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'>Thursday 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. 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 '''Sriram Karthik Badam  (sbadam@umd.edu)''' or '''Pavithra Ramasamy (pavithra.ramasamy94@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!


<br><br>
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 [[BBL mailing lists|these mailing lists]].
 
<br>


== Fall 2017 Schedule ==
== 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.
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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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|-
| 08/31/2017
| 03/05/2020
|     
|     
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
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Please come to our first BBL of the Fall 2017 semester to introduce yourself and share what you're working on in the coming semester. The first BBL will be for us to network with each other and kickoff a great new semester.
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== Fall 2019 HCIL Guest Speaker Series Schedule ==
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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.
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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])
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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.
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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.
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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.
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|-
| 09/07/2017
| 10/17/2019
|     
|     
'''David Weintrop''', University of Maryland, College Park
<b>Prof. Caro Williams-Pierce</b> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>To block or not to block: Understanding the effects of programming language representation in high school computer science classrooms.</b>
<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">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<b>Abstract:</b> In the last few years, Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco have all announced major initiatives to bring computer science classes and computational thinking into every high school in their cities - with countless other smaller school districts following suit. Having made these commitments, attention now shifts towards how best to teach computer science to diverse populations of high school students who grew up in the age of smart phones, iPads, and Facebook. An increasingly popular strategy being employed is the use of graphical, block-based programming environments like Scratch, Blockly, and Alice. While these environments have been found to be effective at broadening participation with younger learners, open questions remain about their suitability in high school contexts. In this talk, I will present findings from a two-year classroom study looking at how the design of introductory programming environments affects learners' emerging understandings of computer science concepts and their perceptions of the field of computer science. I will also discuss the affordances of block-based programming environments relative to more conventional text-based alternatives.
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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>
<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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| 10/31/2019
|   
<b>Rachael Bradley Montgomery</b><br> University of Maryland
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Designing to Support People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities</b>
<br>
<br>
<b>Bio:</b>David Weintrop is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching & Learning, Policy & Leadership in the College of Education with a joint appointment in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of accessible and engaging computational learning environments. He is also interested in the use of technological tools in supporting exploration and expression across diverse contexts including STEM classrooms and informal spaces. His work lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction, design, and the Learning Sciences. David has a Ph.D. in the Learning Sciences from Northwestern University and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. He spent one year as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago studying computer science learning in elementary classrooms prior to joining the faculty at the University of Maryland. Before starting his academic career, he spent five years working as a software developer at a pair of start-ups in Chicago.
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.  
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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>
<br>
</div></div>
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.
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| 09/14/2017
| 11/14/2019
|    
|    
'''Stacy Branham''',<br>University of Maryland Baltimore-County
<b>Adam Aviv</b> George Washington
University
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>From Independence to Interdependence: A Social Narrative of Assistive Technology</b>
<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">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<b>Abstract:</b> In the Assistive Technology and greater disabilities community, “independence” has been a core goal and frame for making progress toward equality. This dominant narrative is often interpreted to mean that disabled people can and should live independently without help from others, and that assistive devices exist to displace reliance on helpers. For example, a wearable device that gives a blind person turn-by-turn directions through an airport displaces a sighted human guide. However, my work with people with disabilities in the home, in the workplace, and in public spaces has demonstrated that collaboration is a significant tool and goal of people with disabilities in their everyday lives. Further, social setting and human-human interactions significantly impact whether and how assistive devices are used. In this talk, I will share and unpack stories from people with various abilities to argue that assistive technology design through the lens of “interdependence” provides a more honest, respectful, and empowering alternative for assistive technology design.
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<br><br>
<b>Bio:</b> Stacy Branham is a Lecturer in Information Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her research in Human-Centered Computing contributes to the subfields of Social Computing and Assistive Technology by investigating how technologies mediate interpersonal relationships, often with people who are blind. Her recent and ongoing studies explore how technology can engender safety as people with disabilities encounter law enforcement at protests, as blind parents care for their children at home, and as transgender people navigate violence in online and offline spaces. Themes she investigates include agency, empowerment, disability, gender, social justice, intimacy, interdependence, personal safety, and ethics in design research. Her research has been recognized with best paper awards at CHI and DIS. Dr. Branham has organized multiple workshops at CSCW and CHI on ethics in design research, culminating in a Special Issue of Interacting with Computers. She is currently a papers AC for CHI 2018 and the Chair of the Student Research Competition for ASSETS 2017. Dr. Branham received her BS and PhD in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, with a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction.
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| 09/21/2017
| 11/21/2019
|     
|     
'''Gabriela Marcu''',<br>Drexel University<br>
<b>Whitney Quesenbery</b> Co-Director, Center for Civic Design
'''Cody Buntain''',<br>University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Gabriela: Addressing health inequities through human-centered design</b><br>
<b> Storytelling makes research data come to life </b>  
<b>Cody: Gaining Insight into Real-World Societal Response Using Social Media</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.
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<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<b>Talk 1 - Abstract:</b> When we use empathy and human-centered approaches in developing health interventions, we have the capacity to affect social change. We can direct human-centered computing toward underserved populations. We can target marginalization, stigma, and inequity with human- centered methods. In this talk, I will share projects that have focused on addressing inequities within children’s behavioral health services, treatment for youth living with HIV, and opioid overdose prevention. I will present methodological approaches to designing for and with underserved populations, and show how to practice inclusion and equity in the design process. Based on the results of my projects, I will also outline design principles for health information technologies that do not sacrifice humanity for standardization. Finally, I will discuss the importance of broadening participation in computing, for more equitable research participation, methods, and output.
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<br><br>
<b>Talk 2 - Abstract:</b> Online social networking platforms (OSNs) like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have become valuable data sources in studying societal response to high-impact events (terror attacks, natural disasters, mass demonstrations, etc.). These events unfold rapidly, with users posting their responses and new developments to OSNs as they happen. Rapidly understanding these responses can be critical to providing assistance or reducing conflict.


This talk discusses three main areas in this research:
1) How well does OSN data reflect real-world population data,
2) What are the patterns in response behavior to these events, and
3) How can low-quality information be filtered out from these data sources?


I will present findings across these questions, showing social media data mirrors certain geographic populations, discussing event-detection algorithms, and outlining some current research in cross-platform information quality. I will then open discussion on future work in: OSN data for qualitative study, crisis informatics, and studies of population/platform differences in online information quality.
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<b>Bio:</b> Gabriela Marcu is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing and Informatics and a Research Fellow with the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute at Drexel University. Her research applies participatory design, action research, and ubiquitous computing to promote behavioral health and social justice. Dr. Marcu directs the Empathic Research Group, a highly diverse and interdisciplinary team passionate about user experience and social change. She holds a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.S. in Informatics from the University of California, Irvine. She has been named a Siebel Scholar, NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Microsoft Research Graduate Women Scholar, and Google Anita Borg Scholar.
| 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>
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<b>Bio:</b> Dr. Cody Buntain is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab and is funded by the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship. His current areas of research include studying complex social systems and how society leverages social media in the aftermath of crises and social unrest. This research includes evaluating information credibility across social media platforms, real-time information retrieval and event detection in response to crises, social media reflections of real-world phenomena, and the intersection of machine learning and computational social science.
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| 12/05/2019
|   
<b>TBA</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b> TBA</b>
<br>
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== Spring 2019 Schedule ==
{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Date
! width="150px" | Leader
! Topic
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|-
| 01/31/2019
|   
<b>Faculty Only BBL</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
Regular BBLs will start from 7th Feb, 2019.
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| 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.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<!-- row end -->
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 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.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<!-- row end -->
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 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.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<!-- row end -->
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 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">
<!-- row end -->
<!-- row start -->
|- 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!
<!-- row end -->
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 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 -->
|-
|-
| 09/28/2017
| 04/25/2019
|     
|     
'''Mark Fuge''',<br>University of Maryland, College Park
<b>TBA</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
'''Designing with Data: How machine learning is morphing human, product, and system design'''
<b> Aravind will run a workshop on how to make PDF documents accessible</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''Abstract:''' The nature of product design has increased in scale, both inside corporations and in self-organized online communities (e.g., OpenIDEO, Local Motors). This is thanks to unprecedented amounts of digital design information made possible by globally distributed groups of thousands of people who collaborate together on design projects over the Internet. However, this increased scale and diversity comes with a price: 1) these groups generate more data than they can effectively use, 2) it becomes difficult to leverage their diverse expertise, and 3) involving non-experts meaningfully the design process, particularly for complex mechanical systems, requires rethinking how people interact with design tools and what kind of intelligent support we need to provide.
<!-- row end -->
<br><br>
In this talk I'll address how advances in machine learning can ameliorate these issues. Specifically, my students and I will introduce ongoing work on three problems: 1) how to use data to understand and simplify complex, high-dimensional, design spaces (to aid in techniques like optimization, design synthesis, and design exploration), 2) how to filter high-quality, diverse submissions out of large pools of design ideas generated by online communities (to aid in design generation and selection), and 3) how to enable non-experts to design complex mechanical parts (such as 3D printable robots) by using AI to automate various mechanical design tasks. Each problem highlights how building probabilistic models of designs via data can often produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts and make design (even of complex, physical systems) more inclusive.


<br><br>
<!-- row start -->
'''Bio:''' Mark Fuge is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, and recently joined the HCIL as a faculty member. His research lies at the intersection of Mechanical Engineering, Machine Learning, and Design; an area often referred to as "Design Informatics" or "Data-Driven Design." He received his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, and received his M.S. and B.S. at Carnegie Mellon University. He has conducted research in applied machine learning, optimization, network analysis, additive manufacturing, human-computer interfaces, crowdsourcing, and creativity support tools. He has received a DARPA Young Faculty Award and a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. You can learn more about his research at his lab’s website: https://ideal.umd.edu
|-
</div>
| 05/02/2019
</div>
|   
<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 -->


<!-- row start -->
|-
|-
| 10/05/2017
| 05/09/2019
|     
|     
'''Sigfried Gold''',<br>University of Maryland, College Park
<b>TBA</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>'''Exploratory visualization tools for health records research, and an exciting detour into infrastructural support for health records research at UMD'''</b>
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">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
'''Abstract:''' Important medical research is increasingly based on analysis of data collected during provision of routine care. Compared to clinical trials data, this "secondary use" data is not susceptible to randomized, prospective study protocols; it suffers from poor quality and extreme "missingness" for observational or retrospective methods; strict privacy and human subjects regulations limit its availability; processing it for analysis is complicated by the diversity of its sources, formats, and the plethora of language and coding systems in which it is recorded; and analyzing it generally requires advanced clinical training and methods for grappling with its extreme multi-variateness, sparsity, and unknown systemic biases. Despite these formidable challenges, this data is orders of magnitude cheaper and more prolific than clinical trial data. Researchers and analysts within medical provider institutions can have access to data for millions of patients essentially for free; while medical products companies, regulators, and payer institutions can affordably purchase data for hundreds of millions of patients. Further, although analysts' uses cases are diverse and their methods (e.g., advanced statistics or machine learning) often opaque as well as immature; they share many basic questions and tasks: they almost universally need to characterize their populations on various demographic and clinical dimensions; they generally need to choose study and comparator cohorts; they need to group patients by disease and treatment parameters; they need to evaluate the significance of untold co-morbidities and confounders; they need to explore and discover temporal patterns obscured by the volume and variability of the data.
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 05/16/2019
|   
<b>Adil Yalcin,</b> Founder and CEO at Keshif
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>It's all about creating new possibilities for people: A journey from the lab to a startup</b>


The advent of common data models and open-source software is just beginning to drastically streamline research workflows with this data. For analysts with access to data in OHDSI (ohdsi.org) format, for instance, many months of the standard observational study workflow can be skipped entirely. OHDSI's web-based cohort construction tools and it's open and growing R methods library allow researchers not only to define and execute their studies in hours or days rather than months, these researchers can now instantly and precisely share their code and aggregate results in a research network to be immediately replicated on dozens of other databases containing records for hundreds of millions of patients.
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.


What this means for my research is: 1) my visualization tools can be built to a single data model and can be tested with a wide variety of use cases and without requiring my subject matter expert collaborators to perform data collection and transformation just to work with me; and 2) my tools can be built with immediate integration into platforms they are already using, so, for instance, they can take advantage of these experimental visualization tools as they design their study and set parameters; they can feed those parameters into their statistical or machine learning algorithms; and they can then (continuing in the same platform) use these visualization tools to explore and evaluate results.
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">
<!-- row end -->


What it also means for my research, for better or worse, is that my model for developing and evaluating visualization software and working with users and collaborators is very different from what HCI researchers are used to, and, since no one at UMD (as far as I know) is using OHDSI or anything like it, I have been spending more time explaining and evangelizing for my preferred research platform than for my research itself.
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 05/23/2019
|   
<b>TBA</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
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">
<!-- row end -->


At the Brown Bag I will talk about both; but depending on audience interest (some of our visualization researchers will be off at IEEE VIS this week), I may end up focusing more on the infrastructural issues.
<br>
<br><br>
<br>
'''Bio:''' With 29 years of experience in developing data management and analysis software on Unix/Linux and web platforms, Gold specializes in designing and implementing innovative, browser-based information visual analytics tools to facilitate the exploration and understanding of complex, multivariate or temporal data. He has experience in a wide array of industries (cyber security, securities trading, law, public sector administration, fundraising), but particular expertise in medical informatics and the secondary use of clinical and claims data for pharmacoepidemiology and patient safety research. He works with medical data using a common data model and open-source software as a collaborator in the OHDSI community.
<br>
<b>
<br>
<br>  
<br>  
</div></div>
</div></div>
|}
== Fall 2018 Schedule ==
{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Date
! width="150px" | Leader
! Topic


<!-- row start -->
|-
|-
| 10/12/2017
| 08/30/2018
|     
|     
'''Foad Hamidi''',<br>University of Maryland, Baltimore County
<b>Student Townhall</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Designing for User Agency and Participation</b>
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">
<b>Abstract:</b> Digital technologies provide many opportunities to engage the interest and attention of users of all ages. A central question for the designers of these systems is what aspects of user interaction do they want to encourage and emphasize. In this talk, I present several research projects in which I designed digital systems to motivate user participation and collaboration. These projects include a digital living media system that engages child users though the dynamics of caring and responsibility and a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) open-source communication board for non-verbal users. For each project, I describe how I worked closely with various stakeholders including children, parents and teachers. I conclude with reflections on how to design digital system to support human agency and participation. 
.
<br><br><b>Bio:</b> Foad Hamidi is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Participatory Design, Digital Living Media Systems and DIY Assistive Technology. He is passionate about interdisciplinary cormmunitity-engaged research and has work on research projects in different cultural contexts, including Kenya, Bhutan and Mexico. He has a PhD in Computer Science from York University, Toronto.
<br>  
<br>  
<!-- row end -->
</div></div>
</div></div>


|-
|-
| 10/19/2017
| 09/06/2018
|   
<b>BBL Student Co-coordinators</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
Come, network, make introductions, and share what you are working on.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
 
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 09/13/2018
|   
<b>Joel Chan, Tammy Clegg</b><br>
University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
TBA
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
.
<br>
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 09/20/2018
|   
<b>Joel Zhang</b><br>
University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
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">
.
<br>
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 10/11/2018
|   
<b>Polly Lee O'Rourke</b><br>
University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
Improving language learning using brain simulation.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
.
<br>
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 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>
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 10/25/2018
|   
<b>Student Townhall</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
Research speed-dating
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
.
<br>
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- 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>
<!-- 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 -->
|-
| 11/15/2018
|   
<b>Student Townhall</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
Research speed dating.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
.
<br>
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|- style="background-color: darkgray;" |
| 03/22/2017
| 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.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
.
<br>
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 12/06/2018
|   
<b>Student Townhall</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
TBA
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
.
<br>
<!-- row end -->
 
<!-- row start -->
|-
| 12/13/2018
|     
|     
'''Internship Panel'''
<b>Cookie Exchange</b>
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
Internship Panel
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.
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<b>Abstract:</b> The panel will share their experiences applying for the internships and finishing them. They will also provide resources including for practicing coding, improving resume, and interview questions.
.
<br><br><b>Bio:</b> The panel consists of PhD students from UMD CS and ISchool---Leyla Norooz, Seokbin Kang, Zhe Cui, Deok Gun Park, and Sriram Karthik Badam. They have done internships at both academia and industry including MSR, Google, Adobe, IBM, LinkedIn, and INRIA (France).
<br>  
<!-- row end -->
 
<br>
<br>
<b>
<br>
<br>  
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</div></div>
</div></div>
|}
== Spring 2018 Schedule ==
{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! Date
! width="150px" | Leader
! Topic


|-
|-
| 10/26/2017
| 01/25/2018
|     
|     
<b>Janet Walkoe</b>,<br>University of Maryland, College Park
Kickoff to a new Semester!
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Teacher Noticing: Leveraging Technology to Explore Noticing and Noticing to Explore Technology</b>
<b>Come, network, make introductions, and share what you are working on</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<b>Abstract:</b> We introduce <i>technology-mediated teacher noticing</i> (TMTN): a vision for the design and use of technology-mediated tools that takes seriously the need for teachers to attend to, interpret, and respond to their students’ thinking. This vision is situated at the intersection of research on teacher noticing, and on technology to support student thinking. We synthesize that work to highlight specific ways that technology-mediated classroom tools can focus and stabilize teachers’ attention on valuable aspects of student thinking emphasized by current reform efforts. We then illustrate TMTN with classroom examples in which technology supported or obstructed teachers' attention to student thinking, and consider implications for research on technology in teacher practice, professional development, and the design of technological tools for K-12 classrooms.
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><br><b>Bio:</b> Janet is a Learning Scientist and Mathematics Educator. She earned her Doctorate from Northwestern University in the Learning Sciences in 2012. She also holds an MS in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. Before enrolling in graduate school, Janet taught high school mathematics (from 1996-2006), earning National Board Certification in 2003. Janet studies the teaching and learning of algebra in formal and informal environments. In particular, she is interested in the natural resources children bring to algebra classes and how to help teachers leverage these resources. Outside the college you may find her at the yoga studio or spending time in Washington DC with her daughter, husband & their pet rats.
<br>  
<br>  
</div></div>
</div></div>


|-
|-
| 11/02/2017
| 02/01/2018
|     
|     
<b>Joseph G. Davis</b>,<br>University of Sydney
'''Bahador Saket'''
<br> Georgia Tech, Atlanta
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Visualizing and Exploring Cliques and Cartel-Like Patterns in Citation Networks</b>
<b>Visualization by Demonstration</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<b>Abstract:</b> With the growing emphasis on metrics such as citation count and h-index for research assessment, several reports of gaming and cartel-like formations for boosting citation statistics have emerged. However, such cartels are extremely difficult to detect. This paper presents a systematic approach to visualizing and computing clique and other anomalous patterns through ego-centric citation network analysis by drilling down into the details of individual researcher’s citations. After grouping the citations into three categories, namely, self- citations, co-author citations, and distant citations, we focus our analysis on the outliers with relatively high proportion of self- and co-author citations. By analyzing the complete co-authorship citation networks of these researchers one at a time along with all the co-authors and by merging these networks, we were able to isolate and visualize cliques and anomalous citation patterns that suggest plausible collusion. Our exploratory analysis was carried out using the citation data from Web of Science (now Clarivate Analytics) for all the highly cited researchers in Computer Science and Physics. I will also discuss some of the potential research opportunities in 'citation analytics'.
<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.
<br><br><b>Bio:</b> Joseph G. Davis is the Professor of Information Systems and Services at the School of Information Technologies, the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. He directs the Knowledge Discovery and Management Research Group and is the theme leader for service computing at the Centre for Distributed and High Performance Computing at Sydney. His research covers crowdsourcing, data analytics, ontologies and semantic web, and service computing. He has published over 110 research papers in these and related areas. His research has been funded by the Australian Research Council, Cooperative Centre for Smart Services, Data 61, IBM Research Labs, Carnegie Bosch Institute, among others.
 
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>
</div></div>


Joseph completed his PhD in Information Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. He has held previous academic positions at Indiana University Bloomington and University of Auckland and Visiting Professorships at Carnegie Mellon University, Syracuse University, University of Pittsburgh, and IBM Research Labs. He is a Senior Member of the ACM and a Charter Member of the Association for Information Systems.
|-
| 02/08/2018
|   
'''Elissa Redmiles'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Dancing Pigs or Security? Measuring the Rationality of End-User Security Behavior</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<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>
<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>  
<br>  
</div></div>
</div></div>


|-
|-
| 11/09/2017
| 02/15/2018
|     
|     
<b>Ben Shneiderman</b>,
'''Erin Peters-Burton'''
<br>University of Maryland, College Park
<br> George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>How do art & design accelerate research in science & engineering?</b>
<b>Building Student Self-Awareness of Learning to Enhance Diversity in the Sciences</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<b>Abstract:</b> Leonardo is the classic example of fusion between art and science, as well as design and engineering. His artistic side amplified his perceptual abilities enabling him to make scientific breakthroughs about human anatomy, hydraulics, optics, and much more. Similarly, Pasteur’s training in lithography sensitized him to understand the chirality of molecules. Artistic skill enabling science is but one of four paths that I see.  A second path is that the demands of art push science and engineering forward, as in the case of Karl Heinz needing to create the MP3 algorithms for compressing music. A third path is that the playful, exploratory, iterative, and divergent methods of art & design free up scientists and engineers to expand the range of their thinking. A fourth path is that products of art & design, such as paintings, sculpture, music, or film can directly inspire scientists and engineers. This talk will present further examples and call for closer connections across these disciplines.
<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>
<br>
</div></div>
 


<br><br><b>Bio:</b> Ben Shneiderman (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/), and a Member of the UM Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and NAI, and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, in recognition of his pioneering contributions to human-computer interaction and information visualization. His contributions include the direct manipulation concept, clickable highlighted web-links, touchscreen keyboards, dynamic query sliders, development of treemaps, novel network visualizations for NodeXL, and temporal event sequence analysis for electronic health records.
|-
| 02/22/2018
Shneiderman is the co-author with Catherine Plaisant of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (6th ed., 2016) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/. With Stu Card and Jock Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999). He co-authored, Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL (www.codeplex.com/nodexl) (Morgan Kaufmann) with Derek Hansen and Marc Smith. Shneiderman’s latest book is The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations (Oxford, April 2016).
|   
'''Norman Su'''
<br> Indiana University
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>The Problem of Designing for Subcultures</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<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>  
<br>  
</div></div>
</div></div>


|-
|-
| 11/16/2017
| 03/01/2018
|   
'''Ya-Wei Li'''
<br> Center for Conservation Innovation, Defenders of Wildlife
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Using Data and Technology to Save Endangered Species.</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<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>
 
|-
| 03/08/2018
|     
|     
'''Karthik Ramani''',<br>Purdue University, <br>West Lafayette
'''Deok Gun Park'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>A New Genre of Human Computer-Interaction and Interfaces for 3D Creative Design and Fabrication</b>
<b>Thinking, Autism and AGI</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<b>Abstract:</b> The convergence of many factors such as low cost sensors, electronics, computing, machines, and more recently machine learning have created the potential for changing the way users engage with the physical world. This talk will explore and demonstrate how we can create new geometric interfaces and interactions that leverage our knowledge of the physical world for 3D design and fabrication. These new methods and tools enable users to personalize designs using new machines. In the first part of the talk we will explore how any consumer with little knowledge of computers can repurpose everyday objects and or shapes and quickly customize them to foldable constructions. Such constructions are then used to create robots in the physical world. In the second part we will see how new interactive workflows using a smart phone and tablets with pen-and-touch interfaces can be used for collaborative 3D design ideation. As a result of low thresholds and simple user interactions with lower cognitive loads, users are shown to explore multiple creative pathways. In the last part of the talk we will examine how a new deep learning technique, “SurfNET”, transforms a single image into 3D shapes and even hallucinate shapes that it has not seen. We envision a future with personalized manufacturing interfaces that lower the barrier for many to participate in the design and fabrication processes.
<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>


<br><br><b>Bio:</b> Karthik Ramani is the Donald W. Feddersen Professor of School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, with courtesy appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering and College of Education. He earned his B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1985, an MS from Ohio State University, in 1987, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1991, all in Mechanical Engineering. He has received many awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations. He has served in the editorial board of Elsevier Journal of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design (JMD). In 2008 he was a visiting Professor at Stanford University (computer sciences), research fellow at PARC (formerly Xerox PARC), and in Oxford University Institute of Mathematical Sciences in summer 2016. He also serves on the Engineering Advisory sub-committee for the NSF IIP (Industrial Innovation and Partnerships). In 2006 and 2007, he won the Most Cited Journal Paper award from CAD and the Research Excellence award in the College of Engineering at Purdue University. In 2009, he won the Outstanding Commercialization award from Purdue University. He was the co-founder of the world’s first commercial shape-based search engine (VizSeek) and more recently co-founded ZeroUI whose product (Ziro) won the Best of Consumer Electronics Show Finalist (CES 2016). He has won several best paper awards and in 2014 the Outstanding Research Excellence Award from ASME Computers and Information Sciences in Engineering Division. NSF recently invited him as a distinguished speaker in cyber-learning and engineering maker spaces. In 2015 he won the most cited researcher for 2005-16 in the Elsevier CAD journal. His recent papers have been published in venues such as ACM (SIGCHI, UIST); IEEE (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, TVCG, VAST), TEI, CAD and ASME JMD.
|-
<br>
| 03/15/2018
|   
'''Clemens Klokmose'''
<br> Aarhus University, Denmark
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Shareable Dynamic Media: A revisit of the fundamentals of interactive computing</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<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.
</div></div>
</div></div>


|- style="background-color: darkgray;" |
|- style="background-color: darkgray;" |
| 11/23/2017
| 03/22/2017
| colspan="2" | No Brown Bag, Thanksgiving recess
| colspan="2" | No Brown Bag, Spring Break.
 
|-
| 03/29/2018
|
'''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">
<b>Designing A Flexible Personal Data Tracking Tool</b>
<br>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<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>


|-
|-
| 11/30/2017
| 04/12/2018
|     
|     
'''Georgia Bullen'''
'''CHI practice talks'''
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
TBD
<b>Combining smartwatches with large displays for visual data exploration by Karthik Badam and Tom Horak</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
TBD
TBD
Line 210: Line 877:


|-
|-
| 12/07/2017
| 04/19/2018
|   
'''Hernisa Kacorri'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Accessibility and Assistive Technologies at the Intersection of Users and Data</b>
<br>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<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>
 
 
|-
| 04/26/2018
|   
'''Chi-Young Oh'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Small Worlds in a Distant Land: International Newcomer Students' Local Information Behavior in Unfamiliar Environments</b>
<br>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<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.
</div></div>
 
 
|-
| 05/03/2018
|   
'''Amanda Lazar'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Rethinking technology for dementia</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<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.
</div></div>
 
 
|-
| 05/10/2018
|   
'''Joel Chan'''
<br> University of Maryland, College Park
| <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed">
<b>Back to the Future: How people construct new creative ideas from old knowledge, and how technology can help</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<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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| 05/17/2018
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|     
'''Pamela Wisniewski'''
'''Rachel Kramer'''
<br> University of Central Florida
<br> World Wildlife Fund
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TBD
<b>WILDLABS.NET: the conservation technology network</b>
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
TBD
<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><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.

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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.