LUCI Blog

Congratulations to the entire Informatics department, but especially Prof. Gillian Hayes who spearheaded the effort, on getting a paper published at CHI 2008. This type of paper, a Research Landscape paper, is a little different than most, because it is a summary of the work that is going on in a department presented as an academic paper. Prof. Hayes took some of the more HCI focussed work and synthesized it into a nice overview of the things that we are passionate about here in the LUCI lab and the Informatics department. You can read the pre-publication version here .

P. Dourish, G. R. Hayes, L. Irani, C. P. Lee, S. Lindtner, B. Nardi, D. J. Patterson, and W. M. Tomlinson, “Informatics at UC, Irvine,” in CHI Research Landscapes, April 2008.

The PPD 08 (Public and Private Displays) workshop focuses on the research challenges and opportunities afforded by the combination of touch sensitive small private input displays coupled with large touch sensitive public displays. Different touch-enabled devices rely on different types of touches (passive stylus, active stylus, fingers and tangible objects), the motivating question for this workshop is how do users switch between these devices and how to facilitate fluid transition from a collection of multiple displays to a single integrated multi-display environment.

More info

"IBM Research is pleased to announce the 2008 Summer Intern Program in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematical Sciences at its United States locations. We are seeking highly motivated graduate and undergraduate students who are interested in pursuing an exciting summer of research, prototyping, and exploring new frontiers of these and related disciplines. Students will have the opportunity to work closely with an outstanding research team on challenging problems that range from leading-edge exploratory work to real-world systems and applications. With a summer internship, students can experience the dynamic technical environment of the largest industrial research organization in the world and network with other top students from many different fields and universities."

Lots of LUCI students have taken advantage of this. Ask around if you are interested. Click on the image on the left for more details.

"The Socio-technical Modeling and Communication Network teams in the Information Sciences Group (CCS-3) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has projects in discrete simulation spanning the full range of research activities from problem analysis, algorithmic and system design to implementation, testing and productive use of our tools. We cover a broad, diverse and ever-expanding range of application domains with a focus on infrastructure modeling; our current portfolio includes communication networks (Internet, PSTN, cellular, ad hoc, mesh, sensor), transportation networks, commodity networks, epidemic modeling, agent-based activity modeling in emergency scenarios, and social networks. Our simulations model large-scale, detailed, socio-technological systems; a key requirement for our tools is scalability, which we achieve through distributed implementations on high performance distributed computing clusters. Most of our students have been able to publish their LANL-work in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.

US citizenship is NOT a requirement."

Full details:here.

Congratulations to post-doc Irina Shklovski, on having had a paper accepted to CHI 2008:

Shklovski, I., Kraut, R. & Cummings, J., (2008). Keeping in touch by technology: Maintaining friendships after a residential move. In proceeding of Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI 2008), New York: ACM Press.

"Creativity, innovative ideas, and usability - when these three elements come together for users of software or Web applications it becomes pure magic. The experience that the artist and developer can create with a well designed user interface can make or break the application that it sits in front of.

First Place $8,000"

"Professor of informatics Gillian Hayes has received an award from Autism Speaks for her proposal, "Technology Support for Interactive and Collaborative Visual Schedules".

Hayes work will focus on developing a digital repository and visual schedule system for use in schools and homes by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)."

Full Press Release

Nuria Oliver, a former Microsoft Research employee, is looking for interns and researchers for an R&D outfit in Barcelona Spain. There could be worse gigs.

"Interested in doing research in a top team while living in vibrant Barcelona (Spain)? The newly formed Multimedia Research Group at Telefonica R&D is accepting intern applications to carry out research in the areas of:
Multimedia Data Analysis, Retrieval and Search
Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing
Multi-modal User Interfaces
User Modeling and Personalization"

and

"The newly formed research group on Multimedia at Telefónica R&D* Barcelona invites for applications for Researcher positions in the areas of Multimedia Data Analysis, Search and Retrieval, Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing and Human Computer Interaction. We are looking for dynamic, creative and resourceful individuals to join our research efforts in Multimedia Computing. The successful candidate will join a multidisciplinary and international team of scientists dedicated tsolve challenging user-oriented problems. "

Click on the images for details

Congratulations to grad student Eric Baumer and faculty member Bill Tomlinson on having had a paper accepted to CHI 2008:

Baumer, E., M. Sueyoshi, B. Tomlinson. 2008. Exploring the Role of the Reader in the Activity of Blogging. In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008). Florence, Italy. 8 pages. (to appear)

Congratulations to grad student Steve Abrams and research scientist Charlotte Lee , on having had a paper accepted to a workshop at CHI 2008:

Lee, Charlotte P. and Steve Abrams. “Group Sensemaking.” 2008. Position paper for workshop on Sensemaking. ACM Conference on Human Factors and Usability (CHI), Florence, Italy, April 2008.