Bio

Misha Sra is the John and Eileen Gerngross Assistant Professor and directs the Perceptual Engineering Lab in the Computer Science department at UCSB. She is affiliated with UCSB's Center for Responsible Machine Learning (CRML), Mind & Machine Intelligence and the Cognitive Science Program. Misha received her PhD at the MIT Media Lab in 2018. She has published at the most selective HCI and VR venues such as CHI, UIST, VRST, and DIS where she received multiple best paper awards and honorable mentions. From 2014-2015, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation wellbeing research fellow at the Media Lab. In spring 2016, she received the Silver Award in the annual Edison Awards Global Competition that honors excellence in human-centered design and innovation. MIT selected her as an EECS Rising Star in 2018. In 2020, she received the Google Research Faculty Award. Her research has received extensive media coverage from leading media outlets (e.g., from Engadget, UploadVR, MIT Tech Review and Forbes India) and has drawn the attention of industry research, such as Samsung and Unity 3D.

Research

My vision: building technologies that integrate with the brain. 

My lab works on designing and engineering new AR/VR, hardware and AI technologies that can augment our physiological and perceptual capabilities. The technologies we design fall into two main categories: 1) systems that transform internal body signals into conscious perception, and 2) systems that transform external world signals into augmented perception. Inspired by the 1960 vision of a Cyborg proposed by Manfred and Kline, our goal is to create future "artifact-organism systems" that extend the body and the mind. These systems will augment human capabilities automatically and unconsciously, leaving us free, as Manfred and Kline wrote - to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.