Tobias Weinberg

I am a CS PhD Student at Matter of Tech Lab advised by Prof. Thijs Roumen at Cornell Tech and co-advised by Prof. Stephanie Valencia from UMD, dedicated to advancing augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technologies. My research centers on developing systems to seamlessly integrate non-informative speech such as humor, interjection words/sounds, reading poetry, etc., enhancing expressivity for individuals with speech and motor impairments.

Areas of interest: accessibility, disability, AAC, expressive communication, LLMs, human-AI interaction, human-centered machine learning, and HCI.

Email  /  CV  /  Scholar  /  Github

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Publications


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Why So Serious? Exploring Timely Humorous Comments in AAC Through AI-Powered Interfaces
Tobias Weinberg, Kowe Kadoma, Ricardo E. Gonzalez Penuela, Stephanie Valencia, Thijs Roumen
CHI 2025   - Best Paper Honorable Mention (best 5%)

We study how AI-powered AAC interfaces can help users with speech disabilities deliver timely, humorous comments. This study highlights design insights to improve expressivity and timing in AAC technology.

Project page • Video • Paper
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SplatOverflow: Asynchronous Hardware Troubleshooting
Amritansh Kwatra, Tobias Weinberg, Ilan Mandel, Ritik Batra, Peter He, Francois Guimbretiere, and Thijs Roumen
CHI 2025   - Best Paper Honorable Mention (best 5%)

We present SplatOverflow, a workflow to support end-users, community members and manitainers asynchronously troubleshoot hardware issues.

Project page • Video • Paper
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CAMeleon: Interactively Exploring Craft Workflows in CAD
Shuo Feng , Lavenda Yifan Shan , Xuening Wang , Ritik Batra, Tobias Weinberg, and Thijs Roumen
(pre-print)  

Designers of physical objects make assumptions on the material and fabrication workflow early in the design process. Recovering from bad assumptions is hard, because the design and resulting CAD model are locked-in to those assumptions. We present CAMeleon, a software tool to interactively explore fabrication workflows at any stage of the CAD process.

Project page • Video • Paper

News

  • Mar 2025 Our paper "Why So Serious? Exploring Timely Humorous Comments in AAC Through AI-Powered Interfaces" won best paper Honorable mention award (best 5%)!!
  • Mar 2025 Our paper "SplatOverflow: Asynchronous Hardware Troubleshooting" won best paper Honorable mention award (best 5%) congratulations Amrit!!!
  • Jan 2025: My first, first author, paper "Why So Serious? Exploring Timely Humorous Comments in AAC Through AI-Powered Interfaces" has been accepted to CHI 2025! Super excited Japan here we go🇯🇵🇯🇵!
  • Jan 2025: Our paper "SplatOverflow: Asynchronous Hardware Troubleshooting" has been accepted to CHI 2025!
  • Sep 2024: Article PiTech Fellowship Spotlight "Transforming Care with Smart Home Technology: Data-Driven Solutions for Group Homes"
  • Jul 2024: Extremely proud of my team, and extremely honored to receive Amazon cloud computing grant from Cornell Data Science Center to further my research towards leveraging AI to bring expressive communication to people with speech disabilities!
  • Mar 2023: Received Siegel Public Interest Technology Impact Fellowship
  • Mar 2023: Article in Leading Newspaper (Infobae Argentina) "The young man with a brilliant mind and a rare illness who received a scholarship in the United States" (in spanish)
  • Oct 2022: Article in the American Technion Society “The sky is not the limit . . . turning ideas into reality to change the world”