Matt Huenerfauth

Matt Huenerfauth is a Professor and Dean of the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). He leads research on assistive technologies for Deaf/Hard of Hearing (DHH) individuals and low-literacy users, focusing on sign language animation, captioning systems, and text simplification. His team works bilingually in English/ASL.

Education:

• Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania (2006)
• M.Sci., University College Dublin (2002)
• M.S., University of Delaware (2001)

Research Interests:

• Accessibility technologies for DHH users
• Sign language recognition/animation
• AI-driven captioning systems
• Computational linguistics for accessibility

His work bridges HCI, NLP, and assistive tech, with a focus on real-world usability and ethical AI.

Articles Trends: Recent work emphasizes multimodal captioning (e.g., prosody visualization), DHH user behavior studies (e.g., caption occlusion metrics), and ethical AI in accessibility systems.

Awards:

• Five-time ASSETS Best Paper Award winner
• RIT Trustees Scholarship Award (2018)
• NSF CAREER Award (2008)

Advising & Grants:

• Total external funding: $5.4M (NSF, Microsoft AI4A, etc.)
• Directed 20+ student researchers

Current projects include ASL-based conversational AI and privacy-preserving sign language video tech.

Labs:

• Center for Accessibility and Inclusion Research (CAIR)
• Linguistic and Assistive Technologies Lab (LATLab)