Congratulations to Gabriela Marcu who was awarded a Microsoft Graduate Women's scholarship.

Thanks STAR

Congratulations to Samuel J. Kaufman, Judy Chen—Dept of Informatics on having their paper, 'Where We Twitter' accepted to CHI 2010—microblogging workshop.

"Users who enter new spaces, especially urban spaces, naturally explore. Increasingly, exploration is augmented by mobile, digital information systems such as mobile phone versions of Google Maps or Yelp. These system's provide statistics, logistical information, and service reviews written for a general audience, but do not typically inform the user about the personalities of space occupants (the character and culture of a space), recent happenings and other kinds of local knowledge. The system described herein hopes to do just that--provide a novel method for the "colorful" understanding of places, drawing from newly-available corpora of geotagged tweets.

"Social media is everywhere – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, My Space, blogs. Making sense of this online networking universe is Donald Patterson, UC Irvine assistant professor of informatics."

Below is an excerpt from an interesting article about the race to restore network connectivity in Haiti. A few interesting points: There is one undersea cable out of Haiti. Because of that ISPs were already using satellite. First responders brought network with them. The effort now is on expanding access to net to everyone.

"Late last week, the Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union dispatched engineers to assess the damage to telecom infrastructure along with 100 satellite terminals—and the personnel to operate them—in an effort to help coordinate rescue efforts. According to a press release, “ITU will also set up a Qualcomm Deployable Base Station (QDBS), a reliable, responsive and complete cellular system designed to enable vital wireless communications aimed at strengthening response and recovery mechanisms in a disaster zone.”

Read more: IEEE Spectrum

From Smart Technologies:

"The challenge
We're looking for innovative multitouch applications for our SMART Table. We already have some applications that help students learn to read, do math problems and more, and we know you can create others that children will want to get their hands on. So take a look at our SMART Table videos and get the creative juices flowing. And don't worry about not having a SMART Table to test your application – we can help you build a table emulator.

Prizes
The grand prize for the contest is a SMART Table. We'll also promote your application on the SMART website for one year, giving you the potential to establish a revenue stream."

More info here. If anyone wants to put together a team for the LUCI lab, email the mailing list.

Congratulations to Informatics graduate student Joel Ross, Computer Science undergraduate student Nitin Shantharam, and Informatics faculty Bill Tomlinson on having their paper, 'Collaborative Filtering and Carbon Footprint Calculation' accepted to ISSST 2010.

This paper describes the design of the Better Carbon calculator, a carbon footprint calculator which uses collaborative filtering and location-based calculation to provide an individual footprint estimate while simultaneously affecting and improving the estimates for other people in a user's community.

Telegraph
"More than 70 white pointers have been tagged by scientists is Western Australia in a world first trial that will send beach lifesavers a text message when one of the predators swims close to the Perth shoreline."

Congratulations to Informatics post-doc Eric P. S. Baumer, Informatics undergraduate alumnus Jordan Sinclain, and Informatics professor Bill Tomlinson on having their paper, '"America Is Like Metamucil:" Fostering Critical and Creative Thinking about Metaphor in Political Blogs' accepted to CHI 2010.

Blogs are becoming an increasingly important medium—socially, academically, and politically. Much research has involved analyzing blogs, but less work has considered how such analytic techniques might be incorporated into tools for blog readers. A new tool, metaViz, analyzes political blogs for potential conceptual metaphors and presents them to blog readers. This paper presents a study exploring the types of critical and creative thinking fostered by metaViz as evidenced by user comments and discussion on the system. These results indicate the effectiveness of various system features at fostering critical thinking and creativity, specifically in terms of deep, structural reasoning about metaphors and creatively extending existing metaphors. Furthermore, the results carry broader implications beyond blogs and politics about exploring alternate configurations between computation and human thought.

Get a copy of this paper here: http://ericbaumer.com/publications/pap1573-baumer.pdf

I spotted this mini-projector in the wild in the toy section of Target. This should help fuel some of the frenzy over studying mini-projectors that has taken over part of the UBICOMP/CHI communities.

Congratulations to Informatics grad student Jed Brubaker, Computer Science grad student Caitlin Lustig and Informatics faculty member Gillian Hayes on having their paper, 'PatientsLikeMe: Empowerment and Representation in a Patient-Centered Social Network' accepted to CSCW 2010.

"We examine the patient networking site PatientsLikeMe relative to current trends in medicine toward patient-centered care and empowerment. We focus on both patient and institutional demands for personal medical data. Given PatientsLikeMe’s mixture of social networking and health management tools, we consider the role of online health communities in the changing patient/provider relationship, and the use of patient-provided medical data."

Congratulations to Congratulations to Informatics grad student Leslie Liu and Informatics faculy Gillian Hayes on having their paper, 'Evaluating the Usefulness and Usability of Collaborative Personal Health Record Systems' accepted to CSCW 2010.

"Personal health record systems (PHR) have great potential to improve both health documentation and patient care. The introduction and adoption of these systems, however, have been relatively slow. In this work, through usability evaluations and clinician interviews, we evaluated the usability of, usefulness of, and the ability to communicate and share information through PHR. We describe the results of our evaluation, which demonstrate how a combination of usability, functionality, and socio-cultural influences are impeding PHR adoption and use."

Congratulations to Informatics faculty members Don Patterson and Susan Sim, and former Informatics grad student Tosin Aiyelokun on having their paper, 'Overcoming Blind Spots in Interaction Design: A Case Study in Designing for African AIDS Orphan Care Communities' accepted to the Journal of Information Technologies & International Development.

Abstract:

The process of designing technological systems for the developing world is a challenging task. In a project that we undertook in the summer of 2007 using an iterative design process, we attempted to develop delay-tolerant networking technology on mobile phones to support workers at AIDS orphanages in Zambia and South Africa. Despite extensive preparations and research, we found that conditions on the ground were radically different from what we had anticipated, and we had to quickly re-group and redefine our strategic goals. This experience made us realize that, for this type of design, resiliency and contingency planning were the most valuable tools in our interaction design toolbox. In response to changing conditions, we rapidly prototyped a different mobile telephony application called Nomatic*AID that provides a feedback loop among donors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and field workers. In this paper, we reflect on the redirection of our work once we reached our field site and our resulting acceptance of design blind spots. We present lessons we learned to help practitioners meet their goals in the presence of considerable and obvious design distance."

Get a copy of this paper here: http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/view/424/192

"With the holiday shopping season officially under way, millions of consumers proceeded to their nearest commercial centers this week in hopes of acquiring the latest, and therefore most desirable, personal device."

Read more about it here: New Device Desirable, Old Device Undesirable

The Technology Review has an interesting report out about how the all-electric Nissan Leaf will be helping transition drivers from a gas-based fuel infrastructure to an electric one. It is particularly interesting to notice how email, mobile and location-aware applications become part of a user's interactions with the car:

"The Leaf's dashboard display will show remaining battery life, the location of charging stations, and which stations are within range. When the car gets low on power, the driver can put it into a "limp" mode so it drives at the most-efficient speed to ensure it gets there."

Once the driver plugs a car into a charging station, Nissan sends e-mail updates on how the charge is progressing, and when it's done. And finally, the owner can use a mobile device to switch on the car's electric air-conditioner or heater before detaching it from the charging station, so as not to waste battery life after pulling away.

The 2008-2009 LUCI Lab Annual Report is now available in the tech reports section of the LUCI website. Direct Link

"The Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction ended the 2008-2009 school year with many significant accomplishments and a strong and innovative research program. LUCI is a growing research center with an increasing international impact and presence.

LUCI claims 7 informatics faculty as core members and an additional 4 faculty members as affiliated members. We have 2 full-time researchers, an artist-in-residence, 4 post-docs, 28 graduate students and approximately 13 undergraduate students affiliated with the lab."

Congratulations to Joel Ross on passing his advancement to candidacy exam!

Thesis: Globalizing Cognitive Labor: The Changing Demographics of Amazon Mechanical Turk

Abstract:

Amazon Mechanical Turk is an online system for crowdsourcing cognitive labor. In this system, tasks are distributed to a population of thousands of anonymous workers, who complete this work for particularly small amounts of money. By making it cheap and easy to gather lots of workers, Mechanical is becoming increasingly popular as a platform for researchers and developers to perform user studies and experiments, as well as a basis for other information systems. Nevertheless, the low rate of pay for these jobs has led many to see Mechanical Turk as a system for exploiting the time and labor of low-income workers. In order to better understand this successful example of crowdsourcing, as well as its effect on workers and how work is performed, we surveyed the demographic make-up and usage behaviors of the anonymous 'Turkers' who complete these tasks. In this talk, I describe how the Turker population has changed over time, detailing a shift from a primarily moderate-income, US-based work-force towards an increasingly international group with a significant population of young, well-educated Indian workers. This change in the international make-up of the Turker population points to how crowdsourced cognitive labor--an increasingly common site of human effort--may be disconnected from the location and the context (both social and otherwise) of its use. This decontextualization may have profound impacts on how people work and cooperate in an increasingly networked and global world.

Committee:

Bill Tomlinson (chair)
Paul Dourish
Gloria Mark
Ramesh Jain
Vidyanad Choudhary (Paul Merage School of Business)