LUCI Blog

"The Live Search team has some cool internship positions, for this summer, that they are trying to fill.

Andrew Shuman's team in Live Search is looking for great students who are keen on building prototypes that examine new methods for improving how people search the web -- e.g., improved query articulation, results analysis, etc. They are working closely with several people in MSR to move this initiative forward. Experience in user interface development and/or search are desirable.

Please have your students contact Andrew Shuman, ashuman@microsoft.com, if they are interested.

Thanks,
Susan Dumais
Microsoft Research
http://research.microsoft.com/~sdumais"

Rumor has it that Dr. Yunan Chen has accepted the Department of Informatics' offer of a faculty position to spearhead an initiative in Medical Informatics. Dr. Chen's research interests include medical informatics, human-computer interaction, and system design & evaluation.

Congratulations to graduate student Amanda Williams and Professor Paul Dourish on having a book chapter published:

Williams, A., Robles, E., and Dourish, P. 2008 (forthcoming). In Foth (ed.), Urban Informatics: Community Integration and Implementation. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, IGI Global.

Congratulations to Dr. Rode on successfully defending her Ph.D. thesis, "An Ethnographic Examination of the Relationship of Gender & End-User Programming"

My favorite quote was when Dr. Rode critiqued the approach that marketers take toward making technology more woman-friendly. She summarized their approach using the quote, "Shrink it and Pink It" Ha!

There's a new smart whiteboard in the lab, a SmartBoard by Hitachi.

Lilly points us to this great example of reappropriated design, tool use in a situated context, embodied chair interaction. :)

Congratulations to graduate student Johanna Brewer and professor Paul Dourish on having a paper accepted to the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, entitled Storied Spaces: Cultural Accounts of Mobility, Technology, and Environmental Knowing.

The BBC introduces viewers to a restaurant in Nuremburg, Germany in which you have no contact with a human being during your experience if you don't care to. Great quotes like "making the dining experience more efficient", and "you can relax while you wait for your food by sending email".

Basically the concept is a touchscreen menu, an magnetic card that manages your tab, a remote chef and a series of rails that wind through the restaurant and deliver food pods to your seat. It is a bit like the evolution of the sushi conveyor belt restaurant, but I think you generally still have to talk to a person in most sushi restaurants.

The Technology Garden is a novel interactive environment: a sensor-equipped community garden in a university office building created to invite interaction with both plants and people. Our goals were to promote human-plant interaction; to encourage social interaction in an organization; and to create a pleasing office environment promoting relaxation. Our research explores how technology can encourage relationship building, or the building of a community of interest in a work environment through non-work activity. Distinct from approaches that seek to minimize or remove the need for human intervention by automating plant care, we wish to draw attention to the needs of plants and to encourage human participation.

Charlotte Lee, Eric Kabisch, Silvia Lindtner, Jahmeilah Richardson, M. Six Silberman (cplee -at- ics.uci.edu, {ekabisch, lindtner, jarichar, msilberm} -at -uci.edu)

GreenScanner is a system that helps people engage in environmentally preferable purchasing during their everyday consumer transactions. This system includes an online database of community-generated environmental impact reviews, and a mobile phone application to enable consumers to access these reviews at a point of purchase. The vision for this system is to provide a forum for exchange of environmental information in a format that is reliable and exceedingly easy to access. By doing so, the site can help people around the world make more informed decisions, and incentivize companies to engage in more environmentally sound practices.

Bill Tomlinson (wmt -at- uci.edu)
Joel Ross (jwross -at- uci.edu)
Ellen Eramya (eeramya -at- uci.edu)

Children with special needs often struggle to understand and communicate basic thoughts and concepts. Augmentative visual communication tools used in special education classrooms can help children make choices and express themselves, to help them understand time and perform certain activities. Mocotos are mobile devices that support non-verbal children in visual communication interventions. By providing flexible programming options based on a library of digital picture cards, the use of Mocotos can range between highly structured communication to unstructured spontane- ous utterances. Nomatic*VS is a large-screen, technology-enhanced visual schedules system which prompts teachers to update the schedule when appropriate, removes physical difficulties in its modification, and collects data for reference.

Sam Kaufman (kaufmans@uci.edu)
Mohamad Monibi (mmonibi@ics.uci.edu)
Gillian Hayes (gillianrh@ics.uci.edu)

STAR

Congratulations to grad student Lilly Irani and professor Paul Dourish on having a workshop paper accepted to CHI 2008:

Irani, L. and Dourish, P. 2008. Portability of Design Research Methods: Cultural Differences in the Creation of Technological Knowledge. CHI 2008 Workshop on Used Centered Design for Development (Florence, Italy).

entrigue is a simple, lightweight photo display that playfully captures the comings and goings in a home.The notion of awareness has typically been treated as an information-driven, representational problem. We reconsider awareness by moving away from viewing it solely as informational and reflecting on how else it might feature in our routine, daily experiences through the design of entrigue. When the display senses that there are people in front of it, it takes a photo and displays it. At any one time, only the last three photos taken are shown on the display, providing a sense of the temporal rhythms and flows of people in the home.

Judy Chen (judychen -at- ics.uci.edu) Alex Taylor (ast -at- microsoft.com)

Congratulations to Informatics Professor Bill Tomlinson and Informatics graduate student Eric Baumer on receiving a sweet NSF Grant:

"The two year grant funds the project titled "Computational Metaphor Identification for Supporting Creativity in Science Education" and will focuse on analyzing the metaphors students use to understand and conceptualize material."

More info here.

GroupMind is a multi-user, large display application that connects participants' laptops (local and remote) to foster brainstorming and collaboration. As a collaborative activity, GroupMind strives to give groups seamless and real-time communication. Our current exploration uses mindmaps (also called concept maps) as the underlying mechanism for brainstorming. The participants will have synchro- nous access to a shared, large display workspace, as well as access to their personal laptops. Collabora- tion can be done at both the large display level and the personal laptop level.

Patrick Shih (patshih -at- ics.uci.edu)
David Nguyen (dhn -at- uci.edu)
Gillian Hayes (gillianrh-at- ics.uci.edu)

Nomatic*Celestial is a location-awareness display not just for locating people, but also for reflections, expressions and community engagement. It shows historical traces of people’s whereabouts and relevant activity information. Being abstract, ambiguous and expressive using graphical represen- tation, and embedded in a shared community space, the display is designed to engage people to actively interpret and interact with the display, the space and each other in a humanly meaningful ways, and at the same time preserve privacy.

Sharon Ding (dingx -at- ics.uci.edu)
Donald J. Patterson (djp3 -at- ics.uci.edu)

Computational Metaphor Identification (CMI) aims to computationally identify conceptual metaphors in large bodies of written text, providing a unique lens onto the conceptual framings used in those documents. The goal is to use these computationally identified metaphors to foster critical discussion of metaphor, particularly in the context of learning science concepts. CMI will be used to encourage students to ask the following questions: Given a particular metaphor, what aspects of the concept or situation does this metaphor highlight? What other aspects of the situation does the same metaphor hide? What is a different metaphor that would highlight or hide different aspects of the same situation?

Eric Baumer (ebaumer -at- ics.uci.edu)
Bill Tomlinson (wmt -at- uci.edu)

LoRy is a locative story telling game to be used in and beyond the classroom setting, cross-grades, by students and teachers. Children interact in a hybrid learning space to encourage social and collaborative learning through exploration of multiple view points. LoRy is comprised of digital technology, non-digital objects, toy objects augmented with RFID tags and a game narrative to be explored while physically moving through a familiar spatial context, such as hometown or school campus. LoRy is inspired by an ethnographic study of adolescents enrolled in an educational program on healthier living. In contrast to the existing program that engages students mainly through text book reading and question-answer sessions in class, LoRy is based on active participation in the learning content.

Silvia Lindtner (lindtner -at- ics.uci.edu)
Nick Noack (nnoack-at- ics.uci.edu)
Gillian Hayes (gillianrh-at- ics.uci.edu)

SeeShell is an augmented Oyster Card (the RFID- enabled Underground ticket) holder which displays, over time, the journeys a rider has taken. When a user passes their Oyster card (which is inside the SeeShell) over the touch-in point at the gate to the station while they are entering or exiting, the SeeShell, using RFID, senses which station the user just passed through and over time a permanent, ink-based map of the stations they have visited begins to emerge on their Oyster Card holder. The Oyster system already tracks users' journeys but there is no convenient way for the users to access or make use of that data. By building SeeShell on top of an already existing system, I hope to show how lived patterns of mobility might be leveraged in new ways and placed back into the hands of their creators

people: Johanna Brewer (johannab -at- ics.uci.edu)

Congratulations to Professor Paul Dourish on having a workshop paper accepted to Pervasive 2008:

Dourish, P. 2008. Points of Persuasion: Strategic Essentialism and Environmental Sustainability. Pervasive 2008 Workshop on Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability (Sydney, Australia).

Congratulations to Informatics graduate student Lilly Irani and Informatics undergraduate student Julie Rico on being awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships. Great job!