Oliver Alonzo

Assistant Professor at DePaul University

I am an Assistant Professor at DePaul University’s School of Computing.

I obtained my PhD from the Computing and Information Sciences program at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where I was advised by Matt Huenerfauth.

My previous experiences include a year as a post-doctoral Assistant Professor at Creighton University, and internships at Facebook and Adobe Research as a UX and HCI Researcher, respectively.

Check out my full CV for more details.

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Research

My work focuses on Computing Accessibility and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). My research includes the application of automatic text simplification tools to assist online reading by people who are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing, as well as tools to assist American Sign Language learners. I focus on the user-centric design and evaluation of such tools, as well as the evaluation metrics of the performance of underlying technologies that power them.

Fun Facts

I play a few instruments, including guitar and piano, and I also sing. I have also performed in a few musical theatre productions, and short films. Off the spotlight, I enjoy doing black & white photography.

I am fluent in Spanish 🇩🇴, English 🇺🇸, and Portuguese 🇧🇷, and I am in the process of learning American Sign Language 🤟.

Recent Publications

• CHI 2025 🏅 Honorable Mention
  "I have never seen that for Deaf people's content:" Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing User Experiences with Misinformation, Moderation, and Debunking on Social Media in the US

  Filipo Sharevski, Oliver Alonzo, Sarah Hau
• ASSETS 2024
  Design and Evaluation of an Automatic Text Simplification Prototype with Deaf and Hard-of-hearing Readers

  Oliver Alonzo, Sooyeon Lee, Akhter Al Amin, Mounica Maddela, Wei Xu, Matt Huenerfauth

  • Paper |
  • Presentation
• ASSETS 2022
  Beyond Subtitles: Captioning and Visualizing Non-speech Sounds to Improve Accessibility of User-Generated Videos

  Oliver Alonzo, Hijung Valentina Shin, Dingzeyu Li

  • Paper |
  • Presentation

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