| 05/14/2015
|
'
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Fall 2014 Schedule
| Date
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Leader
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Topic
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| 09/04/2014
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Niklas Elmqvist
New iSchool Professor in Infovis (link)
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Ubiquitous Analytics: Interacting with Big Data Anywhere, Anytime
Abstract: Computing is becoming increasingly embedded in our everyday lives: mobile devices are growing smaller yet more powerful, large displays are getting cheaper, and our physical environments are turning intelligent and are integrating an increasing number of digital processors. Meanwhile, data is everywhere, and people need to leverage all of this digital infrastructure to turn it into actionable information about their hobbies, health, and personal interest. In this talk, I will present the concept of ubiquitous analytics that is staking out a new digital future of ever-present, always-on computing; one that can support manipulating, thinking about, and interacting with data anytime, anywhere.
Bio: Niklas Elmqvist is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. He is also a member of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He received his Ph.D. in 2006 from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Prior to joining UMD in 2014, he was an faculty member in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University from 2008, a postdoctoral researcher at INRIA in France from 2007, and a visiting scholar at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006. His research areas are information visualization, human-computer interaction, and visual analytics. Prof. Elmqvist is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award in 2013, the Purdue ECE Chicago Alumni New Faculty in 2010, Google research awards in 2009 and 2010, the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teacher Award in 2012, and three best paper awards in premier venues in his field. His work has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as well as by Google, Microsoft, and NVidia. He is a senior member of ACM, IEEE, and IEEE Computer Society.
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| 09/11/2014
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All new students!
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New student introductions!
Much like last year, this BBL is for new students to introduce themselves, talk briefly about their projects and interests and bounce their ideas off the HCIL members. The purpose of these informal and participatory talks is to help connect new students with professors and other students sharing the same interests.
The students presenting are: Chris Musialek, Deok Gun Park, Seokbin Kang, Jonggi Hong, Sriram Karthik Badam and Majeed Kazemitabaar.
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| 09/18/2014
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Moving the cubes!
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Resisting the cookies is futile.
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| 09/25/2014
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Kotaro Hara
CS PhD Student: (link)
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UIST2014 Practice Talk: Tohme: Detecting Curb Ramps in Google Street View Using Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning
Building on recent prior work that combines Google Street View (GSV) and crowdsourcing to remotely collect information on physical world accessibility, we present the first “smart” system, Tohme, that combines machine learning, computer vision (CV), and custom crowd interfaces to find curb ramps remotely in GSV scenes. Tohme consists of two workflows, a human labeling pipeline and a CV pipeline with human verification, which are scheduled dynamically based on predicted performance. Using 1,086 GSV scenes (street intersections) from four North American cities and data from 403 crowd workers, we show that Tohme performs similarly in detecting curb ramps compared to a manual labeling approach alone (F-measure: 84% vs. 86% baseline) but at a 13% reduction in time cost. Our work contributes the first CV-based curb ramp detection system, a custom machine-learning based workflow controller, a validation of GSV as a viable curb ramp data source, and a detailed examination of why curb ramp detection is a hard problem along with steps forward.
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| 10/02/2014
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Michelle Mazurek
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science (link)
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Measuring Password Guessability for an Entire University
Despite considerable research on passwords, empirical studies of password strength have been limited by lack of access to plaintext passwords, small data sets, and password sets specifically collected for a research study or from low-value accounts. Properties of passwords used for high-value accounts thus remain poorly understood.
We fill this gap by studying the single-sign-on passwords used by over 25,000 faculty, staff, and students at a research university with a complex password policy. Key aspects of our contributions rest on our (indirect) access to plaintext passwords. We describe our data collection methodology, particularly the many precautions we took to minimize risks to users. We then analyze how guessable the collected passwords would be during an offline attack by subjecting them to a state-of-the-art password cracking algorithm. We discover significant correlations between a number of demographic and behavioral factors and password strength.
We also compare the guessability and other characteristics of the passwords we analyzed to sets previously collected in controlled experiments or leaked from low-value accounts. We find more consistent similarities between the university passwords and passwords collected for research studies under similar composition policies than we do between the university passwords and subsets of passwords leaked from low-value accounts that happen to comply with the same policies.
|
10/09/2014
(room 2119)
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m.c. schraefel
Professor, University of Southampton (link)
|
Exploring the role of HCI as an agent of cultural change: from health as a medical condition to health as shared, social aspiration.
Abstract: What is the role of HCI in supporting a better normal for our health, creativity, quality of life - especially if we think about health outside a medical context. I have been thinking about the concept of “make better normal” and Ben Shneiderman has challenged me to ask isn’t that the role of design in general? And most of us would agree, so what’s different when we talk about health, not as a medical condition, but as a paradigm shift, where health is a shared and supported social aspiration? In such a discussion, HCI becomes an agent not necessarily for change, but for cultural shift - assuming we might agree on what proactive health looks like in practice - so we can design to support it. As part of this discussion i’ll offer in5 as a design model for proactive health and look forward to your feedback.
Also, we might consider how the role of HCI would change in this dynamic over time. Initially, proactive health design is likely design against the status quo. For example, if the status quo is sedentary knowledge work, and the research shows that more movement during the day is better for us cognitively, physiologically, socially, then what does HCI do to help support this transition individually and culturally? What is the role and perhaps responsibility of our collaborative work with, for instance, visualisation and big data? Likewise, what is the map of this territory for us? where are the important research questions? how would we know them? Do we ourselves need to evolve a new disciplinary expertise from nutrition to neurology for proactive health tech design? I have some thoughts/experiences in this space i’d like to share to hear your insights. Also, in particular, I would also like to present the related outcomes from a Dagstuhl Workshop that happened in June to consider Grand Challenges for Interactive Technology Design for Proactive Health, and to invite you to participate in and contribute to shaping these Challenges. This exchange, i hope, will act as both this invitation and a call to action - to say that if we see the opportunities to make a real and credible difference for proactive health, do we not need to find, fundamentally, ways to better support each others’ work to have effects at scale, to model a path for others to trust and to follow?
Bio: m.c. schraefel, ph.d, f.bcs, c.eng, cscs, @mcphoo holds the post Professor of Computer Science and Human Performance in the Agents, Interaction and Complexity Group of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~mc). mc also holds a Research Chair sponsored by the Royal Academy of Engineering and Microsoft Research to investigate how to design interactive technology to better support creativity, innovation and discovery. As part of that research, schraefel utilises her works with athletes as a professional strength and conditioning, movement and nutrition coach for design insights into real people's longitudinal experience of and challenges with wellbeing practice (http://begin2dig.com). mc directs the Human Systems Interaction Lab at Southampton where the vision is to make better normal; make normal better, and the mission is to explore how ICT can support the brain/body connexion to enhance innovation, creativity and improved Quality of Life for all.
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| 10/16/2014
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Uran Oh
CS PhD Student
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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.
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| 10/23/2014
|
Andrea Wiggins
Assistant Professor, iSchool (link)
|
Citizen Science at Scale: Human Computation for Science, Education, and Sustainability
Citizen science is gaining recognition as an innovative mode of scientific collaboration that engages the public in real-world research. Increased coordination and communication capacities attributed to technological advances have lead to dramatic growth in the scale, scope, and impact of public participation in science, while also enabling novel research that would not otherwise be feasible. In addition, citizen science is full interesting challenges for HCI, with notable needs and opportunities for innovation in such areas as sensors, DIY technologies, mobile applications, painless data entry, usability for "K through gray", STEM learning technologies, and data visualization and exploration tools.
This talk will introduce two projects focused on supporting large-scale participation in citizen science from a data-centric perspective. In the eBird "human-computer learning network", 40% annual growth in data submissions to one of the world's largest biodiversity data sets creates a challenge for data validation by a limited pool of experts. Our team has applied AI and machine learning to refine the system's dynamically-generated data entry interfaces, reducing the incidence of "false positives" for outlier records that require expert review. In addition, we have developed a method to estimate contributors' expertise based entirely on their data submissions, and examining time series of these expertise estimates also suggests a learning effect through ongoing participation. The expertise estimates are currently being incorporated into spatio-temporal models of bird migration to reduce noise introduced by the natural variability in diverse human observers.
The second project, recently funded by the NSF CyberSEES program, will develop proof-of-concept infrastructure to deliver biodiversity data from science classrooms across the US to researchers that need data for ongoing research. Through partnerships with several sustainability science projects and the Smithsonian BioCubes program, student-generated data will be integrated with data collected by professional scientists to support ecological studies monitoring the spread and impact of invasive species, the biogeographic and evolutionary effects of climate change, and community changes in species-rich but vulnerable coastal marine ecosystems. The UMD team will investigate the factors that enable and prevent participation by both data producers (learners) and data consumers (scientists), in order to inform the design and development of current and future cyberinfrastructure.
|
| 10/30/2014
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Nicholas Diakopoulos
Assistant Professor, UMD College of Journalism (link)
|
Computational Journalism: From Tools to Algorithmic Accountability
Abstract: Computational Journalism was initially conceived of as an application of computing technologies to enable journalism across information tasks such as information gathering, organization and sensemaking, storytelling, and dissemination. But computing and algorithms can also become the object of journalism. Algorithms adjudicate a large array of decisions in our lives: not just search engines and personalized online news systems, but educational evaluations, markets and political campaigns, and the management of social services like welfare and public safety. A new form of computational journalism that I call “Algorithmic Accountability Reporting” is emerging to apply the core journalistic functions of watchdogging and accountability reporting to algorithms. In this talk I will provide some perspective on the tool-oriented roots of computational journalism, and then discuss how algorithmic accountability reporting is emerging as a mechanism for elucidating and articulating the power structures, biases, and influences that computational artifacts play in society.
Bio: Nicholas Diakopoulos is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland College of Journalism. His research is in computational and data journalism with an emphasis on algorithmic accountability, narrative data visualization, and social computing in the news. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech where he co-founded the program in Computational Journalism. Before UMD he worked as a researcher at Columbia University, Rutgers University, and CUNY studying the intersections of information science, innovation, and journalism. Nick can be contacted via email at nad@umd.edu, and is online at @ndiakopoulos and http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com.
|
| 11/06/2014
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Susan Winter
Assistant Program Director, MIM
|
Top-Down and Bottom-Up: Building Information Science for an Active Middle
Abstract: Our increasingly digital society has spurred interest in information science, with a belief that it can improve health, safety, the environment, education, economic growth and more. However, capturing these benefits will require skilled information professionals who understand and create digital solutions that improve lives in a variety of fields. Guided by its focus on information, technology and people, the iSchool at the University of Maryland is developing an innovative BS in Information Science (BSIS) that will address the demand for such professionals. High-level frameworks lend structure to the disparate information science activities and disciplinary domains, but lack the detail necessary to guide research and educational programs. At this session, we will co-design the emergent BSIS curriculum that prepares students for success in a wide variety of information science careers.
Bio: Susan J. Winter, Ph.D. is Chair of the UG Committee, Director of Research Advancement, Assistant Director of the MIM Program and of CASCI at UMD’s iSchool. She has previously been a Science Advisor in the Directorate for Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences, Acting Deputy Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure and a Program Director at NSF supporting distributed, interdisciplinary scientific collaboration where she was responsible for programs funding research on virtual organizations as sociotechnical systems, cyber-enabled discovery and innovation, and cyberinfrastructure education, and enabling resources for building community and capacity for complex data-driven and computational science including high performance computers, large-scale databases, and advanced software tools. Her research on the impact of IT on the organization of work has appeared in top journals; she has extensive international managerial and consulting experience, and currently serves on the editorial boards of top Journals. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona, her MA from the Claremont Graduate University, and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley.
|
| 11/13/2014
|
Alina Goldman
iSchool PhD Student
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Audience Performer Collaboration
Integrating story into design may be an effective way to create more fulfilling interaction experiences. This informal presentation and discussion considers how designing immersive “flow” experiences can contribute to HCI research interests by improving motivation and attention. The talk describes immersive design in the context of performance, through multi-sensory technology and dynamic audience participation, and offers ideas to further explore this area of research.
|
| 11/20/2014
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Beverly Harrison
Principal Scientist & Director Mobile Research, Yahoo!
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Yahoo Labs – Mobile Research Group
In this talk, Dr. Beverly Harrison will highlight strategic research areas and directions for Yahoo Labs overall, and then describe key areas the Mobile Research team is actively working on (and hiring for!). Several recent research projects will be presented including a study of teens use of smartphones and mobile apps, a study about people’s understanding of what “personalized ads” means, a social TV prototype app, and some highlights of wearables and hardware prototyping efforts.
Bio: Dr. Beverly Harrison is currently the Senior Director of Mobile Research at Yahoo Labs. Her expertise and passion over the last 20 years is creating, building and evaluating innovative mobile user interface technologies and in inferring user behavior patterns from various types of sensor data. She has previously worked at Xerox PARC, IBM Research, Intel Research, and Amazon/Lab126 as well as doing startups. Beverly has 80+ publications, holds over 50 patents, and held 3 affiliate faculty positions in CSE, iSchool, Design (Univ of Washington). She has a B.S. in Mathematics (Waterloo) and a M.Sc. and PhD in Human Factors Engineering (Toronto) where she was also an active member of the dgp Lab.
|
| 11/27/2014
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No Brown Bag for Thanksgiving break.
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| 12/04/2014
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Georgia Bullen
New America (link)
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Balancing Expertise and Public Audiences: Usability in Internet Research and Policy
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| 12/11/2014
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Holiday Cookie Exchange
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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.
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Past Brown Bags
The following are the past Brown Bag schedules.
Spring 2014
| Date
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Leader
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Topic
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| 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.
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| Feb 6
|
Catherine Plaisant and Michael Gubbels
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Reviewing CHI '13 best videos
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| Feb 13
|
Beverly Harrison
Yahoo Research
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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).
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| 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.
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| Feb 27
|
Romain Vuillemot
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| 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.
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| March 13
|
cancelled
|
|
| March 20
|
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No Brown Bag. Spring Break.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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).
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| April 24
|
Matt Mauriello
HCI CS Grad Student
|
CHI2014 Practice Talk: Social Fabric Fitness
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| 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.
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Spring 2013
| Date
|
Leader
|
Topic
|
| Jan 24
|
|
|
| Jan 31
|
John Gomez
|
|
| Feb 7
|
Ben Bederson
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Tools for synchronous crowdsourcing
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| Feb 14
|
|
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| Feb 21
|
|
|
| Feb 28
|
Lisa Anthony (Host: Leah Findlater)
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Gestural Interaction for Children
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| 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)
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| April 25
|
|
|
| May 2
|
CHI 2013 (No BBL)
|
|
| May 9
|
|
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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
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| Th, Oct 3
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Ed Cutrell
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External Speaker
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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/
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| Th, Oct 10
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Marshini Chetty
Assistant Professor in iSchool and HCIL faculty member
http://marshini.net
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Talk
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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!
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| Th, Oct 17
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Kotaro Hara
CS PhD Student
http://kotarohara.com/
Uran Oh
CS PhD Student
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ASSETS'13 Practice Talks
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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
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| Th, Oct 24
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Makeability Lab
Jon Froehlich's research group in the HCIL
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Discussion
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Reflective discussion of experience exhibiting projects at Silver Spring Mini-Maker Faire.
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| Th, Oct 31
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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/
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Work In Progress Discussion
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HCI and Cybersecurity
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| Th, Nov 7
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Bryan Sivak
Chief Technology Officer at U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
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External Speaker
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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.
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| Th, Nov 14
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Erica Estrada
Lecturer, Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
(Tammy Clegg, contact)
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External Speaker/Design Charette
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Design Thinking
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| Th, Nov 21
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June Ahn
Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies and College of Education (joint appointment), and HCIL faculty member
http://www.ahnjune.com/
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Work In Progress Discussion
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Video Games, Blended Learning, and Large-scale Education Reform
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| Th, Nov 28
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No Brown Bag. Happy Thanksgiving and Hanukkah.
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| Th, Dec 5
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Shannon Collis
Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Maryland
http://shannoncollis.ca/
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Talk/Discussion
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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.
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| Th, Dec 12
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Learn more about the BBL student (co-)coordinator position.
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