Sai's Portfolio

Shloka - Culture for Climate Action

An ethnographic and co-design study to design a video game for climate action. The mechanics of the game are inspired by cultural elements and stories.

Coming Soon 🚧

Religious Inclusivity in videogames

Using digital ethnography and statistical methods, I analyzed Reddit threads to understand the opinions of religious stakeholder and gamers regarding videogames.

Visualization Systems for Player Reflection

Using a Design-Based Research Approach, which includes semi-structured interviews, playtesting, and co-design, I developed a visualization system that encourages reflection and learning in students through Serious Games.

AstraVerse

Through co-design and visual ethnography, I present a design space inspired by religion for the creation of new video game characters.

The Future of Facebook Home (Meta)

During my Internship at Meta, I did generative research to develop ideas for the Future of Facebook Home.

Move

My first internship experience, where I took on multiple roles from being a developer to a UXR, to help streamline Robot production at Invento Robotics.

Abric

Fashion is an important aspect of daily life. Digital fashion stores have taken the world by storm. In this case study, we explore pain points in current online fashion stores and propose an innovative interface and gamified system for Fashion shopping.

Microsoft (Xbox), Redmond, USA

UX Research Intern | June 2024 - September 2024

Conducted 13 usability studies to understand pain-points and opportunities for parental controls in videogames.
Initiated strategy for merging Microsoft's 6 parental control end-points into a single streamlined application.
Established a taxonomy of mental models around parental controls and parenting styles for future designers and stakeholders to design video game parental controls.

GUII Lab, UCSC

Research Intern | September 2021 - Present

Conducted 10 User Interviews with cultural stakeholders to establish a design framework for referencing cultural elements in videogames, resulting in publications at CSCW'23, CHI'22, ICEC'22, and FDG'23.
Conducted 3 large surveys, 10 player interviews, and used Statistical Methods to develop a player taxonomy that analyzes player perceptions of culture in videogames.
Conducted 2 diary studies and 2 Game Playtests for 21 days to study the correlation between videogames and stress, resulting in publications in FDG'23, HCII'22, and CHI Play'22.

Meta, Menlo Park, USA

UX Research Intern | June 2022 - September 2022

Conducted Generative Research for Facebook's Top of Home
Conducted 12 User Interviews with Facebook users and discovered 4 major user expectations for Facebook Top of Home.
Executed 18 Co-Design sessions and validated the design assumptions of the product design team for Facebook Top of Home.
Prototyped 21 new experiences identified from Co-Design sessions for Facebook Top of Home.

Invento Robotics, Bangalore, India

R&D Engineer | June 2020 - March 2021; May 2018 - June 2018

Executed 17 user interviews with stakeholders at various stages of a robot lifecycle, identifying 6 critical bottlenecks.
Conducted card sorting to develop an information architecture module for robotic fleet management portals.
UX insights contributed to a reduction in robot deployment time by 12 hours and increased robot fleet health by 34%.

Title	Conference	Authors
A Topic Modeling Approach Towards Understanding the Discourse between Religion and Videogames on Reddit	ACM CHI PLAY 2024	Sai Siddartha Maram, Johannes Pfau, Mansi Kasar, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Shloka: Developing Climate Change interventions through a lens of Religion and Videogames	ACM CHI PLAY 2024	Sai Siddartha Maram, Yash Malegaonkar, Mário Escarce Junior, Magy Seif El-Nasr
"Ah! I see'' - Facilitating Process Reflection in Gameplay through a Novel Spatio-Temporal Visualization System	ACM CHI 2024	Sai Siddartha Maram, Erica Kleinman, Jennifer Villareale, Jichen Zhu, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Open Player Modeling - Using AI to help Reflection and Learning in Serious Games	ACM SAC 2024	Sai Siddartha Maram, Jennifer Villareale, Jichen Zhu, Magy Seif El-Nasr
An Instructor's Lens into the Role of AI in Teaching Experimental Research via Gamification	ACM SAC 2024	Sai Siddartha Maram, Anna Amato, Giovanni M Troiano, Steven C Sutherland, Camillia Matuk, Edward Melcer, Elin Carstensdottir, Casper Harteveld, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Designing Religious Games for Climate Action	CSCW 2023	Sai Siddartha Maram, Yash Malegaonkar, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Mining Player Behavior Patterns from Domain-Based Spatial Abstraction in Games	IEEE CoG 2023	Sai Siddartha Maram, Johannes Pfau, Jennifer Villareale, Zhaoqing Teng, Jichen Zhu, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Parallel OPM A Visualization System for Analyzing Peers Board States for Gameplay Reflection	IEEE CoG 2023	Sai Siddartha Maram, Jennifer Villareale, Boyd Fox, Jichen Zhu, Magy Seif El-Nasr
A Visual Ethnographic Study at Cultural Spaces to Identify Character Creation Opportunities	FDG 2023	Sai Siddartha Maram, Johannes Pfau, Jai Dodechani, Magy Seif El-Nasr
AstraVerse: Establishing a Culturally Sensitive Framework for Integrating Elements from Mythological Backgrounds	IFIP-ICEC 2022	Sai Siddartha Maram, Johannes Pfau, Reza Habibi, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Integrating the Player's Perspective in AI-Based Game Design: Designing Player-AI Interaction in AI-Based Games	FDG 2023	Jennifer Villareale, Sai Siddartha Maram and Jichen Zhu
Under Pressure: A Multi-Modal Analysis of Induced Stressors in Games for Resilience	FDG 2023	Reza Habibi, Johannes Pfau, Sai Siddartha Maram , Jiahong Li, Bjarke Larsen, Jason Xu, Atieh Kashani, Shweta Sisodiya, Jonattan Holmes, Zhaoqing Teng, Elin Carstensdottir and Magy Seif El-Nasr
Player Segmentation with INSPECT: Revealing Systematic Behavior Differences within MMORPG and Educational Game Case Studies	CHI PLAY 2022	Zhaoqing Teng, Johannes Pfau, Sai Siddartha Maram, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Gaming Beyond Mortal Boarders	ACM CHI 2022 (Workshop)	Sai Siddartha Maram, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Gender, Cultures, and Communication	ACM CHI 2022 (Workshop)	Shweta Sisodiya, Sai Siddartha Maram, Magy Seif El-Nasr, Elin Carstensdottir
A Data-driven Design of AR Alternate Reality Games to Measure Resilience	HCII 2022 (Best Paper)	Rëza Habibi, Sai Siddartha Maram, Johannes Pfau, Jessica Wei, Shweta Sisodiya, Atieh Kashani, Elin Carstensdottir, Magy Seif El-Nasr
CricNet : Segment and Classify Cricket Events	ICML (Un-Workshop)	Sai Siddartha Maram, Shambhavi Mishra
Images to Signals, Signals to Highlights (Presentation)	IEEE GLOBECOM 2020	Sai Siddartha Maram, Neeraj Kumar, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues, Sudeep Tanwar, Arjav Jain
Asking Graphs "How Did I Play?" Generating Graphs through Images Via Signals (Presentation)	ACM Multimedia (Workshop 2020)	Sai Siddartha Maram, Arjav Jain
Neural network and ROS based threat detection and patrolling assistance	IEEE ICACCP 2019 (Best Paper)	Sai Siddartha Maram, Tanuj Vishnoi, Sachin Pandey

Hello, I'm Sai 👋