Thijs Roumen is an assistant professor of information science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. He also directs the Matter of Tech lab at Cornell Tech. His lab focuses on digital fabrication, a subfield of technical human-computer interaction (HCI). The lab’s goal is to enable personal fabrication, e.g., making digital fabrication relevant to everyone, as opposed to industrialists and hobbyists currently using fabrication machines. Besides fabrication, the lab is interested in accessibility, primarily focusing on speech accessibility.
During his Ph.D., Thijs focused on creating models for laser cutting that are machine-independent and allow users to reproduce content shared online and build on the work of others, also known as portability. He implemented a suite of software systems and tools that, together, allowed high-school students to design and build complex 3D objects using laser cutting, a small step toward this bigger goal.
Thijs’ work has been published at top-tier conferences in HCI, including ACM CHI and UIST. Previously, Roumen was a Ph.D. student with Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany. He worked as a research assistant with Shengdong Zhao at the National University of Singapore. He holds an M.Sc. in IT product design from the University of Southern Denmark and a B.Sc. in industrial design from Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands.