About Me

I am a lecturer at School of Information Technologies, the University of Sydney, Australia. Before joining the university of Sydney, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland Informatics Campus, Germany. My primary research focus is in creating Blended Interfaces, which, I define as interfaces that are ubiquitous, blend into the environment and leverage on natural affordances of the context. Within the abstraction under this umbrella term, I explore the design factors such as interactivity in personal and shared spaces, modalities and social acceptance, also, technical factors such as re-usability, energy and appropriation.

News and Activities

Two papers accepted for ACM UIST 19!

Will be a SIGGRAPH Asia E-tech PC committee member.

First PhD student joined my team! Welcome Nisal.

I was appointed as EMCR lead in the Cardiovascular initiative (CVI) of USyd.

Will be a PC member in ACM ISS2019, Seoul, Korea.

We got Faculty equipment grant to setup our FabLab!

ACM ISS 2017: Tutorial on Personalized Interactive Surfaces with Printed Electronics

Recent Publications

Groeger, Feick, Withana, Steimle. (2019). Tactlets. In Proc. UIST ’19 (to appear).

Pourjafarian, Withana, Paradison, Steimle. (2019). Multi-Touch Kit. In Proc. UIST ’19 (to appear).

Withana, Groeger, Steimle. (2018). Tacttoo. In Proc. UIST ’18.

Multi-Touch Skin. Nittala, Withana. (equal contribution), Pourjafarian and Steimle (2018). CHI'18.

Withana, Steimle. (2017). Personalized Interactive Surfaces with Printed Electronics. In Adj. Proc. of ISS '17.

waveSense. Withana, Ransiri, Kaluarachchi, Singhabahu, Shi, Elvitigala, Nanayakkara. (2016). In Adj. UIST '16. (pp. 139–140).