Ban's picture

Ban Al-Ani

BSc., MSc., DipEd, PhD.

Resume and Publications

balani[at]ics[dot]uci[dot]edu

Overview

I am currently working as a project scientist at UCI ICS . My main interest is understanding different users of technology in different contexts . My interest has led me to research social computing and civilians' use of information and communication technologies during crises, developers who work in distributed teams, programmers using eclipse platform, and more recently volunteer coordinators in non-profit organizations. All these research projects focus on understanding people and defining their needs accordingly. My previous studies of computer science/systems and my ongoing study of human-computer-interaction (HCI) has enabled me to bridge between the disciplines of software engineering and HCI.

I have adopted many different empirical approaches during my research: interviews (both remote and f2f), surveys, experiments, walk-throughs and collected data from social media.


Ongoing collaborations

I am working with David Redmiles and exploring the social and global aspects of software engineering. We were awarded a Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems (VOSS) grant in 2009 to investigate trust in distributed teams. We are currently preparing to conduct field studies across three organizations. Ultimately, our goal is to develop support for trust in distributed teams through tools we build that can be incorporated into developers' existing working environment.

I am also working with Gloria Mark and Bryan Semaan to investigate Technology use in environments disrupted by violent conflict. We have conducted ethnographic studies of users in Iraq and gathered data by conducting interviews with Iraqis currently living in Iraq and by crawling their blogs. We have extended our study to include Iranian and Thai bloggers. We have also joined forces with others investigating technology use during crises (project EPIC)


Other collaborations

I have also been fortunate enough to work with others on different projects, some of which are ongoing:
Hadar Ziv Reseacher at UCI,
Debra Richadrson Professor at UCI,
Michelle Bligh, Associate Professor at Claremont Graduate University,
Agi Horspool, Ph.D Candidate at Claremont Graduate University,
Andre van der Hoek, Professor at UCI,
Susan Sim, Assistant Professor at UCI,
Keith Edwards, Associate Professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo,