DECEMBER 2008
Dourish gives opening keynote and invited talk in Australia
Paul
DourishInformatics professor Paul Dourish recently gave the opening keynote talk for the OzCHI conference, the annual Australasian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, held in Cairns in Queensland, Australia.
Dourish's talk titled "Postcolonial Computing: Reframing the Cultural Dimensions of HCI Design" draws lessons from postcolonial studies to sketch some alternative frameworks for understanding the changing relationship between HCI design practice and the breadth of habitat and habitus with which it engages.
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the term "habitus" to refer to the sedimented patterns of thought and dispositions that we acquire through participation in sociocultural settings.
Linking habitat with habitus is particularly appropriate now, as recent years have seen increasing attention paid the broadening contexts of information technology use from office and work settings to public and domestic space, and more broadly, out into the natural world of our everyday (and not-so-everyday) experience.
These sorts of spreads of technology and technological practice have necessitated the development of new modes of analysis and design, often drawing on different disciplines.
As human computer interaction (HCI) is beginning to turn its attention to how technologies move between different cultural settings, the research often raises more questions that it answers. Just what does culture mean? What does it mean for technologies to be "portable" across places and settings—or for methods?
Dourish also gave an invited talk at Queensland University of Technology, in Bribane, Queensland, Australia: "Persuasive Technologies, Ecotopian Agendas, and the Morality of Consumption: Rethinking the Relationship between Human-Computer Interaction and Environmental Sustainability".
Many HCI researchers have recently begun to examine the opportunities to use ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users.
In particular, contemporary technologies -- including mobile devices and ambient displays -- can be imagined to provide opportunities for reflection on personal and collective action, or for monitoring and visualization of behavior and its relationship to environmental change.
These efforts exploit recent explorations of the use of computers as persuasive technologies in domains such as health and fitness.
Dourish's primary research interests are in the areas of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Human-Computer Interaction, and Ubiquitous Computing. He is especially interested in the foundational relationships between social scientific analysis and technological design.
Recent research topics include flexible attribute-based group information repositories, visual techniques to aid people in making assessments of system security, phenomenological analyses of interaction with embodied computational devices, and conceptual frameworks for privacy in information environments.
An audio download of Dourish's talk and presetation is availble as are his slides.
NOVEMBER 2008
New Book edited by Gary Olson, with contributions from Judy Olson
Gary
Olson
Judy
OlsonGary and Judy Olson, Bren Professors of Information and Computer Sciences, have released a new book, Scientific Collaboration on the Internet.
Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants.
Historically, scientific collaborations were carried out by scientists in the same physical location—the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, for example, involved thousands of scientists gathered on a remote plateau in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Today, information and communication technologies allow cooperation among scientists from far-flung institutions and different disciplines. Scientific Collaboration on the Internet provides both broad and in-depth views of how new technology is enabling novel kinds of science and engineering collaboration. The book offers commentary from notable experts in the field along with case studies of large-scale collaborative projects, past and ongoing.
The projects described range from the development of a national virtual observatory for astronomical research to a National Institutes of Health funding program for major multilaboratory medical research; from the deployment of a cyberinfrastructure to connect experts in earthquake engineering to partnerships between developed and developing countries in AIDS research.
The chapter authors speak frankly about the problems these projects encountered as well as the successes they achieved. The book strikes a useful balance between presenting the real stories of collaborations and developing a scientific approach to conceiving, designing, implementing, and evaluating such projects. It points to a future of scientific collaborations that build successfully on aspects from multiple disciplines.
Gary Olson, author of more than 100 published research articles, has dedicated his work to understanding how technology can support remote collaboration. He also has made important contributions to the studies of management practice and the cultural aspects of collaboration, as well as the complex socio-technical issues surrounding technology design.
Judy 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.
OCTOBER 2008
Nardi gives talks in Lithuania and San Diego
Bonnie
NardiInformatics professor Bonnie Nardi recently gave a keynote talk and participated as a keynote panel speaker in Lithuania and San Diego, CA, respectively.
At the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research Conference in San Diego on September 13, Nardi gave a talk entitled "Digital Ethnography" with a discussion of its challenges and opportunities.
Nardi also gave an opening keynote talk at the Information Searching in Context Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania on September 17. The talk highlighted Nardi's research in China on the "mixed realities" of Internet cafes in which the virtual and physical come together in interesting ways. People can become engrossed in playing a virtual game together, for example, but also talk, laugh, eat together in a real physical space.
SEPTEMBER 2008
Nardi awarded $36,000 from Agilent Technologies to study user interfaces
Bonnie
NardiInformatics professor Bonnie Nardi and second year Ph.D. student Ruy Cervantes have been awarded $36,000 from Agilent Technologies to conduct an ethnographic study of engineers' experiences with a range of user interfaces from games to work applications for Agilent Technologies.
Agilent, manufacturer of high-end instruments for measurment in electronics, communications, life sciences, and chemical analysis, is collaborating with us to redesign and update their user interfaces to appeal to a younger generation of engineers.
Nardi's research interests include theory in human-computer interaction and computer-supported collaborative work; computer-mediated communication technologies; and studies of scientific collaboration.
She specializes in the use of ethnographic methods to study technology. Her theoretical orientation is activity theory. Current research includes a study of blogging and an investigation of scientific collaboration among ecologists.
Tsudik and Kobsa awarded $460,000 NSF Cybertrust grant
Gene
Tsudik
Alfred
KobsaProfessor of Computer science Gene Tsudik and Professor of Informatics Alfred Kobsa have been awarded a $460,000 collaborative grant from the NSF Cybertrust program for a project titled "User-Aided Secure Association of Wireless Devices".
The cybertrust project is being conducted in collaboration with Nitesh Saxena, an ICS Ph.D. alum, and Assistant Professor at NYU Polytechnic Institute.
The popularity of personal gadgets opens up many new services for ordinary users. Many everyday usage scenarios involve two or more devices "working together" – for example, sensors and personal RFID tags. Before working together, devices must be securely "paired" to enable secure communication.
The human-imperceptible nature of wireless communication prompts the very real threat of Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attacks.
Another challenge arises due to the lack of a global security infrastructure. Consequently, traditional cryptographic means alone are unsuitable, since unfamiliar devices have no prior security context and no common point of trust.
Therefore, some human involvement in secure device pairing is unavoidable. At the same time, most devices have limited hardware and/or user interfaces, thus complicating human involvement.
Since device pairing is one of the very few areas where security directly involves and affects the average user, the greatest impact of proposed research is expected to be the broader participation in security practices and better appreciation of security and its benefits. The project also emphasizes industry outreach and technology transfer by working with manufacturers and industrial consortia.
The project’s end-goal is to construct a set of user-friendly, scalable and secure methods for sensor initialization.
Students taking part in the project are expected to acquire skills that uniquely interact at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Cybertrust.
Tsudik's research interests are mainly in computer/network security, privacy and applied cryptography. His recent work focuses on privacy in Internet services, RFID systems and mobile ad hoc networks, as well as security in sensor networks and storage systems.
His research also covers secure group communication, in particular, group key agreement, group signatures and group access control. He also is interested in database security and public key cryptography.
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 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.
Nardi to study “Mods”, awarded $100,000 NSF grant
Bonnie
NardiInformatics professor Bonnie Nardi and second-year Ph.D. student Yong Ming Kow have been awarded $100,000 from the National Science Foundation to conduct a cross-cultural study of the development of end user modifications for games, examining "mods" in China and the United States.
Nardi is interested in how technical creativity is differentially expressed in the two cultures by examining diverse data sources including chatrooms, forums, and websites, as well as interviewing mod developers.
Nardi's research interests include theory in human-computer interaction and computer-supported collaborative work; computer-mediated communication technologies; and studies of scientific collaboration.
She specializes in the use of ethnographic methods to study technology. Her theoretical orientation is activity theory. Current research includes a study of blogging and an investigation of scientific collaboration among ecologists.
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.
