Past Brown Bag Lunch Schedules
The following are the past Brown Bag schedules.
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, |
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.
|
| 02/16/2017 |
Susan Winter, |
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.
|
| 02/23/2017 |
Virginia Byrne and Joohee Choi, |
Research design review & CSCW Practice Talk Research Design Review Title: Characteristics of Collaboration in the Emerging Practice of Open Data Analysis |
| 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://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
|
| 03/09/2017 |
Tim Summers & Sanjna Srivatsa, |
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. |
| 03/16/2017 |
Raja Kushalnagar, |
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.
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| 03/23/2017 | No Brown Bag, Spring Break. | |
| 03/30/2017 |
Dion Goh, |
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.
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| 04/06/2017 |
Allison Druin
|
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.
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| 04/13/2017 |
Daniel Votipka
|
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.
|
| 04/20/2017 |
Rebecca Stone
|
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, |
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.
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.
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, |
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.
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.
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| 05/18/2017 |
Tim Dwyer
|
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.
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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
|
| 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.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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| 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).
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| 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!
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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.
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| 02/04/2016 |
Tom Yeh Assistant Professor, University of Colorado CS (link). Host: Jon Froehlich |
Printing Pictures in 3D
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| 02/11/2016 | Cliff Lampe Associate Professor, University of Michigan iSchool (link) Host: Jessica Vitak |
Citizen Interaction Design and its Implications for HCI
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| 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
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| 02/25/2016 | Adil Yalcin PhD Candidate in Computer Science at UMD (link) |
Keshif: Data Exploration using Aggregate Summaries and Multi-Mode Linked Selections
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| 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).
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 03/31/2016 | TBD |
TBD Abstract: 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.
|
| 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 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.
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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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:
|
Fall 2015
| Date | Leader | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| 09/03/2015 | All new students! |
New student introductions!
|
| 09/10/2015 STARTING |
Jean-Daniel Fekete Senior Research Scientist at INRIA (link) |
ProgressiVis: a New Workflow Model for Scalability in Information Visualization
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.
|
| 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
|
| 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
|
| 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)
|
| 10/15/2015 |
| |
| 10/22/2015 | Heather Bradbury Director, Masters of Professional Studies Programs at Maryland Institute College of Art (link) |
Tipping the Balance
|
| 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
|
| 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
|
| 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
|
| 11/19/2015 | Jen Golbeck Associate Professor at UMD's iSchool (link) |
What I Did On My Sabbatical
|
| 11/26/2014 | No Brown Bag for Thanksgiving break. | |
| 12/03/2015 | Ben Shneiderman Professor of Computer Science ([1]) |
Editing Wikipedia Tutorial/Workshop
|
| 12/10/2015 | Larry Lee Chief System Engineer at Elucid Solutions (link) |
The Lucidity Project: Bringing Privacy Back to the Web
|
| 12/17/2015 | HCIL |
Seasonal Cookie Exchange
|
Spring 2015
| Date | Leader | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| 01/29/2015 | Catherine Plaisant Associate Director of Research HCIL (link) |
HCIL's work and its influence
|
| 02/05/2015 | Karthik Badam PhD Student, Department of Computer Science |
Cross-Device Frameworks for Collaborative Visualization
|
| 02/12/2015 | Jack Kustanowitz Principal at MountainPass Technology (link) |
BusWhere - Never Miss the School Bus Again
|
| 02/19/2015 | Jeff Rick Developer and Researcher, ScienceKit project (link) |
Two kids, one iPad
|
| 02/26/2015 | Wei Bai PhD student, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (link) |
BrowserCrypt: A Research on Encryption Usability
|
(Cancelled due to snow) |
Kurt Luther Center for Human-Computer Interaction, Virginia Tech (link) |
Designing Social Technologies for Creativity and Discovery
|
| 03/12/2015 | Michele Williams PhD student, Department of Information Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) (link) |
SWARM: Sensing Whether Affect Requires Mediation
|
| 03/19/2015 Spring Break (no food) |
Sana Malik UMD CS PhD Candidate (link) |
IUI '15 Practice Talk
|
| 03/26/2015 | Hyojoon Kim PhD Student, Georgia Institute of Technology (link) |
uCap: An Internet Data Management Tool for the Home
|
| 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
|
| 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
| |
| 04/09/2015 | Fan Du PhD Student, Department of Computer Science (link) |
CHI Practice Talk: Trajectory Bundling for Animated Transitions
|
| Leyla Norooz PhD Student, iSchool (link) |
CHI Practice Talk: BodyVis: A New Approach to Body Learning Through Wearable Sensing and Visualization
| |
| 04/16/2015 | Yla Tausczik Assistant Professor, iSchool (link) |
Open Government Data and Civic Applications: What would successful collaboration look like?
|
(Cancelled) |
Heather Bradbury Maryland Institute College of Art |
Building a Plane in Mid-air
|
| 04/30/2015 | Andrea Forte Associate Professor of College of Computing & Informatics at Drexel University (link) |
Social Information Spaces: Designing for Smart(er) Societies
|
| 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
|
| 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
|
| 09/11/2014 | All new students! |
New student introductions!
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
|
| 10/02/2014 | Michelle Mazurek Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science (link) |
Measuring Password Guessability for an Entire University
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.
|
| 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
|
| 10/30/2014 | Nicholas Diakopoulos Assistant Professor, UMD College of Journalism (link) |
Computational Journalism: From Tools to Algorithmic Accountability
|
| 11/06/2014 | Susan Winter Assistant Program Director, MIM |
Top-Down and Bottom-Up: Building Information Science for an Active Middle
|
| 11/13/2014 | Alina Goldman iSchool PhD Student |
Audience Performer Collaboration
|
| 11/20/2014 | Beverly Harrison Principal Scientist & Director Mobile Research, Yahoo! |
Yahoo Labs – Mobile Research Group
|
| 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
|
| Feb 6 | Catherine Plaisant and Michael Gubbels | Reviewing CHI '13 best videos |
| Feb 13 | Beverly Harrison Yahoo Research |
Research at Yahoo Labs
|
| Feb 20 | Karyn Moffatt HCI Professor at McGill Univ. bio |
Accessible Social Technology
|
| Feb 27 | Romain Vuillemot | |
| March 6 | Megan Monroe PhD Student homepage |
The Talk Talk
|
| 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.
|
| 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: |
| 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:
|
| 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 | |||