Sang Won Lee has been appointed assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. He is one of 28 new faculty members hired by the college for the 2018-19 academic year.

Lee’s research exists at the intersection of human computer interaction and media arts and seeks to facilitate empathy through communication and collaboration. The products of his research are interactive systems that augment our expressivity and help bridge the gap between disparate groups: the formal audience and the performer, writers, and readers, and experts and novices.

Most recently his research has explored ways to enhance the quality of crowdsourced information by allowing crowd workers to interact in real time with the users who contract them, greatly expanding the applications of crowdsourcing to solve creative tasks such as programming assistance, UI design, and music performance.

In keeping with the theme of using a computer as an expressive instrument, Lee has also experimented with live audiovisual compositions generated by the keystrokes of a computer known collectively as Live Writing.  He has performed individual pieces from the series including Live Writing: Gloomy Streets to reveal the dynamic thought process of a writer rendered as a live music performance to inform how both the writer and the creative process relate to the audience.

Lee has an interdiscplinary background; he received his master’s and doctorate in computer science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; a master’s in music technology from Georgia Tech; a master’s in management science and engineering from Stanford University, and a bachelor’s in industrial engineering from Seoul National University.

Lee’s awards include the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan, and the ICMA Music Award at the International Computer Music Conference. Lee has also received numerous travel grants including the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, the Human Computer Interaction Consortium, and the International Conference in Live Coding.

Written by Amy Loeffler

Share this story