Case Study

Teaching People to Direct and Override Intelligent Systems, and Building the Lab to Do It

Built the Advanced HCI curriculum around adaptive interfaces and founded a university innovation lab from zero, raising $325K and mentoring 200+ students.

Lab Director & Visiting Assistant Professor, Brigham Young University September 2018 to December 2020 University innovation lab, founded from zero Setting 4 of 8 Human-AI InteractionProgram Building
$325K
Raised to found and scale the lab
200+
Students mentored in applied research
$22K
First sponsored capstone secured

Situation

There was no lab, and no course built around intelligent interfaces. The idea: students learn to design for systems that make decisions on a user's behalf, and build products against real problems with real constraints, not academic exercises. No budget, no space, no industry relationships to make it happen yet.

What I Built

  • Built the Advanced HCI curriculum around intelligent and adaptive interfaces, teaching students to design for systems that make decisions on a user's behalf.
  • Led research and prototyping on AI interaction and user control, testing how people direct, correct, and override intelligent systems in applied settings.
  • Founded and scaled an innovation lab from zero, raising $325K and mentoring 200+ students through AR/VR and mobile prototypes that shipped, not just demoed.
  • Applied product-led growth experimentation to student-facing platforms, treating the lab's own tools as products worth measuring and iterating on.
  • Bridged academic research with commercial productization, securing $22K for the program's first industry-sponsored capstone project, the deal that proved outside companies would trust student teams with real problems.
  • Built reusable components that carried across student projects. No team had to start from zero.
Zero budget 2018 $22K first sponsored capstone proof it worked $325K total raised 2020 200+ STUDENTS MENTORED
One $22K deal built on trust, not a track record, opened the door to everything that followed.

The Hardest Problem

Getting the first outside company to trust a brand-new academic lab with a real problem and real money, with no track record to point to. That first $22K sponsored capstone happened because the pitch was built around what the company would get, not what the students would learn. Everything after that got easier. There was finally proof it worked.

Outcome

$325K raised to build a program that didn't exist before. Over 200 students mentored through applied research and real product delivery. The reusable components outlived any single cohort. It became infrastructure the next group of students built on, not something they had to reinvent.

Skills Demonstrated

Program building from zero, fundraising and sponsor development, mentorship at scale, curriculum design bridging theory and practice, human-AI interaction research, AR/VR and mobile prototyping.

Evaluating me for a role

See the rest of the track record

Five case studies from the eight settings, and the commercial record behind them.

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