Arduino Workshop
Last night the LUCI lab had a terrific turnout for an Arduino hacking workshop. About 20 people including undergraduates, graduate students, researchers and faculty turned out to learn how to program this popular microcontroller. The basic goal of the workshop was for everyone to create a device which measured an input (light, sound, pressure) and do something in response (beep, light up, tweet, etc.). There was a little bit of trepidation at first as most of the participants had to trade their software coding skills for wires and breadboards, but once the pizza arrived everything got easier.
This workshop was run by undergraduate student Vahan Hartooni and sponsored by the LUCI lab’s “hackerspace”, which is a new direction that we are undertaking as a result of a Multidisciplinary Design Program (MDP) grant. The grant program is a collaboration between the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) with the following aspirations:
“Under the personal guidance of UCI faculty co-mentors, students will gain first-hand experience and training in state-of-the-art facilities and techniques. This program is designed to help students develop the multidisciplinary skills and knowledge that will propel them into graduate studies or careers in fields that explore the connections between different concentrations.Participants will demonstrate the results of their work at the UCI Undergraduate Research Symposium in May and at additional demonstration events sponsored by Calit2.”
This grant which was spearheaded by undergraduate students (including Vahan Hartooni and Nick LaJeunesse) and subsequently helped along with a little grant writing experience by Informatics faculty member Don Patterson, Informatics Research Scientist/Artist-in-Residence Garnet Hertz and Film & Media Studies faculty member Peter Krapp, was instrumental in last night’s program.
For more information about how you can hack, or about upcoming programs, contact the space at hackerspace@ics.uci.edu.
Amanda Takes a Stab at SXSW - March 5th, 2007
LUCI grad student, Amanda Williams has accomplished her first *real* grad student milestone to graduation, an interview with Wired:
Wired News: Tech Expos Take a Stab at Sex
“At SXSW Interactive, the Sex and Computational Technology panel reflects the mix of disciplines involved in developing the next generation of sex tech: social analysts, sex educators and engineers. The moderator, Amanda Williams, is a Ph.D. student at the University of California at Irvine studying interactive and collaborative technology.
“(The field of) human-computer interaction has a long tradition of depicting users as a brain, an eye and a finger that can click a mouse,” she says. “(But) what about bodies? How about the ways we observe other people’s bodies? And how does this play into how we work with technology and collaborate?”
For Williams, research into what she calls “tangible interfaces” revolves around incorporating social, emotional and bodily aspects of life into our experiences with technology. And it’s not surprising that while designing various systems that do so, “every now and then we’d inadvertently run into a sex thing.”
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