Nikolas Martelaro

Hi, I'm Nik. I am an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. My research seeks to augment designers' capabilities so that we can best leverage human capacity and computation to solve society's toughest problems. My research approach integrates cutting-edge technologies, but always with a foundational understanding of designers and how we think and act. This research activity informs my educational mission to teach future designers how to work creatively and critically so they can solve complex, open-ended design challenges. My work spans design domains, blending hardware, software, and interaction design. Before moving to the HCII, I was a researcher in the Digital Experiences group at the Accenture Technology Labs. I graduated with my Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford's Center for Design Research, where I was co-advised by Larry Leifer and Wendy Ju. I graduated with my B.S. in Engineering Design from the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.

News

[23 Mar 2026] Our paper Visual Lyrics: Generating Animated Text for Music Lyric Videos with an Augmented Text Editor was published at the 31st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2026). Led by David Chuan-En Lin with co-authors Cuong Nguyen and Hijung Valentina Shin, this work was done in collaboration with Adobe Research. Visual Lyrics is a proof-of-concept system that helps novices create animated lyric videos through an augmented text editor, using a multimodal music analysis pipeline and LLM-driven animation synthesis.

[20 Mar 2026] Howard Ziyu Han presented our poster Enhanced Social Navigation Simulation for Community-Driven Participatory Evaluation of Sidewalk Robots at the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2026) in Edinburgh. Co-authors are Ying Zhang, Allan Wang, and Nikolas Martelaro. The poster appears in HRI Companion '26: Companion Proceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

[05 Oct 2025] Our paper Non-Emergency Notification Timing for Drivers Doing Non-Driving-Related Tasks in Autonomous Vehicles: An Interruptibility Study was published at AutomotiveUI 2026. This research, supported by Honda Research Institute, was presented by Howie Wang at the conference in Brisbane. The work investigates how drivers assess their availability to receive notifications while engaged in non-driving tasks during autonomous driving, identifying four distinct notification availability groups and developing a proof-of-concept classification model using multimodal behavioral data to predict optimal notification timing.

[15 Sept 2025] I received a $1.25M NSF Smart and Connected Communities grant for "Public Space Robotics: Community-Driven Models for Social Navigation and Communication." I'm collaborating with Sarah Fox, Corey Harper, and Ding Zhao to develop systems that help robots navigate public areas safely and socially appropriately. The project will engage directly with community members to collect data and train algorithms on how people want robots to behave in public spaces. More details.

[24 Aug 2025] I released the card game What Could Go Wrong? with Wendy Ju. What Could Go Wrong? is a playful way to consider the potential failures of AI systems. The game is available for purchase on The Game Crafter for $49.99.

[19 Aug 2025] I presented "Developing design processes that prompt designerly reflection" at the Workshop on Human-Centered Machine Learning, hosted by Apple.

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Current Research Interests

Human-AI collaboration to support deeper design thought, with a focus on reflective practice, designerly questioning, diagrammatic thinking, and analogical thinking.

Tools to help creatives work better, with foci on systems for generating design artifacts and support for running successful creative businesses.

Collaborative design methods to engage end-users throughout design and engineering processes, with a focus on participatory field studies and simulation-based activities for designing automated physical systems.

Working With Me

Prospective Students

Students interested in the HCII Ph.D. program should apply during the next cycle in autumn. The HCII admits students at the department level. Students are then matched with faculty advisors in their first weeks on campus. If you are interested in joining my group, you are welcome to mention me in your application. I also recommend that you look into other faculty you might be interested in working with and mention them in your application. Consider why you would like to work with these faculty, what you think you can bring to their group, and what you think they could bring to your research.

Student interested in the Masters in Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI) should direct their questions to the program director. Please note that our Masters program is a 1-year professional degree that prepares students for industry and is not a research-oriented program. This being said, MHCI students are welcome to join my research group for Independent Studies.

CMU Students

If you are a CMU student interested in working on one of my group's research projects, please check the HCII Independent Study list for open positions and the desired skills. My group posts new positions at the start of each semester.

If you are a student entrepreneur interested in feedback or advising for your venture, you are welcome to reach out to me via email.

Publications

Please see my Google Scholar page for my most up to date publication list.

Teaching

[Spring 2026] The AI Augmented Designer

[Fall 2025] The AI Augmented Designer

[Spring 2025] Rapid Prototpying of Computer Systems

[Fall 2024] Design of AI Products & Services

Colophon

This webpage is styled using Tufte CSS. The font used is ET Book. Content is authored by Nikolas Martelaro with support from Microsoft Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor using Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet.