Informatics PhD student Olivia Wang won the Grand Prize at the 2025 Research Live! competition, which was held on April 8 in the Campus Instructional Facility Atrium. At the event, which is hosted by the Graduate College, thirteen finalists presented their graduate research in three minutes or less to a general audience. Wang received $500 as the Grand Prize winner.
Wang’s presentation covered the value of leveraging multimodality to make technologies more accessible. The talk included examples of how multimodality is being applied in current games and physical computing research.
Wang’s research interests are in human-computer interaction, with a focus on accessibility. Wang is exploring sound and music as modalities of conveying information to make technologies more accessible. Their broader interests include games, physical computing, embedded systems, and AR/VR. Wang holds bachelor's degrees in computer science and music theory.