Past Brown Bag Lunch Schedules

The following are the past Brown Bag schedules.

Fall 2017

Date	Leader	Topic
08/31/2017	Kickoff to a new Semester!	Come network, make introductions, and share what you are working on Please come to our first BBL of the Fall 2017 semester to introduce yourself and share what you're working on in the coming semester. The first BBL will be for us to network with each other and kickoff a great new semester.
09/07/2017	David Weintrop, University of Maryland, College Park	To block or not to block: Understanding the effects of programming language representation in high school computer science classrooms. Abstract: In the last few years, Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco have all announced major initiatives to bring computer science classes and computational thinking into every high school in their cities - with countless other smaller school districts following suit. Having made these commitments, attention now shifts towards how best to teach computer science to diverse populations of high school students who grew up in the age of smart phones, iPads, and Facebook. An increasingly popular strategy being employed is the use of graphical, block-based programming environments like Scratch, Blockly, and Alice. While these environments have been found to be effective at broadening participation with younger learners, open questions remain about their suitability in high school contexts. In this talk, I will present findings from a two-year classroom study looking at how the design of introductory programming environments affects learners' emerging understandings of computer science concepts and their perceptions of the field of computer science. I will also discuss the affordances of block-based programming environments relative to more conventional text-based alternatives. Bio:David Weintrop is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching & Learning, Policy & Leadership in the College of Education with a joint appointment in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of accessible and engaging computational learning environments. He is also interested in the use of technological tools in supporting exploration and expression across diverse contexts including STEM classrooms and informal spaces. His work lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction, design, and the Learning Sciences. David has a Ph.D. in the Learning Sciences from Northwestern University and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. He spent one year as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago studying computer science learning in elementary classrooms prior to joining the faculty at the University of Maryland. Before starting his academic career, he spent five years working as a software developer at a pair of start-ups in Chicago.
09/14/2017	Stacy Branham, University of Maryland Baltimore-County	From Independence to Interdependence: A Social Narrative of Assistive Technology Abstract: In the Assistive Technology and greater disabilities community, “independence” has been a core goal and frame for making progress toward equality. This dominant narrative is often interpreted to mean that disabled people can and should live independently without help from others, and that assistive devices exist to displace reliance on helpers. For example, a wearable device that gives a blind person turn-by-turn directions through an airport displaces a sighted human guide. However, my work with people with disabilities in the home, in the workplace, and in public spaces has demonstrated that collaboration is a significant tool and goal of people with disabilities in their everyday lives. Further, social setting and human-human interactions significantly impact whether and how assistive devices are used. In this talk, I will share and unpack stories from people with various abilities to argue that assistive technology design through the lens of “interdependence” provides a more honest, respectful, and empowering alternative for assistive technology design. Bio: Stacy Branham is a Lecturer in Information Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her research in Human-Centered Computing contributes to the subfields of Social Computing and Assistive Technology by investigating how technologies mediate interpersonal relationships, often with people who are blind. Her recent and ongoing studies explore how technology can engender safety as people with disabilities encounter law enforcement at protests, as blind parents care for their children at home, and as transgender people navigate violence in online and offline spaces. Themes she investigates include agency, empowerment, disability, gender, social justice, intimacy, interdependence, personal safety, and ethics in design research. Her research has been recognized with best paper awards at CHI and DIS. Dr. Branham has organized multiple workshops at CSCW and CHI on ethics in design research, culminating in a Special Issue of Interacting with Computers. She is currently a papers AC for CHI 2018 and the Chair of the Student Research Competition for ASSETS 2017. Dr. Branham received her BS and PhD in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, with a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction.
09/21/2017	Gabriela Marcu, Drexel University Cody Buntain, University of Maryland, College Park	Gabriela: Addressing health inequities through human-centered design Cody: Gaining Insight into Real-World Societal Response Using Social Media Talk 1 - Abstract: When we use empathy and human-centered approaches in developing health interventions, we have the capacity to affect social change. We can direct human-centered computing toward underserved populations. We can target marginalization, stigma, and inequity with human- centered methods. In this talk, I will share projects that have focused on addressing inequities within children’s behavioral health services, treatment for youth living with HIV, and opioid overdose prevention. I will present methodological approaches to designing for and with underserved populations, and show how to practice inclusion and equity in the design process. Based on the results of my projects, I will also outline design principles for health information technologies that do not sacrifice humanity for standardization. Finally, I will discuss the importance of broadening participation in computing, for more equitable research participation, methods, and output. Talk 2 - Abstract: Online social networking platforms (OSNs) like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have become valuable data sources in studying societal response to high-impact events (terror attacks, natural disasters, mass demonstrations, etc.). These events unfold rapidly, with users posting their responses and new developments to OSNs as they happen. Rapidly understanding these responses can be critical to providing assistance or reducing conflict. This talk discusses three main areas in this research: 1) How well does OSN data reflect real-world population data, 2) What are the patterns in response behavior to these events, and 3) How can low-quality information be filtered out from these data sources? I will present findings across these questions, showing social media data mirrors certain geographic populations, discussing event-detection algorithms, and outlining some current research in cross-platform information quality. I will then open discussion on future work in: OSN data for qualitative study, crisis informatics, and studies of population/platform differences in online information quality. Bio: Gabriela Marcu is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing and Informatics and a Research Fellow with the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute at Drexel University. Her research applies participatory design, action research, and ubiquitous computing to promote behavioral health and social justice. Dr. Marcu directs the Empathic Research Group, a highly diverse and interdisciplinary team passionate about user experience and social change. She holds a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.S. in Informatics from the University of California, Irvine. She has been named a Siebel Scholar, NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Microsoft Research Graduate Women Scholar, and Google Anita Borg Scholar. Bio: Dr. Cody Buntain is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab and is funded by the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship. His current areas of research include studying complex social systems and how society leverages social media in the aftermath of crises and social unrest. This research includes evaluating information credibility across social media platforms, real-time information retrieval and event detection in response to crises, social media reflections of real-world phenomena, and the intersection of machine learning and computational social science.
09/28/2017	Mark Fuge, University of Maryland, College Park	Designing with Data: How machine learning is morphing human, product, and system design Abstract: The nature of product design has increased in scale, both inside corporations and in self-organized online communities (e.g., OpenIDEO, Local Motors). This is thanks to unprecedented amounts of digital design information made possible by globally distributed groups of thousands of people who collaborate together on design projects over the Internet. However, this increased scale and diversity comes with a price: 1) these groups generate more data than they can effectively use, 2) it becomes difficult to leverage their diverse expertise, and 3) involving non-experts meaningfully the design process, particularly for complex mechanical systems, requires rethinking how people interact with design tools and what kind of intelligent support we need to provide. In this talk I'll address how advances in machine learning can ameliorate these issues. Specifically, my students and I will introduce ongoing work on three problems: 1) how to use data to understand and simplify complex, high-dimensional, design spaces (to aid in techniques like optimization, design synthesis, and design exploration), 2) how to filter high-quality, diverse submissions out of large pools of design ideas generated by online communities (to aid in design generation and selection), and 3) how to enable non-experts to design complex mechanical parts (such as 3D printable robots) by using AI to automate various mechanical design tasks. Each problem highlights how building probabilistic models of designs via data can often produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts and make design (even of complex, physical systems) more inclusive. Bio: Mark Fuge is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, and recently joined the HCIL as a faculty member. His research lies at the intersection of Mechanical Engineering, Machine Learning, and Design; an area often referred to as "Design Informatics" or "Data-Driven Design." He received his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, and received his M.S. and B.S. at Carnegie Mellon University. He has conducted research in applied machine learning, optimization, network analysis, additive manufacturing, human-computer interfaces, crowdsourcing, and creativity support tools. He has received a DARPA Young Faculty Award and a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. You can learn more about his research at his lab’s website: https://ideal.umd.edu
10/05/2017	Sigfried Gold, University of Maryland, College Park	Exploratory visualization tools for health records research, and an exciting detour into infrastructural support for health records research at UMD Abstract: Important medical research is increasingly based on analysis of data collected during provision of routine care. Compared to clinical trials data, this "secondary use" data is not susceptible to randomized, prospective study protocols; it suffers from poor quality and extreme "missingness" for observational or retrospective methods; strict privacy and human subjects regulations limit its availability; processing it for analysis is complicated by the diversity of its sources, formats, and the plethora of language and coding systems in which it is recorded; and analyzing it generally requires advanced clinical training and methods for grappling with its extreme multi-variateness, sparsity, and unknown systemic biases. Despite these formidable challenges, this data is orders of magnitude cheaper and more prolific than clinical trial data. Researchers and analysts within medical provider institutions can have access to data for millions of patients essentially for free; while medical products companies, regulators, and payer institutions can affordably purchase data for hundreds of millions of patients. Further, although analysts' uses cases are diverse and their methods (e.g., advanced statistics or machine learning) often opaque as well as immature; they share many basic questions and tasks: they almost universally need to characterize their populations on various demographic and clinical dimensions; they generally need to choose study and comparator cohorts; they need to group patients by disease and treatment parameters; they need to evaluate the significance of untold co-morbidities and confounders; they need to explore and discover temporal patterns obscured by the volume and variability of the data. The advent of common data models and open-source software is just beginning to drastically streamline research workflows with this data. For analysts with access to data in OHDSI (ohdsi.org) format, for instance, many months of the standard observational study workflow can be skipped entirely. OHDSI's web-based cohort construction tools and it's open and growing R methods library allow researchers not only to define and execute their studies in hours or days rather than months, these researchers can now instantly and precisely share their code and aggregate results in a research network to be immediately replicated on dozens of other databases containing records for hundreds of millions of patients. What this means for my research is: 1) my visualization tools can be built to a single data model and can be tested with a wide variety of use cases and without requiring my subject matter expert collaborators to perform data collection and transformation just to work with me; and 2) my tools can be built with immediate integration into platforms they are already using, so, for instance, they can take advantage of these experimental visualization tools as they design their study and set parameters; they can feed those parameters into their statistical or machine learning algorithms; and they can then (continuing in the same platform) use these visualization tools to explore and evaluate results. What it also means for my research, for better or worse, is that my model for developing and evaluating visualization software and working with users and collaborators is very different from what HCI researchers are used to, and, since no one at UMD (as far as I know) is using OHDSI or anything like it, I have been spending more time explaining and evangelizing for my preferred research platform than for my research itself. At the Brown Bag I will talk about both; but depending on audience interest (some of our visualization researchers will be off at IEEE VIS this week), I may end up focusing more on the infrastructural issues. Bio: With 29 years of experience in developing data management and analysis software on Unix/Linux and web platforms, Gold specializes in designing and implementing innovative, browser-based information visual analytics tools to facilitate the exploration and understanding of complex, multivariate or temporal data. He has experience in a wide array of industries (cyber security, securities trading, law, public sector administration, fundraising), but particular expertise in medical informatics and the secondary use of clinical and claims data for pharmacoepidemiology and patient safety research. He works with medical data using a common data model and open-source software as a collaborator in the OHDSI community.
10/12/2017	Foad Hamidi, University of Maryland, Baltimore County	Designing for User Agency and Participation Abstract: Digital technologies provide many opportunities to engage the interest and attention of users of all ages. A central question for the designers of these systems is what aspects of user interaction do they want to encourage and emphasize. In this talk, I present several research projects in which I designed digital systems to motivate user participation and collaboration. These projects include a digital living media system that engages child users though the dynamics of caring and responsibility and a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) open-source communication board for non-verbal users. For each project, I describe how I worked closely with various stakeholders including children, parents and teachers. I conclude with reflections on how to design digital system to support human agency and participation. Bio: Foad Hamidi is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Participatory Design, Digital Living Media Systems and DIY Assistive Technology. He is passionate about interdisciplinary cormmunitity-engaged research and has work on research projects in different cultural contexts, including Kenya, Bhutan and Mexico. He has a PhD in Computer Science from York University, Toronto.
10/19/2017	Internship Panel	Internship Panel Abstract: The panel will share their experiences applying for the internships and finishing them. They will also provide resources including for practicing coding, improving resume, and interview questions. Bio: The panel consists of PhD students from UMD CS and ISchool---Leyla Norooz, Seokbin Kang, Zhe Cui, Deok Gun Park, and Sriram Karthik Badam. They have done internships at both academia and industry including MSR, Google, Adobe, IBM, LinkedIn, and INRIA (France).
10/26/2017	Janet Walkoe, University of Maryland, College Park	Teacher Noticing: Leveraging Technology to Explore Noticing and Noticing to Explore Technology Abstract: We introduce technology-mediated teacher noticing (TMTN): a vision for the design and use of technology-mediated tools that takes seriously the need for teachers to attend to, interpret, and respond to their students’ thinking. This vision is situated at the intersection of research on teacher noticing, and on technology to support student thinking. We synthesize that work to highlight specific ways that technology-mediated classroom tools can focus and stabilize teachers’ attention on valuable aspects of student thinking emphasized by current reform efforts. We then illustrate TMTN with classroom examples in which technology supported or obstructed teachers' attention to student thinking, and consider implications for research on technology in teacher practice, professional development, and the design of technological tools for K-12 classrooms. Bio: Janet is a Learning Scientist and Mathematics Educator. She earned her Doctorate from Northwestern University in the Learning Sciences in 2012. She also holds an MS in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. Before enrolling in graduate school, Janet taught high school mathematics (from 1996-2006), earning National Board Certification in 2003. Janet studies the teaching and learning of algebra in formal and informal environments. In particular, she is interested in the natural resources children bring to algebra classes and how to help teachers leverage these resources. Outside the college you may find her at the yoga studio or spending time in Washington DC with her daughter, husband & their pet rats.
11/02/2017	Joseph G. Davis, University of Sydney	Visualizing and Exploring Cliques and Cartel-Like Patterns in Citation Networks Abstract: With the growing emphasis on metrics such as citation count and h-index for research assessment, several reports of gaming and cartel-like formations for boosting citation statistics have emerged. However, such cartels are extremely difficult to detect. This paper presents a systematic approach to visualizing and computing clique and other anomalous patterns through ego-centric citation network analysis by drilling down into the details of individual researcher’s citations. After grouping the citations into three categories, namely, self- citations, co-author citations, and distant citations, we focus our analysis on the outliers with relatively high proportion of self- and co-author citations. By analyzing the complete co-authorship citation networks of these researchers one at a time along with all the co-authors and by merging these networks, we were able to isolate and visualize cliques and anomalous citation patterns that suggest plausible collusion. Our exploratory analysis was carried out using the citation data from Web of Science (now Clarivate Analytics) for all the highly cited researchers in Computer Science and Physics. I will also discuss some of the potential research opportunities in 'citation analytics'. Bio: Joseph G. Davis is the Professor of Information Systems and Services at the School of Information Technologies, the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. He directs the Knowledge Discovery and Management Research Group and is the theme leader for service computing at the Centre for Distributed and High Performance Computing at Sydney. His research covers crowdsourcing, data analytics, ontologies and semantic web, and service computing. He has published over 110 research papers in these and related areas. His research has been funded by the Australian Research Council, Cooperative Centre for Smart Services, Data 61, IBM Research Labs, Carnegie Bosch Institute, among others. Joseph completed his PhD in Information Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. He has held previous academic positions at Indiana University Bloomington and University of Auckland and Visiting Professorships at Carnegie Mellon University, Syracuse University, University of Pittsburgh, and IBM Research Labs. He is a Senior Member of the ACM and a Charter Member of the Association for Information Systems.
11/09/2017	Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland, College Park	How do art & design accelerate research in science & engineering? Abstract: Leonardo is the classic example of fusion between art and science, as well as design and engineering. His artistic side amplified his perceptual abilities enabling him to make scientific breakthroughs about human anatomy, hydraulics, optics, and much more. Similarly, Pasteur’s training in lithography sensitized him to understand the chirality of molecules. Artistic skill enabling science is but one of four paths that I see. A second path is that the demands of art push science and engineering forward, as in the case of Karl Heinz needing to create the MP3 algorithms for compressing music. A third path is that the playful, exploratory, iterative, and divergent methods of art & design free up scientists and engineers to expand the range of their thinking. A fourth path is that products of art & design, such as paintings, sculpture, music, or film can directly inspire scientists and engineers. This talk will present further examples and call for closer connections across these disciplines. Bio: Ben Shneiderman (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/), and a Member of the UM Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and NAI, and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, in recognition of his pioneering contributions to human-computer interaction and information visualization. His contributions include the direct manipulation concept, clickable highlighted web-links, touchscreen keyboards, dynamic query sliders, development of treemaps, novel network visualizations for NodeXL, and temporal event sequence analysis for electronic health records. Shneiderman is the co-author with Catherine Plaisant of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (6th ed., 2016) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/. With Stu Card and Jock Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999). He co-authored, Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL (www.codeplex.com/nodexl) (Morgan Kaufmann) with Derek Hansen and Marc Smith. Shneiderman’s latest book is The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations (Oxford, April 2016).
11/16/2017	Karthik Ramani, Purdue University, West Lafayette	A New Genre of Human Computer-Interaction and Interfaces for 3D Creative Design and Fabrication Abstract: The convergence of many factors such as low cost sensors, electronics, computing, machines, and more recently machine learning have created the potential for changing the way users engage with the physical world. This talk will explore and demonstrate how we can create new geometric interfaces and interactions that leverage our knowledge of the physical world for 3D design and fabrication. These new methods and tools enable users to personalize designs using new machines. In the first part of the talk we will explore how any consumer with little knowledge of computers can repurpose everyday objects and or shapes and quickly customize them to foldable constructions. Such constructions are then used to create robots in the physical world. In the second part we will see how new interactive workflows using a smart phone and tablets with pen-and-touch interfaces can be used for collaborative 3D design ideation. As a result of low thresholds and simple user interactions with lower cognitive loads, users are shown to explore multiple creative pathways. In the last part of the talk we will examine how a new deep learning technique, “SurfNET”, transforms a single image into 3D shapes and even hallucinate shapes that it has not seen. We envision a future with personalized manufacturing interfaces that lower the barrier for many to participate in the design and fabrication processes. Bio: Karthik Ramani is the Donald W. Feddersen Professor of School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, with courtesy appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering and College of Education. He earned his B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1985, an MS from Ohio State University, in 1987, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1991, all in Mechanical Engineering. He has received many awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations. He has served in the editorial board of Elsevier Journal of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design (JMD). In 2008 he was a visiting Professor at Stanford University (computer sciences), research fellow at PARC (formerly Xerox PARC), and in Oxford University Institute of Mathematical Sciences in summer 2016. He also serves on the Engineering Advisory sub-committee for the NSF IIP (Industrial Innovation and Partnerships). In 2006 and 2007, he won the Most Cited Journal Paper award from CAD and the Research Excellence award in the College of Engineering at Purdue University. In 2009, he won the Outstanding Commercialization award from Purdue University. He was the co-founder of the world’s first commercial shape-based search engine (VizSeek) and more recently co-founded ZeroUI whose product (Ziro) won the Best of Consumer Electronics Show Finalist (CES 2016). He has won several best paper awards and in 2014 the Outstanding Research Excellence Award from ASME Computers and Information Sciences in Engineering Division. NSF recently invited him as a distinguished speaker in cyber-learning and engineering maker spaces. In 2015 he won the most cited researcher for 2005-16 in the Elsevier CAD journal. His recent papers have been published in venues such as ACM (SIGCHI, UIST); IEEE (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, TVCG, VAST), TEI, CAD and ASME JMD.
11/23/2017	No Brown Bag, Thanksgiving recess
11/30/2017	Karen Holtzblatt, InContext Design	Jumpstart your Career: How to Get and Keep Industry Jobs Abstract: Karen Holtzblatt will give a very practical talk on how to get and keep industry jobs. She will cover what the different job types are, how to find the job you want, what a good resume looks like, what you need to think about for a slideshow or portfolio, and what job hunting looks like today. She will also talk about what students should be looking for in a job and how to succeed right away on the job. This talk is based on her years of experience in industry, her mentoring of young professionals, and her current work understanding what new hires need to succeed in technology companies. Bio: Karen Holtzblatt is CEO of InContext Design and driving force behind the Women in Tech Retention Project. A recognized leader in requirements and design, Karen pioneered transformative ideas and design approaches throughout her career. She introduced Contextual Design, the industry standard for understanding the customer and organizing that data to drive innovative product concepts. Karen has now turned her focus to the issue of women in high tech companies in order to understand why women leave the field and to provide solutions. Her research and resulting framework describe the core factors in the work environment that women need to achieve success. Together these can help companies and inspire women. As a member of ACM SIGCHI (The Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) Karen was awarded membership to the CHI Academy a gathering of significant contributors and received the first Lifetime Award for Practice for her impact on the field. Contextual Design is used by companies and universities world-wide. Karen has more than 25 years of teaching experience professionally and in university settings. She holds a doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto. Karen is a Research Scientist at University of Maryland’s iSchool.
12/07/2017	Pamela Wisniewski University of Central Florida	Taking a Teen-Centric Approach to adolescent Online Safety Abstract: Most online safety tools (i.e., “parental controls”) are designed to meet the needs of parents and young children, ignoring the complex developmental needs of adolescents (ages 13-17) as they transition into adulthood. This makes sense; it is easier to design sociotechnical solutions that monitor and restrict undesirable behavior than it is to build systems that help adolescents youth how to self-regulate their own actions. Similarly, it is also more clear cut to create laws, such as the Childrens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), that protect younger children (ages 13 and under), that together, either result in teens being treated like children or leaving teens to virtually fend for themselves. In my talk, I discuss the status quo of technical solutions for adolescent online safety and propose a paradigm shift towards more teen-centric approaches for keeping adolescents safe online, which includes empowering teens to self-regulate their online behaviors to more effectively manage the risks (e.g., information breaches, cyberbullying, sexual solicitations, and exposure to explicit content) they may encounter online. Bio: Dr. Pamela Wisniewski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with a Ph.D. in Computing and Information Systems. She was recently a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Pennsylvania State University, working with Dr. John (“Jack”) M. Carroll. Dr. Wisniewski has over 6 years of industry experience as a systems developer/business analyst in the IT industry. Her research interests are situated at the juxtaposition of HCI, Social Computing, and Privacy. An emerging theme across her research has been regulating the boundaries between how individuals manage their relationships with technology and how they manage their social interactions with others through the use of technology. Her goal is to frame privacy as a means to not only protect end users, but more importantly, to enrich online social interactions that individuals share with others. She is particularly interested in the interplay between social media, privacy, and online safety for adolescents. Dr. Wisniewski’s work has won best papers (top 1%) and best paper honorable mentions (top 5%) at premier conferences in her field, as well as being featured on NPR, Forbes, and Science Daily.

Spring 2017

Date	Leader	Topic
02/02/2017	Kickoff to a new Semester!	Come network, make introductions, and share what each of us is working on Please come to our first BBL of the spring 2017 semester to introduce yourself and share what you're working on in the coming semester. The first BBL will be for us to network with each other and kickoff a great new semester.
02/09/2017	Bilge Mutlu, University of Wisconsin-Madison	Human-Centered Principles and Methods for Designing Robotic Technologies Abstract: The increasing emergence of robotic technologies that serve as automated tools, assistants, and collaborators promises tremendous benefits in everyday settings from the home to manufacturing facilities. While these technologies promise interactions that can be highly complex and beneficial, their successful integration into the human environment ultimately requires these interactions to also be natural and intuitive. To achieve complex but intuitive interactions, designers and developers must simultaneously understand and address human and computational challenges. In this talk, I will present my group’s work on building human-centered guidelines, methods, and tools to address these challenges in order to facilitate the design of robotic technologies that are more effective, intuitive, acceptable, and even enjoyable through successful integration into the human environment. The first part of the talk will review a series of projects that will demonstrate how the marrying of knowledge about people and computational methods through a systematic design process can enable effective user interactions with social, assistive, and telepresence robots. The second part of the talk will cover ongoing work that provides designers and developers with tools to apply these guidelines to the development of real-world robotic technologies and that utilizes partnerships with domain experts and end users to ensure the successful integration of these technologies into everyday settings. The talk will conclude with a discussion of high-level design guidelines that can be drawn from this body of work. Bio: Bilge Mutlu is an associate professor of computer science, psychology, and industrial engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received his Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute in 2009. His background combines training in interaction design, human-computer interaction, and robotics with industry experience in product design and development. Dr. Mutlu is a former Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of the NSF CAREER award as well as several best paper awards and nominations, including HRI 2008, HRI 2009, HRI 2011, UbiComp 2013, IVA 2013, RSS 2013, HRI 2014, CHI 2015, and ASHA 2015. His research has been covered by national and international press including the NewScientist, MIT Technology Review, Discovery News, Science Nation, and Voice of America. He has served in the Steering Committee of the HRI Conference and the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, co-chairing the Program Committees for ROMAN 2016, HRI 2015, ROMAN 2015, and ICSR 2011, the Program Sub-committees on Design for CHI 2013 and CHI 2014, and the organizing committee for HRI 2017. More information on Dr. Mutlu and his research can be found at http://bilgemutlu.com and http://hci.cs.wisc.edu.
02/16/2017	Susan Winter, University of Maryland, College Park	Designing for Diversity: HCI and the Support of Scientific Research Abstract: Understanding user needs and designing new technologies to meet those needs has long been a focus of HCI research. HCI has been embedded within a sociotechnical systems approach often considering user needs within a work context where an employing organization designs the work, chooses the technologies, and hires and trains the employees. This organizational “container” has been eroding, which raises interesting questions about the relationships among people, innovative technologies, work, and the role of HCI in this new hyper-diverse environment. Bio: Susan J. Winter, Ph.D. is Associate Dean for Research and co-Director of the Center for Advanced Study of Communities and Information at the University of Maryland’s School of Information Studies. She has previously been a Science Advisor in the Directorate for Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences, Acting Deputy Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation and a Program Director supporting distributed, interdisciplinary scientific collaboration where she was responsible for programs funding research on virtual organizations as sociotechnical systems, cyber-enabled discovery and innovation, and cyberinfrastructure education, and enabling resources for building community and capacity for complex data-driven and computational science including high performance computers, large-scale databases, and advanced software tools. Her award-winning research on the impact of information and communications technology on the organization of work has appeared in top journals; she has extensive international managerial and consulting experience, and currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Information Technology, Information and Organization, and Group and Organization Management. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona, her MA from the Claremont Graduate University, and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley.
02/23/2017	Virginia Byrne and Joohee Choi, University of Maryland, College Park '	Research design review & CSCW Practice Talk Research Design Review Abstract: Virginia is seeking feedback on a new research project conducted in partnership with the Division of Information Technology: studying and designing an online orientation for college students about online success strategies. The project is motivated by instructor reports that online students have lower rates of retention and reported satisfaction. This project is an exploratory mixed methods design with a series of planned design iterations. We hope to better understand the real vs. perceived strategies enacted by successful online college students. Then, we will design an orientation program to scaffold online learning so that our online students are more likely to enact the strategies shows to predict success. Please come give advice & feedback! Bio: Virginia Byrne is a Technology, Learning and Leadership PhD student in the College of Education's Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership department. She researches how the learning experience changes when learners interact with peers through technology. At the HCIL, Virginia is a member of the BodyVis research team. Title: Characteristics of Collaboration in the Emerging Practice of Open Data Analysis Abstract: The democratization of data science and open government data initiatives are inspiring groups from civic hackers to data journalists to use data to address social issues. The analysis of open government data is expected to encourage citizens to participate in government as well as to improve transparency and efficiency in government processes. Through interviews and survey responses we gathered information on forty projects that involved the analysis of open data. We found that collaborations were interdisciplinary, small in scale, with low turnover, and synchronous communication. Most of the projects asked exploratory questions and made use of descriptive statistics and visualizations. We discuss how these findings contribute to an understanding of the emerging practice of open data analysis and to a broader understanding of open collaboration. Bio: Joohee Choi is a Ph.D. student in Information Studies at University of Maryland, College Park. She is advised by Prof. Yla Tausczik. Her research interest is in understanding collaborative problem solving phenomenon mediated by information technology. She studied how collaboration emerges around the practice of open government data analysis, as well as in multiple online platforms like Github and Stack Overflow. Her current research looks at online Q&A community, Stack Exchange, with a focus on moderators' roles in the community.
03/02/2017	Diversity in Tech Discussion	To continue our discussions surrounding diversity in tech please come to Thursday's BBL prepared to talk about two current diversity topics: 1. Diversity and the LGBTQ Community http://www.geekwire.com/2015/out-in-tech-what-its-like-to-be-lgbt-in-an-industry-struggling-with-diversity/ http://fortune.com/2015/03/12/lesbians-in-tech/ 2. Sexism in Tech https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber http://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/totally-unacceptable-environment-women-tech.html The readings are simply posted as a quick read to get us all thinking about these topics. Please bring your questions and comments as we continue to support and build a diverse and inclusive community here in the HCIL, in the HCI field more broadly, and in the world as a whole.
03/09/2017	Tim Summers & Sanjna Srivatsa, University of Maryland, College Park	Using Business Intelligence and Machine Learning in financial decision making in Cybersecurity sector Abstract: Cybersecurity is a complex and multifaceted challenge that is continuously growing in importance. It is a concern that not only affects banks and government agencies, as it constantly revealed through the media, but its implications expand beyond. It comes as no surprise that Wall Street would push efforts to cash in on the opportunity that is cybersecurity. In fact, cybercrime is fueling a worldwide cybersecurity market which is expected to grow from $75 billion presently to $170 billion by 2020. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent by consumers, businesses, governments, and the rest of the world to secure our ever-changing catalog of technology including, PCs, personal and corporate networks, the Internet of Things (IoT), and mobile devices. Despite a tumultuous stock market and poor venture capital returns, cybersecurity companies are raising large rounds of financing from investors. Due to the nascent nature of this field, the highly data-driven investment methodologies of old are not effective in guiding investment decisions. Investors complain that these methods are not agile and fall short when keeping up with current trends in the cybersecurity market. Our research utilizes principles of business intelligence and the latest research in hacker cognitive psychology to present a comprehensive, informative and easily digestible indicator for investors that is agile and self-optimizing. We present a model that considers blogosphere sentiment, relevant news, trend data, and real-time cyber-attack tools, techniques, and procedures to produce an investment indicator that will assist investors in their decision making. Bio: Dr. Timothy Summers - Director of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Engagement PhD, Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, selected Innovation and Design Fellow M.S. in Information Security Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University Field of Interest: Cybersecurity - Providing a better understanding of hackers and their influence on our largest, most complex socio technological issues Sanjna Srivatsa - Graduate Student of the Information Management Program specializing in Business Intelligence and Machine Learning Graduate assistant for the Virtual Computing Lab Independent study with Dr. Summers Recipient of the MIM Alumni award for Academic excellence 2016
03/16/2017	Raja Kushalnagar, Gallaudet University	Multimedia for Deaf Eyes: How do we make multimedia accessible for deaf and hard of hearing people? Abstract: Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people have relied on assistive and accessible technologies/services to consume or produce aural information. Some hard of hearing people rely on an assistive technology approach to enhance aural information for easier perception and understanding. Other hard of hearing and most deaf people rely on an accessible technology approach to transform the aural information to visual or tactile information for easier perception and understanding. We will briefly discuss the history of DHH assistive and accessible technology. We will then go through interactive examples of how deaf and hard of hearing people consume and produce information through assistive and accessible technologies. After the examples, we will discuss how the differences in aural, visual and tactile modalities influence multimodal information consumption and production Finally, we will discuss the design and development of effective accessible computing solutions for multimodal information access. Bio: Raja Kushalnagar is the Director of the Information Technology program in the Department of Science, Technology and Mathematics at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. His research interests encompass the fields of accessible computing and accessibility/intellectual property law, with the goal of improving access to multimodal information for deaf and hard of hearing (deaf) individuals. In the accessible computing field, he investigates how deaf individuals use aural-to-visual access such as speech-to-text or sign language interpreters and on multimodal access disparities between hearing and deaf. He also develops accessible computing solutions to address these disparities in multimodal information access. In the accessibility/intellectual property law field, he advocates for updates in accessible and intellectual property law, to incorporate accessible computing advances such as captioning/subtitling. He worked in industry for over five years before returning to academia and disability law policy. Towards that end, he completed a J.D. and LL.M. in disability law, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science. He served on the Federal Communications Commission’s Consumer Advocacy Commission. He has published several peer-reviewed publications and received grants in the fields of accessible computing, accessible law and intellectual property law. He can be reached at raja.kushalnagar@gallaudet.edu
03/23/2017	No Brown Bag, Spring Break.
03/30/2017	Dion Goh, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and information Nanyang Technological University	Gaming the System: How Useful are Game-based Approaches for Crowdsourcing Content? Abstract: Crowdsourcing has become a major way of getting work done through an online community. In addition to employing volunteers or paid human experts, computer games are a possible means to attract participants for crowdsourcing projects. Such games are seen as a promising approach to crowdsourcing because they capitalize on people's desire for entertainment. In other words, they make crowdsourcing fun and engaging, fostering participation in the process. This talk will introduce game-based approaches for crowdsourcing. The talk will illustrate these ideas in a specific context of crowdsourcing content, and in particular, mobile media. By blending games with crowdsourcing of mobile media, such applications provide entertainment and content is created as a result of gameplay. Nevertheless, there are challenges associated with game-based approaches for crowdsourcing since they have to meet the twin goals of entertaining users and producing quality output. Through various studies that will be presented, issues in creating these games as well as design lessons are discussed. Bio: Dion Goh has a PhD in computer science. He is currently Associate Professor with Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), where is also the Founding and current Director of the Masters of Information Systems program in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information. He was also the Founding Associate Chair of Graduate Studies of the school. His major areas of research are in mobile information sharing and seeking, social media perceptions and practices, and gamification techniques for shaping user perceptions and motivating behavior. Dion has led a number of funded projects in the use of gamification in mobile content sharing, the use of games for mental health interventions, human computation games for data analytics, mobile tagging, and collaborative querying.
04/06/2017	Allison Druin University of Maryland, College Park	Information @ the Extremes: The National Park Service and a Digital Future Information access, use, preservation, and policy has taken on new meanings for me as I have worked in the federal government. My leave from UMD has spanned two presidential administrations and almost two years. Join me as I reflect on "information @ the extremes" and how we have brought participatory leadership to digital change at the National Park Service. The information I share with you represents my own opinions and ideas and does not reflect the positions of the National Park Service, nor the Department of the Interior, nor the federal government. I also ask that social media not be used to post a summary. Dr. Allison Druin is currently a Special Advisor for National Digital Strategy at the National Park Service. To serve in the federal government, Dr. Druin has taken a 2-year leave of absence being a Professor from the University of Maryland. Previous to her position with the National Park Service, she was Chief Futurist for the UMD Office of the Vice President of Research, and co-founded the Future of Information of Alliance. One position that has not changed for almost 20 years, is being a proud member of the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) where she founded "KidsTeam" to design new technologies for children with children as design partners. For over 12 years she worked with the National Park Service as an outside partner to help develop new digital experiences for learning about the historic, scientific, or cultural aspects of a park or NPS program.
04/13/2017	Daniel Votipka University of Maryland, College Park	Who is Mr. Robot?: A Study of the Humans Behind Software Vulnerability Discovery Abstract: Finding security vulnerabilities in software is a critical task for any organization which still requires human effort even though automation has made significant strides in recent years. The task of vulnerability discovery typically falls on traditional software testers within an organization and white-hat hackers either through bug bounty programs or contracting. This talk explores the experiences, skills, processes, motivations, and metal models of these two communities. We describe our ongoing, semi-structured interview study which focuses on how these groups find bugs, how they have developed the necessary skills, and the challenges they face and give some preliminary findings. Bio: Daniel Votipka is a PhD student in the CS Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Daniel received his MS in Information Security, Technology, and Management from Carnegie Mellon University and his BS in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Daniel's research interests are in usable security, in particular, studying the security behaviors and mental models of those involved in the creation and use of software (i.e. developers, testers, and end-users).
04/20/2017	Rebecca Stone University of Maryland, College Park	Keeping Culture SAFe - DrupalCon Practice Talk Bio: Currently works as a contractor for a global science and technology firm, where she specializes in Automated Behavioral Analysis, a unique and significant automated expansion of psychology's Applied Behavior Analysis. Rebecca co-chairs her company’s Women's Network Employee Resource Group at the enterprise level, where she is responsible for thirteen chapters both nationally and internationally and serving over 30,000 employees. Prior to this she served in the armed forces and worked in multiple technical and leadership positions around the world to include Europe, the Middle East, and the White House. She also serves on many state commissions and national boards. She is the only Commissioner in Maryland's history to hold dual commissions: American Indian Affairs and Veterans Affairs. Nationally she has served on multiple boards, including the Advisory Committee on Minority Veterans, where she was the sub-committee chair on health under the former Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Bob McDonald. Her dedication and loyalty have earned Rebecca multiple accolades, including the President’s Volunteer Service Award - Gold; the Defense Meritorious Service Medal; the Working Mother Magazine & National Association of Female Executives-Women of Excellence Rising Star Award; a CNN Hero nomination; and the 2016 Maryland Governor's Service Award. Rebecca holds a BS in Psychology (USM) and completed the summer intensive program on cultural neuroscience at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, she is currently pursuing an MS in Human Computer Interaction at UMD and is exploring research opportunities in UX surrounding cultures & sub-cultures and diversity differences in various technologies. Rebecca is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the National Association of Female Executives (NAFE), Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the American Legion. Abstract: The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has provided one of the most accepted and widely used methods with which to scale agility within an organization. It also inherently calls upon the delivery of value to the customer. While value is typically encapsulated within the value stream, through areas such as vision and UX, one word that cannot be found anywhere within the framework is "culture". This talk explores how consideration of culture and the target user(s) can dramatically shift the direction of a project, value stream or business. It also covers how this influences the vision and UX design within a portfolio. It will cover the cost of refactoring legacy code that did not consider target demographics when initially conceived, as well as some of the UX Research methods, such as ethnography, that can be used to build cultural consideration within your business model. It will help people focus on a larger picture than just a team, project, program or portfolio approach to the end user... that end users themselves function as a system of systems that needs to be considered. The talk is primarily aimed at intermediate practitioners: ScrumMasters/Developers/UX Content Strategists/Product Owners/CEOs/Biz Dev/UX Researchers/UX Designers/SAFe Practitioners This session will be of interest to those with intermediate experience who work in UX, Agile, Business or Portfolio Vision/Management and who have an interest in how culture can be considered in SAFe and other Scaled Agile approaches.
04/27/2017	Anthony Pellicone, Elissa Redmiles, Brenna McNally University of Maryland, College Park	CHI Practice Talk Anthony Pellicone The Game of Performing Play: Understanding Streaming as Cultural Production Abstract : Live streaming has become pervasive in digital game culture. Previous work has focused largely on technological considerations in streaming platforms. However, little is known about how streamers enter the practice, gain skills, and operate as content producers. We present a qualitative study of an online forum dedicated to streaming. By observing the conversations between veterans and newcomers to the practice, we develop an understanding of how streamers must tie together technological, social, and gameplay-based skills to craft an appealing performance of play. We find that a key skill in streaming is the development of a unique attitude and persona as a gamer, which permeates into every element of a streamer’s performance. As individual identity becomes important in streaming practice, design considerations for platform features such as community moderation and stream metrics may help improve equitable participation in this increasingly important aspect of game culture. Bio: Anthony is in his fifth year of the Information Studies PhD program at the University of Maryland, and he will be defending his dissertation in May. Generally, he is interested in the ways that people learn, socialize, and play in online spaces dedicated to games. His previous work has centered on digital gameplay as an experience that is connected across multiple platforms and communities, and the culture of play in these environments. Currently he is researching both informal science learning in Alternate Reality Games, as well as live-streaming video games as an act of performance and cultural production. Elissa Redmiles Where is the Digital Divide? A Survey of Security, Privacy, and Socioeconomics Abstract: The behavior of the least-secure user can influence security and privacy outcomes for everyone else. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that influence the security and privacy of a broad variety of people. Prior work has suggested that users with differing socioeconomic status (SES) may behave differently; however, no research has examined how SES, advice sources, and resources relate to the security and privacy incidents users report. To address this question, we analyze a 3,000 respondent, census-representative telephone survey. We find that, contrary to prior assumptions, people with lower educational attainment report equal or fewer incidents as more educated people, and that users’ experiences are significantly correlated with their advice sources, regardless of SES or resources. Bio: Elissa Redmiles is a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland in Computer Science. Her research focuses on understanding and measuring users' security behavior and developing security education interventions for at-risk users. She is the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Facebook Fellowship. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Elissa held Marketing Management and Software Engineering roles at IBM and was a Data Science for Social Good Fellow at the University of Chicago. Brenna McNally Gains from Participatory Design Team Membership as Perceived by Child Alumni and their Parents Abstract: The direct gains children perceive from their membership on Participatory Design (PD) teams are seldom the focus of research studies. Yet, how HCI practitioners choose to include children in PD methods may influence the value participants see in their participation, and thereafter the outcomes of PD processes. To understand what gains former child members of a PD team perceive from their participation we conducted a two-part study. In Study 1 we surveyed and interviewed child alumni of a PD team to determine gains that are perceived first-hand. In Study 2 we obtained a secondary perspective by surveying and interviewing parents of alumni. We report on the perceived gains to former participants that were identified and described in these two studies—including collaboration, communication, design process knowledge, and confidence. We reflect on our findings through discussions of the continued applicability of gains, new opportunities, and implications for PD practitioners and methods. Bio: Brenna is a PhD candidate in Information Studies at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). Brenna’s thesis investigates participant perspectives on their membership in an intergenerational Participatory Design team, with a focus on how participants view the ethics of their participation and perceive gains from participation. Brenna is also the Research Coordinator for Kidsteam: A co-design team that works with children to design technologies that support children’s learning and play. Through this work she has been a part of the design of many amazing children’s technologies with researchers throughout the university as well as numerous industry (e.g., Pearson International, Nickelodeon) and government (e.g., U.S. National Park Service, the Office of Science, Technology and Policy at the White House) organizations. Brenna has a M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Maryland and a B.A. in Telecommunication- Digital Media, Art, and Technology from Michigan State University.
05/04/2017	Fan Du, Matthew Mauriello, Majeed Kazemitabaar, University of Maryland, College Park	CHI Practice Talk Fan Du PeerFinder: Finding Similar People to Guide Life Choices Abstract: People often seek examples of similar individuals to guide their own life choices. For example, students making academic plans refer to friends; patients refer to acquaintances with similar conditions, physicians mention past cases seen in their practice. How would they want to search for similar people in databases? We discuss the challenge of finding similar people to guide life choices and report on a need analysis based on 13 interviews. Our PeerFinder prototype enables users to find records that are similar to a seed record, using both record attributes and temporal events found in the records. A user study with 18 participants and four experts shows that users are more engaged and more confident about the value of the results to provide useful evidence to guide life choices when provided with more control over the search process and more context for the results, even at the cost of added complexity. Majeed Kazemitabaar MakerWear: A Tangible Approach to Interactive Wearable Creation for Children Abstract: Wearable construction toolkits have shown promise in broadening participation in computing and empowering users to create personally meaningful computational designs. However, these kits present a high barrier of entry for some users, particularly young children (K-6). In this paper, we introduce MakerWear, a new wearable construction kit for children that uses a tangible, modular approach to wearable creation. We describe our participatory design process, the iterative development of MakerWear, and results from single- and multi-session workshops with 32 children (ages 5-12; M=8.3 years). Our findings reveal how children engage in wearable design, what they make (and want to make), and what challenges they face. As a secondary analysis, we also explore age-related differences. Bio: Majeed is Masters Student in the Computer Science department, working with Jon Froehlich in the HackerSpace. He co-designs, builds and evaluates technologies for children. Matthew Mauriello Exploring Novice Approaches to Smartphone-based Thermographic Energy Auditing: A Field Study Abstract: The recent integration of thermal cameras with commodity smartphones presents an opportunity to engage the public in evaluating energy-efficiency issues in the built environment. However, it is unclear how novice users, without professional experience or training, approach thermographic energy auditing activities. In this paper, we recruited 10 participants for a four-week field study of end-user behavior exploring novice approaches to semi-structured thermographic energy auditing tasks. We analyze thermographic imagery captured by participants as well as weekly surveys and post-study debrief interviews. Our findings suggest that while novice users perceived thermal cameras as useful in identifying energy-efficiency issues in buildings, they struggled with interpretation and confidence. We characterize how novices perform thermographic-based energy auditing, synthesize key challenges, and discuss implications for design. Bio: Matthew Louis Mauriello is a 6th year PhD Candidate working with Dr. Jon E. Froehlich in Sustainable HCI and Ubiquitous Computing.
05/18/2017	Tim Dwyer Monash University	Network Visualization and Immersive Analytics Abstract: In this talk I will give an overview of on-going and recent research activities in the Monash Adaptive Visualisation Lab (MArVL). We currently have two significant research initiatives. The first is Network Visualisation, an area we have exploring for many years, with a focus on developing techniques to produce high-quality diagrams using constraint-based optimisation and alternative, scalable approaches to visualise large graphs. Our second research thrust in recent years has been Immersive Analytics: developing a new research area for the visualisation community that seeks to investigate the use of emerging display and interaction technologies and techniques for visualisation visual analytics. We believe these new technologies represent the potential for a paradigm shift in the utility and ubiquity of visual thinking. Bio: Tim Dwyer received his PhD on "Two and a Half Dimensional Visualisation of Relational Networks" from the University of Sydney in 2005. He was a post-doctoral Research Fellow at Monash University from 2005 to 2008, then a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research, USA in 2008-2009. From 2009 to 2012 He worked as a Senior Software Development Engineer with the Visual Studio product group at Microsoft, USA. A highlight of this period was shipping the Code Map software dependency visualisation tool with Visual Studio 2012. In late 2012 He returned to Monash University as a Larkins Fellow where he now co-directs the Immersive Analytics Initiative and is a founding member of the Monash Adaptive Visualisation Lab.

Fall 2016

Date	Leader	Topic
09/01/2016	Kickoff to a new Semester!	Come network, make introductions, and share what each of us is working on Please come to our first BBL of the fall 2016-2017 academic year to introduce yourself and share what you're working on in the coming semester. The first BBL will be for us to network with each other and kickoff a great new semester.
09/08/2016	TBD	CHI Papers Clinic Lunch Abstract: TBD Bio: TBD
09/15/2016	Karen Holtzblatt InContext Design / University of Maryland, College Park	Contextual Design, Cool Concepts, and Women in Tech Project Abstract: Karen has recently joined University of Maryland as a Research Scientist and will provide a brief overview of her work in user-centered design techniques and innovation as well as her new work understanding and creating intervention methods to help technology companies retain women. Karen will share the new techniques described in her upcoming book Contextual Design V2: Design for life. Because of the revolution in how technology is now integrated into life with smartphones and tablets, designers and researchers must consider new ways of collecting and using user data. The Cool Project helped define the key aspects we must now consider; these led to changes in the Contextual Design Method. Karen will also share the focus of her research on women in technology at the iSchool . Currently through collaborating with many in the industry The Women in Tech Project presents a framework for what keeps women satisfied and successful. They have also developed a measure which is being honed. More research will be occurring as well as the creation of intervention games and techniques. Bio: Karen Holtzblatt is the inventor of Contextual Inquiry and co-founder of InContext Design, which began in 1992 to use Contextual Design techniques to work with product teams to deliver market data and design solutions to clients across multiple industries. Her books, Contextual Design: Defining Customer Centered Systems, and Rapid Contextual Design, are used by companies and universities all over the world. Karen is a member of the CHI Academy (awarded to significant contributors in the Computer Human Interaction Association) and in 2010 received CHI’s first Life Time Award for Practice for her impact on the field. She holds a doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto.
09/22/2016	Elissa Redmiles HCIL, University of Maryland, College Park	How I Learned to be Secure: a Census-Representative Survey of Security Advice Sources and Behavior Abstract: Few users have a single, authoritative, source from whom they can request digital-security advice. Rather, digital- security skills are often learned haphazardly, as users filter through an overwhelming quantity of security advice. By understanding the factors that contribute to users' advice sources, beliefs, and security behaviors, we can help to pare down the quantity and improve the quality of advice provided to users, streamlining the process of learning key behaviors. In this work we rigorously investigated how users' security beliefs, knowledge, and demographics correlate with their sources of security advice, and how all these factors influence security behaviors. Using a carefully pre-tested, U.S.-census-representative survey of 526 users, we present an overview of the prevalence of respondents' advice sources, reasons for accepting and rejecting advice from those sources, and the impact of these sources and demographic factors on security behavior. We find evidence of a "digital divide" in security: the advice sources of users with higher skill levels and socioeconomic status dier from those with fewer resources. This digital security divide may add to the vulnerability of already disadvantaged users. We conclude with recommendations for combating the digital divide and improving the efficacy of digital-security advice. Bio: Elissa Redmiles is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on usable security - the intersection between Cyber-security and Human Computer Interaction. Elissa was a 2015 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Fellow at the University of Chicago. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., she held Marketing Management and Software Engineering roles at IBM and completed her B.S. in Computer Science, cum laude, at the University of Maryland.
09/29/2016	Gregg Vanderheiden Director, Trace R&D Center, University of Maryland, College Park	UMD’s New Trace Center; Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow Abstract: The Trace R&D Center just landed on campus in the iSchool. Founded at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1971, it has for 45 years been a leader in Technology and Disability research, development, and policy. Trace Center developments are found in every modern operating system, US Automated Postal Stations, Amtrak Kiosks, DHS Airport kiosks, and ICT of all types. Trace guidelines and work were used as the foundation for IBM, Microsoft, Apple and other companies' access guidelines as well as key parts of the W3C's WCAG 1 and 2, and US Access Board’s 508/255 guidelines. A brief history of the Trace Center will be provided followed by an overview of the current programs, partners, and potential future directions. Opportunities to get involved will also be explored. Bio: Dr. Vanderheiden has been active in the area of Technology and Disability for over 45 years. His early work was in Augmentative Communication, a term taken from his writings in the late 70’s. Starting in 1979, his focus shifted to personal computers and he worked inside Apple, Microsoft and IBM on increasing the accessibility and usability of their products. Apple included features in Apple IIe, gs, and MacOS and iOS. IBM and Microsoft licensed 9 features from Dr. Vanderheiden’s group for inclusion in DOS, OS/2, and Windows. Dr. Vanderheiden co-chaired and co-authored the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0 and 2.0), worked with the Access Board on 255 and 508, and lead the effort to develop the EZ-Access package of cross-disability access features that are now built into Amtrak ticket machines, Automated Postal Stations, Homeland Security Passport Kiosks, and many other ITMs across the country. His current focus is on the development of a Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII).
10/06/2016	John Wilbanks, Sage Bionetworks	Using Human Centered Design to Make Informed Consent Actually Inform Abstract: Mobile technologies have the potential to revolutionize both the way in which individuals monitor their health as well as the way researchers are able to collect frequent, yet sparse data on participants in clinical studies. In order for data from these devices to have maximal impact in a research setting however, the development of systems to collect, manage, and broadly share these data is essential. Possibly more important are the social constructs on which these systems need to be built to allow maximal utility to come from these data while minimizing adverse impact on individual participants. More specifically, the union of these systems and constructs must be an ecosystem build upon trust. We will present one such ecosystem focused on putting the participant at the center of the data collection: specifically by acknowledging possible risks to both individual participants as well as sub-populations of participants, providing opt-in settings for broad data sharing, and the development of an open research ecosystem built upon a social contract between researchers and research participants. A case study of one such mHealth study, leveraging Apple’s ResearchKit framework, will be presented and discussed. Bio: John Wilbanks is the Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks. Previously, Wilbanks worked as a legislative aide to Congressman Fortney “Pete” Stark, served as the first assistant director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, founded and led to acquisition the bioinformatics company Incellico, Inc., and was executive director of the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. In February 2013, in response to a We the People petition that was spearheaded by Wilbanks and signed by 65,000 people, the U.S. government announced a plan to open up taxpayer-funded research data and make it available for free. Wilbanks holds a B.A. in philosophy from Tulane University and also studied modern letters at the Sorbonne.
10/13/2016	Fan Du HCIL, University of Maryland, College Park	EventAction: Visual Analytics for Temporal Event Sequence Recommendation Abstract: Recommender systems are being widely used to assist people in making decisions, for example, recommending films to watch or books to buy. Despite its ubiquity, the problem of presenting the recommendations of temporal event sequences has not been studied. We propose EventAction, which to our knowledge, is the first attempt at a prescriptive analytics interface designed to present and explain recommendations of temporal event sequences. EventAction provides a visual analytics approach to (1) identify similar records, (2) explore potential outcomes, (3) review recommended temporal event sequences that might help achieve the users' goals, and (4) interactively assist users as they define a personalized action plan associated with a probability of success. Following the design study framework, we designed and deployed EventAction in the context of student advising and reported on the evaluation with a student review manager and three graduate students. http://hcil.umd.edu/eventaction Bio: Fan Du is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, College Park. He works as a research assistant with Prof. Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant. His research focuses on data visualization and human-computer interaction, especially on analyzing healthcare data and user activity logs. http://frankdu.org
10/20/2016	Grant McKenzie, University of Maryland, College Park	Exploring dimensions of 'place' Abstract: Place is one of the foundational concepts on which the field of Geographical Sciences has been built. Traditionally, geographic information science research into place has been approached from a spatial perspective. While space is an integral feature of place, it represents only a single dimension (or a combination of three dimensions to be exact), in the complex, multidimensional concept that is place. With the increased availability of large, user-generated datasets, it has becoming increasingly apparent that the value of 'big data' lies not necessarily in its size, but in its heterogeneity. In my research, I exploit this heterogeneity to build computational, data-driven models of human behavior, taking a multi-dimensional approach to investigating place and the activities people carry out at those places. In this talk I introduce the concept of Semantic Signatures built from spatial, temporal and thematic dimensions extracted from user-contributed, and authoritative datasets. I show how these signatures can enhance existing geolocation methods, form the foundation of place-similarity models and contribute to visualizing the platial pulse of a city. Bio: Grant McKenzie is an assistant professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, affiliate of the Center for Geospatial Information Science and director of the Place Time Analysis Lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2015) and a Master of Applied Science degree from the University of Melbourne (2008). Grant's research interests lie in spatio-temporal data analysis, geovisualization, place-based data analytics and the intersection of information technologies and society. More information on D. Grant McKenzie and his research can be found at http://grantmckenzie.com and http://ptal.io.
10/27/2016	Greg Walsh, University of Baltimore	Life in the Big City: A reflection of four years of HCI Education and Research in Baltimore Abstract: For the last four years, I have been an assistant professor at the University of Baltimore. In those four years, I’ve developed 11 different courses, started a research lab and co-design team (KidsteamUB), and integrated community engagement into our graduate UX classes. In this talk, I will discuss how my research has morphed to be accommodating to the urban university experience, and how life in the HCIL prepared me for these challenges as well as some lessons learned that I can share. Bio: Greg Walsh earned his PhD from the UMD iSchool in 2012 and has been an assistant professor at the University of Baltimore ever since. He is the graduate program director for the MS in Interaction Design and Information Architecture as well as the UX Design program. He is ruggedly handsome and a recipient of a Google 2015 Faculty Research Award.
11/03/2016	John Dickerson, Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park	Better Matching Markets via Optimization Abstract: The exchange of indivisible goods without money addresses a variety of constrained economic settings where a medium of exchange—such as money—is considered inappropriate. Participants are either matched directly with another participant or, in more complex domains, in barter cycles and chains with other participants before exchanging their endowed goods. We show that techniques from computer science and operations research, combined with the recent availability of massive data and inexpensive computing, can guide the design of such matching markets and enable the markets by running them in the real world. A key application domain for our work is kidney exchange, an organized market where patients with end-stage renal failure swap willing but incompatible donors. We present new models that address three fundamental dimensions of kidney exchange: (i) uncertainty over the existence of possible trades, (ii) balancing efficiency and fairness, and (iii) inherent dynamism. For each dimension, we design scalable branch-and-price-based integer programming market clearing methods. Next, we combine these dimensions, along with high-level human-provided guidance, into a unified framework for learning to match in a general dynamic setting. This framework, which we coin FutureMatch, takes as input a high-level objective (e.g., “maximize graft survival of transplants over time”) decided on by experts, then automatically learns based on data how to make this objective concrete and learns the “means” to accomplish this goal—a task that, in our experience, humans handle poorly. Bio: John Dickerson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. I'm the lead developer of the US nationwide kidney exchange program, and lead developer of a better way to deal with TV advertisements (currently in the pilot phase with two of the nation's largest MSOs). He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and has been supported by a Facebook Fellowship, Siebel Scholarship, and an NDSEG Fellowship.
11/10/2016	Bill Kules, iSchool, University of Maryland, College Park	Teaching JavaScript as Social Justice: Interrogating Culture, Bias and Equity in an Introductory Programming Course Abstract: When learning skills like computer programming, students need to develop an understanding of issues of culture, bias and equity at the same time that they learn the technical elements. As information professionals they will need to understand and navigate these issues. This presentation describes a course that integrates both social justice and technical elements, instead of separating them into different courses as is typical practice. I will describe the approach and structure and reflect on the experience and student feedback. I will invite all of us to discuss the creative tension in teaching both technical and ethical skills, and how we can embed these across the curriculum. Bio: Dr. Bill Kules is Visiting Associate Professor at the iSchool. Prior to joining the iSchool, he was Chair of the Department of Library and Information Science (LIS) at The Catholic University of America. Dr. Kules seeks to improve educational practice and outcomes in LIS education through teaching, research and advocacy, with a particular interest in helping students understand how information technology is situated in and reflects broader social structures, constructs and issues such as race, class and gender. He has experience in blended curriculum development, faculty development and mentoring, and continuous program improvement through systematic planning and outcomes assessment. Before joining academia, Dr. Kules spent 20 years designing and implementing information systems for a variety of applications, including wireless telephony, customer service, banking, and a multimedia web sites. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Maryland in 2006.
11/17/2016	Mohammed AlGhamdi, McGill University	Usability of Three-dimensional Virtual Learning Environments: An Exploratory Study of the Think Aloud Approach Abstract: A recent review examining 10 years of research between 1999 and 2009 and focusing on the application of virtual reality technology for educational purposes, has found that the majority of interest from the research community has centered on the learning outcomes of such applications (Mikropoulos & Natsis, 2011). Out of the 53 studies reviewed by Mikropoulos & Natsis, 50 have examined the learning outcomes of such environments. While the findings of this review have revealed that learning outcomes were overwhelmingly positive for such environments, the review has also identified other topics of great interest and importance to such applications that have received very little attention from the research community. One specific topic that has not received adequate attention from researchers examining 3D virtual learning environments is usability. This is of great concern as usability has been shown to influence the learning experiences of users of 3D virtual learning environments, which in turn affects their learning outcomes (Dede, Salzman, Loftin, & Sprague, 1999; Lee, Wong, & Fung, 2010; Merchant et al., 2012). The few studies that have examined the usability of 3D virtual learning environments have predominately focused on the collection of users’ likes and dislikes through the utilization of inquiry-based usability evaluation approaches such as questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups (Dede et al., 1996; Di Blas et al., 2005; Lu, 2008; McArdle et al., 2010; Monahan et al., 2008; Perera et al., 2009; Roussos et al., 1999; Virvou & Katsionis, 2008). While this type of data is of value, it fails to provide usability information based on actual system use; rather, it provides subjective feelings reported by end users regarding system use. In an effort to examine how other usability evalaution approaches can be utilized to provide valuable data stemming from actual system use, my PhD research focused on exploring the use of the think aloud approach for the usability evalaution of a three-dimensional virtual learning environment by end users. In this talk, I will present the research I conducted to explore the impact of the think aloud approach on the validity of various usability metrics collected during the usability evaluation of a specific three-dimensional virtual learning environment by early-teens between the ages of 14-15 years. Bio: Mohammed J. Alghamdi is a faculty member at the School of Information Sciences at Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah Saudi Arabia. He is currently a PhD student in the School of Information Studies in McGill University. He has recently submitted his PhD thesis dissertation titled “Usability of Three-dimensional Virtual Learning Environments: An Exploratory Study of the Think Aloud Approach” and is awaiting to defend it in December of 2016. Throughout his time at the School of Information Studies, he has been involved in research studies focusing on the information seeking process of early-teens engaged in inquiry-based learning as well as research focusing on intergenerational design teams. He has also conducted information literacy seminars for middle school students in the Montreal, Quebec area.
11/24/2016	No Brown Bag, Thanksgiving Break.
12/01/2016	HCIL	Discussion: Diversity in Tech Abstract: Join us for a conversation about diversity in tech. We'll explore disparities in the field, consider the causes of this issue, and discuss what we as HCI educators, researchers, and professionals can do to close this gap. Before joining us on Thursday, please take a some time to read Vauhini Vara's Bloomberg Businessweek article Why Doesn't Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders? and look over some statistics from the Information is Beautiful and the Wall Street Journal on this topic. We'll use these resources as a starting point for our conversation.
12/08/2016	HCIL	HCIL Seasonal Cookie Exchange Abstract: To celebrate the end-of-year holidays, the HCIL will have a cookie exchange/get-together in the lab during the last HCIL brown bag of the semester. Cookie exchanges work by individuals bringing in small bags of cookies (e.g., five bags of chocolate chip cookies) and then selecting that number of other types of cookies (e.g., a bag of sugar cookies, oatmeal raisin, peanut blossoms, etc.) We encourage people to bring cookies in bags (5-6 bags of 5-6 cookies). However, even if you can’t bring in cookies, please still join us for this festive event! Sign up for the cookie exchange here: https://goo.gl/forms/ov68tWvHyzpfbmuA2

Spring 2016

Date	Leader	Topic
01/28/2016	Kickoff to a new Semester!	Come network, make introductions, share what each of us is working on, and learn about the new HCIL website Please come to our first BBL of the spring and introduce yourself, and share what you're working on in the coming semester. We'll also cover our new HCIL website and ask our community to help us tweak and improve it (so bring your laptops if you can). The first BBL will be for us to network with each other and kickoff a great new semester.
02/04/2016	Tom Yeh Assistant Professor, University of Colorado CS (link). Host: Jon Froehlich	Printing Pictures in 3D Abstract: The Tactile Picture Book Project (TPBP) is a research endeavor that utilizes 3D printing as a new media platform for designing, developing, and distributing information in a tangible format. The mission of TPBP is to give children with visual impairments access to a lot more pictures they can "see" by touch and feel. To date, the TPBP team has made 3D adaptations for several children's book classics such as Goodnight Moon, Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Dear Zoo, and Noah's Ark. In this talk, Yeh will demonstrate examples of 3D pictures, discuss the technical challenges encountered in creating these pictures, and share the many valuable lessons learned through the process. In addition, Yeh will present CraftML, a new 3D modeling markup language designed to mimic common web technologies including HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. CraftML allows web designers without prior 3D modeling experience to easily bring their creative talents and design skills to the domain of 3D modeling. The TPBP is supported by a research grant from the National Science Foundation and has appeared in several news outlets such as 9News, Newsweek, DailyCamera, DailyMail, New Scientist, Science Daily, and NPR. (For more information see: https://craftml.io, http://3da11y.info/, http://www.tactilepicturebooks.org/) Bio: Tom Yeh received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for studying vision-based user interfaces. In 2012, he joined the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. Prior to joining CU, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). Dr. Yeh's research interests include 3D printing, big data, citizen science, and mobile security. He has published more than 30 articles across these interest areas. He has received best paper awards and honorable mentions from CHI, UIST, and MobileHCI. In 2014, he received the Student Affairs Faculty of the Year Award. Dr. Yeh's research projects are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
02/11/2016	Cliff Lampe Associate Professor, University of Michigan iSchool (link) Host: Jessica Vitak	Citizen Interaction Design and its Implications for HCI Abstract: Cliff Lampe will be describing the Citizen Interaction Design program at the University of Michigan, which has the goals of teaching HCI and UX skills to students by having them work on civic engagement applications in coordination with Michigan cities. The goals of the program are to explore the role of HCI in civic engagement, to train students in the concept of sustainable interaction design, and to develop new forms of “town/gown” relationships. Dr. Lampe will describe the elements of the program, and then discuss the pros and cons of different efforts over the last three years. The talk will conclude by placing CID in the context of larger trends in HCI and social computing research, in particular the expanding set of domains that HCI is trying to cover - and what that means for rigorous research. Bio: Cliff Lampe is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. His research focuses on prosocial outcomes of social computing systems, including the positive effects of social media interaction, civic engagement through social software, and nonprofit use of social computing tools. In that work, he’s collaborated on studies of sites like Facebook, Reddit, Wikipedia, Ask.fm, Slashdot and more. Cliff is serving as the Technical Program Chair for CHI2016 and CHI2017, as Vice President for Publications for ACM SIGCHI, and as Steering Committee Chair Elect for the CSCW community. In Dungeons and Dragons, he prefers the Druid player class.
02/18/2016	Thomas Haigh Associate Professor of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (link) Host: ???	Working on ENIAC: The Lost Labors of the Information Age Abstract: Books and shows about the history of information technology have usually focused on great inventors and technical breakthroughs, from Charles Babbage and Alan Turing to Steve Jobs and the World Wide Web. Computer operations work has been written out of the story, but without it no computer would be useful. Information historians Thomas Haigh and Mark Priestley are writing it back in. This talk focused on ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer, based on research for their book ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer, published by MIT Press in January, 2016. They explains that the women now celebrated as the “first computer programmers” were actually hired as computer operators and worked hands-on with the machine around the clock. They then look at business data processing work from the 1950s onward, exploring the grown of operations and facilities work during the mainframe era. Concluding comments relate this historical material to the human work and physical infrastructure today vanishing from public view into the “cloud.” Bio: Thomas Haigh received his Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania after earning two degrees in Computer Science from the University of Manchester. Haigh has published on many aspects of the history of computing including the evolution of data base management systems, word processing, the software package concept, corporate computer departments, Internet software, computing in science fiction, computer architecture, and the gendered division of work in data processing. As well as ENIAC in Action (MIT, 2016) he edited Histories of Computing (Harvard, 2011), a collection of the work of Michael S. Mahoney. He write the “Historical Reflections” column for Communications of the ACM. His new projects are an reexamination of the wartime Colossus codebreaking machine and a book, Acolytes of Information, on the history of information systems work in the American corporation.
02/25/2016	Adil Yalcin PhD Candidate in Computer Science at UMD (link)	Keshif: Data Exploration using Aggregate Summaries and Multi-Mode Linked Selections Abstract: We present a new aggregation and multi-mode linked selection framework for data exploration. To enable scalable data overviews, aggregates group records by their attribute values and measure group characteristics within data summaries. To reveal details, linked selections visualize data distributions on aggregations upon interaction with three complementary modes: highlighting, filtering, comparison. This model is domain independent, expressive, minimal, and scalable, and constructs an exploration space without the complexity of manual visualizations and interaction specification tasks. We implemented this framework for tabular data as a web-based tool, Keshif. A Keshif data browser combines summarized aggregations on existing or calculated attributes, and individual records. Data exploration is supported from importing raw data, to authoring, sharing, and forking data browsers, through a fluid, consistent, rapid, and animated interaction design. We demonstrate aggregation designs for multiple data types (categorical, set-typed, numeric, timestamp, spatial) using various glyphs and non-overlapping visualizations (bar, line, icon, disc, geo-area). We illustrate examples from 130+ publicly published Keshif data browsers from diverse domains. Bio: M. Adil Yalcin, is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science at University of Maryland, College Park, and a member of Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL). His goal is to lower human-centered barriers to data exploration and presentation. His research focuses on information visualization and interaction design, implementation, and evaluation. He is the developer of keshif, a web-based tool for rapid exploration of structured datasets. In his previous work, he developed computer graphics techniques and applications.
03/03/2016	Eytan Adar. Assoc Prof, School of Information, Univ. of Michigan (link). Host: Ben Shneiderman	All the Data Fit to Print: Newsroom Tools for Generating Personalized, Contextually-Relevant Visualizations (Campus Visualizations Partnership lecture) Abstract Visualizations can enhance news article content by presenting complex facts clearly and providing contextually-relevant visualizations. By using novel natural language and text mining approaches, our systems define "queries" that encode the article's topic (e.g., "unemployment in CA in March," "global average temperatures in 2012") and the comparisons that are made in the article's text (e.g., differences between states or over time) to guide the visualization generation. Compelling visualizations are relevant and 'interesting'-concepts that are very hard measure, but we address these challenges in the Contextifier, NewsViews, and PersaLog systems, which are meant to help journalists tell their stories more effectively (joint work with Brent Hecht, Jessica Hullman, Tong Gao, Carolyn Gearig, Josh Ford, and Nick Diakopoulos). Bio: Eytan Adar is an Associate Professor in the School of Information & Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. He works at the intersection of HCI and IR/Data Mining and ranges from empirical studies of large-scale online behaviors to building new systems, tools and methods. He has a Bachelors and Masters from MIT and a PHD in Computer Science at the University of Washington. He was a researcher at HP Labs and Xerox PARC, and spun out a company called Outride. Eytan is co-founder of ICWSM and has served as general chair for ICWSM and WSDM. His website is http://www.cond.org
03/10/2016	Alina Goldman PhD Student in Information Studies at UMD's iSchool	StreamBED: Teaching Citizen Scientists to Judge Stream Quality with Embodied Virtual Reality Training Abstract: StreamBED, a new virtual reality (VR) training environment teaches citizen scientists to make holistic assessments about water quality by allowing them to explore and compare virtual watersheds. The initial design of StreamBED garnered positive feedback, but elicited a need for a comprehensive redesign. This talk poses several questions to understand how training may be redesigned to be more engaging and informative. Bio: Alina is a PhD Student in Information Studies at UMD's iSchool.
03/17/2016	No Brown Bag for Spring Break.
03/24/2016	Daniel Robbins (link)	Visualize getting a job (Campus Visualizations Partnership lecture) Abstract Everyone hates LinkedIn. While quite useful, its user interface and paucity of visualization tools requires users to infer relationships, rely on short term memory to form mental models, and resort to ancillary tools for tracking progress. Dan will discuss visualization techniques to assist in a typical job search process. These include views and tools to effectively give overviews of professional connections, stay on top of communications, cue up reminders, and generate summaries. To do this, Dan will suggest ways of integrating timelines, faceted search, and social networks, all in the context of mobile design constraints. Bio: Dan Robbins has lead the creative design and strategy of high-profile, tech-heavy, immersive experiences at the Microsoft Envisioning Center, Artefact, Brown University Computer Graphics Group, Microsoft Research, and Burning Man. Although a trained sculptor, he has published and patented extensively in the areas of UX design for mobile, search, and 3D. Dan weaves together futuristic points of view, empathic observations of the real world, and leading design trends to bring more trust, beauty, magic, and joy into the world. Dan has a very large collection of sculpture supplies in his cold and wet Seattle basement and till very recently, was the proud owner of two broken down artcars. You can see some of Dan's projects via his work and art portfolios (http://bit.ly/dcr-work-portfolio; http://bit.ly/dan_art_sway).
03/31/2016	TBD	TBD Abstract: TBD Bio: TBD
04/07/2016	Andrea Wiggins Assistant Professor, University of Maryland iSchool (link)	Community-based Data Validation in Citizen Science Abstract: Technology-supported citizen science has created huge volumes of data with increasing potential to facilitate scientific progress. However, verifying data quality is still a substantial hurdle due to the intended applications of data and limitations of existing data quality mechanisms. The talk discusses results from a paper that received an "Honorable Mention" at CSCW 2016 which investigated community-based data validation practices in an online community where people record what they see in the nature. We also examined the characteristics of records of wildlife species observations that affected the outcomes of collaborative data quality management. The findings describe the processes that both relied upon and added to information provenance through information stewardship behaviors, which led to improvements in indicators of data quality. The likelihood of community-based validation interactions were predicted by several factors, including the types of organisms observed and whether the data were submitted from a mobile device. Unexpected and counter-intuitive results reflect the realities of the material world in which mobile apps are deployed, and suggest implications for design and practice. The talk concludes with discussion of the evolution of recent developments in Federal policies related to crowdsourcing and citizen science. Bio: Dr. Wiggins is an Assistant Professor at Maryland's iSchool and director of the Open Knowledge Lab at UMD. She studies the design and evolution of sociotechnical systems for large-scale collaboration and knowledge production. Andrea's current work focuses on the role of technologies in citizen science, evaluating individual and collective performance and productivity in open collaboration systems, and the dynamics of open data ecosystems. Andrea serves on several working groups and advisory boards for citizen science projects across a variety of scientific disciplines, and regularly advises federal agencies and nonprofit organizations on citizen science project and technology design.
04/14/2016	CHI Practice Talks Kotaro Hara & Elissa Redmiles	Kotaro: The Design of Assistive Location-based Technologies for People with Ambulatory Disabilities: A Formative Study Elissa: I Think They’re Trying to Tell Me Something: Advice Sources and Selection for Digital Security Abstract (Kotaro): In this paper, we investigate how people with mobility impairments assess and evaluate accessibility in the built environment and the role of current and emerging locationbased technologies therein. We conducted a three-part formative study with 20 mobility impaired participants: a semi-structured interview (Part 1), a participatory design activity (Part 2), and a design probe activity (Part 3). Part 2 and 3 actively engaged our participants in exploring and designing the future of what we call assistive locationbased technologies (ALTs)—location-based technologies that specifically incorporate accessibility features to support navigating, searching, and exploring the physical world. Our Part 1 findings highlight how existing mapping tools provide accessibility benefits—even though often not explicitly designed for such uses. Findings in Part 2 and 3 help identify and uncover useful features of future ALTs. In particular, we synthesize 10 key features and 6 key data qualities. We conclude with ALT design recommendations. Abstract (Elissa): Users receive a multitude of digital- and physical-security advice every day. Indeed, if we implemented all the security advice we received, we would never leave our houses or use the Internet. Instead, users selectively choose some advice to accept and some (most) to reject; however, it is unclear whether they are effectively prioritizing what is most important or most useful. If we can understand from where and why users take security advice, we can develop more effective security interventions. As a first step, we conducted 25 semi-structured interviews of a demographically broad pool of users. These interviews resulted in several interesting findings: (1) participants evaluated digital-security advice based on the trustworthiness of the advice source, but evaluated physical-security advice based on their intuitive assessment of the advice content; (2) negative-security events portrayed in well-crafted fictional narratives with relatable characters (such as those shown in TV or movies) may be effective teaching tools for both digital- and physical-security behaviors; and (3) participants rejected advice for many reasons, including finding that the advice contains too much marketing material or threatens their privacy.
04/21/2016	Sir Timothy O'Shea (link) & Eileen Scanlon (link) Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Edinburgh University, & Regius Professor of Open Education, The Open University, UK (respectively)	How New Technologies Can Enhance Learner Autonomy Abstract: Find out more about the new technology-based approaches for supporting education from the perspective of learner autonomy. The University of Edinburgh and the British Open University have made extensive use of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), including innovative applications of MOOCs to domains such as real-time political situations and citizen science. While to date, MOOCs and shared virtual environments have augmented rather than displaced more mature modes of e-learning, in the future, individual and distributed groups of learners will be able to become much more autonomous as they take advantage of new developments in data science. Sir Timothy O'Shea Bio: Tim O’Shea holds a BSc in Mathematics and Experimental Psychology from Sussex University and a PhD in Computer Based Learning from Leeds University. Prior to assuming academic leadership positions at the Open University, Gresham College, the University of London, and Edinburgh University, he worked as a researcher in the Computer Science Department of the University of Texas at Austin, the Bionics Research Lab at the University of Edinburgh and the Systems Concepts Lab, Xerox PARC, California. His research interests include computer-based learning, MOOCs, artificial intelligence, and mathematics education and encompass 10 books, 22 BBC television programs, and 100+ journal articles. In 2014 Debrett's and The Sunday Times named the 500 most influential people in the United Kingdom and listed Tim in the top 30 in Technology. Eileen Scanlon Bio: Eileen Scanlon is Associate Director of Research and Innovation in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University, UK. She is also Visiting Professor in Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh. Previously, she has held visiting academic appointments at University of California Berkeley and the University of London. Eileen has published extensively in the fields of technology enhanced learning and science communication and has been recognized for exceptional contributions to the fields of educational technology and public engagement with the sciences. Her projects have been funded by The European Commission, The Economic and Social Research Council, The Hewlett Foundation, The Higher Education Funding Council for England, Research Councils UK, and The Joint Information Systems Committee.
04/28/2016	Tamara Clegg Assistant Professor, University of Maryland iSchool & Education (link)	Scientizing Daily Life with New Social, Mobile, & Ubiquitous Technologies Abstract: How can new technologies help learners begin to see the world through scientific lenses (i.e., scientize their lives)? In this talk I will discuss my research team’s current work in understanding and promoting learners scientific disposition development through technology-supported life-relevant science learning experiences. In the Science Everywhere project, June Ahn, Jason Yip, and our amazing graduate students are designing a social media app and interactive community displays to help entire neighborhoods in low-SES contexts scientize their daily life experiences together. I will describe an initial analysis of learners’ and their families’ interactions with the Science Everywhere mobile app that informs our understanding of ways new mobile technologies can promote learners’ scientizing across contexts. I will also provide an initial look at our work on designing and integrating large community displays in these neighborhood contexts. Bio: Tamara “Tammy” Clegg is an assistant professor in the College of Education with a joint appointment in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. She received her PhD in Computer Science at Georgia Tech in 2010 and her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from North Carolina State University in 2002. From 2010-2012 Clegg was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland with the Computing Innovations Fellows program. Her work focuses on developing technology and learning experiences to support life-relevant learning environments where children and communities engage in science in the context of achieving goals relevant to their lives. Clegg uses participatory design to design these new technologies. Her current projects include the design of a social media app and connected community displays called Science Everywhere to engage entire neighborhoods (i.e., learners, teachers, parents, informal educators) in science inquiry connected across community contexts. Additionally, she is working on the design of interactive self-sensing wearables called BodyVis (and supporting learning experiences) that display the dynamic inner-workings of the wearer’s anatomy. Clegg is also co-PI on a project called NatureNet focused on engaging diverse adult communities in community-driven environmental projects with mobile apps and community technologies. These projects are funded by the NSF Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies and Advancing Informal Science Learning (AISL) programs.
05/05/2016	Chris Preist Reader in Sustainability and Computer Systems at Bristol University (link) Host: Jon Froehlich	On the role of gamification in citizen engagement: What is it good for, and what not? Abstract: Community campaigning groups typically rely on core groups of highly motivated members. In this talk we consider how crowdsourcing strategies can be used to support such campaigns. We focus on mobile data collection applications and strategies that can be used to engage casual participants in pro-environmental data collection. We report the results of a study conducted with Close The Door Bristol, a community campaign that encourages shops to keep doors shut in winter and so reduce energy consumption. Our study used both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the impact of different motivational factors and strategies, including both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. Specifically we will present analyses of: - The impact of different motivators and enablers to contribution, including the effect of intrinsic environmental motivation. - The impact of scoring points and a leaderboard on contribution, and the surprising explanation for the observed behaviour revealed through qualitative analysis. Bio: Dr Chris Preist is Reader in Sustainability and Computer Systems at the University of Bristol. He leads a team of researchers who combine the disciplines of Industrial Ecology and Computer Science, with two two main themes; - Modelling the energy use of digital services to allow decisions in software design, internet architecture, business model and user behaviour to be assessed for their impact, both in the short and longer term. - Using digital services to engage individuals, communities and businesses with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, most notably in the area of domestic retrofit for energy efficiency. His research partners include the BBC, Guardian News and Media, the Environment Agency, the Carbon Disclosure Project and EDF Energy. Prior to joining University of Bristol, he was Head of Sustainable IT Research at HP Labs, Bristol from 2007-09, where he led work on the strategic impact of climate change on business and technology development to exploit emerging opportunities. He joined HP Labs in 1987 following a degree in Pure Maths from University of Warwick, and a Ph.D. in logic programming from Imperial College, London. In previous work at HP Labs, he conducted research in artificial intelligence, automated diagnosis, agent-mediated e-commerce and the semantic web.

Fall 2015

Date	Leader	Topic
09/03/2015	All new students!	New student introductions! Much like last year, this BBL is for new students to introduce themselves, talk briefly about their projects and interests and bounce their ideas off the HCIL members. The purpose of these informal and participatory talks is to help connect new students with professors and other students sharing the same interests. We'll also cover useful resources for students (e.g., this very wiki!)
09/10/2015 STARTING AT NOON exceptionally	Jean-Daniel Fekete Senior Research Scientist at INRIA (link)	ProgressiVis: a New Workflow Model for Scalability in Information Visualization Abstract: Information Visualization (infovis) has, for years, been limited to small data: a typical infovis application will work well with up-to 1000 items/records, a few can scale to 100,000 items, and very few, including the leading commercial products such as Tableau and Spotfire, have been able to deal with millions of items. Billions are seldom mentioned in the infovis literature. In contrast, the research fields of machine learning and databases are routinely dealing with datasets of several billions of items, and the numbers are growing. There are legitimate reasons why it takes time for infovis to start catching-up with these large numbers, and some work such as Lins et al. Nanocubes (http://www.nanocubes.net/) and Liu et al. imMens (http://idl.cs.washington.edu/papers/immens), have started to show possible routes to scalability. However, they both rely on either pre-computed aggregations that need hours to compute for large datasets, or on a highly parallel infrastructure performing aggregations on the fly. In my talk, I will explain why we need more flexible solutions and present a new workflow architecture called ProgressiVis, to achieve progressive computations and visualization over massive datasets. Bio: Jean-Daniel Fekete is Senior Research Scientist (DR1) at INRIA, the French National Research Institute in Computer Science. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1996 from Université Paris-Sud. From 1997 to 2001, he joined the Graphic Design group at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes that he led from 2000 to 2001. He was then invited to join the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland in the USA for one year. He was recruited by INRIA in 2002 as a confirmed researcher and became Senior Research Scientist in 2006. He is the Scientific Leader of the INRIA Project Team AVIZ (see www.aviz.fr) that he founded in 2007 and that is well known worldwide in the domains of visualization and human-computer interaction. His main research areas are Visual Analytics, Information Visualization and Human Computer Interaction. Jean-Daniel Fekete was the General Chair of the IEEE VIS Conference in 2014, the first time it was held outside of the USA in Paris. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), Member of the IEEE Information Visualization Conference Steering Committee and of the EG EuroVis Steering Committee. During 2015, he is on Sabbatical at NYU and Harvard.
09/17/2015	Liese Zahabi Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Maryland, College Park (link)	Exploring Information-Triage: Speculative interface tools to help college students conduct online research Abstract: In many ways, the promise of the Internet has been overshadowed by a sense of overload and anxiety for many users. The production and publication of online material has become increasingly accessible and affordable, creating a confusing glut of information users must sift through to locate exactly what they want or need. Even a fundamental Google search can often prove paralyzing.The concept of information-triage may help mitigate this issue. Information-triage is the process of sorting, grouping, categorizing, prioritizing, storing and retrieving information in order to make sense and use of it. This work examines the role of design in the online search process, connects it to the nature of human attention and the limitations of working memory, and suggests ways to support users with an information-triage system. This talk will focus on a set of three speculative online search interfaces and user-testing sessions conducted with college students to explore the possibilities for information-triage and future interface prototypes and testing. Bio: Liese Zahabi is a graphic/interaction designer and Assistant Professor of Graphic/Interaction Design at the University of Maryland in College Park. She received her Master of Graphic Design from North Carolina State University, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Eastern Michigan University. She has been working as a designer for thirteen years, and teaches courses in interaction design, motion design, typography and advanced graphic design. Liese’s academic research focuses on search as a cognitive and cultural process and artifact, and how the design of metaphoric interfaces can change the experience of search tasks. Her creative design work is also metaphorical, and explores how the nature of search manifests itself in visual patterns and sense-making, and how language and image intersect within the context of the Internet.
09/24/2015	HCIL Student Presentations	Graduate students will give short presentations about their past, present, and/or future work. If you are interested in participating, please email the BBL student co-coordinators Austin Beck (austinbb@umd.edu) or Leyla Norooz (leylan@umd.edu)
10/01/2015	Celine Latulipe Associate Professor at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte (link)	Borrowing from HCI: Teamwork, Design and Sketching for Intro Programming Classes Abstract: In this talk, I will present recent efforts to reinvent introductory programming classes by borrowing teaching methodologies from HCI and design classes. A main component is the introduction of the concept of "Lightweight Teams", which has shown to increase student engagement in introductory programming. We also make use of Guzdial and Ericson's Media Computation approach, gamification and more recently formal use of sketchbooks. I will show the results we have so far, which were the subject of a best paper award at ACM SIGCSE earlier this year, and discuss how we continue to build on this work. We believe that bringing an HCI sensibility to introductory programming classes has the potential to increase retention in the classes and in CS majors, and is especially likely to help women and under-represented minorities feel more welcome in the classroom. Bio: Dr. Celine Latulipe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Software and Information Systems in the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research involves developing and evaluating novel interaction techniques, creativity and collaboration support tools and technologies to support the arts, and developing innovation computer science curriculum design patterns. Dr. Latulipe examines issues of how to support exploration in complex interfaces and how interaction affordances impact satisficing behavior. She also conducts research into how to make computer science education a more social experience, both as a way of more deeply engaging students and as an approach to broadening participation in a field that lacks gender and racial diversity.
10/08/2015	Adil Yalçın PhD Student, Department of Computer Science (link)	AggreSet: Rich and Scalable Set Exploration using Visualizations of Element Aggregations (InfoVis practice talk) (AggreSet) Datasets commonly include multi-value (set-typed) attributes that describe set memberships over elements, such as genres per movie or courses taken per student. Set-typed attributes describe rich relations across elements, sets, and the set intersections. Increasing the number of sets results in a combinatorial growth of relations and creates scalability challenges. Exploratory tasks (e.g. selection, comparison) have commonly been designed in separation for set-typed attributes, which reduces interface consistency. To improve on scalability and to support rich, contextual exploration of set-typed data, we present AggreSet. AggreSet creates aggregations for each data dimension: sets, set-degrees, set-pair intersections, and other attributes. It visualizes the element count per aggregate using a matrix plot for set-pair intersections, and histograms for set lists, set-degrees and other attributes. Its non-overlapping visual design is scalable to numerous and large sets. AggreSet supports selection, filtering, and comparison as core exploratory tasks. It allows analysis of set relations including subsets, disjoint sets and set intersection strength, and also features perceptual set ordering for detecting patterns in set matrices. Its interaction is designed for rich and rapid data exploration. We demonstrate results on a wide range of datasets from different domains with varying characteristics, and report on expert reviews and a case study using student enrollment and degree data with assistant deans at a major public university.
10/15/2015
10/22/2015	Heather Bradbury Director, Masters of Professional Studies Programs at Maryland Institute College of Art (link)	Tipping the Balance Abstract: When the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) began the Masters of Professional Studies in Information Visualization www.mica.edu/infovis, there was a document and a goal to take MICA in a new academic direction by integrating design education with course work in visual communication, data analysis, and statistical applications. The audience for this new program was wide ranging in professional skills, expertise, and industry, from designers to research professionals, statisticians, and analysts, coming from private and public industries. This talk will tell the story of how the program moved from an idea to launch, to its fourth year of students, and how design, data, and analysis work together to tip the balance to develop graduates who are more fluid and knowledgeable in the process of creating beautiful, informative, accurate, and persuasive visualizations. Bio: Heather Bradbury, Director of MICA’s Masters of Professional Studies programs in Information Visualization and the Business of Art and Design, comes to MICA with over 15 years of experience in the fields of creative and educational project development and strategic communication. Heather’s background and broad professional experience, including Communications Specialist at the Maryland State Department of Education, Office of the State Superintendent; IDEAS Grants Manager and Education Specialist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (Home of Hubble Space Telescope); and co-owner of Balance-the Salon, an award-winning hair salon and photo gallery, provides her with a unique perspective in program operations and management as well as communication through various mediums to tell stories. Heather has additional experience working in the fields of architecture/interior design, engineering, events and catering, and production pottery.
10/29/2015	Kurt Luther Assistant Professor of Computer Science in HCI/CSCW at Virginia Tech (link)	Combining Crowds and Computation to Make Discoveries and Solve Mysteries Abstract: We are living in the era of big data, and making sense of this data to improve the human condition is a major challenge. Automated techniques in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and other areas have made significant headway, but many types of complex data analysis still require human intervention. Crowdsourcing and human computation raise exciting possibilities for enhancing computational data analysis techniques with scalable human intelligence and creativity, allowing us to solve harder problems and generate deeper insights than humans or computers working alone. In this talk, I will describe several of my recent projects exploring the potential of crowdsourced data analysis. These include Crowdlines, a system that crowdsources a comprehensive overview of a knowledge domain using existing material gathered from the web; Incite, a system that engages non-expert crowds in helping professional scholars make discoveries in large collections of historical documents; and Context Slices, a system that combines crowdsourcing and visual analytics techniques to help experts solve mysteries, such as identifying the subject matter in historical photos or uncovering a terrorist plot in a body of textual evidence. Bio: Kurt Luther is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, where he is also Co-Director of Social Informatics for the Center for Human-Computer Interaction. He builds and studies social technologies that support creativity and discovery, often with applications to the creation and analysis of visual media, such as animation, graphic design, and photography. He also explores how social technologies can engage the public in historical research, preservation, and education. His work is currently funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Archives, and Google. Previously, he was a postdoc in the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and he holds a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech.
11/05/2015	C. Scott Dempwolf Research Assistant Professor and Director, UMD - Morgan State Joint Center for Economic Development (link)	Visualizing Innovation Ecosystems: Networks, Events and the Challenges of Policy and Practice Abstract: For the past five years Scott Dempwolf has collaborated with faculty and students in HCIL to develop new visualizations of innovation using NodeXL and, more recently, EventFlow. This talk presents some of the fruits of those collaborations and discusses some remaining challenges where new visualizations could help shape policy and practice related to innovation and economic development. Scott’s innovation network models use large administrative datasets including patents and research grants in new ways to create novel visualizations of innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems using NodeXL software. These models are being used by policymakers and economic developers to help accelerate the commercialization of research by identifying specific opportunities between university research and industry. Examples include the Illinois Science & Technology Roadmap; the Great Lakes Manufacturing megaregion; the emergence of innovation clusters in Pennsylvania; and local applications in Howard and St. Mary’s counties in Maryland. More recently, working with co-PI Ben Shneiderman and the EventFlow team in HCIL, Scott’s research uses EventFlow (and CoCo) software to analyze sequences of innovation activities. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the goals of this research are to develop new innovation metrics and new insights into the complex sequences of activities that comprise innovation processes. EventFlow’s novel visualizations and analytic capabilities are central to achieving these goals. This talk will present examples of Scott’s work using both NodeXL and EventFlow, focusing specifically on how the visualizations were created and used. The emphasis will be on the use of visualizations as tools for exploring and understanding data and for generating hypotheses. Some ongoing challenges, especially those pertaining to the use of visualizations to shape understanding and public policy will also be discussed. Bio: C. Scott Dempwolf is Assistant Research Professor in the Urban Studies and Planning Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Director of the UMD – Morgan State Center for Economic Development. He is also affiliated with the National Center for Smart Growth Education and Research. His research focuses on understanding, modeling, visualizing and measuring innovation processes; their relationships to economic growth; and the implications for public policy, business strategy and economic development practice. Along with partners from BioHealth Innovation, Scott recently founded Tertius Analytics, LLC. The startup is focused on commercializing applications of his research. Prior to his “second career” in academia, Scott practiced community and economic development at the neighborhood, city, county and regional levels for over 20 years. He teaches an economic development planning studio and other planning courses. He earned his PhD in Urban and Regional Planning at UMD; a Masters in Community and Regional Planning at Temple University; and a Bachelor’s from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
11/12/2015	Matt Mauriello1, Zahra Ashktorab2, Uran Oh1, Brenna McNally2 [1] UMD CS PhD Student [2] UMD iSchool PhD Student	Where Oh Where Have My Grad Students Gone?: An Internship Panel This panel will feature HCIL graduate students in the iSchool and Department of Computer Science who have completed summer internships at Microsoft Research and Google. Panelists will discuss a variety of topics including their experiences in their respective positions, the hiring process, tips to succeeding during the internship, and differences and similarities between their positions across and within companies. Questions will also be welcomed from the audience.
11/19/2015	Jen Golbeck Associate Professor at UMD's iSchool (link)	What I Did On My Sabbatical Abstract: Last year I was on sabbatical and it was the best thing ever! My plan was to do a little work and mostly sit around and read novels. Instead, I did a TON of work on many cool new things. I'll talk about my book, my projects, my new ventures into public intellectual land, and my winter in Miami. Bio: Jen Golbeck is the previous director of the HCIL and is an associate professor in the iSchool. She is a computer scientist and studies social media, AI, and privacy/security.
11/26/2014	No Brown Bag for Thanksgiving break.
12/03/2015	Ben Shneiderman Professor of Computer Science ([1])	Editing Wikipedia Tutorial/Workshop We'll share knowledge about Wikipedia editing, using the HCIL Wikipedia page as an example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Maryland_Human_%E2%80%93_Computer_Interaction_Lab). We'll exchange knowledge about how Wikipedia works, the policies such as NPOV (Neutral Point of View) and requirements for Notability.
12/10/2015	Larry Lee Chief System Engineer at Elucid Solutions (link)	The Lucidity Project: Bringing Privacy Back to the Web Abstract: Many of us have given up the hope of maintaining privacy on the web, willingly handing over our private lives for the opportunity to connect with those we care about. But imagine for a moment an Internet in which our personal information is secure, one in which corporations can't read our posts, scan our photos, or parse our private email. Lucidity is an open source content management system that places privacy at its core. Unlike Drupal and WordPress, Lucidity has been designed to protect our data from those to whom we entrust it while providing both ease of use and sophistication. Using Lucidity, developers can create sites that guarantee their users privacy – not just protection from theft – but also an assurance that those who steward their data can not exploit, sell, or manipulate it. The Lucidity project is backed by a small team at Elucid Solutions. We want to build a large coalition of developers, designers, and end users among the open source community, and to bring privacy back to the web! This talk will present Lucidity, describe its evolution, and paint a vision for its future. We invite you to join us in this exciting collaboration. Bio: Larry Lee has over half a decade of experience developing websites and mobile applications for NGOs and public health initiatives through the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is currently the chief systems engineer at Elucid Solutions and the technical lead for Lucidity - an open source content management system. He is committed to developing open source technologies that protect privacy and promote democratic freedom on the web.Larry Lee has over half a decade of experience developing websites and mobile applications for NGOs and public health initiatives through the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is currently the chief systems engineer at Elucid Solutions and the technical lead for Lucidity - an open source content management system. He is committed to developing open source technologies that protect privacy and promote democratic freedom on the web.
12/17/2015	HCIL	Seasonal Cookie Exchange Cookie exchanges involve people making a certain number of cookies (e.g., 6 bags of 6 cookies each) and bringing them in with a card describing the cookies. They all get lined up and then each person can take six bags of whichever types of cookies they want.

Spring 2015

Date	Leader	Topic
01/29/2015	Catherine Plaisant Associate Director of Research HCIL (link)	HCIL's work and its influence Abstract: An informal discussion as we watch old videos and discuss early work on hypertext, touchscreens sliders, query previews, bringing treasures to the surface, Lifelines, etc. This may be particularly illuminating to those of you that are younger… than the internet. View the history of the HCIL
02/05/2015	Karthik Badam PhD Student, Department of Computer Science	Cross-Device Frameworks for Collaborative Visualization Abstract: Collaborative Visualization focuses on shared use of interactive visual representations of data by a group engaged in joint information processing. However, to fully exploit this, we need to also bring cross-device interaction into picture considering that we carry more than a single device these days. In our research, we created two frameworks— Munin and PolyChrome— for building collaborative visualizations on multiple input and output surfaces, such as tabletop displays, wall-mounted displays, and mobile devices. These frameworks follows a layered architecture to abstract out the communication, interaction, and visualization requirements for the aforementioned. Furthermore, PolyChrome utilizes the web as a medium for collaborative visualization while maintaing a server for persistent storage of visualizations and user interaction over time. Using these two frameworks, we are currently working on 1) development of advanced interaction models for large display environments based on proxemics: the spatial attributes of users such as position, orientation, and distance, and 2) easing the process of collaboration in analytical activities by designing smart ways to share information (for instance, using QR codes).
02/12/2015	Jack Kustanowitz Principal at MountainPass Technology (link)	BusWhere - Never Miss the School Bus Again Abstract: BusWhere is a startup that we are working on in parallel with our client work, and it is geared at allowing parents and school bus administrators to track their children's school bus location to meet the bus in the morning and afternoon on time with no uncertainty or waiting around in the cold. We will discuss the history of the company, where things stand now, some technical and business challenges, and open the floor for questions and/or suggestions. We are in beta now at a couple of schools and will be going mass market in the coming months, so it is an interesting point of inflection / reflection. Bio: Jack founded MountainPass Technology in early 2010 to be the technology partner he was always looking for in previous management roles. Jack has over 18 years of experience managing teams to create and deploy intuitive, attractive, scalable, and secure mobile applications and web applications. On iOS and Android, he worked extensively on the NPR Music and News apps (with millions of downloads), and led development of several other apps including Behavioral Apptivation, Whooley, GrapeVine, iCall4Help, HabitWatch, SeasonClock, and others. He led teams to create user-facing web sites such as blufr.com, jdeal.com, Mood247.com, CareCentral.com and ThriftyPatient.com, did extensive work on back end systems to support the Answers.com and HealthCentral.com (each with millions of PV/month), and worked with MedText and Privia Health on a full application redesign and HIPAA compliance audit. He also has expertise in setting up operational infrastructure, data warehousing, CPL advertising and lead generation, and email deliverability, and has provided consulting for dozens of companies on a variety of technical challenges. Jack has a BS in Computer Systems Engineering from Boston University, and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, where he did research at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He grabs time when he can to play through some Beethoven piano sonatas and is looking forward to hiking with his two sons over an actual mountain pass when they get old enough.
02/19/2015	Jeff Rick Developer and Researcher, ScienceKit project (link)	Two kids, one iPad Abstract: Multi-touch devices are starting to replace PCs as the dominant form of computing, particularly for children. As a result, serious efforts are underway to investigate and integrate tablets into the classroom. Most of these research efforts are software agnostic, assuming that the current software ecology is sufficient to realize and study the potential of the hardware. In such a research mode, it is natural to think of tablets as personal devices since the vast majority of software is built around that premise (e.g., tablets as ebooks). Can they be more? Can tablets support collaborative learning? In this talk, I present a vision of tablets as tiny tabletops to support at-device collaboration. We developed the Proportion iPad app to realize and study this vision. In Proportion, two children work at one tablet to complete a series of increasingly difficult ratio / proportion problems. In our studies at German primary schools (grade 4, age 9-11), we used Proportion to study the role of collaboration and multi-touch. I will present both early empirical findings across conditions and a case study of a particularly successful group. Bio: Jochen "Jeff" Rick designs innovative and effective applications for the newest technologies to research the potential of these technologies to support collaborative, social, and exploratory forms of learning. With an M.S. Electrical Engineering (1999, Georgia Tech) and a Ph.D. Computer Science (2007, Georgia Tech), he feels comfortable developing for emerging platforms. He developed CoWeb, the first wiki designed to support learning, well before Wikipedia existed. He developed DigiTile, a tabletop application for two children to collaboratively learn about fractions through constructing colorful mosaic tiles, before there was a commercial touch tabletop. As an experienced designer (two major server technologies, six applications for interactive tabletops, two applications for tablets, two applications for multiple devices, etc.), he seeks to realize the future of learning technologies. He is the lead developer on UMCP's Science Everywhere project.
02/26/2015	Wei Bai PhD student, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (link)	BrowserCrypt: A Research on Encryption Usability Abstract: Using encryption tool is the only way to truly protect users’ confidentiality from third-party services. Although many encryption tools have been designed so far, they have been tested for usability either only in the lab or not at all. In this talk, we will present our research of usability about a particular encryption tool, called BrowserCrypt. First, we will talk about the overall design about this in-the-field study. Specifically, the usability of BrowserCrypt ignoring key management issue is detailed. Second, we will present our progress so far, including how BrowserCrypt works on Piazza and the data we have collected. Then, the challenges and limitations we encountered will be described, and our corresponding solutions will be proposed. Finally, we will introduce the future work. Bio: Wei Bai is the third-year Ph. D student in ECE department. He obtained this B.S in Electrical Engineering from Beihang University, Beijing, China in 2012 with distinction. He is currently working with Prof. Michelle Mazurek in Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2). His research interests include cyberattack detection and mitigation, and human factors for security and privacy.
03/05/2015 (Cancelled due to snow)	Kurt Luther Center for Human-Computer Interaction, Virginia Tech (link)	Designing Social Technologies for Creativity and Discovery Abstract: Computing has given rise to a wide range of software tools for supporting all stages of a creative process, from ideation and prototyping to disseminating finished creative works. More recently, these tools have begun to incorporate social elements, drawing on a growing body of research demonstrating the benefits of collaboration for enhancing creativity. Crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which allow software developers to programmatically seek out human workers to complete online micro-tasks and integrate the results directly into a user interface, suggest exciting new opportunities to design social technologies that support creative processes. In this talk, I will describe some of my recent projects in this space. These include Pipeline, a tool for supporting leaders of artistic collaborations organized online; and CrowdCrit, a system that crowdsources critiques of visual designs and aggregates the results for designers. I will also present some preliminary work using social technologies to help solve historical mysteries. Throughout the talk, I will identify broader theoretical and design implications for social computing and creativity support tools. Bio: Kurt Luther is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, where he is also a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and a faculty affiliate in Human Centered Design. His general research interests include social computing, crowdsourcing, and creativity support tools. Specifically, he builds and studies social computing systems that support creativity and discovery, with applications to citizen science, movie and game production, visual design, digital humanities, and other domains. His research has been featured by TIME, CNN, and Harvard Business Review. Previously, he was a postdoc in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech, where he was named a Foley Scholar, the GVU Center's highest honor. His undergraduate degree is from Purdue University, where he studied computer graphics, art, and design. He has also worked in the Social Computing groups at Microsoft Research and IBM Research, and the User Experience team at YouTube.
03/12/2015	Michele Williams PhD student, Department of Information Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) (link)	SWARM: Sensing Whether Affect Requires Mediation Abstract: SWARM (Sensing Whether Affect Requires Mediation) is a wearable affective technology designed to allow a user to reflect on their own emotional state, help a user modify their affect, and help a user to interpret the emotional states of others. SWARM aims for a universal design (inclusive of people with various disabilities), with a focus on modular actuation components to accommodate users’ sensory capabilities and preferences, and a scarf form-factor meant to reduce the stigma of accessible technologies through a fashionable embodiment. Using an iterative, user-centered approach, this talk presents SWARM’s design and additionally contributes findings for best practices in creating personal emotion management systems, communicating emotions through technology actuations, wearable design techniques (including a modular soft circuit design technique that fuses conductive fabric with actuation components), and universal design considerations for wearable technology. Bio: Michele A. Williams is a Human-Centered Computing PhD candidate at UMBC. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Bowie State University and a Masters of Software Engineering from Auburn University where she concentrated in human-computer interaction and her thesis consisted of a multimodal intelligent tutoring system. She has worked in industry as both a Voice User Interface Designer for IVR systems and an Accessibility Analyst evaluating systems for compliance with accessibility standards. Her doctoral research has included several projects focused on making technology more accessible for people with disabilities including using wearable computing and social collaboration to make “accessible fashion” and conducting studies to inform the design of mobile navigation technology for people with vision impairments.
03/19/2015 Spring Break (no food)	Sana Malik UMD CS PhD Candidate (link)	IUI '15 Practice Talk Abstract: Finding the differences and similarities between two datasets is a common analytics task. With temporal event sequence data, this task is complex because of the many ways single events and event sequences can differ between the two datasets (or cohorts) of records: the structure of the event sequences (e.g., event order, co-occurring events, or event frequencies), the attributes of events and records (e.g., patient gender), or metrics about the timestamps themselves (e.g., event duration). In exploratory analyses, running statistical tests to cover all cases is time-consuming and determining which results are significant becomes cumbersome. Current analytics tools for comparing groups of event sequences emphasize a purely statistical or purely visual approach for comparison. This paper presents a taxonomy of metrics for comparing cohorts of temporal event sequences, showing that the problem-space is bounded. We also present a visual analytics tool, CoCo (for “Cohort Comparison”), which implements balanced integration of automated statistics with an intelligent user interface to guide users to significant, distinguishing features between the cohorts. Lastly, we describe two early case studies: the first with a research team studying medical team performance in the emergency department and the second with pharmacy researchers. Bio: I'm a 4th-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science and the HCIL.
03/26/2015	Hyojoon Kim PhD Student, Georgia Institute of Technology (link)	uCap: An Internet Data Management Tool for the Home Abstract: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have introduced “data caps”, or quotas on the amount of data that a customer can download during a billing cycle. Under this model, Internet users who reach a data cap can be subject to degraded performance, extra fees, or even temporary interruption of Internet service. For this reason, users need better visibility into and control over their Internet usage to help them understand what uses up data and control how these quotas are reached. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a tool, called uCap, to help home users manage Internet data. We conducted a field trial of uCap in 21 home networks in three countries and performed an in-depth qualitative study of ten of these homes. We present the results of the evaluation and implications for the design of future Internet data management tools. Bio: Hyojoon Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology under the supervision of Professor Nick Feamster. He is broadly interested in computer networks and systems, but currently focus more on network configuration analysis, network reliability enhancement, and building better abstractions for network management. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin - Madison and M.S. from Georgia Tech. In the past, he has worked as a research engineer at Future Systems, a major manufacturer of network & security solutions in South Korea, and did several internships at HP Labs-Palo Alto, CA, USA.
04/02/2015	Matthew Mauriello PhD Student, Department of Computer Science (link)	CHI Practice Talk: Understanding the role of thermography in energy auditing: current practices and the potential for automated solutions Abstract: (Video Preview) The building sector accounts for 41% of primary energy consumption in the US, contributing an increasing portion of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. With recent sensor improvements and falling costs, auditors are increasingly using thermography—infrared (IR) cameras—to detect thermal defects and analyze building efficiency. Research in automated thermography has grown commensurately, aimed at reducing manual labor and improving thermal models. Though promising, we could find no prior work exploring the professional auditor’s perspectives of thermography or reactions to emerging automation. To address this gap, we present results from two studies: a semi-structured interview with 10 professional energy auditors, which includes design probes of five automated thermography scenarios, and an observational case study of a residential audit. We report on common perspectives, concerns, and benefits related to thermography and summarize reactions to our automated scenarios. Our findings have implications for thermography tool designers as well as researchers working on automated solutions in robotics, computer science, and engineering.
	Meethu Malu PhD Student, Department of Computer Science (link)	CHI Practice Talk: Personalized, Wearable Control of a Head-mounted Display for Users with Upper Body Motor Impairments Abstract: Head-mounted displays provide relatively hands-free interaction that could improve mobile computing access for users with motor impairments. To investigate this largely unexplored area, we present two user studies. The first, smaller study evaluated the accessibility of Google Glass, a head-mounted display, with 6 participants. Findings revealed potential benefits of a head-mounted display yet demonstrated the need for alternative means of controlling Glass—3 of the 6 participants could not use it at all. We then conducted a second study with 12 participants to evaluate a potential alternative input mechanism that could allow for accessible control of a head-mounted display: switch-based wearable touchpads that can be affixed to the body or wheelchair. The study assessed input performance with three sizes of touchpad, investigated personalization patterns when participants were asked to place the touchpads on their body or wheelchair, and elicited subjective responses. All 12 participants were able to use the touchpads to control the display, and patterns of touchpad placement point to the value of personalization in providing support for each user’s motor abilities.
04/09/2015	Fan Du PhD Student, Department of Computer Science (link)	CHI Practice Talk: Trajectory Bundling for Animated Transitions Abstract: Animated transition has been a popular design choice for smoothly switching between different visualization views or layouts, in which movement trajectories are created as cues for tracking objects during location shifting. Tracking moving objects, however, becomes difficult when their movement paths overlap or the number of tracking targets increases. We propose a novel design to facilitate tracking moving objects in animated transitions. Instead of simply animating an object along a straight line, we create "bundled" movement trajectories for a group of objects that have spatial proximity and share similar moving directions. To study the effect of bundled trajectories, we untangle variations due to different aspects of tracking complexity in a comprehensive controlled user study. The results indicate that using bundled trajectories is particularly effective when tracking more targets (six vs. three targets) or when the object movement involves a high degree of occlusion or deformation. Based on the study, we discuss the advantages and limitations of the new technique, as well as provide design implications.
	Leyla Norooz PhD Student, iSchool (link)	CHI Practice Talk: BodyVis: A New Approach to Body Learning Through Wearable Sensing and Visualization Abstract: (Video Preview) Internal organs are hidden and untouchable, making it difficult for children to learn their size, position, and function. Traditionally, human anatomy (body form) and physiology (body function) are taught using techniques ranging from worksheets to three-dimensional models. We present a new approach called BodyVis, an e-textile shirt that combines biometric sensing and wearable visualizations to reveal otherwise invisible body parts and functions. We describe our 15-month iterative design process including lessons learned through the development of three prototypes using participatory design and two evaluations of the final prototype: a design probe interview with seven elementary school teachers and three single- session deployments in after-school programs. Our findings have implications for the growing area of wearables and tangibles for learning.
04/16/2015	Yla Tausczik Assistant Professor, iSchool (link)	Open Government Data and Civic Applications: What would successful collaboration look like? Abstract: A growing number of governments are opening their data to the general public. The hope is that citizens and business will be able to transform the data into insights, services, and products that will provide social and economic value. Grassroots organizations and non-profits have begun to make use of the data through the development of civic applications. In this talk I focus on a network of 48 city level organizations. I compare these organizations to the open-source software community. By analyzing GitHub repositories, I evaluate how many civic applications are being created, how many people are involved, and how many of these projects last. Finally I imagine how community design, collaboration tools, and crowdsourcing techniques could be leveraged to better support distributed analysis of open government data.
04/23/2015 (Cancelled)	Heather Bradbury Maryland Institute College of Art	Building a Plane in Mid-air Abstract: How do you launch a new program in an emerging field at an established design school – data, information, and visualization. When the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) decided to create a new graduate program in Information Visualization, there was a document and a great deal of confidence that the program would help take the college in a new direction. This talk will tell the story of pits and perils of how the program moved from an idea, to launch, to bringing its fourth year of students, and how data, information, and visualization was the pilot, engineer, and passenger. Bio: Heather Bradbury, Director of MICA’s Masters of Professional Studies programs in Information Visualization and the Business of Art and Design, comes to MICA with over 15 years of experience in the fields of creative and educational project development and strategic communication. Heather’s background and broad professional experience, including Communications Specialist at the Maryland State Department of Education, Office of the State Superintendent; IDEAS Grants Manager and Education Specialist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (Home of Hubble Space Telescope); and co-owner of Balance-the Salon, an award-winning hair salon and photo gallery, provides her with a unique perspective in business operations and management as well as communication through various mediums to tell stories. Heather has additional experience working in the fields of architecture/interior design, engineering, catering, and production pottery.
04/30/2015	Andrea Forte Associate Professor of College of Computing & Informatics at Drexel University (link)	Social Information Spaces: Designing for Smart(er) Societies Abstract: People are pretty smart. When someone uses bad information, it’s often because the tools they use to find that information were not designed to support good assessments. The need for an integrated HCI response to the problem of information assessment is critical in an age of participatory information sources like Wikipedia, Wikia sites, Reddit, and Ancestry.com. These are information sources produced and curated by thousands of contributors using collaboration or aggregation platforms. Such technologies can be designed to support human needs in different ways; for example, they can be designed using well-understood principles of usability, accessibility, or ergonomics. However, HCI currently lacks a shared vocabulary for talking about “assessability” — those properties of designed spaces that allow people to make good judgments about the information they encounter there. Assessable designs don’t just deliver assessments of information quality, but support people in getting *better* at judging the information they encounter online. Bio: Andrea Forte (andreaforte.net) is an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University. Her work focuses on how social technologies can be designed to support the development of both information and computational literacies. Andrea's research spans several disciplines and she regularly publishes in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work and social computing (CSCW), computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), computing education, and library science. She is a research leader at Drexel’s Expressive and Creative Interaction Technologies (ExCITe) Center. Her current projects are supported by the National Science Foundation and Institute for Museum and Library Services. She is an NSF CAREER award winner, holds a PhD in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Institute of Technology, and a masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Texas at Austin.
05/07/2015	Peter Teuben Astronomy dept (link)	Interface design for the Analysis and Data Mining of the large data coming out of the ALMA telescope Abstract: ALMA telescope is a large radio interferometer in Chile, operated by a large international consortium (Europe, North America, and Japan), and is starting to show groundbreaking new science. The data products will be delivered a series of large data cubes, requiring detailed analysis to get down to the real science. I will explain the ALMA data format, and what we are proposing to do to extract science and visualize these complex results to the user. We have played with some GUI designs, but decided on a pragmatic approach, to adopt and adapt an existing web interface that ALMA is using. We are looking forward to your feedback and suggestions to improve the design.
05/14/2015	CHI-tacular	Come talk (and listen) about the HCIL's time at CHI 2015!

Fall 2014

Date	Leader	Topic
09/04/2014	Niklas Elmqvist New iSchool Professor in Infovis (link)	Ubiquitous Analytics: Interacting with Big Data Anywhere, Anytime Abstract: Computing is becoming increasingly embedded in our everyday lives: mobile devices are growing smaller yet more powerful, large displays are getting cheaper, and our physical environments are turning intelligent and are integrating an increasing number of digital processors. Meanwhile, data is everywhere, and people need to leverage all of this digital infrastructure to turn it into actionable information about their hobbies, health, and personal interest. In this talk, I will present the concept of ubiquitous analytics that is staking out a new digital future of ever-present, always-on computing; one that can support manipulating, thinking about, and interacting with data anytime, anywhere. Bio: Niklas Elmqvist is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. He is also a member of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He received his Ph.D. in 2006 from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Prior to joining UMD in 2014, he was an faculty member in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University from 2008, a postdoctoral researcher at INRIA in France from 2007, and a visiting scholar at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006. His research areas are information visualization, human-computer interaction, and visual analytics. Prof. Elmqvist is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award in 2013, the Purdue ECE Chicago Alumni New Faculty in 2010, Google research awards in 2009 and 2010, the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teacher Award in 2012, and three best paper awards in premier venues in his field. His work has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as well as by Google, Microsoft, and NVidia. He is a senior member of ACM, IEEE, and IEEE Computer Society.
09/11/2014	All new students!	New student introductions! Much like last year, this BBL is for new students to introduce themselves, talk briefly about their projects and interests and bounce their ideas off the HCIL members. The purpose of these informal and participatory talks is to help connect new students with professors and other students sharing the same interests. The students presenting are: Chris Musialek, Deok Gun Park, Seokbin Kang, Jonggi Hong, Sriram Karthik Badam and Majeed Kazemitabaar.
09/18/2014	Moving the cubes!	Resisting the cookies is futile.
09/25/2014	Kotaro Hara CS PhD Student: (link)	UIST2014 Practice Talk: Tohme: Detecting Curb Ramps in Google Street View Using Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning Building on recent prior work that combines Google Street View (GSV) and crowdsourcing to remotely collect information on physical world accessibility, we present the first “smart” system, Tohme, that combines machine learning, computer vision (CV), and custom crowd interfaces to find curb ramps remotely in GSV scenes. Tohme consists of two workflows, a human labeling pipeline and a CV pipeline with human verification, which are scheduled dynamically based on predicted performance. Using 1,086 GSV scenes (street intersections) from four North American cities and data from 403 crowd workers, we show that Tohme performs similarly in detecting curb ramps compared to a manual labeling approach alone (F-measure: 84% vs. 86% baseline) but at a 13% reduction in time cost. Our work contributes the first CV-based curb ramp detection system, a custom machine-learning based workflow controller, a validation of GSV as a viable curb ramp data source, and a detailed examination of why curb ramp detection is a hard problem along with steps forward.
10/02/2014	Michelle Mazurek Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science (link)	Measuring Password Guessability for an Entire University Despite considerable research on passwords, empirical studies of password strength have been limited by lack of access to plaintext passwords, small data sets, and password sets specifically collected for a research study or from low-value accounts. Properties of passwords used for high-value accounts thus remain poorly understood. We fill this gap by studying the single-sign-on passwords used by over 25,000 faculty, staff, and students at a research university with a complex password policy. Key aspects of our contributions rest on our (indirect) access to plaintext passwords. We describe our data collection methodology, particularly the many precautions we took to minimize risks to users. We then analyze how guessable the collected passwords would be during an offline attack by subjecting them to a state-of-the-art password cracking algorithm. We discover significant correlations between a number of demographic and behavioral factors and password strength. We also compare the guessability and other characteristics of the passwords we analyzed to sets previously collected in controlled experiments or leaked from low-value accounts. We find more consistent similarities between the university passwords and passwords collected for research studies under similar composition policies than we do between the university passwords and subsets of passwords leaked from low-value accounts that happen to comply with the same policies.
10/09/2014 (room 2119)	m.c. schraefel Professor, University of Southampton (link)	Exploring the role of HCI as an agent of cultural change: from health as a medical condition to health as shared, social aspiration. Abstract: What is the role of HCI in supporting a better normal for our health, creativity, quality of life - especially if we think about health outside a medical context. I have been thinking about the concept of “make better normal” and Ben Shneiderman has challenged me to ask isn’t that the role of design in general? And most of us would agree, so what’s different when we talk about health, not as a medical condition, but as a paradigm shift, where health is a shared and supported social aspiration? In such a discussion, HCI becomes an agent not necessarily for change, but for cultural shift - assuming we might agree on what proactive health looks like in practice - so we can design to support it. As part of this discussion i’ll offer in5 as a design model for proactive health and look forward to your feedback. Also, we might consider how the role of HCI would change in this dynamic over time. Initially, proactive health design is likely design against the status quo. For example, if the status quo is sedentary knowledge work, and the research shows that more movement during the day is better for us cognitively, physiologically, socially, then what does HCI do to help support this transition individually and culturally? What is the role and perhaps responsibility of our collaborative work with, for instance, visualisation and big data? Likewise, what is the map of this territory for us? where are the important research questions? how would we know them? Do we ourselves need to evolve a new disciplinary expertise from nutrition to neurology for proactive health tech design? I have some thoughts/experiences in this space i’d like to share to hear your insights. Also, in particular, I would also like to present the related outcomes from a Dagstuhl Workshop that happened in June to consider Grand Challenges for Interactive Technology Design for Proactive Health, and to invite you to participate in and contribute to shaping these Challenges. This exchange, i hope, will act as both this invitation and a call to action - to say that if we see the opportunities to make a real and credible difference for proactive health, do we not need to find, fundamentally, ways to better support each others’ work to have effects at scale, to model a path for others to trust and to follow? Bio: m.c. schraefel, ph.d, f.bcs, c.eng, cscs, @mcphoo holds the post Professor of Computer Science and Human Performance in the Agents, Interaction and Complexity Group of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~mc). mc also holds a Research Chair sponsored by the Royal Academy of Engineering and Microsoft Research to investigate how to design interactive technology to better support creativity, innovation and discovery. As part of that research, schraefel utilises her works with athletes as a professional strength and conditioning, movement and nutrition coach for design insights into real people's longitudinal experience of and challenges with wellbeing practice (http://begin2dig.com). mc directs the Human Systems Interaction Lab at Southampton where the vision is to make better normal; make normal better, and the mission is to explore how ICT can support the brain/body connexion to enhance innovation, creativity and improved Quality of Life for all.
10/16/2014	Uran Oh CS PhD Student	ASSETS 2014 Practice Talk: Design of and Subjective Response to On-body Input for People With Visual Impairments For users with visual impairments, who do not necessarily need the visual display of a mobile device, non-visual on-body interaction (e.g., Imaginary Interfaces) could provide accessible input in a mobile context. Such interaction provides the potential advantages of an always-available input surface, and increased tactile and proprioceptive feedback compared to a smooth touchscreen. To investigate preferences for and design of accessible on-body interaction, we conducted a study with 12 visually impaired participants. Participants evaluated five locations for on-body input and compared on-phone to on-hand interaction with one versus two hands. Our findings show that the least preferred areas were the face/neck and the forearm, while locations on the hands were considered to be more discreet and natural. The findings also suggest that participants may prioritize social acceptability over ease of use and physical comfort when assessing the feasibility of input at different locations of the body. Finally, tradeoffs were seen in preferences for touchscreen versus on-body input, with on-body input considered useful for contexts where one hand is busy (e.g., holding a cane or dog leash). We provide implications for the design of accessible on-body input.
10/23/2014	Andrea Wiggins Assistant Professor, iSchool (link)	Citizen Science at Scale: Human Computation for Science, Education, and Sustainability Citizen science is gaining recognition as an innovative mode of scientific collaboration that engages the public in real-world research. Increased coordination and communication capacities attributed to technological advances have lead to dramatic growth in the scale, scope, and impact of public participation in science, while also enabling novel research that would not otherwise be feasible. In addition, citizen science is full interesting challenges for HCI, with notable needs and opportunities for innovation in such areas as sensors, DIY technologies, mobile applications, painless data entry, usability for "K through gray", STEM learning technologies, and data visualization and exploration tools. This talk will introduce two projects focused on supporting large-scale participation in citizen science from a data-centric perspective. In the eBird "human-computer learning network", 40% annual growth in data submissions to one of the world's largest biodiversity data sets creates a challenge for data validation by a limited pool of experts. Our team has applied AI and machine learning to refine the system's dynamically-generated data entry interfaces, reducing the incidence of "false positives" for outlier records that require expert review. In addition, we have developed a method to estimate contributors' expertise based entirely on their data submissions, and examining time series of these expertise estimates also suggests a learning effect through ongoing participation. The expertise estimates are currently being incorporated into spatio-temporal models of bird migration to reduce noise introduced by the natural variability in diverse human observers. The second project, recently funded by the NSF CyberSEES program, will develop proof-of-concept infrastructure to deliver biodiversity data from science classrooms across the US to researchers that need data for ongoing research. Through partnerships with several sustainability science projects and the Smithsonian BioCubes program, student-generated data will be integrated with data collected by professional scientists to support ecological studies monitoring the spread and impact of invasive species, the biogeographic and evolutionary effects of climate change, and community changes in species-rich but vulnerable coastal marine ecosystems. The UMD team will investigate the factors that enable and prevent participation by both data producers (learners) and data consumers (scientists), in order to inform the design and development of current and future cyberinfrastructure.
10/30/2014	Nicholas Diakopoulos Assistant Professor, UMD College of Journalism (link)	Computational Journalism: From Tools to Algorithmic Accountability Abstract: Computational Journalism was initially conceived of as an application of computing technologies to enable journalism across information tasks such as information gathering, organization and sensemaking, storytelling, and dissemination. But computing and algorithms can also become the object of journalism. Algorithms adjudicate a large array of decisions in our lives: not just search engines and personalized online news systems, but educational evaluations, markets and political campaigns, and the management of social services like welfare and public safety. A new form of computational journalism that I call “Algorithmic Accountability Reporting” is emerging to apply the core journalistic functions of watchdogging and accountability reporting to algorithms. In this talk I will provide some perspective on the tool-oriented roots of computational journalism, and then discuss how algorithmic accountability reporting is emerging as a mechanism for elucidating and articulating the power structures, biases, and influences that computational artifacts play in society. Bio: Nicholas Diakopoulos is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland College of Journalism. His research is in computational and data journalism with an emphasis on algorithmic accountability, narrative data visualization, and social computing in the news. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech where he co-founded the program in Computational Journalism. Before UMD he worked as a researcher at Columbia University, Rutgers University, and CUNY studying the intersections of information science, innovation, and journalism. Nick can be contacted via email at nad@umd.edu, and is online at @ndiakopoulos and http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com.
11/06/2014	Susan Winter Assistant Program Director, MIM	Top-Down and Bottom-Up: Building Information Science for an Active Middle Abstract: Our increasingly digital society has spurred interest in information science, with a belief that it can improve health, safety, the environment, education, economic growth and more. However, capturing these benefits will require skilled information professionals who understand and create digital solutions that improve lives in a variety of fields. Guided by its focus on information, technology and people, the iSchool at the University of Maryland is developing an innovative BS in Information Science (BSIS) that will address the demand for such professionals. High-level frameworks lend structure to the disparate information science activities and disciplinary domains, but lack the detail necessary to guide research and educational programs. At this session, we will co-design the emergent BSIS curriculum that prepares students for success in a wide variety of information science careers. Bio: Susan J. Winter, Ph.D. is Chair of the UG Committee, Director of Research Advancement, Assistant Director of the MIM Program and of CASCI at UMD’s iSchool. She has previously been a Science Advisor in the Directorate for Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences, Acting Deputy Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure and a Program Director at NSF supporting distributed, interdisciplinary scientific collaboration where she was responsible for programs funding research on virtual organizations as sociotechnical systems, cyber-enabled discovery and innovation, and cyberinfrastructure education, and enabling resources for building community and capacity for complex data-driven and computational science including high performance computers, large-scale databases, and advanced software tools. Her research on the impact of IT on the organization of work has appeared in top journals; she has extensive international managerial and consulting experience, and currently serves on the editorial boards of top Journals. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona, her MA from the Claremont Graduate University, and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley.
11/13/2014	Alina Goldman iSchool PhD Student	Audience Performer Collaboration Integrating story into design may be an effective way to create more fulfilling interaction experiences. This informal presentation and discussion considers how designing immersive “flow” experiences can contribute to HCI research interests by improving motivation and attention. The talk describes immersive design in the context of performance, through multi-sensory technology and dynamic audience participation, and offers ideas to further explore this area of research.
11/20/2014	Beverly Harrison Principal Scientist & Director Mobile Research, Yahoo!	Yahoo Labs – Mobile Research Group In this talk, Dr. Beverly Harrison will highlight strategic research areas and directions for Yahoo Labs overall, and then describe key areas the Mobile Research team is actively working on (and hiring for!). Several recent research projects will be presented including a study of teens use of smartphones and mobile apps, a study about people’s understanding of what “personalized ads” means, a social TV prototype app, and some highlights of wearables and hardware prototyping efforts. Bio: Dr. Beverly Harrison is currently the Senior Director of Mobile Research at Yahoo Labs. Her expertise and passion over the last 20 years is creating, building and evaluating innovative mobile user interface technologies and in inferring user behavior patterns from various types of sensor data. She has previously worked at Xerox PARC, IBM Research, Intel Research, and Amazon/Lab126 as well as doing startups. Beverly has 80+ publications, holds over 50 patents, and held 3 affiliate faculty positions in CSE, iSchool, Design (Univ of Washington). She has a B.S. in Mathematics (Waterloo) and a M.Sc. and PhD in Human Factors Engineering (Toronto) where she was also an active member of the dgp Lab.
11/27/2014	No Brown Bag for Thanksgiving break.
12/04/2014	Georgia Bullen New America (link)	Balancing Expertise and Public Audiences: Usability in Internet Research and Policy
12/11/2014	Holiday Cookie Exchange	Details Cookie exchanges involve people making a certain number of cookies (e.g., 6 bags of 6 cookies each) and bringing them in with a card describing the cookies. They all get lined up and then each person can take six bags of whichever types of cookies they want.

Spring 2014

Date	Leader	Topic
Jan 30	Helena Mentis New UMBC HCI faculty member bio	Tracking the Body in Healthcare New gesture and movement tracking technologies are offering rich possibilities for our everyday computing experiences. More than simply intuitive and non-intrusive forms of interaction these technologies can provide ways to transform behavioral practices in particular contexts. Within these contexts, there are important challenges in how we take the opportunities provided by body/movement sensing systems and design them in ways that are attuned to the demands and circumstances of a particular setting. In this talk I will explore these issues in the context of the particular setting of healthcare. I will present prior work on a Kinect-based system that uses gesture and voice recognition capabilities to enable clinicians to interact with images during surgery without compromising sterility as well as new work on sensing a Parkinson's patient's movement ability for clinical decision-making and patient empowerment.
Feb 6	Catherine Plaisant and Michael Gubbels	Reviewing CHI '13 best videos
Feb 13	Beverly Harrison Yahoo Research	Research at Yahoo Labs In this talk, Beverly will highlight strategic research areas and directions for Yahoo Labs overall, and then describe key areas the Mobile Research team is actively working on (and hiring for!). Several recent research projects will be presented including a study of teens use of smartphones and mobile apps, a study about people’s understanding of what “personalized ads” means, a social TV prototype app, and some highlights of wearables and hardware prototyping efforts. Beverly Harrison is currently a Principal Scientist and Director of Mobile Research at Yahoo Labs. Her expertise and passion over the last 20 years is creating, building and evaluating innovative user interface technologies and in inferring user behavior patterns from various types of sensor data. She has previously worked at Xerox PARC, IBM Research, Intel Research, and Amazon/Lab126 as well as doing startups. Beverly has 80+ publications, holds over 50 patents, and held 3 affiliate faculty positions in CSE, iSchool, Design (Univ of Washington). She has a B. Mathematics (Waterloo) and a M.Sc. and PhD in Human Factors Engineering (Toronto).
Feb 20	Karyn Moffatt HCI Professor at McGill Univ. bio	Accessible Social Technology For better and worse, technology has changed how we connect with one another, potentially excluding those who have not kept up with changing social norms. To provide one common example: grandparents who have not adopted Facebook often find themselves excluded from family photo sharing practices. In this talk, Karyn will informally discuss recent projects targeted at drawing marginalized individuals into online social forums, with a focus on bridging diverse preferences and accommodating competing needs. Karyn Moffatt is an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at McGill University. Currently, her work focuses on designing tools that are sensitive to the social context in which they will be used and that seek to leverage and support those relationships. Prior to joining McGill University, Karyn was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto supported by awards from NSERC and CIHR’s Health Care, Technology, and Place strategic initiative. She received her doctorate in computer science from the University of British Columbia in 2010.
Feb 27	Romain Vuillemot
March 6	Megan Monroe PhD Student homepage	The Talk Talk So you have to give a talk, now what? Well, it's probably too late to run, and nobody likes a hider, so your best bet is to just suck it up, and start prepping your talk. But how? What should you do first? What are you even trying to accomplish here? Prepping a talk is not only a daunting prospect, but it's really easy to get lost in the details and lose sight of the big picture. In this brown bag, I'll be laying out that big picture, and providing a step-by-step roadmap of how to get there. The goal is to give rookie talk-givers a better sense of direction as they navigate the shadowy abyss of prepping a talk. I'm also hoping that some of the more experienced talk-givers can chime in with some of their best tips and tricks for building a slammin' talk. Megan Monroe is a fifth year PhD student in the Computer Science Department who feels super awkward writing about herself in the third person. That being said, she has given a lot of talks, and is loosely presumed to proficient in this area.
March 13	cancelled
March 20		No Brown Bag. Spring Break.
March 27	Jessica Vitak Assistant Professor in iSchool HCIL faculty member bio	Privacy Management in the Digital Age While regularly used for interpersonal communication, relationship maintenance, and information sharing, newer communication technologies such as Facebook and Twitter have also created significant tension between individuals’ desire to maintain privacy and to be engaged participants in online communities. Problems arise due to the increasing diversity of users on these sites, a lack of privacy management knowledge and/or skills, and the often-changing privacy standards of the sites themselves. Rather than proactively engaging this complexity, many users employ reactive privacy management strategies—until something bad happens to me, I won’t worry about the information I’m sharing. Understanding how people conceptualize privacy and how that conceptualization influences behavior is increasingly important in today’s networked world, as individuals—and information—are now connected in more ways than ever before. The affordances of social media distinguish them from other communication channels, both on- and offline, with content being easier to search and archive, while people and content are more highly linked within systems. Thus, the consequences of employing more reactive strategies are far-reaching, with potential impacts on personal relationships, financials, work, and beyond. In this talk, I’ll highlight some of my recent findings on this topic as well as overview my expected research trajectory for the next few years in this very active space.
April 3	Chris Imbriano CS Ph.D. Student Inclusive Design Lab	Talk and discussion about GitHub and why the HCIL may want to adopt it. In this talk, Chris (and others) will lead a talk and discussion about GitHub. Generally, Chris will give an overview of GitHub and facilitate a discussion about why the HCIL might want to adopt GitHub in some way, perhaps by making an "Organization" entity under which projects can be created and students, faculty, and others in the HCIL can check in their code.
April 10	Vanessa Frias-Martinez Assistant Professor in iSchool bio	From Digital Footprints to Social Insights The pervasiveness of cell phones, mobile applications and social media is generating vast amounts of information that can reveal a wide range of human behavior. From mobility patterns to social connections, these signals expose insights about how humans behave and interact with their environment. While a lot of work has focused on analyzing behaviors, relatively little effort has been dedicated to understanding ways in which such findings could be useful to decision makers in areas like smart cities or public health. In this talk I will discuss two projects: (1) AlertImpact, an agent-based framework that uses geo-referenced cell phone data to model the impact of the preventive actions implemented by the Mexican government during the H1N1 flu outbreak and (2) TweetLand, a method to automatically identify urban land uses and landmarks (point of interest) using tweeting patterns.
April 17	Alex Pompe Senior Technical Advisor at IREX	Bridging ICT4D lessons from the NGO sector towards academia (Slides) Abstract: ICT4D professionals in both the academic and NGO areas stand to benefit from greater collaboration, awareness, and transparency of experiences. However, often at conferences both groups are frustrated due to a lack of common understanding and misconceptions. This talk will present a number of case studies from IREX's ICT work in a variety of regions focused on providing open discussion and discourse so that lessons from all development practitioners can be lent towards improving processes on both sides of the table. The talk will also include discussion of internships and job skills in the ICT4D sector from an NGO employer's perspective. As a Senior Technical Advisor at IREX, Alex Pompe is a lead member of the Center for Collaborative Technology managing the NGO's ICT4D consulting portfolio. Clients come for a range of countries such as Sri Lanka, Malaysia, India, Nepal, Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, and Bhutan. This work focuses on public access to information barriers and community assessment methodologies. He oversees the Libraries for Development program in Namibia, the Tech Age Teachers program in Tunisia, and the New Education Technology program in Kazakhstan. He splits time between the IREX DC and Namibia offices. Alex holds a BS in physics from the University of Illinois, and an MSI from the University of Michigan School of Information. He focused on information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D).
April 24	Matt Mauriello HCI CS Grad Student	CHI2014 Practice Talk: Social Fabric Fitness
May 1		No Brown Bag. CHI 2014 from April 26 to May 1.
May 8	Michael Gubbels, Human-Computer Interaction Master's Student Jon Gluck, Computer Science Ph.D. Student Kent Wills, Computer Science Master's Student	Introduction to 3D Printing in the HCIL (Slides) Graduate students will lead an interactive discussion of 3D printing and a tutorial on how to use the printers in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab.

Spring 2013

Date	Leader	Topic
Jan 24
Jan 31	John Gomez
Feb 7	Ben Bederson	Tools for synchronous crowdsourcing
Feb 14
Feb 21
Feb 28	Lisa Anthony (Host: Leah Findlater)	Gestural Interaction for Children
March 7	Awalin Sopan	Wrong Patient Selection Problem
March 14	Michael Smith-Welch? (Host Jon Froehlich)	Kids, Programming, and Makerspaces
March 21	Spring Break (No BBL)
March 28
April 4	Ben Bederson, Jon Froehlich, Leah Findlater	HCIL Discussion: Activities, BBL, email lists, etc.
April 11	Urah Oh, Anne Bowser	CHI Practice Talks: (1) Urah Oh (full paper) and (2) Anne Bowser (full paper)
April 18	Megan Monroe, Kotaro Hara	CHI Practice Talks: (1) Megan Monroe (full paper) and (2) Kotaro Hara (full paper)
April 25
May 2	CHI 2013 (No BBL)
May 9

Fall 2013

	Who	Type	Topic
Th, Sept 5	No Brown Bag. Rosh Hashanah.
Th, Sept 12	Jon Froehlich Assistant Professor in CS and HCIL faculty member http://www.cs.umd.edu/~jonf/	Talk/Discussion	HCIL Hackerspace
Th, Sept 19	HCIL/HCI Graduate Students facilitated by Michael Gubbels and Tak Yeon Lee	Talk/Discussion	The goal of this session is to provide several students at various points in their academic programs , but especially new students, with a chance to talk about (1) their interests, (2) the projects to which they've contributed, and (3) those they'd like to do. Our hope is that this will allow new students to introduce themselves and convey their interests in a way that helps them find others with shared interests and form working relationships on projects with professors and other students. Students will have 5–8 minutes to introduce themselves and their interests, their previous and current projects, skills and expertise, and their future interests in HCI and the HCIL. Hopefully, this will help new students connect with professors and other students with whom they share interests and can work together on research projects. Following talks will be about 10 minutes for discussion with the presenting students (perhaps for asking them to join a project team).
Wed, Sept 25	Jonathan Donner	External Speaker	Everybody’s internet? :Designing for mobile-centric internet users in the developing world Within 5 years, wireless broadband services will cover 85% of the world’s population, and data-enabled mobile (cellular) devices will outnumber personal computers and tablets. This talk, taken from a book in preparation, details the growing importance of ‘mobile-centric internet use’ in the developing world, raising questions and challenges for design. A breathlessly optimistic narrative has proclaimed the mobile phone the device which will finally close the ‘digital divide’, but the digital world does not run exclusively on mobile handsets. To guide policy and technical investments in socioeconomic development— I argue that it is better to reframe and view the mobile handset as one piece of a person’s digital repertoire, which also might include PCs, telecentres, TVs, tablets, and other devices. In the talk and in the book I revisit some of my previous studies in three domains of socioeconomic development: microenterprises and livelihoods, citizen journalism, and secondary education. Across each, I celebrate the transformational potential of the mobile phone. Yet, in each case, I use the “digital repertoires” lens to raise concerns, identifying how the capacity to generate, produce, and curate information may remain concentrated among those with better resources to secure digital tools, and the skills and incentives to use them. The person with $30 basic data-enabled phone and the person with a smartphone and a state-of-the-art $1000 desktop computer both can connect to the internet; however, it is not the same internet. Yet these persistent digital stratifications can be reduced if technologists, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers work to ensure that constrained digital repertoires enable not only coordination and consumption (which phones already do well), but also contribution (which they do less well). From natural user interfaces to language support to bandwidth pricing, there are concrete ways in which more empathetic design and policy can help a greater proportion of the world’s inhabitants be more productive with their ICTs. Jonathan Donner - Researcher, Technology for Emerging Markets, Microsoft Research Jonathan Donner is a researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group (TEM) at Microsoft Research. For the last decade, Jonathan has published research on the remarkable growth in mobile telephony in the developing world, focusing on its implications for socioeconomic development and inclusion in the informational society, as well as its uses in everyday life. His projects at TEM include Microenterprise Development, Mobile Banking, Citizen Journalism, Mobile Health, and Youth and New Media. His research provides rare perspective on design and mobile HCI issues for those who want to build applications for the fastest growing group of internet users in the world: “mobile centric” internet users. Prior to Joining Microsoft Research, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and worked with Monitor Company and the OTF Group, consultancies in Boston, MA. He is the author, with Richard Ling, of Mobile Communication (Polity, 2009), and co-editor, with Patricia Mechael, of mHealth in Practice: Mobile Technology for Health Promotion in the Developing world (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). His research also appears in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, The Information Society, Information Technologies and International Development, The Journal of International Development, and Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization. His Ph.D. is from Stanford University in Communication Research. Jonathan is based in South Africa and is a visiting academic at the University of Cape Town’s Centre in ICT4D. He is currently working on a new book, provisionally titled After Access: Mobile Internet in the Developing World. Further details on Jonathan’s research are at www.jonathandonner.com and via twitter as @jcdonner
Th, Oct 3	Ed Cutrell	External Speaker	Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM) group at Microsoft Research The Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM) group at Microsoft Research India seeks to address the needs and aspirations of people in the world's developing communities. Our research targets people who are just beginning to use computing technologies and services as well as those for whom access to computing still remains largely out of reach. Most of our work falls under the rubric of the relatively young field of Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD or ICT4D). By combining a variety of backgrounds and training, we are able to engage deeply with some of the complex problems associated with poverty and scarce resources. Our goal is to study, design, build, and evaluate technologies and systems that are useful for people living in underserved rural and urban communities around the world. In this talk, I will give an overview of some of the recent work in the group, focusing on projects that explore modalities and interactions specifically designed for the unique contexts and users we’re working with: 1) VideoKheti: A prototype multimodal system to help low-literate farmers search for agricultural extension videos on smart phones. 2) IVR Junction: A platform for building scalable and distributed voice forums for users with low-end phones. 3) Massively Empowered Classrooms (MEC): A project to explore how innovations in MOOCs and blended learning can be applied to second-tier, large-scale engineering education in India. 4) Maybe something else, depending on the interests of the audience Bio: Ed Cutrell manages the Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM) group at Microsoft Research India. Ed has been working in the field of human-computer interaction since 2000, studying everything from novel interaction techniques to interfaces for search and information retrieval. His current research focuses on Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). The goal of this work is to understand how people in the world's poor and developing communities interact with information technologies and to invent new ways for technology to meet their needs and aspirations. He is trained in cognitive neuropsychology, with a PhD from the University of Oregon. http://research.microsoft.com/~cutrell http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/tem/
Th, Oct 10	Marshini Chetty Assistant Professor in iSchool and HCIL faculty member http://marshini.net	Talk	HCI and Networking - Taming the Internet One Bit at a Time Abstract: As we become more dependent on high speed Internet, we increasingly have to deal with making sure our devices are connected properly, that we're getting the speeds we need, and that we're making efficient use of our data. Yet often, Internet connections break or do not work as planned, causing us endless headaches. We also have to juggle constraints such as slow speeds, limited bandwidth, and high data costs depending on our location and use. My research focuses on helping users manage Internet connectivity in their homes, the workplace, and on the go, particularly under constraints of low resources and high costs. In this talk, I'll go over how I use HCI and networking to reach the goal of taming the Internet for everyday users and talk about future directions. Bio: Marshini Chetty is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland specializing in human computer interaction and ubiquitous computing. Marshini's research focuses on making information about infrastructure technologies more readily available to everyday users to help them manage complex systems such as broadband networks. She has a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA and a Masters and Bachelors in Computer Science from University of Cape Town, South Africa. Prior to joining the iSchool, she completed post-doctoral fellowships at ResearchICTAfrica assessing the quality of broadband in South Africa and Georgia Institute of Technology in the College of Computing creating novel home networking tools. She has completed internships at technology giants IBM Research in New York, and with Microsoft Research in Seattle, Cambridge, U.K., and Cape Town. Her awards include a Fulbright Scholarship, a Google Anita Borg Scholarship, and an Intel PhD fellowship during her graduate career. Marshini’s work has also been featured in popular technology blogs, notably Slashdot, Ars Technical, Network World, and BoingBoing!
Th, Oct 17	Kotaro Hara CS PhD Student http://kotarohara.com/ Uran Oh CS PhD Student	ASSETS'13 Practice Talks	Talk 1: Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations With Google Street View Talk 2: Follow That Sound: Using Sonification and Corrective Verbal Feedback to Teach Touchscreen Gestures
Th, Oct 24	Makeability Lab Jon Froehlich's research group in the HCIL	Discussion	Reflective discussion of experience exhibiting projects at Silver Spring Mini-Maker Faire.
Th, Oct 31	Jen Golbeck Associate Professor in the College of Information Studies, Affiliate Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department, Affiliate in the Center for the Advanced Study of Language, and HCIL Director http://www.cs.umd.edu/~golbeck/	Work In Progress Discussion	HCI and Cybersecurity
Th, Nov 7	Bryan Sivak Chief Technology Officer at U.S. Department of Health & Human Services	External Speaker	Bryan Sivak's bio Bryan Sivak joined HHS as the Chief Technology Officer in July 2011. In this role, he is responsible for helping HHS leadership harness the power of data, technology, and innovation to improve the health and welfare of the nation. Previously, Bryan served as the Chief Innovation Officer to Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, where he has led Maryland’s efforts to embed concepts of innovation into the DNA of state government. He has distinguished himself in this role as someone who can work creatively across a large government organization to identify and implement the best opportunities for improving the way the government works. Prior to his time with Governor O’Malley, Bryan served as Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, where he created a technology infrastructure that enhanced communication between the District’s residents and their government, and implemented organizational reforms that improved efficiency, program controls, and customer service. Bryan previously worked in the private sector, co-founding InQuira, Inc., a multi-national software company, in 2002, and Electric Knowledge LLC, which provided one of the world's first Natural Language Search engines available on the web in 1998.
Th, Nov 14	Erica Estrada Lecturer, Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Tammy Clegg, contact)	External Speaker/Design Charette	Design Thinking
Th, Nov 21	June Ahn Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies and College of Education (joint appointment), and HCIL faculty member http://www.ahnjune.com/	Work In Progress Discussion	Video Games, Blended Learning, and Large-scale Education Reform
Th, Nov 28	No Brown Bag. Happy Thanksgiving and Hanukkah.
Th, Dec 5	Shannon Collis Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Maryland http://shannoncollis.ca/	Talk/Discussion	Discussion of creative work in digital media and computational arts. Shannon Collis is a Canadian artist currently residing in Baltimore, MD. A graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Collis is also completing research at Concordia University in Montreal in the area of Digital Media and Computation Arts (Fall 2013). Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Maryland, where she teaches Digital Foundations and Print Media. Her studio practice focuses on creating installations and interactive environments that explore various ways in which digital technologies can transform our perception of audio and visual stimuli. Her work has been exhibited across North America as well as in Europe, Asia and Australia.
Th, Dec 12