OCTOBER 2009
Kobsa named Associate Editor of new ACM journal
Alfred
KobsaInformatics Professor Alfred Kobsa has been appointed Associate Editor of the new "ACM Transactions on Intelligent Interactive Systems" (TIIS). The journal will publish research articles concerning the design, realization, and/or evaluation of interactive systems that exhibit some form of "intelligent" behavior.
The Journal's focus will be on sensing and perception, knowledge representation and reasoning, learning, creativity, planning, autonomous motion and manipulation, natural language processing, and social interaction.
Kobsa's research lies in the areas of user modeling and personalized systems (with applications in the areas of information environments, expert finders, and user interfaces for disabled and elderly people), privacy, and in information visualization.
He is also the editor of "User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research", edited several books and authored numerous publications in the areas of user-adaptive systems, human-computer interaction and knowledge representation.
SEPTEMBER 2009
Van der Hoek receives NSF grant for the improvement of software design education
André van
der HoekAssociate Dean André van der Hoek has received a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant to research software design education, specifically to understand and innovate tool support, design exercises and course modules for sketch-based design practice and reflection.
Van der Hoek's research will take an introspective look at the process by which a student or group of students arrive at a final software design. He hopes to delve into the alternatives students consider, as well as the thought processes students go through before arriving at a final product. His project will observe actual software designers in
action and implement a tool for creative, sketch-based software design, and migrate to a studio-based approach to software design education.Through this research, van der Hoek hopes to enable students to gain a broader and deeper understanding of software design, and provide
instructors with an enhanced portfolio of teaching methods.Van der Hoek's research focuses on understanding and advancing the role of design, coordination, and education in software engineering. He has authored and co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, and in 2006 was a recipient of an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. He is a co-author of the 2005 Configuration Management Impact Report as well as the 2007 Futures of Software Engineering Report on Software Design and Architecture.
Van der Hoek was honored, in 2005, as UC Irvine Professor of the Year for his outstanding and innovative educational contributions.
JULY 2009
Tomlinson awarded NSF EAGER Grant to study interactive media for childhood environmental awareness
Bill
TomlinsonBill Tomlinson, professor of informatics, has been awarded a $280,371 Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) for his project which will utilize narrative-centered computing (NCC) to allow children to see how their own behavior can cause positive or negative changes in a story ecosystem.
Unlike traditional computational storytelling that utilizes a linear “filmstrip”, NCC framework begins with a new mechanism for computational storytelling called spatiotemporal anchoring. Spatiotemporally anchored stories consist of a network of story nodes in which each node depicts a small element of the overall plot, and is anchored to a specific location in space and time.
To advance the story users explore a rich geographical representation of the relevant spatiotemporal locale, discovering story nodes and the interconnections between them. Because nodes can be anchored at variable levels of spatiotemporal resolution and interlinked in non-linear ways, exploring these narratives will help children to develop more nuanced abilities for reasoning about distributed causation and variable scale. These abilities, in turn, will translate into more effective engagement with environmental issues.
The EAGER program is intended to support exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches, therefore the grant will go toward funding the creation of a testbed interactive narrative, to be deployed online and as a temporary science museum exhibit. This narrative will use spatiotemporal anchoring along with video and traditional cinematographic techniques to dramatize the interactions that take place within a representative California ecosystem, for example, a marine environment in which sea otters, kelp forests, and sea urchins all interact.
Tomlinson's research deals with the social impacts of information technologies, in particular regarding environmental issues and interactive education systems. His previous contributions to informatics and computer science are significant in human-computer interaction, interactive animation, autonomous agents, and multi-device systems.
APRIL 2009
Judy Olson gives talk on social ergonomics at CHI 2009
Judy
OlsonJudy Olson, Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences, gave the plenary opening at Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) 2009. Olson's talk, Even Small Distance Matters: Social Ergonomics in Collocated and Remote Teams, focused on the study of social ergonomics, the design of workplaces and systems that fit the natural social capabilities and inclinations of workers and users.
Olson reviewed some of the highlights of what is known about natural social capabilities and inclinations, showed how they play out in both “radically collocated” teamwork and remote teamwork before finishing with a set of guidelines for everyone to use when having to work either collocated or remotely.
CHI is the premier worldwide forum for exchanging information on all aspects of how people interact with computers. CHI 2009 ran from April 4-9, in Boston, MA offering two days of pre-conference workshops and four days of dynamic sessions that explored the future of computer-human interaction with researchers, practitioners, educators and students.
More than 2000 professionals from over 40 countries attended this year's conference, which marked 27 years of research, innovation and development of the Computer-Human Interaction community.
Olson has published about 110 peer-reviewed research articles and is best known for her work on distance collaborations and has achieved international acclaim for her studies that compared office workers in geographically distributed organizations to those working in the same location.
MARCH 2009
Lewis and Tomlinson featured in inaugural issue of International Journal of Learning and Media
Bill
TomlinsonUndergraduate student Lauren Lewis and ICS Professor Bill Tomlinson, along with Education professor Rebecca Black, are currently featured in the inaugural issues of the International Journal of Learning and Media, a MacArthur Foundation/MIT Press journal.
“Let everyone play: An educational perspective on why fan fiction is, or should be, legal” makes a theoretical, legal, and moral proposition that fan fiction, a form of derivative writing based on existing media and popular culture, be considered fair use of copyrighted materials under U.S. copyright law.
Lewis is a second year Computer Science major and helped co-author the publication in the summer of 2008 as a participant in Calit2's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Information Technology (SURF-IT) program.
Tomlinson's research deals with the social impacts of information technologies, in particular regarding environmental issues and interactive education systems. His previous contributions to informatics and computer science are significant in human-computer interaction, interactive animation, autonomous agents, and multi-device systems.
