Patterson receives a grant for Wi-Fi Access Point survey
Assistant Professor Don Patterson received a grant from the Ted & Janice Smith Faculty Seed Fund Program to perform an 802.11b/g Wi-Fi Access Point survey of the Irvine campus and surrounding areas.
Don
PattersonThis is an essential step in the development of location-based services which are privacy observant and don't require any new infrastructure.
This will serve as a building block from which challenging problems of mapping cultural representations of space are addressed.
October 2005
Patterson receives best paper award
Assistant Professor Don Patterson recently received a best paper award at the ninth annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC 2005) for work on activity recognition.Don
PattersonIn particular, his paper, "Fine-Grained Activity Recognition by Aggregating Abstract Object Usage" looked at ways that RFIDs could be leveraged to provide context for intelligent user interfaces.
RFIDs are Radio Frequency Identification tags which have gained momentum in supply-chain management as bar code replacements.
Unlike bar codes, RFID tags have enough addresses that they can identify individual goods rather than just classes of goods and don't require line-of-sight in order to be read. Similar to bar codes though, RFIDs require no batteries and are very durable.
Several retailers such as Wal-Mart, and other large procurement organizations, like the U.S. Department of Defense, utilize RFIDs at the palette level to track inventory as it moves around the world.
Economists predict that if the cost of an RFID tag becomes low enough, they will be used to tag individual goods as well.
If individual goods can be separately tracked an enormous new world will open up as objects can be located in real time in the wild.
The focus of Professor Patterson's recent paper was to investigate object interaction as a method of identifying activities that a person is engaged in. This is made possible by coupling an instrumented bracelet and many individuall RFID-tagged goods to identify what a person has touched.
The paper demonstrated two results. First it identified what aspects of object use were relevant for activity recognition. Those aspects include paying attention to which activities interrupt other activities, and how many objects of a given class are touched, but not which specific objects are touched.
The second result was a demonstration of an idea called object smoothing which shows how a system can robustly recognize activities which use objects that it has never seen before. The key idea is to leverage an ontology of objects to identify which things are functionally similar to each other.
Kobsa earns Humboldt Research Award
Alfred Kobsa, professor of informatics, has been awarded the coveted Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, conferred by the government of Germany upon senior foreign scientists and scholars. He will be accepting the award next Spring in Germany.
Alfred
KobsaThe research award honours the academic achievements of the award winner’s lifetime. Furthermore, award winners are invited to carry out research projects of their own choice in Germany in cooperation with colleagues in Germany.
Kobsa will work with Professor Oliver Günther and Dr. Sarah Spiekermann from Humboldt University, Berlin, and jointly study privacy implications of the usage of radio frequency identification tags in the retail industry.
The award program was inaugurated in thankful response for the European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan established by the United States government after World War II.
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation was entrusted with implementation of the program, which initially recognized senior natural scientists from the U.S., but which has since been extended to internationally recognized scholars in the field of humanities, including lawyers, social scientists, and economists, throughout the world.
However, the emphasis of the program continues to be in the honoring of American natural scientists. The object is to pay tribute to academic accomplishments of award winners and to foster long-term cooperation between foreign and German researchers.
Taylor receives NSF cybertrust grant
Richard N. Taylor, professor of informatics, has been awarded $455,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation to explore software architecture-based approaches for engineering secure decentralized applications with Paul Dourish, associate professor of informatics.
Richard N.
TaylorThe project will, over a period of three years, focus on developing effective design principles and software architectural styles for incorporating trust management in decentralized applications.
The project will also study existing decentralized reputation-based systems and investigate how they can better protect and respond against potential malicious attacks.
September 2005
Interdisciplinary trio to study social dynamics of technology
Paul Dourish, Simon Cole and Jennifer Terry have been awarded a $750,000 NSF award to investigate the ways new and emerging technologies such as blogging and text messaging are transforming peoples' privacy and identity in today's society.
Paul
DourishBy bringing together researchers from the Schools of Humanities, Social Ecology, and Information and Computer Sciences, this project takes a broad view of the ways in which technology and everyday life intersect, placing technology in a broader social and cultural context.
The interdisciplinary team of researchers will examine three core questions of social dynamics: how are practices of privacy and identity changing, what new patterns are evolving and how is the relationship between technical and social being developed?
The three-year research project is titled "Privacy, Identity and Technology."
August 2005
Mark receives mentor awardProfessors Gloria Mark and Renato Pajarola received the Bren School of ICS 2004-2005 Outstanding Student Mentor Award.
This award recognizes faculty members who have shown uncommon dedication to graduate students.
July 2005
Patterson joins faculty
The Bren School of ICS is pleased to welcome a new faculty member, Don Patterson to the Department of Informatics.Don
PattersonPatterson received his Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington, working with Henry Kautz and Dieter Fox on devices that provide cognitive assistance for the elderly, such as the “Activity Compass” and the “Opportunity Knocks” system.
While at graduate school he received several prestigious honors.
He was a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate fellow; and the recipient of the UW CSE Educator's Fellowship for 2004-2005. He was also awarded the 2000-2001 Bob Bandes Teaching Award and served as the 2001-2002 Graduate Student Coordinator and the 2002-2003 Prospective Grad Student Recruiting Co-chair.
Don Patterson’s areas of research interest lie at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Ubiquitous computing and he has applied this work to transportation and activity assistance.
May 2005
Professor wins teaching awardAndré van der Hoek, assistant professor of informatics, has been awarded Professor of the Year from the Dean of the Division of Undergraduate Education.
The award comes with a $1,000 contribution to the fund for scholarly enhancement.
April 2005
Building a New Science of Design
The Science of Design will transform the way complex software-intensive systems - everything from autos and rockets to web applications - are designed. As a result, tomorrow's systems pervading our lives will be more flexible, more reliable, and faster to market, and many more products and applications will emerge as a result of the new science.Richard N.
TaylorThe National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Richard N. Taylor $775,000 to help establish a set of teachable scientific principles to reinvent software design.
Taylor's proposal will extend work on the REST (REpresentational State Transfer) software architectural style formulated by Taylor's student Roy Fielding in his 2000 dissertation.
The REST style underlies today's World Wide Web and its primary protocol HTTP/1.1, which is familiar as the "http://" in web addresses. REST gives software designs highly desirable qualities prized by software engineers, such as extensibility, flexibility and performance. more »
Ph.D. student earns prestigious NSF Research Fellowship
Congratulations to first-year Ph.D. student Amanda Williams. Williams was one of 1,020 students awarded a 2005 fellowship from the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
The three-year award entitles Williams to $30,000 each year to continue her research in human-computer interaction and will pay her tuition costs.
Williams is one of five 2005 UCI recipients and the only computer science awardee.
For more information about GRFP, please visit the NSF site.
Details of Williams' research can be found at her homepage.
Gloria Mark, associate professor of informatics, has been named a 2005-06 Fulbright Scholar.
Gloria
MarkMark will spend six months next year in Germany researching geographically distributed teams. She will be affiliated with Humboldt University in Berlin, beginning January 2006.
Mark's research interests are in computer-supported cooperative work, particularly the ways in which technologies can support large-scale remote team collaboration. Germany has a long tradition in the field of work psychology, and Mark will apply concepts from this area to her research.
The Fulbright Program, now in its 55th year, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. more »
Faculty awarded two of four Nicholas' Prizes from Calit2
Informatics assistant professors Cristina Lopes and Bill Tomlinson were awarded two of the four first Nicholas Foundation Prizes for Cross-Disciplinary Research, announced Calit2 Irvine Division Director Albert Yee. The $300,00 prize will support four proposals in all.
Don
PattersonCristina Lopes and Steve C. Cramer, assistant professor in Neurology, were awarded $80,000 to continue researching an integrated computing/communications platform that measures and transmits physical therapy information from the homes of spinal-cord injury patients to UCI via the Internet for more detailed monitoring of patient recovery.
Bill Tomlinson, assistant professor of Informatics and Drama, along with F. Lynn Carpenter, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, also were awarded $80,000 for their EcoRaft project. Their intent is that the project, a combination fixed/mobile interactive environmental exhibit, can be installed at science museums around the country to help teach environmental science to children.
For additional information on these awards please view the press release.
January 2005
Informatics students receive ARCS fellowshipInformatics graduate students Keri Carpenter and Emily Oh Navarro have received the prestigious Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Foundation Fellowship Award for outstanding achievement and dedication to the study of science.
The Orange County Chapter of the ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) Foundation is one of twelve chapters that are dedicated to helping the best and brightest United States students by providing scholarships to scientists and engineers.
This is the fourth consecutive ARCS fellowship for graduate students in the Department of Informatics. Informatics graduate students Eric Dashofy and Emily Oh Navarro each received this award during the 2003-2004 academic year.
