Ruy F. Cervantes Fregoso

Informatics Ph. D. Candidate

Keywords

Networks of innovation, entrepreneurship
learning, knowledge creation and sharing, education, ICT4D

CSCW, CHI, ethnography, design

Bio

I am interested in how socio-technical infrastructures support people when learning, working and collaborating, and in how digital media can be used to extend these infrastructures.

For my dissertation I doing an ethnographic study of the emerging Internet industry in Mexico, and how it is transtioning from a providing services to the local market towards an innovation-based industry. My goals is to understand how start-up companies in mid-income countries are building the social infrastructures they need to succeed in world markets, within the social, economic, cultural and historical constraints of the country.

Another project that influenced my current work was an ethnographic study of low-cost laptops use for learning in Mexican elementary schools, were I became aware of the complexities of building the socio-technical infrastructures to make digital media technologies truly useful for learning and working.

Previous joining to the Ph.D. program at UC Irvine I was working as a software consultant, both in Mexico and in India. I am Mexican, born and raised. I love traveling, and I take pictures to pay more attention to what I am looking at.

C.V.

Publications

Referred Conference Papers

Cervantes, R., Warschauer, M., Nardi, B., & Sambasivan, N. Infrastructures for low-cost laptop use in Mexican schools. CHI 2011. ACM. [pdf]

Venolia, G., Tang, J., Cervantes, R., Bly, S., Robertson, G., Lee, B., and Inkpen, K. Embodied Social Proxy: Mediating Interpersonal Connection in Hub and Satellite Teams. CHI 2010 [pdf]

Cervantes, R., Richardson, J. and Nardi, B. "I Am a Black Cat, Letting Day Come and Go": Multimodal Conversations in a Poetry Workshop. HICSS 2009. [pdf]

Workshops and Colloquiums

Cervantes, R. Infrastructures to Imagine: The Mexican Internet Industry. Doctoral Colloquium. iConference 2011. [pdf]

Posters

Ruy Cervantes, Nithya Sambasivan: VoiceList: user‐driven telephone-based audio content. Proceedings of Mobile HCI 2008: 499-500 [pdf]

Yong Ming Kow, Ruy Cervantes: Examining the Four Infrastructures Supporting the Hundred Dollars Laptop. CSCW 2008

Research Group

I am part of the TechDeC at UC Irvine, anthropologically inspired approaches coupled with design techniques to study digital technology use across cultures and social groups. My advisor is Bonnie Nardi.

email: ruy at ics dot uci dot edu