This web site will automatically generate a paper/presentation title for you based on the titles from urban computing conferences. Some of them hit just a little too close to home, so I suppose this post is just a little reminder to keep it real...

Here are some that it generated for me:

• Incubating the Striated Game
• Prototyping the Responsive Space
• Sketching the Mesh Market
• Getting the Embedded Wars

urban computing conference title generator

See also the post-modern essay generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Via BoingBoing

A wacky cool contest from DARPA. Also how awesomely relevant is the Nena song from the awesome 80's?

DARPA Network Challenge

"To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways."

Congratulations to Informatics faculty member Bill Tomlinson on having his book, 'Greening Through IT' published by MIT Press.

"Environmental issues often span long periods of time, far-flung areas, and labyrinthine layers of complexity. In Greening through IT, Bill Tomlinson investigates how the tools and techniques of information technology (IT) can help us tackle environmental problems at such vast scales. Tomlinson describes theoretical, technological, and social aspects of a growing interdisciplinary approach to sustainability, "Green IT," offering both a human-centered framework for understanding Green IT systems and specific examples and case studies of Green IT in action.

Tomlinson contrasts the broad ranges of time, space, and complexity against which environmental concerns play out to the relatively narrow horizons of human understanding: it's hard for us to grasp thousand-year projections of global climatic disruption or our stake in melting icecaps thousands of miles away. IT can bridge the gap between human scales of understanding and environmental scales.

Tomlinson offers many examples of efforts toward sustainability supported by IT—from fishermen in India who eliminated waste by coordinating their activities with mobile phones to the installation of smart meters that optimize electricity use in California households—and offers three detailed studies of specific research projects that he and his colleagues have undertaken: EcoRaft, an interactive museum exhibit to help children learn principles of restoration ecology; Trackulous, a set of web-based tools with which people can chart their own environmental behavior; and GreenScanner, an online system that provides access to environmental-impact reports about consumer products. Taken together, these examples illustrate the significant environmental benefits innovations in information technology can enable."

Get a copy of this book here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12058

Immaterials: the ghost in the field from timo on Vimeo.

Garnet will be displaying his new book of photos (for sale in the vending machine) in Milan in October.

"Documentation of the book project, "A Collection of Many Problems (In Memory of the Dead Media Handbook)" can be found at http://conceptlab.com/problems/. It is meant as a visual introduction to media archaeology in the spirit of The Dead Media Project.

The bookwork, "A Collection of Many Problems (In Memory of the Dead Media Handbook)" will be on display on a podium in the center of the space. In the space there is also a place for people to write notes and sketches on paper related to the topic of The Dead Media Handbook - a project proposed by author Bruce Sterling in 1995: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Media_Project"

Nearness from timo on Vimeo.

"London design firm Berg (formerly Schulz and Webb) is working on a series of provocative videos exploring "designerly applications for RFID." The first one is this lovely Rube Goldberg machine running on RFID: "With RFID it's proximity that matters, and actual contact isn't necessary. Much of Timo's work in the Touch project addresses the fictions and speculations in the technology. Here we play with the problems of invisibility and the magic of being close."

Reblogged from boing boing

A little humor to follow up on the Google Street View via bicycle posts we've had recently.

"The Newkirk Center for Science and Society is pleased to announce the Newkirk Fellowship Award recipients for 2009. The proposals submitted in response to the Newkirk Fellows RFP were reviewed by UCI faculty members associated with the Center. They provided evaluations and commentary based on the extent to which the proposal addressed the general mission of the Newkirk Center for Science and Society and to the extent to which the research proposed was likely to produce results that the Center could share with one or more of our audiences

<snip/>
Eric Kabisch, School of Information and Computer Science - Datascape

Congratulations to Informatics faculty Paul Dourish and QUT/Melbourne research fellow Christine Satchell on having their paper, "Beyond the User: Use and Non-Use in HCI" accepted to OzCHI 2009.

The paper explores why it might be just as important to think about the ways that people DON'T use computers as the ways that they do.

Get a copy from here: http://www.dourish.com/publications/2009/nonuse-ozchi.pdf

The dark side of social networking - OCRegister.com

"Here’s some advice from Dr. Donald Patterson — director of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction at UCI .... about pondering the dark side of social networking."

"Consider how the software will use your location and whether or not you are making yourself vulnerable by letting people know where you are — or where you aren’t — before giving software permission to use your location information."

A little University humor to lighten the load this week. This is the sort of thing that is painfully funny to anyone who has ever tried to get a paper published on their own. If that's not you, you can just look forward to that day....

How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 1 2 3 Easy Steps

Congratulations to Informatics graduate student Mohamad Monibi and Informatics faculty member Don Patterson on having their paper, 'Collaborative Predictions from Status' accepted to Ambient Intelligence 2009.

Abstract: In this paper we describe the use of collaborative filtering to make predictions about place using data from custom instant messaging status. Previous research has shown accurate predictions can be made from an individual’s personal data. The work in this paper demonstrates that community data can be used to make predictions in locations that are completely new to a user.

Congratulations to Informatics faculty member Don Patterson on having his paper, 'Constructing Topological Maps of Displays with 3-D Positioning Information' accepted to Ambient Intelligence 2009.

Abstract: To better coordinate information displays with moving people and the environment, software must know the locations and three dimensional alignments of the display hardware. In this paper we describe a technique for creating such an enhanced topological map of networked public displays using a mobile phone. The result supports a richer user experience, without the cost of maintaining a high resolution reconstruction of a smart environment.

From (MoCo Loco: Spoticam by Antrepo) comes this clever lamp that is in the shape of a security camera.

Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman

This is creeptastic - don

Lilly Irani, another doctoral candidate at UC Irvine, is concerned about a lack of workers' rights on Mechanical Turk. In one survey she conducted, more than half of the respondents complained of unfair rejection of work that resulted in no payout.

Irani and another UC Irvine student built software called Turkopticon, which aims to level the playing field between workers and requesters by providing better community feedback and information on requesters' reputations.

Exciting news from Aaron Quigley's blog:

"Aaron Quigley's work in Pervasive Computing and InfoVis: June 2009 HITLab Australia Director Designate

I'm very excited to announce that I am going to be the inaugural director of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory Australia (HIT Lab AU) and an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Tasmania. The HITLab consists of three international research laboratories. The first is now a leading research lab formed in the University of Washington USA over 20 years ago and the second laboratory was started in New Zealand in 2002. This is the third research lab. "

From:ABC News. Here's a snip:

"I'm sure we all have a GPS horror story to tell. Those nifty devices sometimes takes one on longer routes than necessary, lead one down roads that no longer exist or always seems to find the worst traffic.

A Swedish couple vacationing in Italy may win the GPS booby prize. The BBC reports that the couple wanted to visit Capri, off Italy's west coast near Naples. When they arrived at their destination they asked around for directions to the island's famed Blue Grotto all ready to take in some sun and the stunning sights of rugged cliffs plunging into the sparkling blue Mediterranean.

Instead they were informed that they were 400 miles off course in the industrial town of Carpi in northern Italy. Pilot error... or how two transposed letters can change everything."

Data Scienist > Data Geek > Designer ｫ Visualizing Economics

"Reading Nathan Yau's recent post about the Rise of the Data Scientist inspired me to take a look Ben Fry's dissertation on Computational Information Design in which he describes the process for understanding data as follows:"

From Garnet:

If you're in LA and have no plans for Friday night...

From Machine Project:

Computer Interface: A Video History
Friday, July 24th, 2009
8pm

A talk by Jamie Zigelbaum

The interface is the bridge and bottleneck between humans and computers. Over the past 50 years researchers have invented and imagined many and various interfaces to join synapse and transistor. In this talk Jamie will give a brief history of human-computer interaction research and we’ll watch videos of seminal interfaces from Sutherland’s Sketchpad in ‘63 up through the latest nerdtastic work at MIT and elsewhere.

Jamie Zigelbaum is a Ph.D. student in Prof. Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. This talk is a version of a lecture that he’s given with Dr. Jean-Baptiste Labrune in Ishii’s Tangible Interfaces class and with Labrune and Seth Hunter in Prof. Pattie Maes’ and Ishii’s New Paradigms for Human-Computer Interaction class. Jamie is in LA for the summer working downtown at Oblong Industries.
Machine Project
1200 N Alvarado St
Los Angeles, CA 90026-3127

Interesting graph showing the amount of tweeting vs the number of followers on Twitter. This is from a data dense report: Sysomos | In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World. Another sound bite-y quote "5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity"

I had to blog about this cool little gadget. It's a time-lapse camera, not unlike the Microsoft SenseCam. Add batteries, configure, and forget. Come back in weeks and download the timelapse video. Nice and easy. It seems ripe for cool social hacks.

"Weatherproof time-lapse camera for watching your greenery!S et it up in one minute and shove it into the ground near your prized chrysanthemums. When the growing season is over, you'll have a visual record of their growth. This camera does time lapse photography the easy way"

From my favorite geekery site: thinkgeek.com

Garnet Hertz has been hanging out with us in the LUCI lab for the last quarter or so while he finishes up his Ph.D. He is continuing his research and has put up a web page with the concept that he is currently developing. For the sake of letting everyone know what everyone else is doing in LUCI, here is a little summary of the project:

This project is motivated by the following concepts:

1. Un-Simulation of Driving - This project un-simulates the driving component of a videogame. Driving game simulations strive to be increasingly realistic, but this realism is usually focused on graphical representations. Instead, this system pursues "real" driving through a videogame as its primary goal.

2. GPS Navigation Parallax & Mixed Reality - Driving with a GPS navigation system can be game-like. This project explores the consequences of only using GPS map data as a navigation tool for driving. The windshield of this project's vehicle only shows GPS data, and as a result, driving it in the real world is often difficult or dangerous. As a result, this project explores and investigates how GPS data differs from the physical world, and what happens when an augmentation of reality envelops and obfuscates reality.

I think this video and the corresponding website is interesting for two reasons. First, because it demonstrates a movement toward open government data which is a new and important trend. The second is because the data itself is about IT spending in the government.

To experience this visualization of this U.S. Government data (and apparently to access the data itself) go here: http://it.usaspending.gov/

Okay, so I don't get out much, but last night I was at South Coast Plaza and stumbled across this iPod vending machine. I had heard that such things existed before, but I didn't think I would run into one unless I was in an alley in Japan. It turns out that there is one in Macy's.

It is iPod branded, but has Sony and other other company products in it also. There is one screen in the upper left with marketing videos running in a loop and a touch screen on the right for picking your gadget.

There was clearly a security concern as there was a special video camera watching it and it was in the middle of a Macy's, not in an alley in Japan.

So now, if it is too much trouble to get your iPod from the Apple Store 50 feet away, you can use the vending machine instead.

So, it looks like the Google Street View Team has gone pedestrian. You can now look at DisneyLand Paris using the Street View interface. Just for the record the LUCI blog predicted that Street View will go inside buildings before long. You heard it here first.

"By merging graphics with props in the physical world, handheld Augmented Reality games pull the player through the small screen and into a larger merged play-space. Our primary motivation for this AR game was to explore fast-action first-person augmented reality, where the camera controls and movement that would typically require a mouse and keyboard are handled directly by simply moving the device. Advanced tracking technology allows the player to quickly zoom in and out and view the world at steep angles, making this a highly interactive and engaging game. Finally, we wanted to test tangible input mechanics, such as placing and shooting Skittles to trigger in-game events."

From: Mechanical Turk Best Practices - O'Reilly Radar

"For most users of mechanical turk (us included), it has become an API call that fits smoothly within their workflow. (Or as someone at the meetup wryly suggested, turk is a Remote Person Call.) The last pair of speakers, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman, reminded us that behind mechanical turk lies thousands of workers† ("the crowd in the cloud") working without (health care) benefits, oftentimes at extremely low hourly wages. Irani and Silberman suggested that rather than abstracting mechanical turk services as mere API calls, users should start thinking of the plight of the turks ("Mechanical Turk Bill of Rights") behind the service. As a first step they have a released a Firefox plugin that aims to narrow the information assymetry between turks (those performing tasks) and requesters (those posting tasks). While requesters can see ratings for turks, requesters aren't rated: Turkopticon lets turks rate requesters. They need more turks to download and start using Turkopticon, so if you know any mechanical turks please enourage them do so."

If you click on the "iTunes Podcast" link on the upper right, you can subscribe to audio and video content from the LUCI lab through the iTunes store now. It was broken. Apple support technicians helped us to clean up our records in the database. Now anything we record shows up in your iPod with nary a lift of your finger (after lifting a finger to subscribe). The content is still a little raw, but it's flowing at least....

HacketyHack

Commentary by Warren Applebaum

Hackety Hack a programming environment for the language ruby, meant for children. Its creator is the radical and outrageous professor [ok warren -ed.] who goes by the internet handle ”why the lucky stiff”. His goal is to enrich the lives of children and adults with programming and imagination; or perhaps to just draw cats. His other work; “why’s poignant guide to ruby” is one of the most unorthodox approaches to programming language study that I’ve ever encountered. He uses comic strips to denote the reader’s comprehension of each topic. His use of illustrations in comic book fashion allows him to explicitly depict the designs he is describing in ruby; as well as another of his creations, “shoes”, a GUI framework for ruby.

Children armed with Hackety Hack; coupled with some of the already available ubiquitous technologies, such as the iPhone presents a very optimistic outlook for the future of computing. Our children will already be programming the applications we learned how to implement in college, as tweens or even elementary school students. What kind of science fair projects are children going to be entering in the next decade? The impact of having these resources available for children at such a young age presents many concerns about developmental growth. The sacrifice of their other activities in order to program could possibly hinder their intellectual or emotional growth.

Congratulations to Joel Ossher on passing his advancement to candidacy exam!

Thesis: Automated Dependency Analysis for Internet-Scale Code Reuse

Committee:
Crista Lopes (Chair)
Jim Jones
Andre van der Hoek
Ian Harris
Jim Hicks

Software reuse by search-copy-paste-and-adapt has become a common practice in software development, along with other more traditional forms of reuse. Opportunities for this kind of reuse are plentiful, thanks in large part to the widespread adoption of open source processes and the availability of search engines for locating relevant code. Despite increased availability, merely locating an appropriate artifact to reuse is not sufficient. There remains the challenge of developing an understanding of its workings as well as integrating it into a project. This is made more difficult by the interconnected nature of complex software, as a single artifact may touch many different pieces of the system. This greatly complicates localizing usage examples and extracting reusable pieces from existing code. This paper presents a novel method of static dependency analysis to help support the understanding and integration of reusable code. Our dependency slicing algorithm automatically isolates self-contained slices from a source program, thereby dramatically reducing the amount of source code irrelevant to the artifact of interest. We describe how we modified Sourcerer, an infrastructure for internet-scale open source code search, to support an implementation of our dependency slicing algorithm. An empirical evaluation showed that the slicing algorithm introduced no compilation errors. Further, compared to the standard approach to dependency resolution, it reduced the number of files required by up to 300 times and decreased the number of declarations in these files by up to 4000 times.

More examples can be found here:http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Data/LightStage/

Lightstage

Commentary by Warren Applebaum

Lightstage and Cinema 2.0 are the combined efforts of Jules Urbach and AMD. Lightstage is a full body data capture environment, where 6,500 white LED lights and many HD camera’s take data from objects, for example humans, and provide CGI and Entertainment developers exact duplicates of the object for use in film, video games, and even communications. The Lightstage captures data from the flashing of the lights at speeds too fast for the human eye to see; from each light’s individual reflection from the object, a data structure is formed. The data being collected from the Lightstage is currently being rendered into CGI graphics for future films and human models.

The exciting goal for Lightstage is its potential when coupled with a strong enough rendering device to produce tactile representations of whatever was captured on its stage. The biggest claim, being that it could provide the dataset to power a future Holodeck (From Star Trek, a room that is completely composed of light rendered tactile objects). This is an incredible leap for the field of data visualizations, just think about sequence diagrams which were composed of real actors, just a thought.

Congratulations to Eric Baumer on successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis "Computational Metaphor Identification to Foster Critical Thinking and Creativity"

Committee:
Bill Tomlinson (Chair)
Lindsey Richland
Paul Dourish

The world's longest abstract (verging on becoming a "concrete")

Metaphor, the partial framing of a target concept in terms of a source concept, permeates human thought and action. Metaphors often manifest themselves as linguistic patterns in which language associated with a source concept is used to describe a target concept. Any given metaphor highlights some aspects of a concept while simultaneously downplaying others. Novel metaphors can provide creative reframings of familiar concepts by highlighting those aspects hidden by more common metaphors. However, due to their ubiquity, conceptual metaphors can be difficult to examine critically, if we can even notice them in the first place.

To address such difficulties, this dissertation develops computational metaphor identification (CMI), which identifies potential conceptual metaphors in written text. CMI maps selectional preferences of relatively frequent nouns in a source corpus to those in a target corpus. Such mappings indicate potential metaphors from concepts in the source corpus to those in the target. CMI can be used to draw attention to potential conceptual metaphors that might otherwise go unnoticed, making those metaphors available for critical and creative examination. For example, what might a given metaphor highlight, what might it hide, and what alternative metaphors might frame the situation differently? In this way, CMI is designed not as a type of computational reasoning, but as a means of facilitating human reasoning.

To evaluate its capacity to foster critical thinking and creativity, computational metaphor identification was incorporated into an educational module about cell biology, which was used to perform an experimental study in a 7th grade classroom. Students’ answers to written questions about the cell were analyzed using CMI, and potential metaphors were presented back to students. The results demonstrate that the use of CMI effectively fostered both critical thinking about metaphors and creative generation of alternative metaphors. These results also speak to the varying roles of surface and structural similarity in metaphorical reasoning, as well as the relationship between noticing similarities and noticing differences when thinking about metaphors. This evaluation not only demonstrates CMI’s usefulness in educational contexts, but it also carries broader implications for exploring the relationship between computation and human thought.

Photo courtesy of Wallflower83

Trust without touch: jumpstarting long-distance trust with initial social activities
by Jun Zheng, Elizabeth Veinott, Nathan Bos, Judith S. Olson, Gary M. Olson

Commentary by Latu Evelyn Fusimalohi

SUMMARY
This article explores what it means to “trust” both in the virtual world as well as the real world. Specifically, interactions through CMC, also known as “Computer-mediated communication”, as well as traditional in-person interactions, are tested against each other to show the effectiveness of meeting someone in person prior to interacting with them online, through online chatting or via email, as opposed to interacting without having ever face-to-face interactions. More trust exists when there have been a face-to-face establishment prior to interacting through the internet. Meeting in-person establishes 3 key aspects: “interactivity”, “visibility” and “social information”. All three aspects lead up to trust. In conclusion, the article shows that in order for CMC to be effective, there should be a face-to-face interaction prior to interacting online, thereby increasing the level of trust, resulting in a more comfortable social contact.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project did a study of mobile internet users and classified people into ten different categories based on how you use and feel about social networks.

Try it and see what kind of user you are:

" Is Facebook your window to your social world? Is your mobile device the last thing you put aside before shutting the light out at night? Or does the deluge of digital information leave you flat and the ring of your cell phone leave you cranky?

The questions below allow you to place yourself in one of the categories in the Pew Internet Project's Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users."

It turns out that I'm (Don) a "Digital Collaborator"

"If you are a Digital Collaborator, you use information technology to work with and share your creations with others. You are enthusiastic about how ICTs help you connect with others and confident in your ability to manage digital devices and information. For you, the digital commons can be a camp, a lab, or a theater group – places to gather with others to develop something new."

I think that that is a fair description of me. Something about this smells like a horoscope though...

Congratulations to Judy Chen on passing her advancement to candidacy exam!

Thesis: rhythIMs: I Talk, Therefore IM

Committee:
Paul Dourish (Chair)
Gillian Hayes
Antoinette LaFarge
Don Patterson
Alex Taylor

rhythIMs is a visualization that presents patterns of instant messaging and physical presence. When we interact with others, much of our interaction is built around the convergence of each other's rhythms. Just as temporality is central to our experience of the world, it is also central to collaboration and our interactions with other people. By designing information visualization for use away from the desktop environment, I explore how technology can be used to support social presence, awareness and connectedness.

Congratulations to Yasser Ganjisffar on passing his advancement to candidacy exam!

Thesis: On Improving Search in Wikipedia

Committee:
Crista Lopes (Chair)
Faryar Jabbari
Ramesh Jain
Jim Jones
Don Patterson

Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia on the Web, is often seen as the most successful example of crowdsourcing. The encyclopedic knowledge it accumulated over the years is so large that one often uses search engines, to find information in it. In contrast to regular Web pages, Wikipedia is fairly structured, and articles are usually accompanied with history pages, categories and talk pages. The meta–data available in these pages can be analyzed to gain a better understanding of the content and quality of the articles. We analyze the quality of search results of the current major Web search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Live) in Wikipedia. We discuss how the rich meta–data available in wiki pages can be used to provide better search results in Wikipedia. Built on the studies on “Wisdom of Crowd” and the effectiveness of the knowledge collected by a large number of people, we investigate the effect of incorporating the extent of review of an article in the quality of rankings of the search results. The ex- tent of review is measured by the number of distinct editors contributed to the articles and is extracted by processing Wikipedia’s history pages. Our experimental results show that re–ranking search results of the three major Web search engines using the review feature improves quality of their rankings for Wikipedia–specific searches. We also compare the effectiveness of the proposed review–based ranking with PageRank based ranking.

Congratulations to Phoebe Lin on passing her Master's Thesis defense!

Thesis: Evaluating the Donor Experience in Development Work

Committee:
Don Patterson (Chair)
Susan Sim
Bill Tomlinson

Nomatic*Aid is designed to link donors, non-governmental relief/aid agencies and fieldworkers together into a communication network. It's a socio-technical system which leverage three technology components (a website, a database of managed aid projects and a mobile computing platform in the field) with organizational structures present in aid work. The primary goal of the system is to make the use of donated money more transparent to donors by using geo-tagging technique to identify donations and an email system to feedback donors.

Congratulations to Lilly Irani on passing her Advancement to Candidacy Exam!

Thesis: Seeing Practice in Second Life and Design Life

Committee:
Paul Dourish (Chair)
Gillian Hayes
Bonnie Nardi
Kavita Philip
Keith Murphy

This work presents two projects concerned with technological practices -- one of being a Second Life resident and one of being a technology designer. These projects see the cultures of Second Life and of design, like cultures more generally, as fluid, produced through everyday social interaction conditioned by history, contingency, and imagination.

Part I: Situated Practices of Seeing: Visual Practice in Second Life

Graphical virtual worlds are increasingly significant sites of collaborative interaction. Many argue that the simulation of the everyday environment makes them particularly effective for collaboration. Based on a study of visual practice in Second Life, I argue: first, that the practice of looking is more varied than it might at first seem; second, that we need to look beyond the virtual in understanding virtual worlds; and third, that implementations blend interactional practice. I detail basic tools for seeing in Second Life's virtual world client. I then describe the diversity of cultural practices of seeing the world and seeing audience that have emerged among users, with implications for sociality and self-presentation in a virtual world. I suggest that the value of virtual worlds as sites of collaboration might lie more in their richness and openness to appropriation and flexibilities of visual practice that engenders than in their simulation of everyday interaction. Visual practice helps to understand the particular, learned, and situated ways people come to see the world in this instance, a virtual one.

Part II: Transnational Technodesign

It is well-established that technologies that make sense within one cultural context may be understood and adopted entirely differently when put into a different cultural context. In response to the many difficulties and misadventures of technology transfer, there is a growing response that calls for the export of *design methods* rather than designed objects. Equipped with proper methods, it is often assumed that people can design technologies that suit their settings and purposes. Yet there are many reasons to believe that design methods, such as usability testing, participatory design, or requirements engineering, cannot travel so easily. Prescriptions of practice that work in one cultural context may not work in another.I present reflections on a particular case of design research in an Andhra Pradesh village -- a case of surprises and methodological mutation and highlight directions for future work.

Congratulations to Jahnavi Kondragunta on passing her Master's Thesis defense!

Thesis: Building a Context aware Infrastructure using Bluetooth

Context Aware applications are applications that behave according to the context they are placed in. Infrastructures can be integrated with such applications to develop context awareness and modify their behavior according to the changes in the context. In this paper we present a core system that aids in developing such applications. The system estimates the location of people around the infrastructure by observing the bluetooth devices that they carry. The applications can then use this information as desired. To study the viability of bluetooth tracking and the efficiency of the system, an experimental system was implemented and deployed on the 5th floor of Donald Bren Hall at University of California, Irvine. The experimental system was put on a trial run and the results obtained were analyzed. The results show that building a successful tracking system based on Bluetooth is complex and requires significant changes to user behavior.

Committee:
Donald Jay Patterson (Chair)
James A Jones
Yunan Chen

Congratulations to Silvia Lindtner on passing her advancement to candidacy exam in the General Track!

Cultivating Cool: Gaming, Networking & Leveling Up in Urban China

With the ubiquity of digital devices computer mediated gaming has become a pervasive aspect of our everyday lives in and between our homes and work, on streets, in malls and public transportation systems. Gaming practices have come to span across and relate a multitude of digital and physical sites that are embedded in larger webs of social connection and politics beyond just fun and leisure. This paper offers a new approach to debates of productive play and serious gaming that considers games in and of themselves a means for practical achievement in day-to-day management of social connection and socio-economic positioning. I present findings from two ethnographic studies that explored gaming sites in urban China where digital and physical scenes collided and became meaningful through the ways in which players positioned themselves and their gaming practices to socio-political narratives of a new and open China. In particular, I focus on two entertainment sites, wang ba (Internet cafe) and exclusive gaming clubs, and the role they played in the daily lives of their inhabitants to discuss implications for game design, and interaction design more broadly.

Committee:
Paul Dourish (chair)
Ken Anderson
Tom Boellstorff
Gillian Hayes
Kavita Philip

The Nation's Oldest and Most Widely Known Academic Honor Society

Five students at the College of William and Mary founded Phi Beta Kappa in 1776, during the American Revolution. For over two and a quarter centuries, the Society has embraced the principles of freedom of inquiry and liberty of thought and expression. Laptops have replaced quill pens, but these ideas, symbolized on Phi Beta Kappa's distinctive gold key, still lay the foundations of personal freedom, scientific inquiry, liberty of conscience and creative endeavor.

Phi Beta Kappa celebrates and advocates excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. Its campus chapters invite for induction the most outstanding arts and sciences students at America’s leading colleges and universities. The Society sponsors activities to advance these studies — the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences — in higher education and in society at large.

Only about 10 percent of the nation's institutions of higher learning have Phi Beta Kappa chapters.

Only about 10 percent of the arts and sciences graduates of these distinguished institutions are selected for Phi Beta Kappa membership.

The ideal Phi Beta Kappan has demonstrated intellectual integrity, tolerance for other views, and a broad range of academic interests. Each year, about one college senior in a hundred, nationwide, is invited to join Phi Beta Kappa.

Membership in Phi Beta Kappa shows commitment to the liberal arts and sciences, and to freedom of inquiry and expression — and it provides a competitive edge in the marketplace. Potential employers regularly contact the national office of Phi Beta Kappa to confirm the membership of job seekers who have listed Phi Beta Kappa among their credentials.

Congratulations to Leslie Liu who is this year’s recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Undergraduate Research for the School of ICS. Leslie will be honored at this weekend’s Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Leslie will be honored for her work in studying the usability and adoption of Personal Health Record websites. She has been leading this work for more than a year and recently submitted a paper to the AMIA conference.

A lot of other LUCI researchers will also be presenting this weekend, including Alex, Aurora, Gabi, Michael, and Sen. It should be great day!