Academia
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Computer Science
University of British Columbia; Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Thesis – The Haptic Creature: Social Human-Robot Interaction through Affective Touch
Master of Science (MS) in Computer Science
University of Wisconsin; Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Thesis – Webjumper: An Icon-based Framework for Managing Bookmarks on the World Wide Web
Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Science
University of Wisconsin; Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Minor – Electroacoustic Music
Experience
➤ I received a PhD from the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada). I was under the supervision of Dr. Karon MacLean and, consequently, was a research assistant in her SPIN Research Group. My thesis topic was “The Haptic Creature: Social Human-Robot Interaction through Affective Touch” in which I explored the communication of emotion through touch in the social interaction between humans and robots.
➤ Following from my doctoral research, I am the inventor and chief architect of the Haptic Creature: a small, animal-like robot pet designed to sense and communicate solely through touch. I was responsible for all aspects of the robot’s design and development, including its look and feel, behavior, software, and mechatronics.
➤ I was a research assistant on the Swimming Across the Pacific project of the Human Communication Technologies (HCT) Research Laboratory in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC) under the supervision of Dr. Sidney Fels. I provided software enhancements, optimizations, stability, and general code cleanup, which was focused mainly on the OpenGL rendering engine. I also helped prepare and exhibit the virtual swimming platform at SIGGRAPH 2004 (Los Angeles) and Imagina 2005 (Monaco).
➤ I was a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at St. Edward’s University (Austin, Texas, USA). I developed and taught courses to all levels of undergraduate students, both computer science and non-science majors. Courses were in general problem solving, advanced object-oriented programming (Java), and human-computer interaction (HCI).
➤ I received a MS and BS from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA). My master’s thesis topic was “Webjumper: An Icon-based Framework for Managing Bookmarks on the World Wide Web”.
➤ I was a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA), where I was in charge of an introductory programming course for non-engineering students. I developed course content; selected textbooks; taught lecture periods; oversaw lab sections; and delegated work to teaching assistants.
➤ I was a research assistant on the Rainfall Project in the School of Fine Arts at the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA) under the supervision of Professor Stephen Pevnick (MFA). I was a member of a small team of artists and engineers working to realize Professor Pevnick’s large-scale Graphical Waterfall®, which is capable of rendering images through falling water. I was solely responsible for all levels of software design and development — from device drivers up to the graphical user interface — through every phase of project life cycle. I wrote the software system from scratch in C and 8086 Assembler on MS-DOS. The team designed all non-PC hardware. Working in this creative group instilled in me a drive to push limits beyond what is conventionally considered possible.
Publications
Steve Yohanan and Karon E. MacLean (2012). The Role of Affective Touch in Human-Robot Interaction: Human Intent and Expectations in Touching the Haptic Creature. In International Journal of Social Robotics (SORO) – Special Issue on Expectations, Intentions & Actions, volume 4, number 2, pages 163-180, April 2012. [doi: 10.1007/s12369-011-0126-7]
Steve Yohanan and Karon E. MacLean (2011). Design and Assessment of the Haptic Creature’s Affect Display. In HRI ’11: Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, pages 473-480, Lausanne, Switzerland, March 6-9 2011. (Best Paper Award: “Most Interesting Interaction”). [doi: 10.1145/1957656.1957820]
Jonathan Chang, Karon MacLean, and Steve Yohanan (2010). Gesture Recognition in the Haptic Creature. In Proceedings of EuroHaptics 2010, pages 385-391, Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 8-10 2010. [doi:10.1007/978-3-642-14064-8_56]
Steve Yohanan and Karon E. MacLean (2009). A Tool to Study Affective Touch: Goals & Design of the Haptic Creature. In CHI ’09: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 4153-4158, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, April 4-9 2009. [doi:10.1145/1520340.1520632]
Steve Yohanan and Karon E. MacLean (2008). The Haptic Creature Project: Social Human-Robot Interaction through Affective Touch. In Proceedings of the AISB 2008 Symposium on the Reign of Catz & Dogz: The Second AISB Symposium on the Role of Virtual Creatures in a Computerised Society, volume 1, pages 7-11, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, April 1-4 2008. (Best Paper Nominee).
Steve Yohanan, Mavis Chan, Jeremy Hopkins, Haibo Sun, and Karon MacLean (2005). Hapticat: Exploration of Affective Touch. In ICMI ’05: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, pages 222-229, Trento, Italy, October 4-6 2005. [doi:10.1145/1088463.1088502]
Sidney Fels, Steve Yohanan, Sachiyo Takahashi, Yuichiro Kinoshita, Kenji Funahashi, Yasufumi Takama, and Grace Tzu-Pei Chen (2005). User Experiences with a Virtual Swimming Interface Exhibit. In ICEC 2005: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Entertainment Computing, pages 433-444, Sanda, Japan, September 19-21 2005. [doi:10.1007/11558651_42]
Sidney Fels, Yuichiro Kinoshita, Tzu-Pei Grace Chen, Yasufumi Takama, Steve Yohanan, Sachiyo Takahashi, Ashley Gadd, and Kenji Funahashi (2005). Swimming Across the Pacific: A VR Swimming Interface. In IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, volume 25, number 1, pages 24-31, Jan-Feb 2005. [doi:10.1109/MCG.2005.20]