JULY 2008
Van der Hoek receives $50,000 gift from Accenture
André van
der HoekAndré van der Hoek, associate professor of Informatics, will use the unrestricted gift to support his research that is exploring new software engineering tools that assist development teams in avoiding conflicts that arise from parallel work on the same code base.
Van der Hoek will particularly use the funds to further the Palantir project, which has shown success in reducing the number and magnitude of conflicts via a strategy of continuous sharing of information about who changes which artifacts in parallel.
Professor van der Hoek's research lies in the fields of configuration management and software architecture, focusing on two research questions: (1) how to better coordinate the activities of multiple, geographically distributed developers and (2) how to better leverage higher levels of abstraction in designing and implementing software systems.
Van der Hoek also explores how simulation can aid students in learning more about the software engineering process.
JUNE 2008
Sim receives mentoring award from Associated Graduate Students
Susan
Elliott SimInformatics professor Susan Elliott Sim has been awarded the Associated Graduate Students (AGS) 2nd Annual Mentoring Award in the non-tenured category.
AGS sponsors this annual award as a way to recognize faculty mentors who inspire and guide their students, and whose dedication to graduate students and commitment to excellence have made significant contributions to both the professional development and quality of life for their students.
All graduate students and recent alumni can nominate faculty for this award by submitting a nomination form. This gives graduate students an opportunity to recognize a faculty member who goes “above and beyond” for his or her students.
Two awards are given each year, one to a tenured faculty member, and one to a non-tenured faculty member.
The winners in both categories are determined by a committee of graduate students and faculty from across campus, and all nominees are awarded a certificate and given the option to be recognized at the Graduate Commencement ceremony.
AGS is the recognized graduate student government association at the University of California, Irvine and represent nearly 5,000 graduate and professional students to the campus and system wide administration.
Sim's main area of research is program comprehension, in particular, tools and techniques that help software developers understand source code. Her primary research interest is the use of empirical methods to determine what are the right tools to build and whether the tools we have built help developers.
Additional information about Sim and her work can be found on her web site.
Kobsa gives several keynotes on privacy and personalization
Alfred
KobsaInformatics professor Alfred Kobsa has been giving several keynote addresses and invited talks on the topic of Privacy and Personalization, namely at the Atelier sur la vie privée en commerce électronique, Montréal, QC, Canada; the 21st International FLAIRS Conference, Coconut Grove, FL; and the 2008 KES Symposium on Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services in Piraeus, Greece.
He also presented a talk on this topic at the 2008 ISR Research Forum.
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.
Additional information about Kobsa and his work can be found on his web site.
Taylor awarded ICSE 2008 Most Influential Paper Award
Richard N.
TaylorInformatics professor Richard N. Taylor and two of his former doctoral students, Peyman Oreizy and Nenad Medvidovic were recipients of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2008 Most Influential Paper Award.
The award, jointly sponsored by ACM/SIGSOFT and IEEE TCSE, is presented at each ICSE meeting to the author(s) of the paper from the ICSE meeting of 10 years ago that is judged to have had the most influence on the theory or practice of software engineering during the 10 years since its original publication.
The paper, entitled Architecture-Based Runtime Software Evolution, presented an architecture-based approach to runtime software evolution and highlighted the role of software connectors in supporting runtime change.
The paper also introduced ArchStudio, a software and systems architecture development environment created at UC Irvine that focused on software development from the perspective of software and systems architecture.
Award recipients are presented with a plaque engraved with their names at ICSE's award presentation session. The recipients are also asked to give a presentation to the conference on their current views on software engineering.
Taylor's research is focused on design — the issues, techniques, and agents involved in creating and evolving software artifacts and processes.
Additional information about Taylor and his work can be found on his web site.
APRIL 2008
Student to attend European Consortium for Political Research social network analysis course
Yong
Ming KowYong Ming Kow, a first year Informatics graduate student, has been chosen to attend a two week course in social network analysis at Ljubljana University in Slovenia.
The course will take place in August and is sponsored by the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR).
The ECPR is an independent, scholarly association, established in 1970. It supports and encourages the training, research and cross-national co-operation of political scientists throughout Europe and beyond.
Kow's research focuses on the development of knowledge systems from their historical-cultural roots, based on a study of guilds in World of Warcraft (WoW) and inter-dependency of knowledge systems in information space and their implications to knowledge production based on a study of WoW gaming communities.
Student receives fellowship to conduct research in Singapore
Jahmeilah
RichardsonJahmeilah Richardson, a first year graduate student in Informatics, received a National Science Foundation Fellowship in a program called the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute.
The programs primary goals are to introduce students to East Asia and Pacific science and engineering in the context of a research setting, and to help students initiate scientific relationships that will better enable future collaboration with foreign counterparts.
The funds will enable her to spend eight weeks conducting research in Singapore this summer.
Richardson's research interests are in fieldwork and usability testing, specifically she is interested in the transition technology makes from the research setting into natural/real life settings. She is also interested in technologies to facilitate learning and communication across cultures.
Students to present poster at Mobile HCI 2008
Ruy Cervantes and Nithya Sambasivan, first year graduate students in Informatics, had a poster, "VoiceList: A User-generated Audio-based Mobile User Interface," accepted to the Mobile HCI 2008 conference in Amsterdam.
The conference provides a forum for academics and practitioners to discuss the challenges and potential solutions for effective interaction with mobile systems and services.
It covers the design, evaluation and application of techniques and approaches for all mobile and wearable computing devices and services.
Tomlinson awarded $200,000 NSF CreativeIT grant
Bill
TomlinsonProfessor of informatics Bill Tomlinson and Lindsey Richland, assistant professor of education have been awarded a $200,000 NSF CreativeIT grant.
This grant will support the dissertation research of Informatics doctoral student Eric Baumer, who contributed significantly to the grant.
The two year grant funds the project titled "Computational Metaphor Identification for Supporting Creativity in Science Education" and will focuse on analyzing the metaphors students use to understand and conceptualize material.
Identifying the metaphors that students use in their learning has previously been labor intensive, requiring a great deal of time and attention from a human instructor.
The work will develop a suite of computational techniques to enable and standardize the process of metaphor identification. The result will be a technological tool kit that supports human creativity by automatically identifying metaphors in bodies of text.
The tool kit will then be evaluated as a technology to foster creative learning in high school science students and combined with existing high quality, inquiry-based science instructional modules in the WISE system from UC Berkeley (SAIL software) so that the metaphors that it extracts may be presented and incorporated with other learning processes.
Tomlinson's research deals with environmental issues in information technology ("Green IT"), multi-device human-computer interaction, computer supported learning, multi-agent systems, and real-time animation.
Students receive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Lily
Irani
Julie
RicoLily Irani, a doctoral student in informatics and Julie Rico, an undergraduate informatics major, have each been selected for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), which provides students with three years of funding -- up to $121,500 -- for research-focused Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields.
NSF Fellows are expected to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering.
Irani's research interests are everyday privacy strategies in collaboration, design for and in the "developing world," and gender issues in technology.
Rico conducts research in the Bren School's LUCI (Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction) Lab that focuses on the challenges of designing, using, and understanding the elements of a ubiquitous computing world.
Some of these different facets include computing in the face of mobile computers and mobile users, understanding and exploring new patterns of socio-technical behavior, and the design and construction of technology which supports ubiquitous computing.
MARCH 2008
Students awarded $10,000 Google Anita Borg Scholarship
Silvia
Lindtner
Gabriela
MarcuSilvia Lindtner, a doctoral student in informatics and Gabriela Marcu, an undergraduate informatics major, have been selected as winners of the Google Anita Borg Scholarship for women in computing.
Each student will receive a $10,000 scholarship from Google, and will attend the 2008 Google Scholars' Retreat held in April where they will be joined by recipients of the Google United Negro College Fund and Google Hispanic College Fund scholarship programs.
The networking retreat will include workshops with a series of speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities.
Lindtner, a Long Beach native, was part of a team within a Siemens Research lab that developed an interactive computer game, Fish 'N' Steps, which links a player's daily footstep count to the growth and activity of animated fish.
Her team's idea was a twist on the Tamagotchi "digital pet" that created a sensation when manufacturer Bandai introduced it in 1996. The "health" and "happiness" of the handheld virtual creature depended on how well the user took care of it by responding to prompts for food, play and sanitation.
Marcu is a member of the first class of the new Informatics major in the Bren School and has helped spread the word about the new program by forming the Informatics Student Association, (INSA).
She is a member of the Women in Computer Science (WICS) group at UCI which helps and encourages women to pursue a college degree and a successful career in the Computer Science fields.
Marcu also provides community outreach to local high schools and community colleges through the Bren School's Student Ambassador where she encourages students to pursue a career in the information and computer sciences field.
The scholarship is named in honor of Dr. Anita Borg (1949 - 2003), who devoted her adult life to revolutionizing the way we think about technology and dismantling barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields.
Recipients are selected based on the strength of candidates' academic background and demonstrated leadership.
FEBRUARY 2008
Tomlinson receives Sloan fellowship
Bill
TomlinsonProfessor of Informatics Bill Tomlinson has been awarded a 2008 Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards given to young researchers.
The Sloan Research Fellowship program, which began in 1955, will provide recipients with $50,000 over two years to pursue research of their choosing. Tomlinson is among 118 scientists at 64 colleges and universities to receive the honor this year.
The program supports the work of exceptional young researchers in a variety of fields, including physics, computer science, economics and mathematics. Nine UCI researchers have earned Sloan fellowships in the past five years.
Tomlinson, also d affiliate of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), is interested in the relationship between information technology and environmental issues, human-computer interaction and educational technology. He joined the UCI faculty in 2003.
“Both the Bren School of ICS and Calit2 have been incredibly supportive of my research over the last several years,” Tomlinson said. “This fellowship is an exciting external recognition from a major philanthropic institute, and helps give me the financial freedom to pursue other cutting-edge projects in the future.”
Tomlinson's primary research interests focus on the field of "Green IT" - looking at the ways in which information technology impacts global environmental issues.
He has several projects under way in this area, including an educational museum exhibit that helps children learn about restoration ecology, an online site that helps people engage in environmentally preferable purchasing, and a system that lets people track their own environmental impact.
His group also conducts research in multi-device human-computer interaction, computer supported learning, multi-agent systems, and real-time animation.
Dourish named member of CHI Academy
Paul
DourishPaul Dourish, professor of Informatics has been named one of six new members of the CHI Academy, and will be recognized at the 2008 SIGCHI Awards in Florence, Italy.
Throughout his career, Dourish has worked at the intersection of computer science and social science, with a focus on the domains of computer-supported cooperative work and ubiquitous computing.
From social science, he draws not only empirical and methodological considerations but also theoretical and conceptual frameworks that illuminate the role of technology in social and cultural production.
His recent work has focused in particular on problems of location and of privacy, considering how people achieve concerned social action with, around, and through mobile technologies and digital media.
ACM SIGCHI, the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, brings together people working on the design, evaluation, implementation, and study of interactive computing systems for human use.
ACM SIGCHI provides an international, interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas about the field of human-computer interaction (HCI).
The CHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made extensive contributions to the study of HCI and who have led the shaping of the field.
JANUARY 2008
Hayes receives award from Autism Speaks to develop a visual schedule system
Gillian
HayesProfessor of informatics Gillian Hayes has received an $83,563 award from Autism Speaks for her proposal, "Technology Support for Interactive and Collaborative Visual Schedules".
Hayes work will focus on developing a digital repository and visual schedule system for use in schools and homes by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Using visual schedules, such as words, images and tangible objects to represent activities that will take place (or have taken place) has been shown to reduce the symptoms associated with autism.
The proposed system will be more than just a digital version of current visual scheduling techniques.
Part of the system design will leverage the current use of visual schedules by replacing them with both large, mounted and small, portable interactive touch screens.
This will enable caregivers and individuals with ASD to more quickly and easily interact with the schedules, marking when activities are completed and rearranging schedule items with streamlined, simple interactions.
The system will also enable new modes of interaction, including greater communication and collaboration amongst caregivers.
Using the smart visual schedules system, caregivers can generate reports, share information with one another, and possibly even update an individual schedule at a distance as circumstances change.
Autism Speaks is a New York City-based advocacy organization, founded in February 2005 by Bob Wright, Vice Chairman of General Electric, and his wife Suzanne, to improve public awareness about autism and to promote autism research.
The Wrights founded Autism Speaks to help find a cure for autism spectrum disorders a year after their grandson, Christian, was diagnosed with autism.
Kobsa and Mark receive Google Research Awards
Alfred
Kobsa
Gloria
MarkTwo Informatics Professors were recipients of a 2007 Google Research Award, each in the amount of $50,000.
One award went to Alfred Kobsa to support his research on compliance with disparate privacy laws and user privacy preferences.
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.
The other award went to Gloria Mark in support of her research on managing multi-tasking and Interruptions.
Mark's research examines the usability of leading edge collaborative technologies including a collaborative hypermedia authoring system, an electronic shared workspace, an application-sharing mechanism, and collaborative virtual environments.
