Archive for April, 2011

Happy 30th Birthday Computer Mouse | InnovationNewsDaily - April 28th, 2011

mouse

mouse

LUCI gets some love from the press:
“After 30 Years, Computer Mouse Still Prevails”

via Happy 30th Birthday Computer Mouse | Three Decade Later the Mouse Still Trumps Multitouch Rivals | iPad and Kinect Can’t Compete | InnovationNewsDaily.

The world the mouse created

One cannot understand the success and longevity of the computer mouse without putting it in the context of the computing revolution it enabled. Before the mouse, users interacted with their computers by feeding in abstract punch cards or linguistically confusing lines of code words. The mouse transformed the computer into a visual device, thereby moving computing into the visual, immediate, “what you see is what you get” world that humans feel comfortable with.

“[The mouse] was a key development in the creation of graphic user interfaces,” said Donald Patterson, director of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction at the University of California, Irvine. “The mouse enabled long-term engagement with the screen, albeit indirectly, in a way that wasn’t particularly expensive and wasn’t prone to arm and hand fatigue.”

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Posted: 4/28/11 11:37 pm UTC by Add Your Comment
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T-Mobile Product Roadmap Roadshow - April 28th, 2011

T-Mobile came by the LUCI lab and Donald Bren Hall and gave a product roadmap presentation for the campus today.
We started with some research presentations:

  1. André van der Hoek talked about using tablets in the classroom and meeting room for creative/design work
  2. Chen Li talked about intelligent mobile search
  3. Steve Voida talked about studying multi-tasking office work instrumented with sensors to understand how work is done throughout the week
  4. Alfred Kobdsa talked about studies of usability of personal navigation devices
  5. Karen Cheng talked about mobile technology for health with high vulnerability low resource populations.
  6. Bill Maurer talked about mobile finance in the developing world

Then T-Mobile, via Kimberly Back, gave us a glimpse of what T-Mobile is up to and what is coming down their product pipeline:

  1. They are currently owned by Deutsche Telekom
  2. Currently T-Mobile has deployed HSPA+ (“21Mbps theoretical” 4G) which is 6-8 Mbps down, 2Mbps up.  Covers 200 million people.
  3. In June SoCal is getting upgraded to HSPA+ (“42Mbps theoretical” 4G) 10-12 Mbps download (on the street, not theoretical), 2Mbps upload.
  4. Those are just speeds from phone to the tower however…
  5. Traditionally telecoms use T1 connections (x6) from tower out…
  6. 90% of T-Mobiles have direct Ethernet out now.  T-Mobile is 12-18 months ahead of AT&T. This is why AT&T wants to buy them.  This is the source of the iPhone speed troubles everything after the tower…
  7. T-Mobile has Wi-Fi based calling for voice (not just data) using standard protocols.  It creates a secure tunnel to T-Mobile data center over Wi-Fi where it is connected to normal phone network.  This works internationally free of charge.
  8. U.S. Market share in 2010: 26% Android, 28% Apple, 25% RIM, 20% other. Android is growing much faster in new purchases, however.
  9. Nokia Astound is coming out with “one of the bigger banks in America” with Near-Field Communications later in the year
  10. 3 new Blackberries coming out, one with Near-Field communications in July.
  11. New 4G Mobile Hotspot came out last week that connects to the HSPA+ 21 network.
  12. Samsung Galaxy was the first tablet device that came out from T-Mobile with Android, but runs Android 2.2 and is falling behind.
  13. Dell Streak is also an existing device running Android 2.2 and is upgradeable to Android Honeycomb because it has a dual-core processor.
  14. A nice slide on tablet comparisons that they are going to forward to us.
  15. They have a tablet that records in 3-D !.  Not even sure what to make of that.
  16. If T-Mobile doesn’t carry it and it takes a SIM card, they can get it through Business Partner Sales.
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Posted: 4/28/11 8:05 pm UTC by Make the First Comment
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Garnet’s OutRun project in Make: magazine - April 27th, 2011

Garnet’s OutRun project is features in a 4 page article in Make: Magazine.

Congrats Garnet!

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Posted: 4/27/11 10:00 pm UTC by Make the First Comment
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Spring has arrived in the LUCI lab - April 22nd, 2011

A mysterious entity has littered the lab with eggs. Happy Hunting. Play fair.

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Posted: 4/22/11 4:08 pm UTC by Make the First Comment
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T.A.C.O. Truck wins 3rd Place at Engage UCI - April 21st, 2011

LUCI at Engage UCI

Brenda Ramirez and Diana Garcia

Congrats to undergraduate students, Brenda Ramirez and Diana Garcia, who are advised by Informatics faculty member Gillian Hayes and Informatics Research Scientist and Artist-in-Residence Garnet Hertz for winning 3rd place at “Engage UCI: A Celebration of Community Collaboration”

They presented a poster titled, “Circuit Bending: Technology and Community Outreach for Children in Latino Communities”

“Circuit Bending is the creative short-circuiting of electronic devices such as children’s toys and small digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators. Circuit bending usually involves dismantling electronics and adding components such as switches and potentiometers that alter the circuit.”

For more info check out a link to Garnet’s page.

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Posted: 4/21/11 9:11 pm UTC by Make the First Comment
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Divining a Digital Future - April 20th, 2011

Diving A Digital Future

Diving A Digital Future

Congratulations to Informatics Professor Paul Dourish and lab friend Genevieve Bell on having actual real copies of their new book “Diving a Digital Future”! (Amazon)

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Posted: 4/20/11 6:39 pm UTC by Make the First Comment
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LUCI Shoes - April 18th, 2011


The merchandising potential is endless!
Order yours today!
A basic set of shoes can be ordered here.
A version with a QR code can be ordered here.

Note that this is a little different than the pair I sent out by email. If you want a different style made or something, leave a comment and I’ll see if it’s feasible.

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Posted: 4/18/11 12:14 am UTC by Make the First Comment
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UCI: “Rethinking Reachability” - April 13th, 2011

Melissa Mazmanian

Melissa Mazmanian, who has a Ph.D. in organization studies from the MIT Sloan School of Management, says her recent acquisition of a smart phone was life-changing. “I check emails far more than I used to,” she says, “and probably far more than I need to.”

Melissa Mazmanian, an informatics assistant professor at the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences; informatics doctoral student Ellie Harmon; and Christine Beckman, associate professor at the Paul Merage School of Business, will initially study two Orange County families and their relationships with their BlackBerrys, iPhones and similar devices. They expect to study 12 families over a two-year period.

“A lot of the conversations about new technologies focus on how to make them better and faster, but it’s equally important for us to think deeply about the implications of being connected all the time,” says Mazmanian.

The full article is available from the UCI communications website here.
Next we know Melissa will be giving a TED Talk.

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Posted: 4/13/11 3:47 pm UTC by Make the First Comment
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Bagging Gradient-Boosted Trees for High Precision, Low Variance Ranking Models - April 8th, 2011

Moleskins and Pens

Photo courtesy of paulworthington

Congratulations to Informatics graduate student Yasser Ganjisaffar, Informatics faculty Crista Lopes and their collaborator Rich Caruana from Microsoft on having their paper,
‘Bagging Gradient-Boosted Trees for High Precision, Low Variance Ranking Models’ accepted to SIGIR 2011.

Abstract: Recent studies have shown that boosting provides excellent predictive performance across a wide variety of tasks. In Learning-to-rank, boosted models such as RankBoost and LambdaMART have been shown to be among the best performing learning methods based on evaluations on public data sets. In this paper, we show how the combination of bagging as a variance reduction technique and boosting as a bias reduction technique can result in very high precision and low variance ranking models. We perform thousands of parameter tuning experiments for LambdaMART to achieve a high precision boosting model. Then we show that a bagged ensemble of such LambdaMART boosted models results in higher accuracy ranking models while also reducing variance as much as 50%. We report our results on three public learning-to-rank data sets using four metrics. Bagged LamdbaMART outperforms all previously reported results on ten of the twelve comparisons, and bagged LambdaMART outperforms non-bagged LambdaMART on all twelve comparisons. For example, wrapping bagging around LambdaMART increases NDCG@1 from 0.4137 to 0.4200 on the MQ2007data set; the best prior results in the literature for this data set is 0.4134 by RankBoost.

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Posted: 4/8/11 6:40 pm UTC by Make the First Comment
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Sen gets an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship - April 5th, 2011

NSF Logo

NSF Logo


Congratulations to Sen Hirano on getting an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! It’s a tremendous honor with lots of perks.

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Posted: 4/5/11 4:22 pm UTC by Make the First Comment
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