collected on Project Sidewalk, and then we transformed those point data into sidewalk quality measure. And then we sort of did this correlation analysis between sidewalk quality to other socioeconomic factors like education, wealth, and how people travel around like car ownership, housing ownership, all of these factors that we can find in American community survey. So surprisingly that in Seattle, neighborhoods with lower sidewalk quality are more affluent, predominantly white, have lower housing and population density, and use driving as their primary mode of transportation. So if you're someone's familiar with Seattle, this is not surprising, but at a time to me was a bit of a surprise. And I'm really glad I did this project before moving here. So in contrast, like neighborhoods with higher sidewalk quality have like higher population, housing density, higher racial diversity, percentage of immigrants, and commute primarily by walking or public transportation. So this was a very nice first project just to get myself familiarized with Project Sidewalk, and then with the data we collected, and then working with my advisor. So and then from this project, working in this project, I realized that like wall cross-sourcing is a very effective way of collecting data. The problem is that cross-sourcing data can be very noisy. So this was sort of the motivation for my second project. So after working in the summer, like sort of the noise in the cross-sourcing data that has like been really keeping me awake at nights, like how we can like improve the quality of our Project Sidewalk data set. So why took a machine learning course for big data in 2022? Winter? Yeah, I think that was a core. So we worked on a course project called LabelLate. It's basically trying to help people to label on Project Sidewalks. That's where the name came from. So we built this machine learning pipeline to infer the accuracy of Project Sidewalk Label based on user input. So we leveraged this popular package called Snorkel. It's a week programmatic, programmatic week supervision package where it doesn't require people to manually label the training data set for a machine learning model. Instead, what we have to do is write a set of labeling functions that can programmatically summarize what is potentially a correct label and what is potentially an incorrect label. So why was working on this project? An example that the Snorkel package they had on their website is how to use this package to detect spam comments on YouTube. So it's very simple and straightforward. If a comment that would have like phrases like subscribe to my video or check out this link, it's likely to be a spam comment. Whereas the more specific comments like, oh, check out this dog at like 30 seconds, it's very cute. It's likely to be like a real genuine comment. So we sort of took the similar spirit and we sort of summarized like we sort of looked into where the user is. the users are actually making mistakes in Project Sidewalk and how we can summarize that into labeling functions that would help us label all these data. So the example that we'll always like to talk about is during my experience of working on Project Sidewalk, we've realized that people would make the mistake of labeling driveways as curb ramps in residential areas. So driveways may sometimes be used as the last resort for people on wheelchairs or people using strollers, but they're not regulated by any sort of ADA guidelines and they should not be labeled as curb ramps in our data set. So, and then my knowledge of urban planning sort of kicked in and then I've found out this way of you can actually identify curb ramps based on, you can actually identify curb ramps from other driveways based on the location of this curb ramp. So basically, the government would install curb ramps that are close to intersections, especially in residential areas. So we sort of, so this is the sort of a combination of our observation of user behavior plus urban design guidelines. So we gathered other things like this, including user behaviors of our planning guidelines, the characteristics of Project Sidewalk, and then we had a set of like eight different labeling functions. And now we've fed this into our programmatic week supervision pipeline and then trained another FT transformer model. So after our technical evaluation, we deployed this model onto the Project Sidewalk platform. So people would just go onto the platform and label as they would do on normal Project Sidewalk, but when they make a mistake, or the model in first that this is likely to be an incorrect label, we will pop up sort of notification asking, are you sure this is a curb ramp or whatever they're labeling? And then walk them through correct and incorrect examples. So we did a user study comparing Project Sidewalk, the original Project Sidewalk against Project Sidewalk augmented with our model. And in the intervention group, users achieve significantly higher labeling accuracy and also enhance their confidence in labeling and their understanding of urban accessibility problems. So I'm like very proud of this project in terms that it's like a combination of the different skills and knowledge that I have. So I was very happy that this was accepted as a Kai 2024 paper. Nice, congrats. I was gonna ask, I really enjoy the you were actually able to utilize your background and urban planning feed it into some machine learning pipeline and help you improve the accuracy. Do you have any other examples of where in your current HCI projects, you were like, hmm, let me pull out my urban planning experience and give you an answer or help you figure out. I was a, I don't have any, I can't really remember any examples off the top of my head, but there would be scenarios where it's the sort of the urban planning intuition where I think the problem is here. This actually reminds me of another topic I want to talk about is I guess one of the things that you talked on previous episodes is the hidden curriculum that people aren't being really thought through their PhD process. I feel like although it took me like a very long time to going to this PhD program, but like the skills that I picked up along the way, like for example, making figures, making videos, making presentations and then how to manage my time, manage my stress, manage my expectations. I feel like those were the things that really, they all sort of prepare me well for this PhD program. - It was awesome. I know that Project Sidewalk host events like MAPAThons, which are the kind of more community-based efforts to do a lot of data labeling. At the same time, can you talk more about how they work? - Yes, of course. This actually is a perfect transition to my next project I want to talk about. It's a very community-driven deployment of Project Sidewalk. So this project is also my other Chi-Favor this year. It's based in this town called Ordell in New Jersey. So in 2021, they had a group of community disability advocates that reached out to us and asked if they could use Project Sidewalk to map their city because there were many barriers in using sidewalks in Ordell. At the same time, they partner with their local girl scouts to have this project as part of their service learning. The advocates, the girl scouts and other community members contributed to the mapping altogether and resulted in a girl scout lab presentation to the city council. And map pathons were one of the most important events in this whole process. So the way that map pathons typically happen, so at the time it was during the pandemic still. It was, we had two remote map pathons with Ordell community members where I'm John, my advisor, and then Mikey, who's the research scientist on Project Sidewalk, and then me and Katrina, who was the other researcher working on this project, we would join remotely. And then normally John would give an overview of how Project Sidewalk is and show people how you actually would contribute data on Project Sidewalk. And then I remember in Ordell, so specifically they, for the first map pathon, the community advocates gathered a bunch of people including girl scouts, their parents, healthcare professionals, and other community members in a room in their city hall. And then everyone did the mapping together. It was very nice in a way that there were a lot of disability advocates who participated in the event. And the girl scouts would reach out to their community members with like say mobility, disability, and really ask their opinion, ask their labeling in Project Sidewalk. They would ask questions like, "Oh, can you pass this obstacle? "Can you do you think this uplift would be an obstacle "for you?" So in this way they learned a lot about urban accessibility throughout the mapping process. And also the end result is they contributed very accurate data to the database. So in total, I think in Ordell, over 80 volunteers contributed to the mapping effort providing over 12,000 labels covering 36 miles of streets. So after the girl scouts presented in their city hall, yeah, it was a city council town council meeting. So Ordell passed an ordinance requiring homeowners to repair sidewalks before they sell their homes. And then they are also considering ways to offset the cost of sidewalk repairs by having different tax incentives and arrangement with contractors. So this is very like a very gratifying moment of having worked on a research project and it actually translated into some real world impact. But I guess there's something even more beyond the tangible outcomes of this project in terms of sidewalk improvements. And I guess what struck me the most is the awareness and behavioral changes in community members after they participated in this project. So after the deployment, we had 19 interviews with key stakeholders. And now what we found was they really had this shift in behavior and awareness regarding our back accessibility and they all had a great time. also demonstrated a stronger sense of civic responsibility. So in terms of behavior changes, one of the girl's girls' parents mentioned that now their kids are very aware of things like returning shopping carts. After they've done their shopping, so it doesn't become a obstacle in the mid-off decide walk for people who are using wheelchairs. And then I remember when we were doing interview with the girls' girls, they would say things like, the goal isn't just to fix sidewalks, but really to address every obstacle that stood in the way of making our community a better place. So for girls 11, 12 years old, for them to be able to say something like this, it's just very heartening and inspiring. And I think the impact of such projects like goes way beyond then the physical repairs to sidewalks, but like rather educating a new generation of people who are much more aware of the needs of people with motor disabilities. And just imagine the kind of the world that they would be able to build when they were up. - Absolutely. Yeah, I was just thinking back to the question that I kind of the question without potential answer about how we would change the cultural mentality around urban accessibility in places where I grew up, for example, and you just really hit the nail right there. And I felt like, you know, the I came up with three listening to you. I came up with kind of like the three components so first, it started in the community. Second, educate the next generation and third, do it in a fun, interactive way, kind of like the project sidewalk. So this is perfect. - So yeah, in the paper, we also synthesize like sort of the key implications for future digital civic tools, regarding like how they can make the tools more interactive, engaging, and also tips about how to collaborate with communities. - Cool. - So yeah. - Okay, so if I am a random person living in a random city interested in, for example, mapping my town with the help of project sidewalk, how do I get involved with this? How do I, how does it work for other people? So the whole kind of integration with the project sidewalk and accessing it. Okay, so let's more. - So I guess this is actually how our 21 cities came about because it wasn't really us racing out to people and asking if we can deploy. And there are cities, but more people just stumbling on our website through all sorts of ways and ask, oh, I really want to bring project sidewalk to our own city. So we do have a documentation on the website to say, oh, this is the steps that you should take. If you want to join the project sidewalk effort. So it normally involves a lot of efforts and dedication from the community itself. Like we have to first sort of gather data and then sort of distribute the entire city into different neighborhoods so we can direct different crowd workers into different mapping different areas. And also like organizing mapatham events like you just mentioned, mapatham is a very effective way of contributing data. It sometimes is just nice to be able to sit in a room with other people and now working on the same efforts together. And we also have things like a dashboard and then to see how much people have mapped after each mapathon. And we would often give out things like teachers for the people who mapped the most for people who have the highest accuracy of mapping. Yeah, that's pretty good. How are the tools that our contributes to project sidewalk? How are they used by someone with disability or someone in a wheelchair? What are kind of like the physical things that they can use from that? So this actually is also a nice transition to my next project. A new edge. So currently, the project sidewalk data, we do not support navigation. Like, nothing that's related to navigation guidance, there's no current support. There's all kinds of reasons. A current project I'm working on is together the perception of mobility barriers across different disability groups and implications for designing access, scoring, algorithms and potential navigation routes. So the way that we collect data on project sidewalk right now is besides asking people to label sidewalk features or problems of a certain type, we also ask people to label the severity of the, to rate the severity of the label. And then the way that we say severity, it's a score ranging from one to five. One meaning that a person on a wheelchair is able to pass. But five is indicates a scenario where it's impossible for a person to pass on a wheelchair. And oftentimes, this is what we're asking is really asking users to channel themselves through the lens of a wheelchair user to see if they can pass or not. And then a lot of times, the judgment is not very accurate. And then there are so many other kinds of mobility aids that a wheelchair itself, it cannot really summarize all the scenarios. So in sort of my past experience of interacting with people with disabilities who use project sidewalk, they would have different ideas. So we talk to someone with very strong upper mobility he would point to a label that's rated as a severe, or a severity rating of four or five on project sidewalk and say this would not be a problem for him because he has super strong upper mobility you could get passed this easily. And then people who are using crutches and walkers, they would say that like a missing curb ramp is less of a problem for them, they can still get through this. So I'm really interested in sort of exploring how people with different mobility aids interact with the environment differently and how they respond to different barriers or actually what are actually some of the common barriers and where are the key differences. So we are currently working on this very large skill survey just to gather people's perceptions across several groups of different mobility aids. And then we hope that the results of these findings would have some implications on how we design access score algorithms, access score in terms of, we would, it's like walk score, but in terms of accessibility. And also potentially having future navigation algorithms that the ideal scenario is like if you pull up your Google maps or Apple maps, you tell them that you are using certain mobility aids and they will be able to give you a route that's the most suitable based on your mobility aid and your own body strength. - Yeah, that is pretty cool. I remember, I feel like a part of Google, there's also, you know, there's the elevation and things like that that are definitely very important, especially with a mobility aid or a stroller, I cannot imagine. This is the reason I don't live in Seattle, Seattle because there isn't a way I would be pushing a stroller up or down the hillside. Seattle has, it's incredible. The questions that I like to finish up every episode, what's in store for two Lee, one's Shake graduates? Well, I know you're very early into your PhD, but kind of what are your plans afterwards in a way of combining your passion for urban accessibility and design and having now this new built HCI experience. So I guess it's a question that I've been poundering a lot at the same time, I feel like, I haven't really made much progress. I feel like this is the question that will come up in whatever sort of conversation if you're talking to PhD students, whether if you want to go into academia or industry, what do you actually want to do with all this knowledge that you've gained in your PhD? And I guess as you've mentioned, I'm still earlier on in my PhD progress and I don't know for sure. But I guess my ultimate goal and as I've written in my PhD application is I want to design better cities. And I want to contribute in ways however big or small to the skull that I have. And I guess one thing I'm really passionate about is to really empower people to do marker size to urban design process to empower people with the abilities of shaping their own environments. So I guess working on urban accessibility is a small part of this ultimate goal, but also I feel like it's a very big and significant part of making cities more inclusive. - Absolutely, yeah. I'm gonna open up a secret to you most of the PhD students don't know until after they defend what they plan to do. I changed my overview on what I plan to do was my PhD basically at the end of year five, I graduated in six years. So I was set on industry and then did a wild turn. And now very dead set on academic research. So I would just my unsolicited advice here just to be open, but you have a passion in mind, which is great as we already mentioned, when you choose the road of passion, I feel like it shows up. It reveals to you in its own way. So just kind of keep your eyes open. So best of luck. Thanks so much for being on this episode. Thank you. - So I guess there's just like one thing I would like to emphasize that although I may be the only current PhD student working on Project Sidewalk, but it's really the accumulation of my advisor's effort and all the PhD generations of PhDs before me that contribute to this project. And then also we have a group of research scientists, student interns and local communities who contributed immensely to maintaining this project, developing this project. My own research could have not been possible without this dedicated team of great people. And I really have the privilege of using Project Sidewalk to work on my own research and events are one science because all of these wonderful people who work on Project Sidewalk. - This episode was powered by Create, the Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences at the University of Washington and Resna, the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America. (upbeat music) - Thanks for listening to Gears of Progress. I hope you enjoyed learning about choose work at the intersection of urban design and accessibility. Before you go, don't forget to show some love for this podcast by rating it on your favorite platform and stay tuned for the next episode. (upbeat music)