Brown Bag Lunch Schedule: Difference between revisions

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The HCIL has an open, semi-organized weekly "brown bag lunch (BBL)" every <span style='color:red; font-weight:800'>Thursdays from 12:30-1:30pm in HCIL (2105 Hornbake, South Wing)</span>.  The topics range from someone's work, current interests in the HCIL, software demos/reviews, study design, proposed research topics, introductions to new people, etc.  The BBL is the one hour a week where we all come together--thus, it’s a unique time for HCIL members with unique opportunities to help build collaborations, increase awareness of each other’s activities, and generally just have a bit of fun together with <span style='color:red; font-weight:800'>free food every week</span>. There is no RSVP; simply show up!
= THIS PAGE IS NOT UPDATED ANYMORE=


If you would like to give or suggest a talk, presentation, workshop, etc., send an email to BBL student co-coordinators '''Deokgun Park  (intuinno@umd.edu)''' or '''Rebecca Stone (rebecca.johnson.stone@gmail.com)'''. In the email, briefly describe the topic and preferred dates.
'''Instead see this new page about the [https://hcil.umd.edu/bbl-speaker-series/ BBL Lecture series]'''


To be notified about upcoming events, please subscribe one of [[BBL mailing lists|these mailing lists]].  
OLD TEXT:  The HCIL has an open, semi-organized weekly "Guest Speaker & Pizza Series" every <span style='color:green; font-weight:800'>Thursday from 12:30-1:30pm in HCIL (2119 Hornbake, South Wing)</span>.  The topics range from someone's work, current interests in the HCIL, software demos/reviews, study design, proposed research topics, introductions to new people, etc. The BBL is the one hour a week where we all come together--thus, it’s a unique time for HCIL members with unique opportunities to help build collaborations, increase awareness of each other’s activities, and generally just have a bit of fun together. There is no RSVP; simply show up!


We thank YAHOO for its sponsorship of the HCIL Brown Bag Lunches
If you would like to give or suggest a talk, presentation, workshop, etc., send an email to BBL student co-coordinators '''Teja Maddali (hmaddali@umd.edu)''' or '''Aravind JR (aravind@umd.edu)'''. In the email, briefly describe the topic and preferred dates.
[[File:Yahoo.jpg|60px]].


== Fall 2016 Schedule ==
To be notified about upcoming events, please subscribe to one of [[BBL mailing lists|these mailing lists]].
 
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== Spring 2020 Guest Speaker Series Schedule ==
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! Topic


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|-
| 02/06/2020
|   
<b>Dr. Joel Chan, Dr. Amanda Lazar and Dr. Catherine Plaisant</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Panel discussion "What does a successful process for an HCI researcher look like?</b>
<br>
We'll be kicking off this semester with a panel discussion. Dr. Joel Chan, Dr. Amanda Lazar, and Dr. Catherine Plaisant will engage in a conversation with us about what successful processes for an HCI researcher look like in terms of personal development, week to week / day to day workflow, moving ideas forward, etc. 
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|-
| 02/13/2020
|   
<b>Christian Vogler,</b> Gallaudet University
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>The User Experience of Viewing Captioned Content</b>
<br>
Much has been made of the ability of automatic speech recognition (ASR) to supplement or replace human captioners both for video content and for live meetings. While the word error rate of ASR has been steadily improving, and on some types of content can even beat out human captioners, these improvements do not automatically in a good user experience for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. In this talk we will examine the reasons why this is so, and provide an overview of current efforts to develop human-centered caption quality metrics that are more closely aligned with meeting the needs of people who depend on captions to consume content.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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|-
| 02/20/2020
|   
<b>Wei Ai</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Promoting Pro-social Behavior with End-to-End Data Science</b>
<br>
The recent development of data science methods, including large-scale machine learning and causal inference, has presented a game-changing opportunity for social good provision through the effort of the crowd. In this talk, I introduce an end-to-end data science pipeline to promote behavioral change for pro-social benefits. More specifically, this involves conducting causal data analysis on empirical data for actionable insights and robust prediction models, incorporating the insights and predictions in designing recommender systems for individual actions, and evaluating the effectiveness of the recommender systems in promoting behavioral changes with randomized field experiments. I will present two applications of the end-to-end pipeline, where we designed and deployed team recommender systems on an online microfinance platform (Kiva.org) and a ride-sharing platform (DiDi). We evaluated the recommender systems through large-scale field experiments, which show significant increases in user participation. The recommender system has been deployed in DiDi and has impacted millions of users in practice.
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|-
| 02/27/2019
|   
<b>B Prabhakaran</b> University of Texas, Dallas
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Quantifying Human Performance and the Quality of Immersive Experiences</b>
<br>
Psychometric evaluations are generally used to understand the Quality of Experience (QoE) of immersive environments produced using augmented/mixed/virtual reality. Typically, these subjective evaluations are done from an end-user point-of-view, but these are limited by the subjective observations due to a number of factors. The objective approach consists of measuring the QoE by monitoring the network technical parameters or the network Quality of Service (QoS), such as throughput, delay, and packet loss. Most of the research on objective approaches for QoS-QoE mapping have focused on video streaming. Such objective QoS-QoE mapping strategies cannot be directly applied for immersive environments.
Hence, in this talk, we address two related questions: (1) Can we identify metrics that can objectively quantify the performance of an immersive environment? (2) Can we use the above objective performance metrics to understand the possible user QoE without the need for subjective user study or with minimal user study? We start with different examples of immersive environments such as haptic-enabled applications, mirror therapy, and games. We discuss what metrics are influenced by different system parameters such as processing power, and network QoS. Then, we present some of our preliminary work on understanding users’ QoE through these metrics.
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|-
|-
| 09/01/2016
| 03/05/2020
|    <br>  
|     
Kickoff to a new Semester!
<b>Dr. Joel Chan</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
Come network, make introductions, and share what each of us is working on
<b>What does a successful process for an HCI researcher look like? Part 2</b>
<br>
TBA
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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.
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== Fall 2019 HCIL Guest Speaker Series Schedule ==
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! Date
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| 08/29/2019
|   
<b>Hack-a-thon</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-expand">
<b>HCIL Website Hack-a-thon.</b>
<br>
We are kick starting this semester's BBL with a Hack-a-thon event. You will be tasked to update the HCIL website by checking for broken links, updating faculty information, checking for spelling and grammar errors and also improving the accessibility of the images in the website.
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|-
| 09/05/2019
|   
<b>Prof. Jun-Dong Cho</b> Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Celestial: Color Patterns for improving Color Perception for blind people.</b>
<br>
It is relatively difficult to recreate the abstract three-dimensional shape with only the tactile sense. Gibson said "These abilities can be improved through practice." "When you touch something, You may have no idea about it at first touch, but as you continue touching, you soon will know vaguely what it is" , Kojiro Hirose said. 
Recently, we developed "Blind-touch" to aid the visually impaired to appreciate greater painter’s work of art. This work is a reproduction of an existing masterpiece by means of a 3D printer and haptic electronics. It recognizes the pattern by touching the object in the artwork with a fingertip, and voice explanation and sound effect are provided through the voice user interface.  Color is an equaling lens through which we experience the natural and digital realities. Now, we are exploring the tactile-color association based on semiotics  to represent colors  with fingertip tactile sensation. In this way, audio  and touch contribute information to the non-visual perception of color in an complementary manner. In this talk, we review the related works and  introduce a so-called “Celestial color tactile pattern”  built based on the concept of both pictogram and ideogram and its variants.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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|-
| 09/12/2019
|   
<b>Prof. Niklas Elmqvist, Prof. Amanda Lazar, and Prof. Joel Chan</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b> A panel discussion on approaches to reviewing research papers.</b>
<br>
In light of the approaching deadline for SIGCHI 2020, Professors Niklas Elmqvist, Amanda Lazar, and Joel Chan will discuss the why/how of giving feedback on drafts of research papers. This would be helpful for anyone (Undergrad, Masters, or PhD students) who might be thinking of volunteering to review for conferences, ACM SIGCHI, or even for other lab members in the HCIL’s very own CHI clinic. Reviewers of all levels of expertise, even if you’ve never reviewed a research paper, are encouraged to participate and ask questions during the discussion. ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdpW6sU2b9Y link to video])
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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|-
| 09/19/2019
|   
<b>Ben Shneiderman</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b> Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Designing Next Generation User Experiences</b>
<br>
The next generation of user experiences will produce 1000-fold improvements in human capabilities. These new tools will amplify, augment, enhance, and empower people, just as the Web, email, search, navigation, digital photography, and many other applications have already done. These new human-centered tools will produce comprehensible, predictable, and controllable applications that promote self-efficacy and social participation at scale. The goal is to ensure human control, while increasing the level of automation. In short, the next generation of tools will make more people, more creative, more often.
<br>
Improved designs will give billions of users comprehensible interfaces that hide the underlying complexity of advanced algorithms. Users will see familiar visual strategies based on direct manipulation to provide informative feedback about the machine’s state and what they can do. Every use will build confidence that users can reliably accomplish their goals and increase the trust that the machine is under their control.
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|-
| 09/26/2019
|   
<b>Tom Ball</b> Microsoft Research
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>MakeCode and CODAL: intuitive and efficient embedded systems programming for education</b>
<br>
Across the globe, it is now commonplace for educators to engage in the making (design and development) of embedded systems in the classroom to motivate and excite their students. This new domain brings its own set of unique requirements. Historically, embedded systems development requires knowledge of low-level programming languages, local installation of compilation toolchains, device drivers, and applications. For students and educators, these requirements can introduce insurmountable barriers.<br>
We present the motivation, requirements, implementation, and evaluation of a new programming platform that enables novice users to create software for embedded systems. The platform has two major components: <br>1) Microsoft MakeCode (www.makecode.com), a web app that encapsulates an entire beginner IDE for microcontrollers; and <br>2) CODAL, an efficient component-oriented C++ runtime for microcontrollers.<br> We show how MakeCode and CODAL provide an accessible, cross-platform, installation-free programming experience for the BBC micro:bit and other embedded devices.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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|-
| 10/3/2019
|   
<b>Naeemul Hassan</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b> Towards Automated Fact Discovery and Ranking</b>
<br>
In this talk, I present the work of finding new, prominent situational facts, which are emerging statements about objects that stand out within certain contexts. Many such facts
are newsworthy—e.g., an athlete’s outstanding performance in a game, or a viral video’s impressive popularity. Effective and efficient identification of these facts assists journalists in reporting,
one of the main goals of computational journalism. A situational fact can be modeled as a “contextual” tuple that stands out against historical tuples in a context, specified by a conjunctive constraint involving dimension attributes when a set of measure attributes are compared. New tuples are constantly added to the table, reflecting events happening in the real world. Our goal is to discover constraint-measure pairs that qualify a new tuple as a contextual significant tuple, and discover them quickly before the event becomes yesterday’s news.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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|-
| 10/10/2019
|   
<b>John Dickerson</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-expand">
<b> Diversity in Matching Markets</b>
<br>
In bipartite matching problems, vertices on one side of a bipartite graph are paired with those on the other. In its offline variant, both sides of the graph are known a priori; in its online variant, one side of the graph is available offline, while vertices on the other arrive online and are irrevocably and immediately matched (or ignored) by an algorithm. Examples of such problems include matching workers to firms, advertisers to keywords, organs to patients, and riders to rideshare drivers. Much of the literature focuses on maximizing the total relevance---modeled via total weight---of the matching. However, in many real-world problems, it is also important to consider the contribution of diversity: hiring a diverse pool of candidates, displaying a relevant but diverse set of ads, and so on.
In this talk, we model the promotion of diversity in matching markets via maximization of a submodular function over the set of matched edges. We present new results in a generalization of traditional offline matching, b-matching, where vertices have both lower and upper bounds on the number of adjacent matched edges. We also present new theoretical results in online submodular bipartite matching. Finally, we conclude with ongoing work that approaches the problem of hiring a diverse cohort of workers through the lens of combinatorial pure exploration (CPE) in the multiarmed bandit setting, and discuss an ongoing experiment in this space at a large research university.
This talk will cover joint work with Saba Ahmadi, Faez Ahmed, Samsara Counts, Jeff Foster, Mark Fuge, Samir Khuller, Zhi Lang, Nicholas Mattei, Karthik A. Sankararaman, Candice Schumann, Aravind Srinivasan, and Pan Xu.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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|-
| 10/17/2019
|   
<b>Prof. Caro Williams-Pierce</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Designing for Mathematical Play: Failure and Feedback</b>
<br>
Prof. Caro will share her analysis of three types of microworld (videogame, simulation, and cognitive tutor), and how each constrain and afford mathematical play differently through their feedback and failure mechanisms. In doing so, she will also introduce her framework for youth and adult mathematical play, and describe how different design approaches influence different ways of mathematical learning. Anyone interested in designing digital learning environments is particularly encouraged to come - Prof. Caro promises that it'll be interesting even if you don't research math learning!
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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|-
| 10/24/2019
|   
<b>Karen Holtzblatt</b> Incontext Design
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b> What is Valuing vs “Jerk” Behavior? How behavior impacts a positive working experience</b>
<br>
Women in tech leave the field at twice the quit rate as men. Women often state, and research confirms, that women don’t feel valued. They point to the culture of the organization and how they are treated as a contributing factor. They say that men are “bro’s” or “jerks.” In 2018, we launched the Valuing &amp; Jerk Project as one WITops initiative (https://www.witops.org). This talk
will present our findings and perspective.
Behavior creates or undermines connection and value. The Valuing and Jerk Project focuses on understanding which behaviors are experienced as valuing in everyday work and which result in
naming the other as a “jerk”. Using Contextual Inquiry, we have uncovered core valuing behaviors, what devaluing means, and where behavior crosses the line to become “jerk” behavior. Armed with this understanding our next step is to generate and test interventions and solutions. The talk will introduce the Valuing and Jerk Project.
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|-
|-
| 09/08/2016  <br>
| 10/31/2019
| TBD
|   
<b>Rachael Bradley Montgomery</b><br> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''CHI Papers Clinic Lunch'''
<b>Designing to Support People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities</b>
<br>
Have you ever wondered how to create websites, applications, and content that support individuals with cognitive and learning disabilities; individuals who are aging; or individuals who are tired, overworked, and distracted?  The W3C
Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility (COGA) Task Force has been working on a design guide that goes beyond WCAG 2.2 to support individuals with cognitive and learning disabilities. The resulting design patterns and guidance bridges accessibility and usability and support a much wider audience than just those with disabilities.  Rachael will present her perspectives as an invited expert on this work. Please come learn about the design patterns and how to provide input on this evolving document.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''Abstract:''' TBD
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<br><br>
 
'''Bio:''' TBD
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|-
| 11/7/2019
|   
<b>Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden</b><br>TRACE center
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Underestimating the challenge of cognitive disabilities (and digital literacy). Directions to explore in short, medium and long term.
</b>
<br>
Recent work has caused us to question our understanding of the challenge of digital access by people with cognitive disabilities.  Our underestimation may, in part, help explain our difficulties as a field to date. In part, it has exposed what may be a much wider problem than we understood, and one that goes beyond those we have thought of as having cognitive disabilities. It intersects with digital literacy but also has implications for those with other disabilities as well. The concept of Technology Quotient (TQ) will be discussed and approaches for addressing access by people with cognitive disabilities and low digital literacy today, tomorrow and in the future will be explored in this talk.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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|-
| 11/14/2019
|   
<b>Adam Aviv</b> George Washington
University
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b> Human Factors in Mobile Authentication</b>
<br>
Mobile authentication is a crucial component of authentication more broadly,
especially as mobile devices become evermore connected to the broader computer
security ecosystem. The overarching goal of my research is to improve the
current state of mobile authentication by taking a holistic approach to
measuring mobile authentication and its impacts that intersect directly with the
user experience. In this talk, I will present a narrative of contributions to
mobile authentication over the last 10 years, focusing on how human factors
impact the security, from attacks, choices, and perceptions. I will particularly
focus on one form of mobile authentication, Android's graphical pattern unlock,
which may be the most heavily used graphical authentication system, ever. Based
on my experience, I will also present some new directions and methods that can
improve the security of mobile authentication and some new results on PINs and
LG's graphical Knock Code Authentication.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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|-
| 11/21/2019
|   
<b>Whitney Quesenbery</b> Co-Director, Center for Civic Design
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b> Storytelling makes research data come to life </b>
<br>
We all love our user research data…but why is it such a struggle to use the insights we uncover to create direction for a project?  Storytelling is the missing link, getting past charts and graphs to dig into what the data means for meeting human needs and making something usable and useful. Whitney will show how stories put research insights into context, communicate the entire user journey, show problems through the eyes of your users, and help you ask better questions (and run better usability tests) to gain deeper insights. Whitney is the co-founder of the Center for Civic Design, approaching democracy as a design problem, so there will be examples from the challenges of designing elections as well as stories from her work in theatre.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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|-
| 11/28/2019
|   
<b>Happy Thanksgiving Day</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b> No BBL. Time to catch up with families and friends :) </b>
<br>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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<!-- row start -->
|-
| 12/05/2019
|   
<b>TBA</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b> TBA</b>
<br>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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<br>
<br>
<br>
<b>
<br>
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<br>  
</div></div>
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== Spring 2019 Schedule ==
{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Date
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! Topic


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|-
|-
| 09/15/2016
| 01/31/2019
| '''Karen Holtzblatt'''<br>InContext Design / University of Maryland, College Park
|    
<b>Faculty Only BBL</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''Contextual Design, Cool Concepts, and Women in Tech Project'''
Regular BBLs will start from 7th Feb, 2019.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''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.
<!-- row end -->


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. [http://www.incontextdesign.com/cool/ The Cool Project] helped define the key aspects we must now consider; these led to changes in the [http://www.incontextdesign.com/womenintech/ Contextual Design Method].
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 02/07/2019
|   
<b>Faez Ahmed,</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Design Democratization in the Age of Machine Learning.</b>
<br>
Design democratization can transform the way we think about designing products. However, to enable design democratization, we need machine learning and computing methods to enable organizations to process a large amount of information efficiently. Using the example of online design contests, we will discuss three problems which organizations face in conducting design contests: a) How does one form teams to evaluate design ideas? b) How does one filter high quality and diverse ideas out of hundreds of submissions? and c) How does one reliably measure the creativity of ideas? We will discuss how matching, ranking, and novelty estimation methods developed in our work address these issues and what challenges remain for the field.
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Karen will also share the focus of her research on women in technology at the iSchool . Currently through collaborating with many in the industry [http://www.incontextdesign.com/womenintech/ 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.
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<br><br>
|-
'''Bio:''' Karen Holtzblatt is the inventor of Contextual Inquiry and co-founder of [http://www.incontextdesign.com/ InContext Design], which began in 1992 to use Contextual Design techniques to work with product teams to deliver market data and design solutions to clients across multiple industries. Her books, [http://www.incontextdesign.com/books/contextual-design-defining-customer-centered-systems/ Contextual Design: Defining Customer Centered Systems], and [http://www.incontextdesign.com/books/rapid-contextual-design/ Rapid Contextual Design], are used by companies and universities all over the world.
| 02/14/2019
|   
<b>Huaishu Peng,</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Interactive Fabrication and Fabrication for Interaction.</b>
<br>
3D printing technology has been widely applied to produce well-designed objects. There is a hope to make both the modeling process and printing outputs more interactive, so that designers can get in-situ tangible feedback to fabricate objects with rich functionalities. To date, however, knowledge accumulated to realize this hope remains limited. In this talk, I will present two lines of research. The first line of work aims at facilitating an interactive process of fabrication. I demonstrate novel interactive fabrication systems that allow the designer to create 3D models in AR with a robotic arm to print the model in real time and on-site. The second line of work concerns the fabrication of 3D printed objects that are interactive. I report new techniques for 3D printing with novel materials such as fabric sheet, and how to print one-off functional objects such as sensor and motor. I will conclude the talk by outlining future research directions built upon my current work.
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| 02/21/2019
|   
<b>Niklas Elmqvist</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Everyone a Data Scientist: Empowering Casual Users to Understand Complex Data.</b>
<br>
Understanding data is quickly becoming the new digital divide. Merely having access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) is no longer sufficient when our society is overflowing with massive volumes of raw, complex, and heterogeneous data. Since best-practice data science workflows are still only available through esoteric software libraries, typically accessed using the Python and R languages, leveraging this data to its full potential often requires significant programming expertise. Even commercial point-and-click analytics tools such as Tableau, Spotfire, and QlikView require training and assume significant prior knowledge of mathematical, statistical, and sometimes even machine learning concepts. This means that currently only people who have the appropriate data and technology literacy can harness the ready availability of data in our society.
 
In this work-in-progress talk, I will discuss our efforts for shrinking or outright eliminating this new digital data divide through interactive visualization, explainable machine learning, and collaborative technologies. More specifically, I will talk about several past, current, or planned projects on this topic, including (1) the use of mixed-initiative interaction, which combines both human and computational efforts in the analytical process; (2) the use of attention for computational steering; (3) recommender systems for automatically suggesting the next analytical step in a workflow; (4) direct manipulation methods for interacting with machine learning models; and (5) "team-first" collaborative mechanisms that reduce the barrier to synchronizing and sharing work to facilitate emergent collaboration. This is ongoing research, so your feedback on these efforts is welcome.
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|-
| 02/28/2019
|   
<b>Townhall</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Research Speed Dating</b>
<br>
This week everyone is a speaker. We want everyone to talk about what is keeping you busy these days. This is a great way to recruiting participants, get feedback on your research questions, your data collection methods or anything concerning your research. We want you to share your research to the rest of HCIL group.
 
Faculty members, Ph.D. students, Masters students, and Bachelors students, we strongly encourage you to share your work so that everyone is aware of what’s happening inside HCIL.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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|- style="background-color: lightgreen;" |
| 03/07/2019
| colspan="2" | <b>HCIL Spring Cleaning</b><br>Join and help spruce up the HCIL and be a part of a larger conversation of what the lab space should look like. We start at noon (12 pm) and there is free food for anyone who joins!
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|-
| 03/14/2019
|   
<b>Stories from the HCIL</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
Come and tell your favorite stories about the HCIL and the iSchool in this new format that we're trying for the BBL. It's like a casual fireside chat where you get to learn about the rich history of the HCIL from the people who know it best! And there is pizza, of course.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|- style="background-color: lightgray;" |
| 03/21/2019
| colspan="2" | No Brown Bag, Spring Break.
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|- style="background-color: lightgreen;" |
| 03/28/2019
| colspan="2" | <b>HCIL Symposium Practice Talks</b><br>All speakers are invited to come rehearse their talk. Please shoot an email to the BBL coordinators and add your name to the schedule: <b>[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17E6g3SgnnNdJIFFnGjkOVDWCETR7DXnBUh29s0kMYnY/edit#gid=0 HERE]</b>.
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|- style="background-color: lightgreen;" |
| 04/04/2019
| colspan="2" | <b>HCIL Symposium In Session</b><br>No BBL, instead we encourage you to join us at the <b>[http://hcil.umd.edu/events/event/hcil-annual-symposium/ HCIL Symposium]</b>.
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 04/11/2019
|   
<b>Wayne Lutters,</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Supporting service work in information infrastructure</b>
<br>
An introduction to Wayne’s lab via a high-level overview of some key historical projects and an active discussion of what we are wrestling with this particular week – representing maps of belief space (w/ Phil Feldman).
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 04/18/2019
|   
<b>Zheng Yao,</b> Carnegie Mellon University
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Join, Stay or Go? Members’ Life Cycles in Online Health Communities</b>
<br>
This talk discusses temporal changes in members’ participation in online health community (OHC), focusing on their motivations for joining and changes in their motivations as they transition to other roles or ultimately leave the community. We use mixed methods, combining behavioral log analysis, automated content analysis, surveys and interviews. We found that members started participating in OHCs for a common set of reasons, mainly to acquire support and to perform social comparisons. When their need for support decreased, most members quit the site. The motivations of those who stayed shifted to providing support and helping other members in the community. Oldtimers also established social ties with others members, which motivated them to stay in the community. These oldtimers, who contributed the majority of content, encountered challenges that threatened their commitment to the community, including negative emotion related to other members’ deaths. These challenges led them to take leaves of absence from the community or to drop out permanently. Our findings shed light on the changing motivations of OHC members, which provide implications for better designing OHCs.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 04/25/2019
|   
<b>TBA</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b> Aravind will run a workshop on how to make PDF documents accessible</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 05/02/2019
|   
<b>Yue Jiang,</b> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>ORC Layout: Adaptive GUI Layout with OR-Constraints</b>
<p>We propose a novel approach for constraint-based graphical user interface (GUI) layout based on OR-constraints (ORC) in standard soft/hard linear constraint systems. ORC layout unifies grid layout and flow layout, supporting both their features as well as cases where grid and flow layouts individually fail. We describe ORC design patterns that enable designers to safely create flexible layouts that work across different screen sizes and orientations. We also present the ORC Editor, a GUI editor that enables designers to apply ORC in a safe and effective manner, mixing grid, flow and new ORC layout features as appropriate. We demonstrate that our prototype can adapt layouts to screens with different aspect ratios with only a single layout specification, easing the burden of GUI maintenance. Finally, we show that ORC specifications can be modified interactively and solved efficiently at runtime.</p>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<!-- row end -->


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.
<!-- row start -->
<br>  
|-
</div></div>
| 05/09/2019
|   
<b>TBA</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
TBA
<br><br><b>Note:</b> CHI 2019 will be in session during this time. Everyone is still invited, but many people might be away for the conference.  
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<!-- row end -->


<!-- row start -->
|-
|-
| 09/22/2016
| 05/16/2019
| '''Elissa Redmiles''' <br>HCIL, University of Maryland, College Park
|    
<b>Adil Yalcin,</b> Founder and CEO at Keshif
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''How I Learned to be Secure: a Census-Representative Survey of Security Advice Sources and Behavior'''
<b>It's all about creating new possibilities for people: A journey from the lab to a startup</b>
 
One of the most valuable parts of the DNA of HCIL is its focus on "human", and how our mentors guide us to connect our work with people (users). As a student of this school of thought, I had found my purpose to help the 95% by identifying, questioning, and removing barriers (creating opportunities) in visual analytics. Two years ago, with results baked in lab, and the same driving purpose, I stepped into a world unknown to me: creating, running, and growing a business, one customer at a time.
 
I am back to share some of the surprises, new perspectives, and validations from this journey so far. What I missed can help you realize the opportunities you already have. What I wish I knew may reveal some gaps. And, what remained constant may hint that research in university and what comes after may not be so different after all. I also will touch on the subtle and dynamic balance between your elevator pitch, your audience, the value you provide, and crossing the finish line.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''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.
<!-- row end -->
<br><br>
'''Bio:''' Elissa Redmiles is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on usable security - the intersection between Cyber-security and Human Computer Interaction. Elissa was a 2015 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Fellow at the University of Chicago. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., she held Marketing Management and Software Engineering roles at IBM and completed her B.S. in Computer Science, cum laude, at the University of Maryland.
<br>
</div></div>


<!-- row start -->
|-
|-
| 09/29/2016
| 05/23/2019
| '''Gregg Vanderheiden''' <br>Director, Trace R&D Center, University of Maryland, College Park
|    
<b>TBA</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''UMD’s New Trace Center;  Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow'''
TBA
<br><br><b>Note:</b> This slot may be cancelled since it is right at this end of the semester.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''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. 
<!-- row end -->
<br><br>
 
'''Bio:''' Dr. Vanderheiden has been active in the area of Technology and Disability for over 45 years.  His early work was in Augmentative Communication, a term taken from his writings in the late 70’s.  Starting in 1979, his focus shifted to personal computers and he worked inside Apple, Microsoft and IBM on increasing the accessibility and usability of their products. Apple included features in Apple IIe, gs, and MacOS and iOS.  IBM and Microsoft licensed 9 features from Dr. Vanderheiden’s group for inclusion in DOS, OS/2, and Windows.  Dr. Vanderheiden co-chaired and co-authored the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0 and 2.0), worked with the Access Board on 255 and 508,  and lead the effort to develop the EZ-Access package of cross-disability access features that are now built into Amtrak ticket machines, Automated Postal Stations, Homeland Security Passport Kiosks, and many other ITMs across the country.  His current focus is on the development of a Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII). 
<br>  
<br>
<br>
<b>
<br>
<br>  
<br>  
</div></div>
</div></div>
|}
== Fall 2018 Schedule ==
{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Date
! width="150px" | Leader
! Topic


<!-- row start -->
|-
|-
| 10/06/2016
| 08/30/2018
|'''John Wilbanks''',<br>Sage Bionetworks <br>
|    
<b>Student Townhall</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''Using Human Centered Design to Make Informed Consent Actually Inform'''
Instead of the regular BBL, there will be an internal HCIL-students-only townhall meeting instead.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''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.
.
<br><br>
'''Bio:''' John Wilbanks is the Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks. Previously, Wilbanks worked as a legislative aide to Congressman Fortney “Pete” Stark, served as the first assistant director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, founded and led to acquisition the bioinformatics company Incellico, Inc., and was executive director of the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. In February 2013, in response to a We the People petition that was spearheaded by Wilbanks and signed by 65,000 people, the U.S. government announced a plan to open up taxpayer-funded research data and make it available for free. Wilbanks holds a B.A. in philosophy from Tulane University and also studied modern letters at the Sorbonne.
<br>  
<br>  
<!-- row end -->
</div></div>
</div></div>


|-
|-
| 10/13/2016
| 09/06/2018
| '''Fan Du'''<br>HCIL, University of Maryland, College Park
|    
<b>BBL Student Co-coordinators</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''EventAction: Visual Analytics for Temporal Event Sequence Recommendation'''
Come, network, make introductions, and share what you are working on.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''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
<br><br>
'''Bio:''' Fan Du is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, College Park. He works as a research assistant with Prof. Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant. His research focuses on data visualization and human-computer interaction, especially on analyzing healthcare data and user activity logs. http://frankdu.org
<br>
</div></div>


<!-- row start -->
|-
|-
| 10/20/2016
| 09/13/2018
| '''Grant McKenzie''',<br>University of Maryland, College Park
|    
<b>Joel Chan, Tammy Clegg</b><br>
University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''Exploring dimensions of 'place' '''
TBA
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''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.
.
<br><br>
'''Bio:''' Grant McKenzie is an assistant professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, affiliate of the Center for Geospatial Information Science and director of the Place Time Analysis Lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2015) and a Master of Applied Science degree from the University of Melbourne (2008).  Grant's research interests lie in spatio-temporal data analysis, geovisualization, place-based data analytics and the intersection of information technologies and society. More information on D. Grant McKenzie and his research can be found at http://grantmckenzie.com and http://ptal.io.
<br>  
<br>  
</div></div>
<!-- row end -->


<!-- row start -->
|-
|-
| 10/27/2016
| 09/20/2018
| '''Greg Walsh''',<br> University of Baltimore
|    
<b>Joel Zhang</b><br>
University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''Life in the Big City: A reflection of four years of HCI Education and Research in Baltimore'''
Research proposal centered around pain tracking and sharing.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
.
<br>
<!-- row end -->


<!-- row start -->
|- style="background-color: darkgray;" |
| 03/22/2017
| colspan="2" | No Brown Bag, Cancelled.
<!-- row end -->


<!-- row start -->
|-
| 10/4/2018
|   
<b>Brian Ondov, Sriram Karthik Badam</b><br>
University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
Brian’s paper talks about Evaluating Visual Comparison and seeks to understand how different encodings of data can drastically affect how we perceive quantities. More information about this project is available at http://hcil.umd.edu/visualcomparison/.
<br> <br>
Karthik’s paper is about a computing platform called Vistrates which seeks to unify the fragmented analytical workflows employed by users to analyze a group of visualizations created in different tools.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''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.
.
<br><br>
'''Bio:''' Greg Walsh earned his PhD from the UMD iSchool in 2012 and has been an assistant professor at the University of Baltimore ever since. He is the graduate program director for the MS in Interaction Design and Information Architecture as well as the UX Design program. He is ruggedly handsome and a recipient of a Google 2015 Faculty Research Award.
<br>  
<br>  
</div></div>
<!-- row end -->


<!-- row start -->
|-
|-
| 11/03/2016
| 10/11/2018
| '''John Dickerson''', Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park
|    
<b>Polly Lee O'Rourke</b><br>
University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''Better Matching Markets via Optimization'''
Improving language learning using brain simulation.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''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.
.
<br>
<!-- row end -->


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.
<!-- row start -->
<br><br>
|-
'''Bio:''' John Dickerson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. I'm the lead developer of the US nationwide kidney exchange program, and lead developer of a better way to deal with TV advertisements (currently in the pilot phase with two of the nation's largest MSOs). He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and has been supported by a Facebook Fellowship, Siebel Scholarship, and an NDSEG Fellowship.
| 10/18/2018
|   
<b>Andrea Batch</b><br>
University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Information Olfactation: Harnessing Scent to Convey Data</b><br>  
Olfactory feedback for analytical tasks is a virtually unexplored area in spite of the advantages it offers for information recall, feature identification, and location detection. We have introduced the concept of information olfactation as the fragrant sibling of information visualization, and this talk will cover our theoretical model of how scent can be used to convey data. Building on a review of the human olfactory system and mirroring common visualization practice, we propose olfactory marks, the substrate in which they exist, and their olfactory channels that are available to designers. To exemplify this idea, we present viScent: A six-scent stereo olfactory display capable of conveying olfactory glyphs of varying temperature and direction, as well as a corresponding software system that integrates the display with a traditional visualization display, along with three applications that make use of the viScent system.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
.
<br>  
<br>  
</div></div>
<!-- row end -->


<!-- row start -->
|-
|-
| 11/10/2016
| 10/25/2018
| '''Bill Kules''', iSchool, University of Maryland, College Park
|    
<b>Student Townhall</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''Teaching JavaScript as Social Justice: Interrogating Culture, Bias and Equity in an Introductory Programming Course'''
Research speed-dating
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''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.
.
<br><br>
<br>  
'''Bio:''' Dr. Bill Kules is Visiting Associate Professor at the iSchool. Prior to joining the iSchool, he was Chair of the Department of Library and Information Science (LIS) at The Catholic University of America. Dr. Kules seeks to improve educational practice and outcomes in LIS education through teaching, research and advocacy, with a particular interest in helping students understand how information technology is situated in and reflects broader social structures, constructs and issues such as race, class and gender. He has experience in blended curriculum development, faculty development and mentoring, and continuous program improvement through systematic planning and outcomes assessment.
<!-- row end -->


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.
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 11/01/2018
|   
<b>Joohee Choi</b> <br>
University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
Will Too Many Editors Spoil The Tag? Conflicts and Alignment in Q&A Categorization (CSCW Practice Talk)
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
.
<br>  
<br>  
</div></div>
<!-- row end -->


<!-- row start -->
|-
| 11/08/2018
|   
<b>Alina Striner</b> <br>
University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Learning in the Holodeck: the Role of Multisensory Cues on Pattern Recognition in VR</b><br>
Designing for multiple senses has the capacity to improve virtual realism, extend our ability to process information, and more easily transfer knowledge between physical and digital environments. HCI researchers are beginning to explore the viability of integrating multisensory media (“multimedia”) into virtual experiences, however research has yet to consider whether mulsemedia truly enhances pattern recognition in virtual reality (VR). In the context of citizen science watershed habitat training, our research asks, how does realism affect observation skills in VR? Within this domain, we build a multisensory system that allows users to feel (wind, thermal, humidity) and smell landscape and environmental conditions. We then compare and report on how users make observations and infer patterns between 2 stream habitats in VR, with and without the multisensory information. Our findings reveal that multisensory information improved the number of high-level, mid-level and low-level observations participants made, and positively impacted engagement and immersion.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
.
<br>
<!-- row end -->


<!-- row start -->
|-
|-
| 11/17/2016
| 11/15/2018
|'''Mohammed AlGhamdi''',<br>McGill University
|    
<b>Student Townhall</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''Usability of Three-dimensional Virtual Learning Environments: An Exploratory Study of the Think Aloud Approach'''
Research speed dating.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''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).
.
<br><br>
<br>  
The few studies that have examined the usability of 3D virtual learning environments have predominately focused on the collection of users’ likes and dislikes through the utilization of inquiry-based usability evaluation approaches such as questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups (Dede et al., 1996; Di Blas et al., 2005; Lu, 2008; McArdle et al., 2010; Monahan et al., 2008; Perera et al., 2009; Roussos et al., 1999; Virvou & Katsionis, 2008). While this type of data is of value, it fails to provide usability information based on actual system use; rather, it provides subjective feelings reported by end users regarding system use.
<!-- row end -->
<br><br>
In an effort to examine how other usability evalaution approaches can be utilized to provide valuable data stemming from actual system use, my PhD research focused on exploring the use of the think aloud approach for the usability evalaution of a three-dimensional virtual learning environment by end users. In this talk, I will present the research I conducted to explore the impact of the think aloud approach on the validity of various usability metrics collected during the usability evaluation of a specific three-dimensional virtual learning environment by early-teens between the ages of 14-15 years.
<br><br>
'''Bio:'''  Mohammed J. Alghamdi is a faculty member at the School of Information Sciences at Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah Saudi Arabia. He is currently a PhD student in the School of Information Studies in McGill University. He has recently submitted his PhD thesis dissertation titled “Usability of Three-dimensional Virtual Learning Environments: An Exploratory Study of the Think Aloud Approach” and is awaiting to defend it in December of 2016. Throughout his time at the School of Information Studies, he has been involved in research studies focusing on the information seeking process of early-teens engaged in inquiry-based learning as well as research focusing on intergenerational design teams. He has also conducted information literacy seminars for middle school students in the Montreal, Quebec area.
</div></div>


<!-- row start -->
|- style="background-color: darkgray;" |
|- style="background-color: darkgray;" |
| 11/24/2016
| 03/22/2017
| colspan="2" | No Brown Bag, Thanksgiving Break.
| colspan="2" | No Brown Bag, Thanksgiving Break.
<!-- row end -->
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 11/29/2018
|   
<b>Lelani Battle</b><br>
University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
A Characterization Study of Exploratory Analysis Behaviors in Tableau <br>
Exploratory visual analysis (EVA) is an interactive process comprising both focused tasks and more open-ended exploration. Visual analysis tools aim to facilitate this process by enabling rapid specification of both data transformations and visualizations, using a combination of direct manipulation and automated design. With a better understanding of users’ analysis behavior, we might improve the design of these visualization tools to promote effective outcomes. <br>
In this talk, I will present our recent work on characterizing the EVA process. We contribute a consistent definition of EVA through review of the relevant literature, and an empirical evaluation of existing assumptions regarding how analysts perform EVA. We present the results of a study where 27 Tableau users answered various analysis questions across 3 datasets. We measure task performance, identify recurring patterns across participants’ analyses, and assess variance from task specificity and dataset. We find striking differences between existing assumptions and the collected data. Participants successfully completed a variety of tasks, with over 80% accuracy across focused tasks with measurably correct answers. The observed cadence of analyses is surprisingly slow compared to popular assumptions from the database community. We find significant overlap in analyses across participants, showing that EVA behaviors can be predictable. Furthermore, we find few structural differences between open-ended and more focused analysis tasks. Finally, I will discuss the implications of our findings for the design of effective data analytics systems, and highlight several promising directions for future study.
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|-
|-
| 12/01/2016
| 12/06/2018
| HCIL
|    
<b>Student Townhall</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''Discussion: Diversity in Tech'''
TBA
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<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''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, please take a some time to read Vauhini Vara's ''Bloomberg Businessweek'' article [https://www.dropbox.com/s/4o1tqy005i7yb0l/Why%20Doesn't%20Silicon%20Valley%20Hire%20Black%20Coders%3F.pdf?.pdf%3Fdl=0&dl=0 Why Doesn't Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?] and look over some statistics from the [http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/diversity-in-tech/ Information is Beautiful] and the ''[http://graphics.wsj.com/diversity-in-tech-companies/ Wall Street Journal]'' on this topic. We'll use these resources as a starting point for our conversation.<br><br>
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|-
|-
| 12/08/2016
| 12/13/2018
| '''HCIL'''
|    
<b>Cookie Exchange</b>
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| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''HCIL Seasonal Cookie Exchange'''
We encourage you to make/buy cookies (or some related treat) and create individual bags (about six cookies in each bag, and about 4-6 bags). Then bring them in labeled on 12/13 and you can pick bags from other people to take home or eat on the spot. However, you do not need to make cookies to attend! All are welcome to come and hang out.
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'''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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<br>Sign up for the cookie exchange here: https://goo.gl/forms/ov68tWvHyzpfbmuA2
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<p></p><br/>


== Spring 2017 Schedule ==
== Spring 2018 Schedule ==
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|-
|-
| 02/02/2017
| 01/25/2018
|     
|     
Kickoff to a new Semester!
Kickoff to a new Semester!
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| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
Come network, make introductions, and share what each of us is working on
<b>Come, network, make introductions, and share what you are working on</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
Please come to our first BBL of the Spring 2018 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.
<br>
</div></div>
 
|-
| 02/01/2018
|   
'''Bahador Saket'''
<br> Georgia Tech, Atlanta
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Visualization by Demonstration</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
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.
<b>Abstract:</b> A commonly used interaction paradigm in most visualization tools is manual view specification. Tools implementing manual view specification often require users to manually specify visual properties through GUI operations on collections of visual properties and data attributes that are presented visually on control panels. To interact with tools implementing manual view specification users need to understand the potentially complex system parameters being controlled. Additionally, in such tools, users need to constantly shift their attention from the visual features of interest when interacting.
 
In this talk, I present an alternative interaction paradigm for visualization construction and data exploration called visualization by demonstration. This paradigm advocates for a different process of visualization construction. I will also discuss the trade-offs between these interaction paradigms based on the data collected from an empirical study. I will then discuss applications of the "by demonstration’" paradigm in other areas in data visualization.
<br>
<br>
<b>Bio:</b> Bahador Saket is a third-year Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech, where he works with Dr. Alex Endert. His current research focuses on the design of interaction techniques for visualization construction and visual data exploration. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Bahador worked at different research labs including Microsoft Research, CNS Research Center, and NUS-HCI Lab. He has published over 12 peer-reviewed articles in the leading journals and conferences in the field of human-computer interaction and data visualization such as IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), Computer Graphics Forum, CSCW, UIST, and MobileHCI.  
<br>
<br>  
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</div></div>
</div></div>


|-
|-
| 02/09/2017
| 02/08/2018
|    
|    
'''Bilge Mutlu''',<br>University of Wisconsin-Madison
'''Elissa Redmiles'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''Human-Centered Principles and Methods for Designing Robotic Technologies'''
<b>Dancing Pigs or Security? Measuring the Rationality of End-User Security Behavior</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''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.
<b>Abstract:</b> Accurately modeling human decision-making in security is critical to think about when, why, and how to recommend that users adopt certain secure behaviors. We used behavioral economics experiments to model the rationality of end-user security decision-making in a realistic online experimental system simulating a bank account. We ask participants to make a financially impactful security choice, in the face of transparent risks of account compromise and benefits offered by an optional security behavior (two-factor authentication). We find that more than 50% of our participants made rational (e.g., utility optimal) decisions, and we find that participants are more likely to behave rationally in the face of higher risk. Additionally, we confirm that users are boundedly rational: they make decisions based on some risks and context, but not others, and we can model their behavior well as a function of these factors. Finally, we show that a “one-size-fits-all” emphasis on security can lead to market losses, but that adoption by a subset of users with higher risks or lower costs can lead to market gains.
<br><br>
<br>
'''Bio:''' Bilge Mutlu is an associate professor of computer science, psychology, and industrial engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.  He received his Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute in 2009. His background combines training in interaction design, human-computer interaction, and robotics with industry experience in product design and development. Dr. Mutlu is a former Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of the NSF CAREER award as well as several best paper awards and nominations, including HRI 2008, HRI 2009, HRI 2011, UbiComp 2013, IVA 2013, RSS 2013, HRI 2014, CHI 2015, and ASHA 2015. His research has been covered by national and international press including the NewScientist, MIT Technology Review, Discovery News, Science Nation, and Voice of America. He has served in the Steering Committee of the HRI Conference and the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, co-chairing the Program Committees for ROMAN 2016, HRI 2015, ROMAN 2015, and ICSR 2011, the Program Sub-committees on Design for CHI 2013 and CHI 2014, and the organizing committee for HRI 2017. More information on Dr. Mutlu and his research can be found at http://bilgemutlu.com and http://hci.cs.wisc.edu.</br>  
<b>Bio:</b> Elissa Redmiles is a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland in Computer Science. Her research focuses on using computational and social science methodologies to understand and improve users' privacy and security learning processes, behavior, and perceptions. She is the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a National Science Defense and Engineering Graduate 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.
<br>  
</div></div>
</div></div>




|-
|-
| 02/16/2017
| 02/15/2018
|    
|    
'''Susan Winter''',<br>University of Maryland, College Park
'''Erin Peters-Burton'''
<br> George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
TBD
<b>Building Student Self-Awareness of Learning to Enhance Diversity in the Sciences</b>
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<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
TBD<br>  
<b>Abstract:</b> Many students are being left out of pursuing further studies in science because the current system of science education values students who learn via completion in an isolated, rather than collaborative way (Tobias, 1990). The stereotype of students who excel in science tend to be the ones who can conform to the institutional structure where the teacher is the sole source of knowledge (Friere, 2000). Through the idea of “Education as the Practice of Freedom” (hooks, 1994), the presentation will explain investigations that explore tangible ways to break down that stereotype. This research begins with the assumption that if teachers taught the ways science operates as a discipline, then students gain more power to construct their own scientific knowledge because they understand the “rules” of knowledge validation (Duschl, 1990). Learning how scientific knowledge is constructed and being self-aware of one’s own learning in science can help level the playing field so that students can do inquiry well (NRC, 1996; AAAS, 1993) and the science classroom will be a more inclusive, positive environment rather than relying on isolated competition for teaching. In this presentation, I will present an overview of research I have done over the past 10 years that focuses on helping students to become self-aware of their learning in science and how scientific knowledge is constructed. The work involves 8th grade students, undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals. The studies include constructs such as self-efficacy, motivation, metacognition, self-regulated learning, and visualization. Findings of the studies are synthesized into self-awareness priorities and how those constructs will ultimately impact social justice by providing more opportunities to see alternative perspectives and learn the “rules” of knowledge validation in science. As a result, students develop a sense of agency and an identity where anything is possible because they can learn independently in any situation.
<br>
<b>Bio:</b> Erin E. Peters-Burton is the Donna R. and David E. Sterling Endowed Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. She has a B.S. in Physics from the University of Illinois, a M.Ed. in Educational Psychology and Social Foundations of Education from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. from George Mason University (VA) in Educational Psychology and Educational Research Methods.
She has taught middle school and high school science and mathematics for 15 years prior to her academic work and was a National Board Certified Teacher in Early Adolescence Science.
She has published in science education, teacher education, educational psychology, marine biology, geology education, history and philosophy of science, technology, educational leadership, and learning disability journals. Her book, Thinking Like Scientists: Using Metacognitive Prompts to Develop Nature of Science Knowledge, and her edited book, The STEM Road Map: A Framework for Integrated STEM Education have led to the curriculum series books from the National Science Teacher Association entitled, STEM Road Map for Elementary School, STEM Road Map for Middle School, and STEM Road Map for High School.
In 2016 she was awarded the Association of Science Teacher Educators Outstanding Science Teacher of the Year in recognition of her work with the professional development of secondary science teachers.
<br>
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</div></div>
</div></div>


|-
|-
| 02/23/2017
| 02/22/2018
|    
|    
TBD
'''Norman Su'''
<br> Indiana University
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
TBD
<b>The Problem of Designing for Subcultures</b>
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<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
TBD<br>  
<b>Abstract:</b> Members of subcultures speak about and act with pervasive technologies in service to their distinct traditions. I will describe how outwardly subcultures maintain a unified front, yet inwardly are rich sites for compromise and confrontation over technology. I will highlight findings from work we have done with subcultures and, in particular, my own fieldwork with Irish traditional musicians. I will close by describing new design opportunities for technologies that acknowledge the remarkable solidarity and discord of subcultures.
<br>
<b>Bio:</b> Norman Makoto Su is an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. His research interests lie in human–computer interaction (HCI) and computer–supported cooperative work (CSCW). His Authentic User Experience (AUX) lab characterizes the relationship of technology with subcultures and designs systems to support their notion of authenticity. He received his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine and a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Information and Library Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. He has done internships at IBM, The Aerospace Corporation, and PARC.
<br>  
</div></div>
</div></div>


|-
|-
| 03/02/2017
| 03/01/2018
|    
|    
TBD
'''Ya-Wei Li'''
<br> Center for Conservation Innovation, Defenders of Wildlife
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
TBD
<b>Using Data and Technology to Save Endangered Species.</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
TBD<br>  
<b>Abstract: </b>We will discuss how Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit wildlife conservation organization, is expanding its use of technology and data analytics to conserve endangered species.  We will summarize our projects involving remote-sensing data to monitor wildlife habitat and compliance with conservation agreements; data mining of federal government decisions to build the largest public repository of text-searchable documents on the U.S. Endangered Species Act; natural language processing of those documents to improve public understanding of how our government conserves endangered species; use of data visualization tools to reveal patterns in large datasets; and other initiatives.  We invite the audience to actively engage with us about how we can improve our work and offer ideas for future projects and potential collaborations.
<br><br>
<b>Bio: </b>Ya-Wei (Jake) specializes in endangered species law, policy, and science.  He leads the Center for Conservation Innovation at Defenders of Wildlife, which focuses on developing innovative and pragmatic strategies to conserve endangered and at-risk species.  Before joining Defenders in 2010, Jake practiced environmental law in the private sector.  Jake holds a B.S. from Drexel University and a J.D. from Cornell University Law School.  At Cornell, Jake also completed graduate coursework in conservation biology and herpetology.
<br><br>
Jacob works on linking science to Endangered Species Act policy.  He works with others inside and outside of Defenders to make ESA-related data available and easily interpretable, so that policy makers and the public can make informed decisions about conservation.  Before joining Defenders, Jacob was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Connecticut, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013.  From 2000-2008, Jacob was a field biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in New Mexico and Arizona, during which time he completed his Bachelor's degree in Conservation Ecology at Prescott College.
</div></div>
</div></div>


|-
|-
| 03/09/2017
| 03/08/2018
|    
|    
TBD
'''Deok Gun Park'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
TBD
<b>Thinking, Autism and AGI</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
TBD<br>  
<br>
<b>Abstract:</b> Despite recent advances in deep learning, we do not know yet how we can combine these application-specific models to build an artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Furthermore, the data is becoming the bottleneck to scale these approaches for the multiple tasks.  In this talk, I propose a theory of the thinking and a neural algorithm that can bootstrap intelligence with limited computational resources and data.  This neural algorithm approximates the O(n3) parameter space of the thinking theory into the O(1) parameters to make learning tractable for the biological intelligent agents. I will explain this proposal by cognitive phenomenons that are observed in a human, such as infant language acquisition, visual and verbal thinking, personality, creativity, exploit-exploration trade off, dreaming, one-shot learning, abstract language.
<br><br>
<b>Bio:</b> Deokgun Park is a Ph.D. candidate in the HCILab of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, being advised by Prof. Niklas Elmqvist. His research focuses on the computational methods for open-ended tasks.  He completed M.S. in Interdisciplinary Engineering at Purdue University and M.S. in Biomedical Engineering at Seoul National University, where he obtained B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering at Seoul National University. He worked at the government research institute, industry research labs, and startups. He has published and licensed his patents to companies including Samsung Electronics.
</div></div>
</div></div>


|-
|-
| 03/16/2017
| 03/15/2018
|    
|    
TBD
'''Clemens Klokmose'''
<br> Aarhus University, Denmark
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
TBD
<b>Shareable Dynamic Media: A revisit of the fundamentals of interactive computing</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
TBD<br>  
<b>Abstract:</b> Developing interactive systems that support collaboration between people, distribution across heterogeneous devices and user appropriation is notoriously difficult. Today’s software rests on a foundation built for personal computing, and to properly support the aforementioned qualities we need to revisit this foundation. In this talk, I will present you with a vision called Shareable Dynamic Media, inspired by Alan Kay’s seminal vision of Personal Dynamic Media. I will present a prototype implementation of the vision called Webstrates, and demonstrate how it enables the development of software where distribution across devices, collaboration between people, and malleability and reprogrammability are the norm rather than the exception. I will show our latest project, Codestrates, that combines Webstrates with the literate computing approach of interactive notebooks.
<br><br>
<b>Bio:</b> Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose is an associate professor in the development of advanced interactive systems at the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. He co-directs the Digital Creativity Lab that is part of the Center for Advanced Visualisation and Interaction (CAVI). Clemens has worked as a postdoc at Computer Science, Aarhus University and at Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique, Université Paris-Sud. He has furthermore spent a year as a user interface specialist in the industry. Clemens received his PhD in Computer Science in 2009 from Aarhus University supervised by prof. Susanne Bødker. Clemens’ main interest is the fundamentals of interactive computing, particularly to support and understanding computing with multiple devices and multiple people. Many of his ideas are crystallised into the Webstrates platform (webstrates.net), which he leads the development of.
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|- style="background-color: darkgray;" |
|- style="background-color: darkgray;" |
| 03/23/2017
| 03/22/2017
| colspan="2" | No Brown Bag, Spring Break.
| colspan="2" | No Brown Bag, Spring Break.


|-
|-
| 03/30/2017
| 03/29/2018
|    
|  
TBD
'''Wei Bai'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Understanding User Tradeoffs for Search in Encrypted Communication</b>
<br>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
Abstract: End-to-end message encryption is the only way to achieve absolute message privacy. However, searching over
end-to-end encrypted messages is complicated. Several popular instant messaging tools (e.g., WhatsApp, iMessage) circumvent this inconvenience by storing the search index locally on the devices. Another approach, called searchable encryption, allows users to search encrypted messages without storing the search index locally. These approaches have inherent tradeoffs between usability and security properties, yet little is known about how general users value these tradeoffs, especially in the context of email rather than instant messaging. In this paper, we systematize these tradeoffs in order to identify key feature differences. We use these differences as the basis for a choice-based conjoint analysis experiment focused on email (n=160), in which participants make a series of choices between email services with competing features. The results allow us to quantify the relative importance of each feature. We find that users indicate high relative importance for increasing privacy and minimizing local storage requirements. While privacy is more important overall, local storage is more important than adding additional marginal privacy after an initial improvement. These results suggest that local indexing, which provides more privacy, may often be appropriate for encrypted email, but that searchable encryption, which limits local storage, may also hold promise for some users.
<br><br>
Bio: Wei Bai is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, advised by Prof. Michelle L. Mazurek. His research interests include network security and privacy with an emphasis on human factors, and his dissertation is about user perceptions of and attitudes toward encrypted communication. He obtained his MS in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland. Contact him at wbai@umd.edu.
</div></div>
 
|-
| 04/05/2018
|
'''Eun-Kyoung Choe'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
TBD
<b>Designing A Flexible Personal Data Tracking Tool</b>
<br>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
TBD<br>  
<b>Abstract:</b> We now see an increasing number of self-tracking apps and wearable devices. Despite the vast number of available tools, however, it is still challenging for self-trackers to find apps that suit their unique tracking needs, preferences, and commitments. In this talk, I will present OmniTrack, a mobile self-tracking system, which enables self-trackers to construct their own trackers and customize tracking items to meet their individual tracking needs. OmniTrack leverages a semi-automated tracking approach that combines manual and automated tracking methods. From a deployment study, we showed how participants used OmniTrack to create, revise, and appropriate trackers—ranging from a simple mood tracker to a sophisticated daily activity tracker. I will discuss how to further improve OmniTrack by incorporating multimodal interactions, providing more appropriate visualizations on a mobile device, and supporting researchers' unique data collection needs.
<br><br>
<b>Bio:</b> Eun Kyoung Choe (http://eunkyoungchoe.com) is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies at University of Maryland, College Park. Her primary research areas are in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Health Informatics. She examines the design and evaluation of personal informatics tools to empower individuals—including patients, caregivers, clinicians, and those who wish to engage in self-tracking—to make positive behavior changes through fully leveraging their personal data. She explores this topic in various contexts, including sleep and productivity, patient-clinician communication and data sharing, and personal data insights and visualization. Her past and current research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft Research, and the Google Anita Borg Scholarship. She received her PhD in Information Science from University of Washington, MS in Information Management and Systems from University of California, Berkeley, and BS in Industrial Design from KAIST, Korea.
</div></div>
</div></div>


|-
|-
| 04/06/2017
| 04/12/2018
|    
|    
'''CHI practice talks'''
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Combining smartwatches with large displays for visual data exploration by Karthik Badam and Tom Horak</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
TBD
TBD
<br>
</div></div>
|-
| 04/19/2018
|   
'''Hernisa Kacorri'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
TBD
<b>Accessibility and Assistive Technologies at the Intersection of Users and Data</b>
<br>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
TBD<br>  
<b>Abstract</b>: Advances in artificial intelligence enable us to address key social issues. However, to see the benefit of this technology in many real-world applications, an integrative approach is necessary; effective solutions consist of a pipeline of processes or tasks involving both humans and machines. My research has integrated human computer interaction (HCI) techniques and data-driven methods applied to human data to steer technological innovations for people with visual impairments and for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. In this talk, I will provide an overview of my research program, and I will demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating machine learning and HCI methodologies with two concrete examples: i) teachable object recognizers trained by blind users, and ii) facial expression synthesis in sign language animations.
<br><br>
<b>Bio</b>: Hernisa Kacorri is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies and holds an affiliate appointment in the Computer Science and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at University of Maryland, College Park. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2016 from The Graduate Center at City University of New York, and has conducted research at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, IBM Research-Tokyo, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on data-driven technologies that address human challenges, faced due to health or disability, with an emphasis on rigorous, user-based experimental methodologies to assess impact. Hernisa is a recipient of a Mina Rees Dissertation Fellowship in the Sciences, an ACM ASSETS best paper finalist, and an CHI honorable mention award. She has been recognized by the Rising Stars in EECS program of CMU/MIT.
</div></div>
</div></div>


|-
|-
| 04/13/2017
| 04/26/2018
|    
|    
TBD
'''Chi-Young Oh'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
TBD
<b>Small Worlds in a Distant Land: International Newcomer Students' Local Information Behavior in Unfamiliar Environments</b>
<br>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
TBD<br>  
<b>Abstract</b>: International students are a rapidly growing sub-population of students, and the United States, as a top destination, has hosted students from 218 different countries. However, as with other international newcomers, these students face various types of challenges in a new country. Studies have reported the challenges this population faces in regard to cultures, academic systems, and general adjustments, but research is less clear about the challenges they face in terms of information behaviors during adjustment to a new country. This study addresses the information behaviors of international newcomer students in the context of adjustment to new local environments; that is, their local information behavior (LIB). Specifically, drawing on prior work and theories, this research conceptualizes the idea of "socio-national context," the degree to which there are individuals from the same country available in one's local environment, as a factor influencing international newcomer students’ information behavior. Through the findings from this longitudinal mixed-method study of international and U.S. graduate students in different socio-national contexts, it is argued that information behavior theories and models need to account for people's socio-national contexts if they are to inform research involving international newcomer students and provide insights on designing systems and services for all international newcomer students, especially those from countries that tend to be less well-represented among international students in a host country.
<br><br>
<b>Bio</b>: Chi Young Oh is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park's College of Information Studies. His areas of research span information behavior, human-computer interaction, health informatics, and community informatics, and his dissertation research examines international newcomer students' information behaviors during adjustment to a host country. Chi Young holds an MS in Information Science (with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a BA in Psychology, a BA in Library and Information Science, and a BBA in Business Administration from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. Prior to joining University of Maryland, he was a user experience researcher in the UX Lab of internet search portal Daum in South Korea and a new product planner and assistant marketing manager at LG Electronics.
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|-
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| 04/20/2017
| 05/03/2018
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|    
TBD
'''Amanda Lazar'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
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TBD
<b>Rethinking technology for dementia</b>
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TBD<br>  
<b>Abstract</b>: As the population ages, research is increasingly focused on conditions associated with growing older, such as cognitive and physical impairment. Technology is often presented as a solution for managing or treating these changes. This framing can position health conditions as problems to address through design and can neglect the complexity and positive aspects of older adulthood. In this talk, I draw on critical perspectives from Human-Computer Interaction and Gerontology. I describe ways in which technology can help us understand and challenge stereotypes around aging as well as cognitive impairment, and my ongoing and future work in this area. I will argue for a view of aging that takes into account the ways that technologies position older individuals and, in turn, the way that this view can inform the design of new technologies to enrich the experience of growing older.
<br><br>
<b>Bio</b>: Amanda Lazar is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information studies at the University of
Maryland, College Park. Her research is in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and Health
Informatics. She studies how technologies designed for health and wellbeing position and support
marginalized populations. She received her PhD from the University of Washington in the Biomedical and Health Informatics program and her undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.
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|-
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| 04/27/2017
| 05/10/2018
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|    
TBD
'''Joel Chan'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
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TBD
<b>Back to the Future: How people construct new creative ideas from old knowledge, and how technology can help</b>
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TBD<br>  
<b>Abstract:</b> Where do good ideas come from? One answer is that they come from prior knowledge: for example, Thomas Edison leveraged his knowledge of phonographs to “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. Yet, much research on human creativity demonstrates that prior knowledge often constrains creativity. How do people construct new creative ideas from old knowledge? And (how) can technology help? In the first part of my talk, I will summarize empirical work I have done that advances theories of the conditions under which people successfully construct new creative ideas from prior knowledge. This empirical work shows that prior knowledge can inspire creativity when it is analogically related to the current problem. This insight informs the ongoing work I will discuss in the second part of my talk: developing information technologies that combine human and machine intelligence to more effectively support analogical reasoning over prior knowledge.
<br><br>
<b>Bio: </b>Joel Chan is an Assistant Professor in the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies (iSchool), and Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). His research and teaching focus on the intersection of people, information, and creativity. He wants to know how they (can best) combine to enable us to design the future(s) we want to live in. His work has been recognized with a Best Paper Award at the ASME Design Theory and Methodology conference, the Design Studies Award 2015, and supported by an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Project Scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.
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| 05/04/2017
| 05/17/2018
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|    
TBD
'''Rachel Kramer'''
<br> World Wildlife Fund
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<b>WILDLABS.NET: the conservation technology network</b>
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TBD<br>  
<b>Abstract: </b> WILDLABS.NET: the conservation technology network is a collaboration across organizations that provides online infrastructure to connect wildlife conservationists directly to technologists to support the informed integration of technology tools in conservation practice. Since 2015, WILDLABS has evolved into a thriving online community of over 2,300 experts around the globe who crowd-source ideas and information, share case studies and co-develop solutions to pressing conservation and research challenges. WILDLABS community members range from academics to tech sector professionals, NGO staff, field-based practitioners and makers. On our platform, ideas are shared in over 25 technology and conservation challenge-specific groups with over 450 active discussion threads. The community is also a hub for posting grant and job opportunities to enhance the uptake of technical expertise into wildlife conservation initiatives. In this talk, we’ll explore the latest happenings on WILDLABS and empower those with engineering and related expertise to share their abilities to help save species.
<br><br>
<b>Bio: </b> Rachel Kramer is a wildlife crime expert at World Wildlife Fund with a decade of experience in field-based conservation, wildlife and natural resource trade monitoring, policy and technology solutions. With TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network that is a strategic alliance of WWF and IUCN, Rachel has overseen projects in Africa and Asia and manages wildlife trade assessments—including in the United States—to support enforcement action and policy change. Through WWF’s Wildlife Crime Technology Project supported by a Google Global Impact Award, Rachel joined United for Wildlife partners in 2015 in founding WILDLABS.NET: the conservation technology network. Rachel got her start in conservation serving in the Peace Corps in Madagascar from 2006-2009, leading community-based monitoring and conservation projects until her evacuation in the coup. Her graduate research at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies focused on surveying wild species consumption and natural resource dependence in Park-bordering communities in Madagascar’s northeastern rainforest. Rachel is committed to harnessing the power of communities and technology to advance the sustainable use of natural resources for future generations.
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Latest revision as of 20:51, 1 February 2021

THIS PAGE IS NOT UPDATED ANYMORE

Instead see this new page about the BBL Lecture series

OLD TEXT: The HCIL has an open, semi-organized weekly "Guest Speaker & Pizza Series" every Thursday from 12:30-1:30pm in HCIL (2119 Hornbake, South Wing). The topics range from someone's work, current interests in the HCIL, software demos/reviews, study design, proposed research topics, introductions to new people, etc. The BBL is the one hour a week where we all come together--thus, it’s a unique time for HCIL members with unique opportunities to help build collaborations, increase awareness of each other’s activities, and generally just have a bit of fun together. There is no RSVP; simply show up!

If you would like to give or suggest a talk, presentation, workshop, etc., send an email to BBL student co-coordinators Teja Maddali (hmaddali@umd.edu) or Aravind JR (aravind@umd.edu). In the email, briefly describe the topic and preferred dates.

To be notified about upcoming events, please subscribe to one of these mailing lists.


Spring 2020 Guest Speaker Series Schedule

Date Leader Topic
02/06/2020

Dr. Joel Chan, Dr. Amanda Lazar and Dr. Catherine Plaisant University of Maryland

Panel discussion "What does a successful process for an HCI researcher look like?
We'll be kicking off this semester with a panel discussion. Dr. Joel Chan, Dr. Amanda Lazar, and Dr. Catherine Plaisant will engage in a conversation with us about what successful processes for an HCI researcher look like in terms of personal development, week to week / day to day workflow, moving ideas forward, etc.

02/13/2020

Christian Vogler, Gallaudet University

The User Experience of Viewing Captioned Content
Much has been made of the ability of automatic speech recognition (ASR) to supplement or replace human captioners both for video content and for live meetings. While the word error rate of ASR has been steadily improving, and on some types of content can even beat out human captioners, these improvements do not automatically in a good user experience for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. In this talk we will examine the reasons why this is so, and provide an overview of current efforts to develop human-centered caption quality metrics that are more closely aligned with meeting the needs of people who depend on captions to consume content.

02/20/2020

Wei Ai University of Maryland

Promoting Pro-social Behavior with End-to-End Data Science
The recent development of data science methods, including large-scale machine learning and causal inference, has presented a game-changing opportunity for social good provision through the effort of the crowd. In this talk, I introduce an end-to-end data science pipeline to promote behavioral change for pro-social benefits. More specifically, this involves conducting causal data analysis on empirical data for actionable insights and robust prediction models, incorporating the insights and predictions in designing recommender systems for individual actions, and evaluating the effectiveness of the recommender systems in promoting behavioral changes with randomized field experiments. I will present two applications of the end-to-end pipeline, where we designed and deployed team recommender systems on an online microfinance platform (Kiva.org) and a ride-sharing platform (DiDi). We evaluated the recommender systems through large-scale field experiments, which show significant increases in user participation. The recommender system has been deployed in DiDi and has impacted millions of users in practice.

02/27/2019

B Prabhakaran University of Texas, Dallas

Quantifying Human Performance and the Quality of Immersive Experiences
Psychometric evaluations are generally used to understand the Quality of Experience (QoE) of immersive environments produced using augmented/mixed/virtual reality. Typically, these subjective evaluations are done from an end-user point-of-view, but these are limited by the subjective observations due to a number of factors. The objective approach consists of measuring the QoE by monitoring the network technical parameters or the network Quality of Service (QoS), such as throughput, delay, and packet loss. Most of the research on objective approaches for QoS-QoE mapping have focused on video streaming. Such objective QoS-QoE mapping strategies cannot be directly applied for immersive environments. Hence, in this talk, we address two related questions: (1) Can we identify metrics that can objectively quantify the performance of an immersive environment? (2) Can we use the above objective performance metrics to understand the possible user QoE without the need for subjective user study or with minimal user study? We start with different examples of immersive environments such as haptic-enabled applications, mirror therapy, and games. We discuss what metrics are influenced by different system parameters such as processing power, and network QoS. Then, we present some of our preliminary work on understanding users’ QoE through these metrics.

03/05/2020

Dr. Joel Chan University of Maryland

What does a successful process for an HCI researcher look like? Part 2
TBA

Fall 2019 HCIL Guest Speaker Series Schedule

Date Leader Topic
08/29/2019

Hack-a-thon

HCIL Website Hack-a-thon.
We are kick starting this semester's BBL with a Hack-a-thon event. You will be tasked to update the HCIL website by checking for broken links, updating faculty information, checking for spelling and grammar errors and also improving the accessibility of the images in the website.


09/05/2019

Prof. Jun-Dong Cho Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea

Celestial: Color Patterns for improving Color Perception for blind people.
It is relatively difficult to recreate the abstract three-dimensional shape with only the tactile sense. Gibson said "These abilities can be improved through practice." "When you touch something, You may have no idea about it at first touch, but as you continue touching, you soon will know vaguely what it is" , Kojiro Hirose said.

Recently, we developed "Blind-touch" to aid the visually impaired to appreciate greater painter’s work of art. This work is a reproduction of an existing masterpiece by means of a 3D printer and haptic electronics. It recognizes the pattern by touching the object in the artwork with a fingertip, and voice explanation and sound effect are provided through the voice user interface. Color is an equaling lens through which we experience the natural and digital realities. Now, we are exploring the tactile-color association based on semiotics to represent colors with fingertip tactile sensation. In this way, audio and touch contribute information to the non-visual perception of color in an complementary manner. In this talk, we review the related works and introduce a so-called “Celestial color tactile pattern” built based on the concept of both pictogram and ideogram and its variants.

09/12/2019

Prof. Niklas Elmqvist, Prof. Amanda Lazar, and Prof. Joel Chan University of Maryland

A panel discussion on approaches to reviewing research papers.
In light of the approaching deadline for SIGCHI 2020, Professors Niklas Elmqvist, Amanda Lazar, and Joel Chan will discuss the why/how of giving feedback on drafts of research papers. This would be helpful for anyone (Undergrad, Masters, or PhD students) who might be thinking of volunteering to review for conferences, ACM SIGCHI, or even for other lab members in the HCIL’s very own CHI clinic. Reviewers of all levels of expertise, even if you’ve never reviewed a research paper, are encouraged to participate and ask questions during the discussion. (link to video)

09/19/2019

Ben Shneiderman University of Maryland

Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Designing Next Generation User Experiences
The next generation of user experiences will produce 1000-fold improvements in human capabilities. These new tools will amplify, augment, enhance, and empower people, just as the Web, email, search, navigation, digital photography, and many other applications have already done. These new human-centered tools will produce comprehensible, predictable, and controllable applications that promote self-efficacy and social participation at scale. The goal is to ensure human control, while increasing the level of automation. In short, the next generation of tools will make more people, more creative, more often.
Improved designs will give billions of users comprehensible interfaces that hide the underlying complexity of advanced algorithms. Users will see familiar visual strategies based on direct manipulation to provide informative feedback about the machine’s state and what they can do. Every use will build confidence that users can reliably accomplish their goals and increase the trust that the machine is under their control.

09/26/2019

Tom Ball Microsoft Research

MakeCode and CODAL: intuitive and efficient embedded systems programming for education
Across the globe, it is now commonplace for educators to engage in the making (design and development) of embedded systems in the classroom to motivate and excite their students. This new domain brings its own set of unique requirements. Historically, embedded systems development requires knowledge of low-level programming languages, local installation of compilation toolchains, device drivers, and applications. For students and educators, these requirements can introduce insurmountable barriers.
We present the motivation, requirements, implementation, and evaluation of a new programming platform that enables novice users to create software for embedded systems. The platform has two major components:
1) Microsoft MakeCode (www.makecode.com), a web app that encapsulates an entire beginner IDE for microcontrollers; and
2) CODAL, an efficient component-oriented C++ runtime for microcontrollers.
We show how MakeCode and CODAL provide an accessible, cross-platform, installation-free programming experience for the BBC micro:bit and other embedded devices.

10/3/2019

Naeemul Hassan University of Maryland

Towards Automated Fact Discovery and Ranking
In this talk, I present the work of finding new, prominent situational facts, which are emerging statements about objects that stand out within certain contexts. Many such facts are newsworthy—e.g., an athlete’s outstanding performance in a game, or a viral video’s impressive popularity. Effective and efficient identification of these facts assists journalists in reporting, one of the main goals of computational journalism. A situational fact can be modeled as a “contextual” tuple that stands out against historical tuples in a context, specified by a conjunctive constraint involving dimension attributes when a set of measure attributes are compared. New tuples are constantly added to the table, reflecting events happening in the real world. Our goal is to discover constraint-measure pairs that qualify a new tuple as a contextual significant tuple, and discover them quickly before the event becomes yesterday’s news.

10/10/2019

John Dickerson University of Maryland

Diversity in Matching Markets
In bipartite matching problems, vertices on one side of a bipartite graph are paired with those on the other. In its offline variant, both sides of the graph are known a priori; in its online variant, one side of the graph is available offline, while vertices on the other arrive online and are irrevocably and immediately matched (or ignored) by an algorithm. Examples of such problems include matching workers to firms, advertisers to keywords, organs to patients, and riders to rideshare drivers. Much of the literature focuses on maximizing the total relevance---modeled via total weight---of the matching. However, in many real-world problems, it is also important to consider the contribution of diversity: hiring a diverse pool of candidates, displaying a relevant but diverse set of ads, and so on.

In this talk, we model the promotion of diversity in matching markets via maximization of a submodular function over the set of matched edges. We present new results in a generalization of traditional offline matching, b-matching, where vertices have both lower and upper bounds on the number of adjacent matched edges. We also present new theoretical results in online submodular bipartite matching. Finally, we conclude with ongoing work that approaches the problem of hiring a diverse cohort of workers through the lens of combinatorial pure exploration (CPE) in the multiarmed bandit setting, and discuss an ongoing experiment in this space at a large research university.

This talk will cover joint work with Saba Ahmadi, Faez Ahmed, Samsara Counts, Jeff Foster, Mark Fuge, Samir Khuller, Zhi Lang, Nicholas Mattei, Karthik A. Sankararaman, Candice Schumann, Aravind Srinivasan, and Pan Xu.

10/17/2019

Prof. Caro Williams-Pierce University of Maryland

Designing for Mathematical Play: Failure and Feedback
Prof. Caro will share her analysis of three types of microworld (videogame, simulation, and cognitive tutor), and how each constrain and afford mathematical play differently through their feedback and failure mechanisms. In doing so, she will also introduce her framework for youth and adult mathematical play, and describe how different design approaches influence different ways of mathematical learning. Anyone interested in designing digital learning environments is particularly encouraged to come - Prof. Caro promises that it'll be interesting even if you don't research math learning!

10/24/2019

Karen Holtzblatt Incontext Design

What is Valuing vs “Jerk” Behavior? How behavior impacts a positive working experience
Women in tech leave the field at twice the quit rate as men. Women often state, and research confirms, that women don’t feel valued. They point to the culture of the organization and how they are treated as a contributing factor. They say that men are “bro’s” or “jerks.” In 2018, we launched the Valuing & Jerk Project as one WITops initiative (https://www.witops.org). This talk will present our findings and perspective. Behavior creates or undermines connection and value. The Valuing and Jerk Project focuses on understanding which behaviors are experienced as valuing in everyday work and which result in naming the other as a “jerk”. Using Contextual Inquiry, we have uncovered core valuing behaviors, what devaluing means, and where behavior crosses the line to become “jerk” behavior. Armed with this understanding our next step is to generate and test interventions and solutions. The talk will introduce the Valuing and Jerk Project.

10/31/2019

Rachael Bradley Montgomery
University of Maryland

Designing to Support People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities
Have you ever wondered how to create websites, applications, and content that support individuals with cognitive and learning disabilities; individuals who are aging; or individuals who are tired, overworked, and distracted? The W3C Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility (COGA) Task Force has been working on a design guide that goes beyond WCAG 2.2 to support individuals with cognitive and learning disabilities. The resulting design patterns and guidance bridges accessibility and usability and support a much wider audience than just those with disabilities. Rachael will present her perspectives as an invited expert on this work. Please come learn about the design patterns and how to provide input on this evolving document.

11/7/2019

Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden
TRACE center

Underestimating the challenge of cognitive disabilities (and digital literacy). Directions to explore in short, medium and long term.
Recent work has caused us to question our understanding of the challenge of digital access by people with cognitive disabilities. Our underestimation may, in part, help explain our difficulties as a field to date. In part, it has exposed what may be a much wider problem than we understood, and one that goes beyond those we have thought of as having cognitive disabilities. It intersects with digital literacy but also has implications for those with other disabilities as well. The concept of Technology Quotient (TQ) will be discussed and approaches for addressing access by people with cognitive disabilities and low digital literacy today, tomorrow and in the future will be explored in this talk.

11/14/2019

Adam Aviv George Washington University

Human Factors in Mobile Authentication
Mobile authentication is a crucial component of authentication more broadly, especially as mobile devices become evermore connected to the broader computer security ecosystem. The overarching goal of my research is to improve the current state of mobile authentication by taking a holistic approach to measuring mobile authentication and its impacts that intersect directly with the user experience. In this talk, I will present a narrative of contributions to mobile authentication over the last 10 years, focusing on how human factors impact the security, from attacks, choices, and perceptions. I will particularly focus on one form of mobile authentication, Android's graphical pattern unlock, which may be the most heavily used graphical authentication system, ever. Based on my experience, I will also present some new directions and methods that can improve the security of mobile authentication and some new results on PINs and LG's graphical Knock Code Authentication.

11/21/2019

Whitney Quesenbery Co-Director, Center for Civic Design

Storytelling makes research data come to life
We all love our user research data…but why is it such a struggle to use the insights we uncover to create direction for a project? Storytelling is the missing link, getting past charts and graphs to dig into what the data means for meeting human needs and making something usable and useful. Whitney will show how stories put research insights into context, communicate the entire user journey, show problems through the eyes of your users, and help you ask better questions (and run better usability tests) to gain deeper insights. Whitney is the co-founder of the Center for Civic Design, approaching democracy as a design problem, so there will be examples from the challenges of designing elections as well as stories from her work in theatre.


11/28/2019

Happy Thanksgiving Day

No BBL. Time to catch up with families and friends :)

12/05/2019

TBA

TBA






Spring 2019 Schedule

Date Leader Topic
01/31/2019

Faculty Only BBL

Regular BBLs will start from 7th Feb, 2019.

02/07/2019

Faez Ahmed, University of Maryland

Design Democratization in the Age of Machine Learning.
Design democratization can transform the way we think about designing products. However, to enable design democratization, we need machine learning and computing methods to enable organizations to process a large amount of information efficiently. Using the example of online design contests, we will discuss three problems which organizations face in conducting design contests: a) How does one form teams to evaluate design ideas? b) How does one filter high quality and diverse ideas out of hundreds of submissions? and c) How does one reliably measure the creativity of ideas? We will discuss how matching, ranking, and novelty estimation methods developed in our work address these issues and what challenges remain for the field.

02/14/2019

Huaishu Peng, University of Maryland

Interactive Fabrication and Fabrication for Interaction.
3D printing technology has been widely applied to produce well-designed objects. There is a hope to make both the modeling process and printing outputs more interactive, so that designers can get in-situ tangible feedback to fabricate objects with rich functionalities. To date, however, knowledge accumulated to realize this hope remains limited. In this talk, I will present two lines of research. The first line of work aims at facilitating an interactive process of fabrication. I demonstrate novel interactive fabrication systems that allow the designer to create 3D models in AR with a robotic arm to print the model in real time and on-site. The second line of work concerns the fabrication of 3D printed objects that are interactive. I report new techniques for 3D printing with novel materials such as fabric sheet, and how to print one-off functional objects such as sensor and motor. I will conclude the talk by outlining future research directions built upon my current work.

02/21/2019

Niklas Elmqvist University of Maryland

Everyone a Data Scientist: Empowering Casual Users to Understand Complex Data.
Understanding data is quickly becoming the new digital divide. Merely having access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) is no longer sufficient when our society is overflowing with massive volumes of raw, complex, and heterogeneous data. Since best-practice data science workflows are still only available through esoteric software libraries, typically accessed using the Python and R languages, leveraging this data to its full potential often requires significant programming expertise. Even commercial point-and-click analytics tools such as Tableau, Spotfire, and QlikView require training and assume significant prior knowledge of mathematical, statistical, and sometimes even machine learning concepts. This means that currently only people who have the appropriate data and technology literacy can harness the ready availability of data in our society.

In this work-in-progress talk, I will discuss our efforts for shrinking or outright eliminating this new digital data divide through interactive visualization, explainable machine learning, and collaborative technologies. More specifically, I will talk about several past, current, or planned projects on this topic, including (1) the use of mixed-initiative interaction, which combines both human and computational efforts in the analytical process; (2) the use of attention for computational steering; (3) recommender systems for automatically suggesting the next analytical step in a workflow; (4) direct manipulation methods for interacting with machine learning models; and (5) "team-first" collaborative mechanisms that reduce the barrier to synchronizing and sharing work to facilitate emergent collaboration. This is ongoing research, so your feedback on these efforts is welcome.

02/28/2019

Townhall

Research Speed Dating
This week everyone is a speaker. We want everyone to talk about what is keeping you busy these days. This is a great way to recruiting participants, get feedback on your research questions, your data collection methods or anything concerning your research. We want you to share your research to the rest of HCIL group.

Faculty members, Ph.D. students, Masters students, and Bachelors students, we strongly encourage you to share your work so that everyone is aware of what’s happening inside HCIL.

03/07/2019 HCIL Spring Cleaning
Join and help spruce up the HCIL and be a part of a larger conversation of what the lab space should look like. We start at noon (12 pm) and there is free food for anyone who joins!
03/14/2019

Stories from the HCIL

Come and tell your favorite stories about the HCIL and the iSchool in this new format that we're trying for the BBL. It's like a casual fireside chat where you get to learn about the rich history of the HCIL from the people who know it best! And there is pizza, of course.

03/21/2019 No Brown Bag, Spring Break.
03/28/2019 HCIL Symposium Practice Talks
All speakers are invited to come rehearse their talk. Please shoot an email to the BBL coordinators and add your name to the schedule: HERE.
04/04/2019 HCIL Symposium In Session
No BBL, instead we encourage you to join us at the HCIL Symposium.
04/11/2019

Wayne Lutters, University of Maryland

Supporting service work in information infrastructure
An introduction to Wayne’s lab via a high-level overview of some key historical projects and an active discussion of what we are wrestling with this particular week – representing maps of belief space (w/ Phil Feldman).

04/18/2019

Zheng Yao, Carnegie Mellon University

Join, Stay or Go? Members’ Life Cycles in Online Health Communities
This talk discusses temporal changes in members’ participation in online health community (OHC), focusing on their motivations for joining and changes in their motivations as they transition to other roles or ultimately leave the community. We use mixed methods, combining behavioral log analysis, automated content analysis, surveys and interviews. We found that members started participating in OHCs for a common set of reasons, mainly to acquire support and to perform social comparisons. When their need for support decreased, most members quit the site. The motivations of those who stayed shifted to providing support and helping other members in the community. Oldtimers also established social ties with others members, which motivated them to stay in the community. These oldtimers, who contributed the majority of content, encountered challenges that threatened their commitment to the community, including negative emotion related to other members’ deaths. These challenges led them to take leaves of absence from the community or to drop out permanently. Our findings shed light on the changing motivations of OHC members, which provide implications for better designing OHCs.

04/25/2019

TBA

 Aravind will run a workshop on how to make PDF documents accessible
05/02/2019

Yue Jiang, University of Maryland, College Park

ORC Layout: Adaptive GUI Layout with OR-Constraints

We propose a novel approach for constraint-based graphical user interface (GUI) layout based on OR-constraints (ORC) in standard soft/hard linear constraint systems. ORC layout unifies grid layout and flow layout, supporting both their features as well as cases where grid and flow layouts individually fail. We describe ORC design patterns that enable designers to safely create flexible layouts that work across different screen sizes and orientations. We also present the ORC Editor, a GUI editor that enables designers to apply ORC in a safe and effective manner, mixing grid, flow and new ORC layout features as appropriate. We demonstrate that our prototype can adapt layouts to screens with different aspect ratios with only a single layout specification, easing the burden of GUI maintenance. Finally, we show that ORC specifications can be modified interactively and solved efficiently at runtime.

05/09/2019

TBA

TBA

Note: CHI 2019 will be in session during this time. Everyone is still invited, but many people might be away for the conference.

05/16/2019

Adil Yalcin, Founder and CEO at Keshif

It's all about creating new possibilities for people: A journey from the lab to a startup

One of the most valuable parts of the DNA of HCIL is its focus on "human", and how our mentors guide us to connect our work with people (users). As a student of this school of thought, I had found my purpose to help the 95% by identifying, questioning, and removing barriers (creating opportunities) in visual analytics. Two years ago, with results baked in lab, and the same driving purpose, I stepped into a world unknown to me: creating, running, and growing a business, one customer at a time.

I am back to share some of the surprises, new perspectives, and validations from this journey so far. What I missed can help you realize the opportunities you already have. What I wish I knew may reveal some gaps. And, what remained constant may hint that research in university and what comes after may not be so different after all. I also will touch on the subtle and dynamic balance between your elevator pitch, your audience, the value you provide, and crossing the finish line.

05/23/2019

TBA

TBA

Note: This slot may be cancelled since it is right at this end of the semester.






Fall 2018 Schedule

Date Leader Topic
08/30/2018

Student Townhall

Instead of the regular BBL, there will be an internal HCIL-students-only townhall meeting instead.

.

09/06/2018

BBL Student Co-coordinators

Come, network, make introductions, and share what you are working on.

09/13/2018

Joel Chan, Tammy Clegg
University of Maryland, College Park

TBA

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09/20/2018

Joel Zhang
University of Maryland, College Park

Research proposal centered around pain tracking and sharing.

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03/22/2017 No Brown Bag, Cancelled.
10/4/2018

Brian Ondov, Sriram Karthik Badam
University of Maryland, College Park

Brian’s paper talks about Evaluating Visual Comparison and seeks to understand how different encodings of data can drastically affect how we perceive quantities. More information about this project is available at http://hcil.umd.edu/visualcomparison/.

Karthik’s paper is about a computing platform called Vistrates which seeks to unify the fragmented analytical workflows employed by users to analyze a group of visualizations created in different tools.

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10/11/2018

Polly Lee O'Rourke
University of Maryland, College Park

Improving language learning using brain simulation.

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10/18/2018

Andrea Batch
University of Maryland, College Park

Information Olfactation: Harnessing Scent to Convey Data
Olfactory feedback for analytical tasks is a virtually unexplored area in spite of the advantages it offers for information recall, feature identification, and location detection. We have introduced the concept of information olfactation as the fragrant sibling of information visualization, and this talk will cover our theoretical model of how scent can be used to convey data. Building on a review of the human olfactory system and mirroring common visualization practice, we propose olfactory marks, the substrate in which they exist, and their olfactory channels that are available to designers. To exemplify this idea, we present viScent: A six-scent stereo olfactory display capable of conveying olfactory glyphs of varying temperature and direction, as well as a corresponding software system that integrates the display with a traditional visualization display, along with three applications that make use of the viScent system.

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10/25/2018

Student Townhall

Research speed-dating

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11/01/2018

Joohee Choi
University of Maryland, College Park

Will Too Many Editors Spoil The Tag? Conflicts and Alignment in Q&A Categorization (CSCW Practice Talk)

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11/08/2018

Alina Striner
University of Maryland, College Park

Learning in the Holodeck: the Role of Multisensory Cues on Pattern Recognition in VR
Designing for multiple senses has the capacity to improve virtual realism, extend our ability to process information, and more easily transfer knowledge between physical and digital environments. HCI researchers are beginning to explore the viability of integrating multisensory media (“multimedia”) into virtual experiences, however research has yet to consider whether mulsemedia truly enhances pattern recognition in virtual reality (VR). In the context of citizen science watershed habitat training, our research asks, how does realism affect observation skills in VR? Within this domain, we build a multisensory system that allows users to feel (wind, thermal, humidity) and smell landscape and environmental conditions. We then compare and report on how users make observations and infer patterns between 2 stream habitats in VR, with and without the multisensory information. Our findings reveal that multisensory information improved the number of high-level, mid-level and low-level observations participants made, and positively impacted engagement and immersion.

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11/15/2018

Student Townhall

Research speed dating.

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03/22/2017 No Brown Bag, Thanksgiving Break.
11/29/2018

Lelani Battle
University of Maryland, College Park

A Characterization Study of Exploratory Analysis Behaviors in Tableau
Exploratory visual analysis (EVA) is an interactive process comprising both focused tasks and more open-ended exploration. Visual analysis tools aim to facilitate this process by enabling rapid specification of both data transformations and visualizations, using a combination of direct manipulation and automated design. With a better understanding of users’ analysis behavior, we might improve the design of these visualization tools to promote effective outcomes.

In this talk, I will present our recent work on characterizing the EVA process. We contribute a consistent definition of EVA through review of the relevant literature, and an empirical evaluation of existing assumptions regarding how analysts perform EVA. We present the results of a study where 27 Tableau users answered various analysis questions across 3 datasets. We measure task performance, identify recurring patterns across participants’ analyses, and assess variance from task specificity and dataset. We find striking differences between existing assumptions and the collected data. Participants successfully completed a variety of tasks, with over 80% accuracy across focused tasks with measurably correct answers. The observed cadence of analyses is surprisingly slow compared to popular assumptions from the database community. We find significant overlap in analyses across participants, showing that EVA behaviors can be predictable. Furthermore, we find few structural differences between open-ended and more focused analysis tasks. Finally, I will discuss the implications of our findings for the design of effective data analytics systems, and highlight several promising directions for future study.

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12/06/2018

Student Townhall

TBA

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12/13/2018

Cookie Exchange

We encourage you to make/buy cookies (or some related treat) and create individual bags (about six cookies in each bag, and about 4-6 bags). Then bring them in labeled on 12/13 and you can pick bags from other people to take home or eat on the spot. However, you do not need to make cookies to attend! All are welcome to come and hang out.

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Spring 2018 Schedule

Date Leader Topic
01/25/2018

Kickoff to a new Semester!

Come, network, make introductions, and share what you are working on

Please come to our first BBL of the Spring 2018 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.

02/01/2018

Bahador Saket
Georgia Tech, Atlanta

Visualization by Demonstration

Abstract: A commonly used interaction paradigm in most visualization tools is manual view specification. Tools implementing manual view specification often require users to manually specify visual properties through GUI operations on collections of visual properties and data attributes that are presented visually on control panels. To interact with tools implementing manual view specification users need to understand the potentially complex system parameters being controlled. Additionally, in such tools, users need to constantly shift their attention from the visual features of interest when interacting.

In this talk, I present an alternative interaction paradigm for visualization construction and data exploration called visualization by demonstration. This paradigm advocates for a different process of visualization construction. I will also discuss the trade-offs between these interaction paradigms based on the data collected from an empirical study. I will then discuss applications of the "by demonstration’" paradigm in other areas in data visualization.

Bio: Bahador Saket is a third-year Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech, where he works with Dr. Alex Endert. His current research focuses on the design of interaction techniques for visualization construction and visual data exploration. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Bahador worked at different research labs including Microsoft Research, CNS Research Center, and NUS-HCI Lab. He has published over 12 peer-reviewed articles in the leading journals and conferences in the field of human-computer interaction and data visualization such as IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), Computer Graphics Forum, CSCW, UIST, and MobileHCI.

02/08/2018

Elissa Redmiles
University of Maryland, College Park

Dancing Pigs or Security? Measuring the Rationality of End-User Security Behavior

Abstract: Accurately modeling human decision-making in security is critical to think about when, why, and how to recommend that users adopt certain secure behaviors. We used behavioral economics experiments to model the rationality of end-user security decision-making in a realistic online experimental system simulating a bank account. We ask participants to make a financially impactful security choice, in the face of transparent risks of account compromise and benefits offered by an optional security behavior (two-factor authentication). We find that more than 50% of our participants made rational (e.g., utility optimal) decisions, and we find that participants are more likely to behave rationally in the face of higher risk. Additionally, we confirm that users are boundedly rational: they make decisions based on some risks and context, but not others, and we can model their behavior well as a function of these factors. Finally, we show that a “one-size-fits-all” emphasis on security can lead to market losses, but that adoption by a subset of users with higher risks or lower costs can lead to market gains.
Bio: Elissa Redmiles is a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland in Computer Science. Her research focuses on using computational and social science methodologies to understand and improve users' privacy and security learning processes, behavior, and perceptions. She is the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a National Science Defense and Engineering Graduate 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.


02/15/2018

Erin Peters-Burton
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

Building Student Self-Awareness of Learning to Enhance Diversity in the Sciences

Abstract: Many students are being left out of pursuing further studies in science because the current system of science education values students who learn via completion in an isolated, rather than collaborative way (Tobias, 1990). The stereotype of students who excel in science tend to be the ones who can conform to the institutional structure where the teacher is the sole source of knowledge (Friere, 2000). Through the idea of “Education as the Practice of Freedom” (hooks, 1994), the presentation will explain investigations that explore tangible ways to break down that stereotype. This research begins with the assumption that if teachers taught the ways science operates as a discipline, then students gain more power to construct their own scientific knowledge because they understand the “rules” of knowledge validation (Duschl, 1990). Learning how scientific knowledge is constructed and being self-aware of one’s own learning in science can help level the playing field so that students can do inquiry well (NRC, 1996; AAAS, 1993) and the science classroom will be a more inclusive, positive environment rather than relying on isolated competition for teaching. In this presentation, I will present an overview of research I have done over the past 10 years that focuses on helping students to become self-aware of their learning in science and how scientific knowledge is constructed. The work involves 8th grade students, undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals. The studies include constructs such as self-efficacy, motivation, metacognition, self-regulated learning, and visualization. Findings of the studies are synthesized into self-awareness priorities and how those constructs will ultimately impact social justice by providing more opportunities to see alternative perspectives and learn the “rules” of knowledge validation in science. As a result, students develop a sense of agency and an identity where anything is possible because they can learn independently in any situation.
Bio: Erin E. Peters-Burton is the Donna R. and David E. Sterling Endowed Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. She has a B.S. in Physics from the University of Illinois, a M.Ed. in Educational Psychology and Social Foundations of Education from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. from George Mason University (VA) in Educational Psychology and Educational Research Methods. She has taught middle school and high school science and mathematics for 15 years prior to her academic work and was a National Board Certified Teacher in Early Adolescence Science. She has published in science education, teacher education, educational psychology, marine biology, geology education, history and philosophy of science, technology, educational leadership, and learning disability journals. Her book, Thinking Like Scientists: Using Metacognitive Prompts to Develop Nature of Science Knowledge, and her edited book, The STEM Road Map: A Framework for Integrated STEM Education have led to the curriculum series books from the National Science Teacher Association entitled, STEM Road Map for Elementary School, STEM Road Map for Middle School, and STEM Road Map for High School. In 2016 she was awarded the Association of Science Teacher Educators Outstanding Science Teacher of the Year in recognition of her work with the professional development of secondary science teachers.


02/22/2018

Norman Su
Indiana University

The Problem of Designing for Subcultures

Abstract: Members of subcultures speak about and act with pervasive technologies in service to their distinct traditions. I will describe how outwardly subcultures maintain a unified front, yet inwardly are rich sites for compromise and confrontation over technology. I will highlight findings from work we have done with subcultures and, in particular, my own fieldwork with Irish traditional musicians. I will close by describing new design opportunities for technologies that acknowledge the remarkable solidarity and discord of subcultures.
Bio: Norman Makoto Su is an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. His research interests lie in human–computer interaction (HCI) and computer–supported cooperative work (CSCW). His Authentic User Experience (AUX) lab characterizes the relationship of technology with subcultures and designs systems to support their notion of authenticity. He received his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine and a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Information and Library Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. He has done internships at IBM, The Aerospace Corporation, and PARC.

03/01/2018

Ya-Wei Li
Center for Conservation Innovation, Defenders of Wildlife

Using Data and Technology to Save Endangered Species.

Abstract: We will discuss how Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit wildlife conservation organization, is expanding its use of technology and data analytics to conserve endangered species. We will summarize our projects involving remote-sensing data to monitor wildlife habitat and compliance with conservation agreements; data mining of federal government decisions to build the largest public repository of text-searchable documents on the U.S. Endangered Species Act; natural language processing of those documents to improve public understanding of how our government conserves endangered species; use of data visualization tools to reveal patterns in large datasets; and other initiatives. We invite the audience to actively engage with us about how we can improve our work and offer ideas for future projects and potential collaborations.

Bio: Ya-Wei (Jake) specializes in endangered species law, policy, and science. He leads the Center for Conservation Innovation at Defenders of Wildlife, which focuses on developing innovative and pragmatic strategies to conserve endangered and at-risk species. Before joining Defenders in 2010, Jake practiced environmental law in the private sector. Jake holds a B.S. from Drexel University and a J.D. from Cornell University Law School. At Cornell, Jake also completed graduate coursework in conservation biology and herpetology.

Jacob works on linking science to Endangered Species Act policy. He works with others inside and outside of Defenders to make ESA-related data available and easily interpretable, so that policy makers and the public can make informed decisions about conservation. Before joining Defenders, Jacob was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Connecticut, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. From 2000-2008, Jacob was a field biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in New Mexico and Arizona, during which time he completed his Bachelor's degree in Conservation Ecology at Prescott College.

03/08/2018

Deok Gun Park
University of Maryland, College Park

Thinking, Autism and AGI


Abstract: Despite recent advances in deep learning, we do not know yet how we can combine these application-specific models to build an artificial general intelligence (AGI). Furthermore, the data is becoming the bottleneck to scale these approaches for the multiple tasks. In this talk, I propose a theory of the thinking and a neural algorithm that can bootstrap intelligence with limited computational resources and data. This neural algorithm approximates the O(n3) parameter space of the thinking theory into the O(1) parameters to make learning tractable for the biological intelligent agents. I will explain this proposal by cognitive phenomenons that are observed in a human, such as infant language acquisition, visual and verbal thinking, personality, creativity, exploit-exploration trade off, dreaming, one-shot learning, abstract language.

Bio: Deokgun Park is a Ph.D. candidate in the HCILab of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, being advised by Prof. Niklas Elmqvist. His research focuses on the computational methods for open-ended tasks. He completed M.S. in Interdisciplinary Engineering at Purdue University and M.S. in Biomedical Engineering at Seoul National University, where he obtained B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering at Seoul National University. He worked at the government research institute, industry research labs, and startups. He has published and licensed his patents to companies including Samsung Electronics.

03/15/2018

Clemens Klokmose
Aarhus University, Denmark

Shareable Dynamic Media: A revisit of the fundamentals of interactive computing

Abstract: Developing interactive systems that support collaboration between people, distribution across heterogeneous devices and user appropriation is notoriously difficult. Today’s software rests on a foundation built for personal computing, and to properly support the aforementioned qualities we need to revisit this foundation. In this talk, I will present you with a vision called Shareable Dynamic Media, inspired by Alan Kay’s seminal vision of Personal Dynamic Media. I will present a prototype implementation of the vision called Webstrates, and demonstrate how it enables the development of software where distribution across devices, collaboration between people, and malleability and reprogrammability are the norm rather than the exception. I will show our latest project, Codestrates, that combines Webstrates with the literate computing approach of interactive notebooks.

Bio: Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose is an associate professor in the development of advanced interactive systems at the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. He co-directs the Digital Creativity Lab that is part of the Center for Advanced Visualisation and Interaction (CAVI). Clemens has worked as a postdoc at Computer Science, Aarhus University and at Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique, Université Paris-Sud. He has furthermore spent a year as a user interface specialist in the industry. Clemens received his PhD in Computer Science in 2009 from Aarhus University supervised by prof. Susanne Bødker. Clemens’ main interest is the fundamentals of interactive computing, particularly to support and understanding computing with multiple devices and multiple people. Many of his ideas are crystallised into the Webstrates platform (webstrates.net), which he leads the development of.

03/22/2017 No Brown Bag, Spring Break.
03/29/2018

Wei Bai
University of Maryland, College Park

Understanding User Tradeoffs for Search in Encrypted Communication

Abstract: End-to-end message encryption is the only way to achieve absolute message privacy. However, searching over end-to-end encrypted messages is complicated. Several popular instant messaging tools (e.g., WhatsApp, iMessage) circumvent this inconvenience by storing the search index locally on the devices. Another approach, called searchable encryption, allows users to search encrypted messages without storing the search index locally. These approaches have inherent tradeoffs between usability and security properties, yet little is known about how general users value these tradeoffs, especially in the context of email rather than instant messaging. In this paper, we systematize these tradeoffs in order to identify key feature differences. We use these differences as the basis for a choice-based conjoint analysis experiment focused on email (n=160), in which participants make a series of choices between email services with competing features. The results allow us to quantify the relative importance of each feature. We find that users indicate high relative importance for increasing privacy and minimizing local storage requirements. While privacy is more important overall, local storage is more important than adding additional marginal privacy after an initial improvement. These results suggest that local indexing, which provides more privacy, may often be appropriate for encrypted email, but that searchable encryption, which limits local storage, may also hold promise for some users.

Bio: Wei Bai is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, advised by Prof. Michelle L. Mazurek. His research interests include network security and privacy with an emphasis on human factors, and his dissertation is about user perceptions of and attitudes toward encrypted communication. He obtained his MS in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland. Contact him at wbai@umd.edu.

04/05/2018

Eun-Kyoung Choe
University of Maryland, College Park

Designing A Flexible Personal Data Tracking Tool

Abstract: We now see an increasing number of self-tracking apps and wearable devices. Despite the vast number of available tools, however, it is still challenging for self-trackers to find apps that suit their unique tracking needs, preferences, and commitments. In this talk, I will present OmniTrack, a mobile self-tracking system, which enables self-trackers to construct their own trackers and customize tracking items to meet their individual tracking needs. OmniTrack leverages a semi-automated tracking approach that combines manual and automated tracking methods. From a deployment study, we showed how participants used OmniTrack to create, revise, and appropriate trackers—ranging from a simple mood tracker to a sophisticated daily activity tracker. I will discuss how to further improve OmniTrack by incorporating multimodal interactions, providing more appropriate visualizations on a mobile device, and supporting researchers' unique data collection needs.

Bio: Eun Kyoung Choe (http://eunkyoungchoe.com) is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies at University of Maryland, College Park. Her primary research areas are in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Health Informatics. She examines the design and evaluation of personal informatics tools to empower individuals—including patients, caregivers, clinicians, and those who wish to engage in self-tracking—to make positive behavior changes through fully leveraging their personal data. She explores this topic in various contexts, including sleep and productivity, patient-clinician communication and data sharing, and personal data insights and visualization. Her past and current research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft Research, and the Google Anita Borg Scholarship. She received her PhD in Information Science from University of Washington, MS in Information Management and Systems from University of California, Berkeley, and BS in Industrial Design from KAIST, Korea.

04/12/2018

CHI practice talks

Combining smartwatches with large displays for visual data exploration by Karthik Badam and Tom Horak

TBD

04/19/2018

Hernisa Kacorri
University of Maryland, College Park

Accessibility and Assistive Technologies at the Intersection of Users and Data

Abstract: Advances in artificial intelligence enable us to address key social issues. However, to see the benefit of this technology in many real-world applications, an integrative approach is necessary; effective solutions consist of a pipeline of processes or tasks involving both humans and machines. My research has integrated human computer interaction (HCI) techniques and data-driven methods applied to human data to steer technological innovations for people with visual impairments and for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. In this talk, I will provide an overview of my research program, and I will demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating machine learning and HCI methodologies with two concrete examples: i) teachable object recognizers trained by blind users, and ii) facial expression synthesis in sign language animations.

Bio: Hernisa Kacorri is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies and holds an affiliate appointment in the Computer Science and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at University of Maryland, College Park. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2016 from The Graduate Center at City University of New York, and has conducted research at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, IBM Research-Tokyo, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on data-driven technologies that address human challenges, faced due to health or disability, with an emphasis on rigorous, user-based experimental methodologies to assess impact. Hernisa is a recipient of a Mina Rees Dissertation Fellowship in the Sciences, an ACM ASSETS best paper finalist, and an CHI honorable mention award. She has been recognized by the Rising Stars in EECS program of CMU/MIT.


04/26/2018

Chi-Young Oh
University of Maryland, College Park

Small Worlds in a Distant Land: International Newcomer Students' Local Information Behavior in Unfamiliar Environments

Abstract: International students are a rapidly growing sub-population of students, and the United States, as a top destination, has hosted students from 218 different countries. However, as with other international newcomers, these students face various types of challenges in a new country. Studies have reported the challenges this population faces in regard to cultures, academic systems, and general adjustments, but research is less clear about the challenges they face in terms of information behaviors during adjustment to a new country. This study addresses the information behaviors of international newcomer students in the context of adjustment to new local environments; that is, their local information behavior (LIB). Specifically, drawing on prior work and theories, this research conceptualizes the idea of "socio-national context," the degree to which there are individuals from the same country available in one's local environment, as a factor influencing international newcomer students’ information behavior. Through the findings from this longitudinal mixed-method study of international and U.S. graduate students in different socio-national contexts, it is argued that information behavior theories and models need to account for people's socio-national contexts if they are to inform research involving international newcomer students and provide insights on designing systems and services for all international newcomer students, especially those from countries that tend to be less well-represented among international students in a host country.

Bio: Chi Young Oh is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park's College of Information Studies. His areas of research span information behavior, human-computer interaction, health informatics, and community informatics, and his dissertation research examines international newcomer students' information behaviors during adjustment to a host country. Chi Young holds an MS in Information Science (with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a BA in Psychology, a BA in Library and Information Science, and a BBA in Business Administration from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. Prior to joining University of Maryland, he was a user experience researcher in the UX Lab of internet search portal Daum in South Korea and a new product planner and assistant marketing manager at LG Electronics.


05/03/2018

Amanda Lazar
University of Maryland, College Park

Rethinking technology for dementia

Abstract: As the population ages, research is increasingly focused on conditions associated with growing older, such as cognitive and physical impairment. Technology is often presented as a solution for managing or treating these changes. This framing can position health conditions as problems to address through design and can neglect the complexity and positive aspects of older adulthood. In this talk, I draw on critical perspectives from Human-Computer Interaction and Gerontology. I describe ways in which technology can help us understand and challenge stereotypes around aging as well as cognitive impairment, and my ongoing and future work in this area. I will argue for a view of aging that takes into account the ways that technologies position older individuals and, in turn, the way that this view can inform the design of new technologies to enrich the experience of growing older.

Bio: Amanda Lazar is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research is in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and Health Informatics. She studies how technologies designed for health and wellbeing position and support marginalized populations. She received her PhD from the University of Washington in the Biomedical and Health Informatics program and her undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.


05/10/2018

Joel Chan
University of Maryland, College Park

Back to the Future: How people construct new creative ideas from old knowledge, and how technology can help

Abstract: Where do good ideas come from? One answer is that they come from prior knowledge: for example, Thomas Edison leveraged his knowledge of phonographs to “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. Yet, much research on human creativity demonstrates that prior knowledge often constrains creativity. How do people construct new creative ideas from old knowledge? And (how) can technology help? In the first part of my talk, I will summarize empirical work I have done that advances theories of the conditions under which people successfully construct new creative ideas from prior knowledge. This empirical work shows that prior knowledge can inspire creativity when it is analogically related to the current problem. This insight informs the ongoing work I will discuss in the second part of my talk: developing information technologies that combine human and machine intelligence to more effectively support analogical reasoning over prior knowledge.

Bio: Joel Chan is an Assistant Professor in the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies (iSchool), and Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). His research and teaching focus on the intersection of people, information, and creativity. He wants to know how they (can best) combine to enable us to design the future(s) we want to live in. His work has been recognized with a Best Paper Award at the ASME Design Theory and Methodology conference, the Design Studies Award 2015, and supported by an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Project Scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.


05/17/2018

Rachel Kramer
World Wildlife Fund

WILDLABS.NET: the conservation technology network

Abstract: WILDLABS.NET: the conservation technology network is a collaboration across organizations that provides online infrastructure to connect wildlife conservationists directly to technologists to support the informed integration of technology tools in conservation practice. Since 2015, WILDLABS has evolved into a thriving online community of over 2,300 experts around the globe who crowd-source ideas and information, share case studies and co-develop solutions to pressing conservation and research challenges. WILDLABS community members range from academics to tech sector professionals, NGO staff, field-based practitioners and makers. On our platform, ideas are shared in over 25 technology and conservation challenge-specific groups with over 450 active discussion threads. The community is also a hub for posting grant and job opportunities to enhance the uptake of technical expertise into wildlife conservation initiatives. In this talk, we’ll explore the latest happenings on WILDLABS and empower those with engineering and related expertise to share their abilities to help save species.

Bio: Rachel Kramer is a wildlife crime expert at World Wildlife Fund with a decade of experience in field-based conservation, wildlife and natural resource trade monitoring, policy and technology solutions. With TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network that is a strategic alliance of WWF and IUCN, Rachel has overseen projects in Africa and Asia and manages wildlife trade assessments—including in the United States—to support enforcement action and policy change. Through WWF’s Wildlife Crime Technology Project supported by a Google Global Impact Award, Rachel joined United for Wildlife partners in 2015 in founding WILDLABS.NET: the conservation technology network. Rachel got her start in conservation serving in the Peace Corps in Madagascar from 2006-2009, leading community-based monitoring and conservation projects until her evacuation in the coup. Her graduate research at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies focused on surveying wild species consumption and natural resource dependence in Park-bordering communities in Madagascar’s northeastern rainforest. Rachel is committed to harnessing the power of communities and technology to advance the sustainable use of natural resources for future generations.

Past Brown Bags

View the Past Brown Bag Lunch Schedules to learn more about prior talks.