LUCI grad student, Amanda Williams has accomplished her first *real* grad student milestone to graduation, an interview with Wired:

Wired News: Tech Expos Take a Stab at Sex

"At SXSW Interactive, the Sex and Computational Technology panel reflects the mix of disciplines involved in developing the next generation of sex tech: social analysts, sex educators and engineers. The moderator, Amanda Williams, is a Ph.D. student at the University of California at Irvine studying interactive and collaborative technology.

"(The field of) human-computer interaction has a long tradition of depicting users as a brain, an eye and a finger that can click a mouse," she says. "(But) what about bodies? How about the ways we observe other people's bodies? And how does this play into how we work with technology and collaborate?"

For Williams, research into what she calls "tangible interfaces" revolves around incorporating social, emotional and bodily aspects of life into our experiences with technology. And it's not surprising that while designing various systems that do so, "every now and then we'd inadvertently run into a sex thing."