Brown Bag Lunch Schedule

The HCIL has an open semi-organized weekly "brown bag lunch (BBL)" on every Thursdays from 12:30-1:30pm in HCIL (2105 Hornbake, South Wing). The topics range from someone's work, current interest to the HCIL, a software demo/review, a study design, a proposed research topic, an introduction to a new person, etc. The BBL is the one hour a week where we all come together--thus, it’s a unique time for HCIL members with unique opportunities to help build collaborations, increase awareness of each other’s activities, and generally just have a bit of fun together with free food every week.

To sign up for a session, send an email to BBL student co-coordinator Michael Gubbels (mgubbels@umd.edu) or Tak Yeon Lee (tylee@umd.edu). In the email, briefly describe the topic and preferred dates.

We thank YAHOO! for its sponsorship of the HCIL Brown Bag Lunches. To get notified about upcoming events, please subscribe one of these mailing lists.

Sponsors

We thank YAHOO for its sponsorship of the HCIL Brown Bag Lunches

Past Brown Bags

The following are the past Brown Bag schedules.

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