"To finish a dissertation, you are expected to move toward distant goals with few concrete milestones. For many, the instinct is to go it alone. Grinding it out in isolation, however, is unlikely to produce your highest-quality work most efficiently.

But, you may ask, what choice do you have? A graduate student's support system can be thin. Getting time with the busy professors who ostensibly provide our main guidance is not easy. Even if they are accessible, it makes sense to use their time efficiently. They may expect to review only polished products and engage in only crucial conversations, rather than assist with everyday decisions."

"the largest color LED display worldwide, & the first photo-voltaic system integrated into a glass curtain wall in China. the display requires zero external energy, as the facade harvests solar energy by day & uses it to illuminate the screen after dark. the display comprises of 2,292 color (RGB) LED’s light points comparable to a 24,000 sq. ft. (2.200 m2) monitor screen for dynamic content display"

The Nomatic*IM team is proud to announce the release of Nomatic*IM 0.0.5.
This is a general purpose version for the Mac.
You can download it from http://djp3-pc2.ics.uci.edu/LUCICodeRepository/nomaticIM/wiki/Download

New features and enhancements:

• Post User Study:
  • Removed suggestion shuffling so that predictions are better.
  • Allowed Nomatic*IM to fill in best guess as default.
• New broadcast options:
  • Added support for Twitter.
  • Added more flexible broadcasting via the preference pane.
  • Rearchitected the broadcast code for better speed.

This is a video interview with the senior curator of the "Design and the Elastic Mind" show at MOMA. Click on the image to view it.

"To document MoMA's wonderful, monumental exhibit spanning design, science and technology, "Design and the Elastic Mind," we enlisted the help of the show's esteemed curator, Paola Antonelli. Paola speaks in detail about several of the exhibits, including "The Afterlife," a system for turning corpses into batteries, robots that act as personal climatizers and DNA origami. She also weighs in on her curatorial approach, addressing the role of the designer, her mission to shift public perception of design and how design revolutionizes our lives."

Congratulations to Informatics undergraduates Gabi Marcu and Sam Kaufman on being asked to speak at the UROP Undergraduate Research Symposium regarding their two separate projects, SenseCam and Nomatic*IM, respectively. The symposium will be held on Saturday, May 31 at the UCI Humanities Buildings.

" UROP sponsors the UCI Undergraduate Research Symposium, an annual event held in May that allows hundreds of undergraduates the opportunity to present their research results or creative activities in a professional setting. The Symposium provides the opportunity for students to attend and learn about the work of their fellow students, and to volunteer to assist at the event. Members of the larger UCI community are also invited to attend."

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Photo courtesy of paulworthington

Congratulations to Informatics Master's student Kah Liu and Informatics Professor Don Patterson on having received a grant from the Ted and Janice Smith Faculty Seed Fund:

"We propose to test the concept of a context-aware to-do list. Such a to-do list would enable a user to filter their to do items according to their current place or activity. This system builds on the existing Nomatic*IM architecture but takes the research in a new direction."

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The dashboard for the Lamborghini Reventón. How much does good design cost? Well this design will cost you 1 million euro. Oh for the day when my car needs an artificial horizon indicator....

"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.