CS&E Colloquium: Understanding and Harnessing Self-Avatars to Investigate and Mitigate Bias

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. This week's speaker, Tabitha Peck (Davidson College), will be giving a talk titled "Understanding and Harnessing Self-Avatars to Investigate and Mitigate Bias."

Abstract

Bias is unfair prejudice in favor of or against a thing, person, or group. It is multi-faceted and manifests in extended reality (XR) research in various ways. In this talk I will discuss multiple examples of bias in XR systems research and encourage researchers to address potential bias in future XR research. Additionally, I will present multiple ways to mitigate real-world bias using self-avatars in XR systems.

Biography

Dr. Tabitha C. Peck is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Davidson College. She is the head of the Davidson Research in Virtual Environments (DRIVE) lab investigating theory and applications of self-avatars in virtual environments. She received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to investigate the impact of self-avatars to foster inclusive STEM classrooms and has received numerous honorable mentions for best papers at IEEE VR. She is actively involved in the virtual reality research community and has served in numerous conference planning chair roles and as an associate editor. She is currently an IEEE VR 2025 program chair.