A white-on-black line drawing of Oliver's face with his hand near his chin

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.

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 and English, and I am in the process of learning Portuguese and American Sign Language.

Selected Publications

See publications for a full list.
  1. ASSETS
    Beyond Subtitles: Captioning and Visualizing Non-speech Sounds to Improve Accessibility of User-Generated Videos
    Oliver Alonzo, Hijung Valentina Shin, and Dingzeyu Li
    In The 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility 2022
    See on ACM Project Website
  2. CHI
    Methods for Evaluating the Fluency of Automatically Simplified Texts with Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Adults at Various Literacy Levels
    Oliver Alonzo, Jessica Trussell, Matthew Watkins, Sooyeon Lee, and Matt Huenerfauth
    In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2022
    See on ACM
  3. TACCESS
    Reading-Assistance Tools Among Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Computing Professionals in the U.S.: Their Reading Experiences, Interests and Perceptions of Social Accessibility
    Oliver Alonzo, Lisa Elliot, Becca Dingman, Sooyeon Lee, Akhter Al Amin, and Matt Huenerfauth
    ACM Trans. Access. Comput. 2022
    See on ACM
  4. CHI
    Comparison of Methods for Evaluating Complexity of Simplified Texts among Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Adults at Different Literacy Levels
    Oliver Alonzo, Jessica Trussell, Becca Dingman, and Matt Huenerfauth
    In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2021
    See on ACM
  5. CHI
    Automatic Text Simplification Tools for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Adults: Benefits of Lexical Simplification and Providing Users with Autonomy
    Oliver Alonzo, Matthew Seita, Abraham Glasser, and Matt Huenerfauth
    In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2020
    See on ACM

News

Apr 17, 2023 I successfully defended my dissertation 🙌🏼 a big thank you to all my dissertation members and everyone who attended!
Jan 20, 2023 I accepted a position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at DePaul University’s School of Computing 🎉
Oct 9, 2022 Our paper releasing our dataset of word-complexity judgements from DHH adults was accepted to the TSAR 2022 workshop at EMNLP!
Aug 12, 2022 I started teaching at Creighton University! I’m excited for this opportunity to experience the faculty life as I complete my dissertation research.
Jun 16, 2022 The paper describing our work during my internship with Adobe Research was accepted to be at ASSETS’22 ✌🏼