Past Member

Sneha Priscilla Makini

Former Product Design & Development Lead

Sneha was a graduate student at the Lab for Social Machines (now the Center for Constructive Communication) under the supervision of Prof. Deb Roy. For her Master's thesis, she worked on creating and studying PictureBlocks, an open-ended literacy and creativity app for young children to share multi-media picture canvasses with friends, while exploring spelling and vocabulary concepts. 

After graduation, she stayed on as a Product Design and Development Lead, driving prototyping efforts across different projects. She integrated her Master's thesis work to co-design and build a digital storytelling app for children's narrative & socio-emotional development (StoryBlocks), central to a study involving a child-coach-parent network (Learning Loops). She co-created a mechanism to help coaches by auto-detecting learning milestones via analyzing logs of children's play data while building words (Play Analytics).  

She also helped establish a school program and mobile app for middle schoolers (INSPIRE) to expose them to video stories of triumph and hope, through a chatbot named JoJo. Her other notable work has involved developing data analytics and visualization tools (Pulse and HealthPulse) alongside journalists to track and better understand the fragmented social media landscape.