Mark Roman Miller

I am looking for PhD students to join my lab at IIT, and Illinois Tech is hiring professors at all levels. Please reach out to me if you are interested in either.

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. I study virtual and augmented reality from the perspectives of communication, security, and data science. My interdisciplinary roots come from my time in between computer science and communication as a PhD student advised by Jeremy Bailenson in the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.

There are new communication opportunities and challenges for augmented reality. Throughout time, one of the evergreen uses of media is person-to-person communication. New challenges and opportunities arise with the use of AR. What happens when your face is blocked by a virtual-popup in someone else’s view and you don’t know it? Communication involves a shared world - common ground, to use the technical term - and if the various augmentations we hare aren’t shared, will communication work differently? On the other hand, where can augmentations help us communicate more effectively?

Virtual and augmented reality devices mediate a virtual world to a user. While there a lot of research on the display side of these devices, the opportunity (or threat?) of regular use motivates me to study the wide range of data these devices collect. On the data science side, this data is great for scientific insights into some traditionally difficult problems, like emotion expression and nonverbal synchrony. On the security side, this data can be quite identifying, posing risks to users’ privacy.

I’m happy to discuss my research and topics related to it. Reach out to me at mmiller30 -at- iit -dot- edu.