Speaker: Krzysztof Gajos

Date: 2015-12-03 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
Krzysztof will share results of two projects, both of which are a part of our larger effort to develop gic rather than social mechanisms for coordinating work, which enables productive use of even the smallest human contributions. Unlike conventional crowdsourcing, organic crowdsourcing leverages participants' intrinsic motivation to attract free, high quality contributions from knowledgeable participants.

LabintheWild.org is a platform for conducting behavioral experiments with unpaid online volunteers. Volunteers from all over the world participate in LabintheWild studies in exchange for personalized feedback on their performance. Over the past three years, LabintheWild has attracted nearly 3 million distinct visitors from over 200 countries and resulted in over 1 million completed experimental sessions. We have validated this platform by demonstrating that results obtained on LabintheWild match those obtained in traditional laboratory settings. LabintheWild has made it possible for us to conduct research that would not have been feasible with traditional methods. Krzysztof will summarize the findings from several experiments conducted on LabintheWild and synthesize the emerging set of best practices for designing studies that attract intrinsically motivated participants and for ensuring validity of the data. Eneralizable mechanisms to engage intrinsically motivated online volunteers to collectively accomplish large tasks.

The Idea Hound project exemplifies our contributions to the largely unexplored area of "organic" crowdsourcing, an approach to human computation in which intrinsically motivated people contribute to algorithmically coordinated human computation workflows as a byproduct of performing activities that they find inherently valuable. In contrast to earlier peer production systems like Wikipedia, organic crowdsourcing relies on algorithm.

Bio:
Krzysztof Gajos is an associate professor of Computer Science at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Krzysztof is broadly interested in intelligent interactive systems, a research area that bridges artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Recent projects pursued by his group contributed to diverse areas such as personalized adaptive user interfaces, systems for supporting collective creativity, organic crowdsourcing, large-scale experimentation in the wild, and learning technologies.

Prior to arriving at Harvard, Krzysztof was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington and his M.Eng. and B.Sc. degrees from MIT. In the Fall of 2005, he was visiting faculty at the Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana, where he taught Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Krzysztof is a coeditor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems. He is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship.

Speaker: Neha Kumar

Date: 2015-11-19 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
With the rapid proliferation of mobile phones across the world, marginal technology users are fast becoming the majority as they begin to engage with technologies on their own terms. My research focuses on understanding these emerging sociotechnical contexts in under-represented communities across the world and leveraging this understanding to design and deploy appropriate technological interventions for the benefit of these communities. In this talk, I will present Projecting Health - a mobile health initiative that we (collaborators at the University of Washington and I) designed and deployed in rural India to address the high maternal and infant mortality rates in the region. I will also briefly discuss other projects I am working on that focus on mobile health solutions for resource-constrained settings.

Bio:
Neha Kumar is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech, with a joint appointment in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing. Before coming to Georgia Tech, she completed two postdoctoral appointments. The first was at the University of Washington's Computer Science and Engineering department, where she worked with Prof. Richard Anderson and Prof. Gaetano Borriello. The second was at University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication, where she was the 'Digital Diversity Postdoctoral Scholar'. She completed her Ph.D. at the School of Information at UC Berkeley and was advised by Prof. Tapan Parikh. She carries two masters degrees from Stanford University, one in Computer Science and the other in Learning, Design and Technology. She was a recipient of the Google Anita Borg Memorial Fellowship in 2012.

Speaker: Amanda Stent

Date: 2015-11-12 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
Content on the world wide web increasingly takes the form of video; consequently, it is important both to analyze and to summarize video in order to facilitate search, personalization, browsing, etc. In this talk I will present two projects from Yahoo Labs devoted to different aspects of video processing. First, I will present a method for automatic creation of a well-formatted, readable transcript for a video from closed captions or ASR output. Readable transcripts are a necessary precursor to indexing, ranking and content-based summarization of videos. Our approach uses acoustic and lexical features extracted from the video and the raw transcription/caption files. Empirical evaluations of our approach show that it outperforms baseline methods. Second, I will present a method for video summarization that uses title-based image search results to find visually important shots. A video title is often carefully chosen to be maximally descriptive of the video's main topic, and hence images related to the title can serve as a proxy for important visual concepts of the main topic. However, images searched using the title can contain noise (images irrelevant to video content) and variance (images of different topics). Our approach to video summarization is a novel co-archetypal analysis technique that learns canonical visual concepts shared between video and images, but not in either alone, by finding a joint-factorial representation of the two data sets. Experimental results show that our approach produces superior quality summaries compared to several recently proposed approaches. I will conclude the talk with some ideas for future work on video summarization using multimodal representations.

Bio:
Amanda Stent manages researchers at Yahoo Labs who work on analysis and summarization of web content (text, images and video). Previously, she was a Principal Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Labs -- Research in NJ, and before that an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, NY. She holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Rochester. She has authored over 80 papers on natural language processing and holds several patents. She is president of the ACL/ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialog and one of the rotating editors of the journal Dialogue & Discourse.

Speaker: Andrew Campbell

Date: 2015-11-05 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ballroom)

Abstract:
Much of the stress and strain of student life remains hidden. The StudentLife continuous sensing app assesses the day-to-day and week-by-week impact of workload on stress, sleep, activity, mood, sociability, mental health and academic performance of a single class of 48 students across a 10-week using Android phones. Results from the StudentLife study show a number of significant correlations between the automatic objective sensor data from smartphones and mental health and educational outcomes of the student body. We identify a Dartmouth term lifecycle in the data that shows students start the term with high positive affect and conversation levels, low stress, and healthy sleep and daily activity patterns. As the term progresses and the workload increases, stress appreciably rises while positive affect, sleep, conversation and activity drops off. We show how passive sensing data from phones can infer studying and partying behavior across the term. Finally, we show how a smartphone can automatically predict student GPA.

Bio:
Andrew T. Campbell is a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, where he leads the smartphone sensing group. His group developed a number of early sensing applications for smartphones and is currently focused on turning the everyday smartphone into a cognitive phone. Andrew received his Ph.D. in computer science (1996) from Lancaster University, England and the NSF Career Award (1999) for his research in programmable wireless networks. Before joining Dartmouth, he was a tenured associate professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University (1996-2005). Prior to that, he spent ten years in the software industry in the US and Europe leading the development of operating systems and wireless networks. Andrew has been a technical program chair of a number of conferences in his area including ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiHoc and ACM SenSys; also, he co-chaired the NSF sponsored workshop on pervasive computing at scale (2011) and the recent NSF workshop on student health (2015). Andrew is currently a visiting faculty at CMU in Rwanda and spent his sabbatical year (2003-2004) at the computer laboratory, Cambridge University, as an UK EPSRC visiting fellow, and fall 2009 as a visiting professor at the University of Salamanca, Spain.

Speaker: Krystina Madej

Date: 2015-10-29 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
At the forefront of narrative innovation are social media channels – speculative spaces for creating and experiencing stories that are interactive and collaborative. Media, however, is only the material access point, to the expressiveness of narrative content. Wikis, messaging, mash-ups, and social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others) are on a trajectory of participatory story creation that goes back many centuries. These forms offer authors ways to create narrative meaning that reflects our current media culture, as the harlequinade reflected the narrative material culture of the 18th century, and as the volvelle reflected that of the 13th century.

In Interactivity, Collaboration, and Authoring in Social Media I first prospect the last millennium for antecedents of today's authoring practices. I do so with a view to considering how today's digital manifestations are a continuation, perhaps a reiteration, perhaps a novel pioneering, of humans' abiding interest in interactive narrative. I then take the reader inside the process of creating a collaborative, interactive narrative in today's social media through an authoring experience undertaken by a group of graduate students. The engaging mix of blogs, emails, personal diaries, and fabricated documents used to create the narrative demonstrates that a social media environment can facilitate a meaningful and productive collaborative authorial experience and result in an abundance of networked, personally expressive, and visually and textually referential content. The resulting narrative, After Love Comes Destruction, based in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, shows how a generative narrative space evolved around the students' use of social media in ways they had not previously considered both for authoring and for delivery of their final narrative artifact.

Bio:
Dr. Madej research area is narrative, in particular narrative as material culture, narrative structure, and user experience of narrative across media. Her current work is in somatic engagement for young children with digital narratives, the Disney master narrative, and social media collaborative authoring. She has co-authored "Disney Stories: Getting to Digital" (2012) with Newton Lee and co-edited "Engaging Imagination and Developing Creativity," which is now in its second edition (2015), with Dr. Kieran Egan. She teaches at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, the Center for Digital Media in Vancouver, and for the Erasmus Program at the University of Lower Silesia, Wroclaw, Poland.

Speakers: Anders Sundaes Løvlie, Erik Grönvall, Anna Vallgårda

Date:
2015-10-15 12:00:00

Location:
Scheller College of Business - LeCraw Auditorium, Room 100

Abstract:
As part of a collaborative workshop, Georgia Tech is hosting seven faculty members from Copenhagen IT University. These faculty have a wide range of research projects and interests including interaction and participatory design, videogames and new forms of play, cultural heritage, and material media. Three of the faculty will offer short presentations to indicate the breadth and depth of this work:

Presenters:
Anders Sundaes Løvlie -Playful Interfaces to Digital Cultural Heritage

In Europe, massive efforts have been made to digitize and make accessible online the large amount of cultural heritage objects on display in museums and other heritage institutions. While success is typically measured in the number of millions of objects that have been added to a database, few or none popular services for end-users have been created. This talk will take a brief look at the possibility of using playful design approaches to address this problem, based on a project proposal we are currently seeking funding for.

Anders Sundnes Løvlie is Assistant Professor at ITU. His research focuses on communication design, locative media and online debate.

Erik Grönvall - Participation through design, use and the community

The way in which we involve diverse stakeholders in collaborative design processes (i.e. co-design) have changed drastically over the last 40 years. With the ‘third wave of HCI' we have moved both the design and use of technology out of the workplace and into peoples' everyday lives. As an effect, the use and appropriation of technology potentially involves more actors and distributed settings compared with a workplace scenario. The move from design to use within ‘third wave' co-design also emphasises participation (in society, the local community, etc) and how to design for participation. Using some recent and ongoing projects, this talk will briefly present aspects of participation, participatory design and co-design.

Erik Grönvall is an Associate Professor at ITU. His research foci are on Participatory Design and participation, physical computing and to understand the role of technology in everyday life (for example in out-of-clinic care).

Anna Vallgårda - Giving form to computational things

The computer is no longer at the center of attention rather it is only one our of many materials which constitutes the computational things we use and design today. As a result what we design is not merely interfaces to well-known physical forms and forms of interaction. Instead interaction design has become a form-giving practice in which we have to deal with both physical form, temporal form, and the interaction gestalt. This talk will take a brief look at what the negotiations between the trinity of forms will entail in practice.

Anna Vallgårda is an Associate Professor and Head of the IxD lab at ITU. Her research focuses on developing interaction design as a material practice through constructive design research.

Speakers: Multiple

Date: 2015-10-08 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Agenda Overview (Rahul Basole) -- GT@VIS15

Rahul C. Basole is Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing. He directs the Computational Enterprise Science Lab focusing on information visualization and visual analytics for strategic decision support.

Presenters:

Hannah Kim
InterAxis: Steering Scatterplot Axes via Observation-Level Interaction
Hannah Kim received the MS degree in computer science from Georgia Tech. She is currently a first year Ph.D. student in computer science at Georgia Tech. Her research interests include data mining, machine learning, and visual analytics.

Alex Endert
Mixed-Initiative Visual Analytics using Task-Driven Recommendations

Hyunwoo Park
A Visual Analytics Approach to Understanding Care Process Variation and Conformance
Hyunwoo Park is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. His research interests cover visual analytics in business applications and technology and innovation management in business ecosystem.

Peter Polack
TimeStitch: Interactive Multi-focus Cohort Discovery and Comparison
Peter Pollack is an Interface designer with interests in making complex systems accessible to non-experts, and considering user experience in interactive sense-making tools.

Robert Pienta
AdaptiveNav: Adaptive Discovery of Interesting and Surprising Nodes in Large Graphs
Robert Pienta is a PhD student in computational science and engineering at Georgia Tech working with Polo Chau. His academic interests are human-in-the-loop machine learning, visual analytics, and large-scale graph mining. As an undergraduate, he attended Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology majoring in computer science and mathematics.

Arjun Srinivasan
Sequencing the Enterprise Genome: Interactive Visual Analysis of Multi-Dimensional Alliance Activities of Global Enterprises
Arjun Srinivasan is a 2nd year MS CS student focusing on information visualization, visual analytics and business decision support systems.

Andrew Dai
Hands On, Large Display Visual Data Exploration
Andrew Dai is an undergraduate studying Computer Science. He works with Chad Stopler and Ramik Sadana under Dr. John Stasko in the Information Interfaces Lab.

Alex Godwin
Drawing Data on Maps: Sketch-Based Spatiotemporal Visualization
Alex Godwin is a third-year graduate student in Human-Centered Computing (HCC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He works on problems in information visualization, sketch-based interaction, and computing for good.

Speaker: Yanni Loukissas

Date: 2015-10-01 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
Despite their proliferation, data are surprisingly limited in scope. Even the largest data sets-promoted as ‘big data'-are merely aggregated indexes to what ethnographers call “local knowledge.” This talk calls attention to the myriad ways in which data are local: bounded by places, moments, communities and rituals. It asks, what are the implications of data provenance? Moreover, it offers a set of models for visualizing data in ways that highlight their specificity, rather than cleaning, filtering or effacing those characteristics. Making space for regional categories, historical terminology, place-based values and workplace errors can help us interpret data as an aggregate, rather than a monolithic source of information.

Consider the following cases: NewsScape, an academic initiative based at UCLA, has accumulated video and transcripts for over three hundred thousand broadcast news programs from around the world; the Digital Public Library of America, a non-profit organization, has linked together millions of digitized resources from libraries, archives and museums; Zillow, an online real estate marketplace, has amassed sales data on more than one hundred million homes in the United States. Each of these endeavors draws together data from disparate locales, enabling panoramic views across distributed sites of collection. However, such vistas also evoke anxiety about the loss of cultural context for data and the material limits of its encoding. Though our capacity to amass diverse sources of data continues to expand, I argue that data can never fully transcend their traditional roles as tokens for more intimate forms of knowledge. This talk will offer insight into the heterogeneous structure of aggregated data sets, challenge dominant narratives around big data, and help audiences think about the varied ways and places in which data are made.

Bio:
Yanni Loukissas is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. His research draws together design and social studies of media technologies. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he was a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he co-coordinated the Program in Art, Design and the Public Domain. He was also a principal at metaLAB, a research project of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society that explores digital futures for the arts and humanities. Additionally, he has taught at Cornell, MIT, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Originally trained as an architect at Cornell University, he subsequently received a Master of Science and a PhD in Design and Computation at MIT. While at MIT, he worked with the Initiative on Technology and Self, the Media Lab, and the Center for Bits and Atoms. He also completed postdoctoral work at the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society. He is the author of Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture (Routledge, 2012).

Speaker: David Joyner

Date: 2015-09-24 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132

Abstract:
In 2014, the College of Computing embarked on an incredible experiment: a low-cost, high-quality Masters degree in Computer Science, targeted at working professionals and delivered via the internet. While distance learning has been around for decades, this online Masters leveraged principles from recent MOOCs to drastically cut tuition and maximize course quality. While incredible investment has been devoted to developing professional material and delivering a quality experience, one variable could not have been anticipated: the impact of the amazing students in the program. The main takeaway from my time working on this program is that the OMS program has attracted amazing students, and the structure of the program lets them do amazing things. In this talk, I'll report on the OMSCS (Online Masters in CS) program nearing the two year mark, focusing especially on the role students have had in the program's success. I'll discuss the qualifications that the students in the program bring, and how the flexibility and affordability of the program is allowing students to participate who would not be able to otherwise. I'll discuss how those amazing students are, in turn, elevating the quality of the program as a whole, and ultimately teaching each other as much as they learn from us. I'll discuss the unique affordances of the program, and how it gives those students influence and impact that would be difficult in a traditional program. Finally, I'll also deliver some comments direct from students about their experience in the program. The hope is that this talk will inspire others to get involved in online initiatives like the OMSCS, and equip others with the knowledge to structure the program to maximize student impact

Bio:
David Joyner is an adjunct lecturer at Georgia Tech and a course developer and manager at Udacity, working on the Georgia Tech Online Masters in Computer Science. He has developed or co-developed four courses in the program, and served as instructor for two courses. This semester, he is developing and teaching CS6460: Educational Technology in the program. David previously completed his PhD at Georgia Tech, specializing in metacognition and intelligent tutoring systems, and also holds a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction.

No video.

Speaker: William A. Pike

Date: 2015-09-17 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 118 (Auditorium)

Abstract:
Contemporary analysis problems frequently derive from high-throughput streaming data sources, whether from scientific instrumentation, distributed sensor networks, or web-scale systems. Frequently, in-stream analysis methods for such data are based on rule sets, alerting thresholds, or incremental algorithms that require relatively little human input; when human-in-the-loop analysis is required, such exploratory discovery is often performed by discretizing the problem into static subsets that can be investigated offline. However, it is increasingly desirable to create interactive, visual analysis environments that can help make sense of dynamic phenomena as they occur, especially in domains where human judgment is critical like scientific discovery or threat detection, and where intervention in the dynamic phenomena requires real-time, rather than forensic, analysis. This talk discusses new research, open challenges, and collaboration opportunities in analysis in motion, an approach for bridging machine-driven and human-driven discovery in massive streams. This approach transforms the feedback loop in joint human and machine reasoning by capturing human background knowledge through visual interaction, automating the construction of human-useful hypotheses from live data, and steering models and data collectors in response to evolving knowledge.

Bio:
Bill Pike is the Director of the Computational and Statistical Analytics Division at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. His division leads research in data science, visualization and human computer- interaction, cyber security, and software engineering. He also leads the Analysis in Motion initiative, a five-year internal Laboratory investment to develop transformative analytics capabilities for large-scale, high-throughput data by blending human and machine reasoning capabilities in new ways. Dr. Pike has led research and development programs that have resulted in new information analysis methods in applications as varied as threat discovery, energy reliability, disaster response, cyber security, and privacy protection. He has also led the deployment of these capabilities to operational use in government and industry. He develops programs and advises government partners on visual analysis systems, distributed data-driven decision making, and human-computer interaction. He has also led the development of long-term visions for the future of information work for the US Government. He previously served as the Technical Group Manager for Visual Analytics at PNNL, the R&D coordinator for the National Visualization and Analytics Center, and the General Chair of IEEE VisWeek and the IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology. He holds a Ph.D. from Penn State.

Speaker: Maithilee Kunda

Date: 2015-09-10 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
Visual thinking can be a powerful mechanism for understanding and reasoning about complex information. Despite the pervasiveness of this idea in disciplines ranging from education to information visualization, the cognitive processes that make up visual thinking are not well understood. In this talk, I will describe how computational cognitive models can provide insight into the specific processes that underlie visual thinking. My talk also explores questions related to individual variations in the recruitment of visual thinking and the effects these variations have on task performance. My research is motivated by the recognition that, in the data-to-knowledge-to-action pipeline, "knowledge" includes the tangible representations displayed by computational tools as well as the mental representations constructed by people who use these tools. In line with this view, I will discuss how my research supports the design of computational systems that reason about data visually, as humans do, as well as systems that explicitly take into account the cognitive abilities of their users.

Bio:
Maithilee Kunda is a research scientist in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her work in artificial intelligence (AI), specifically in the area of computational cognitive systems, examines the role that visual thinking plays in learning and intelligent behavior, with a special focus on applications for individuals on the autism spectrum. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics with Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Video is not available for this event.

Speaker: Alex Endert

Date: 2015-09-03 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
An affordance is an object in the physical world, that when perceived by a person, invokes cognitive processes that lead to the planning and execution of action to accomplish some task. In visualization, we often create visual artifacts from data that invoke similar processes of analytical reasoning, hypothesis formation, and knowledge discovery. Humans can observe trends, patterns, outliers, and other visually-salient data characteristics through visualization. I posit that we can transform visual analytics through creating interactive visual affordances. That is, to enable users to interact directly with the visual glyphs and representations created from the data or data model. In this talk, I'll highlight some of the work from my students and I towards such techniques.

Bio:
Alex Endert is is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He directs the Visual Analytics Lab, where him and his students explore novel user interaction techniques for visual analytics. He is an active contributor to venues for human-computer interaction and information visualization (ACM CHI, IEEE VIS, IEEE TVCG, IEEE CG&A). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Virginia Tech in 2012, advised by Dr. Chris North. In 2013, his work on Semantic Interaction was awarded the IEEE VGTC VPG Pioneers Group Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the Virginia Tech Computer Science Best Dissertation Award.

Speaker: Anna Xambo

Date: 2015-08-27 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 118 (Auditorium)

Abstract:
Musical tabletops are collaborative interactive systems. They are designed both for professional musical performance and for casual interaction in public settings. These systems support co-located collaboration, offered by a shared interface. However, we still know little about their challenges and opportunities for collaboration. In this talk, I will present the findings of three empirical studies from my dissertation. Two exploratory studies were conducted using the Reactable, a commercial musical tabletop. The first study was a multi-session exploratory study with expert musicians. The second study was a field study with visitors in a science center. A third study was performed as an experimental study with heterogeneous groups using a bespoke system. The findings show the potential of these devices for supporting peer learning, sketching musical ideas in collaboration, and democratic settings between beginner users (with no prior knowledge in music computing) and expert users.

Bio:
Anna Xambó is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Music Technology / Digital Media at Georgia Tech for the EarSketch project. She completed her PhD in computer-supported collaboration on interactive tabletops for music performance at The Open University (UK). Her background is in music computing, HCI, communication and audiovisual media technologies, and anthropology. She was a research fellow for the British ESRC-funded project Methodological Innovation in Digital Arts and Social Sciences (London Knowledge Lab, UCL Institute of Education). Her research interests include computer-supported collaborative music, tangible user interfaces for music performance, hands-on collaborative learning, and STEAM education.

Speaker: Keith Edwards and Funded Project Receipents

Date: 2015-08-20 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
In the first GVU Brown Bag Seminar of the academic year, Keith Edwards, GVU Center Director and Professor of Interactive Computing, will open the event with an overview of the center, outlining its unique resources and opportunities available to the research community and previewing some events coming up this semester.

Georgia Tech researchers funded by the GVU Center and IPaT Research and Engagement Grants will follow. They will give brief overviews of their work and its contributions to their respective fields.

Presentations:

Applying Design Studio Pedagogy in STEM Learning with Novel Presentation and Sensing Technologies
Betsy DiSalvo, Mark Guzdial, Blair MacIntyre
(Supported by GVU and IPaT)

Reimagining Humanities Visualization: A Research-Through-Design Workshop for Civic and Cultural Data
Rahul Basole, Polo Chau, Carl DiSalvo, Alex Endert, Jim Foley, Nassim JafariNaimi, Lauren Klein, Yanni Loukissas, John Stasko, and Jimeng Sun
(Supported by GVU and IPaT)

Promoting Cognitive Systems Research at Georgia Tech
Ashok Goel, Elizabeth Whitaker
(Supported by IPaT and GTRI)

Real-Time Control to Replace Schedules on the Atlanta Streetcar
Kari Watkins, Russ Clark
(Supported by GVU, IPaT, and the Center for Urban Innovation)

Speaker: Erica Newcomb

Date: 2015-04-23 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE is a $10 million global competition to develop mobile devices that puts healthcare in the palm of your hands. Finalist teams will build a consumer health device to be tested by consumer users, independent of a medical facility or healthcare worker. In Spring of 2014, XPRIZE was seeking a partnership with a User Experience organization to expose teams to a variety of practical, hands-on UX development philosophies and examples of UX. Erica W. Newcomb was selected as the UX Advisor and her company, PointClear Solutions, as the UX partner to the XPRIZE internal operations team or individual teams on issues relating to user experience throughout the competition. This presentation will provide a brief history of the Star Trek Tricorder, XPRIZE competition details, and the UX challenges with regard to the finalist teams' solutions.

Bio:
Erica Wingo Newcomb has over 17 years of user experience expertise, the last 12 of which have been spent in the healthcare and public health domains. As the Director of User Experience for PointClear Solutions, she leads a team of User Experience Experts, Visual Designers and Front-end Developers. Erica leads design/development teams on an array of healthcare projects, conducts UX workshops around the country, and teaches UX research principles for the Masters of Health Informatics at University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB) as adjunct faculty. She was also appointed UX Advisor to the Qualcomm XPRIZE, a $10 million price competition designed to bring healthcare to the palm of the consumer's hand. Prior to PointClear, she led projects for Centers for Disease Control (CDC), US Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) and various dotcoms, both living and deceased. Erica is also a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and Business Analyst (CBA). She applies the tenants of Agile UX in her approach to projects in order to create unique and intuitive solutions. Erica holds a Masters of Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech, and a Bachelor of Arts from Birmingham-Southern College.

Date: 2015-04-16 12:00:00

Location: Centergy Building (Hodges Room, 3rd Fl) 75 5th Street, NW

Each year, GVU provides seed grants, with support from IPaT, to research initiatives committed to building on our success in interdisciplinary research and innovation in the human experience of computing. These investments create a path for external funding as our research prospers.

2014 - 2015 Research and Engagement Grants

The speakers for this Brown Bag session will discuss their respective research projects.

Title:

Autism: in Numbers and Stories

Abstract:
Autism prevalence rates in the United States have more than doubled since 2000 (from 1 in 150 to 1 in 68 children being identified). Despite this trend as the nation's fastest growing developmental disability, many insurance providers, including Medicaid, do not cover autism services or early intervention services for autism.
Our research project draws on policy research and human-­‐centered design research to build communication tools (“digital boundary objects”) that aid the public and legislators in understanding the negative economic impact of late intervention and providing an evidence base for the justification of passage and implementation of early intervention services in ASD. In this talk we will report on the website we developed incorporating qualitative stories of children and families with visualizations of latest evidence in autism policy research. This website is intended for policymakers to improve the continuum of care and interagency system of supports for children with autism. We foresee variations of these tools to be used by the public for raising awareness and enabling collective action.

Bios:

Nassim JafariNaimi is an Assistant Professor at the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech and the Director of the Design and Social Interaction Studio which she established in 2013. Nassim's research interest is in the ethical and political implications of design and its capacity to mediate social and collective interactions. Her research spans both theoretical inquiry and experimental design, situated at the intersection of Design, the Humanities, and Human Computer Interaction. She received her PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Kimberley Roussin Isett earned a Ph.D. in Management with a specialization in organization theory from the University of Arizona (School of Public Administration and Policy, Eller College of Management) in 2001. Her work concentrates on institutional pressures and dynamics in implementing government services, with a particular interest in the delivery of services to vulnerable populations. To date, Dr. Isett has been awarded over $1m as a Principal Investigator. Grant and contract funded work has included an evaluation of New York City's HIV/AIDS Services Administration, a large eight state evaluation of the implementation of evidence-based practices in mental health (adult populations), and a four state study and evaluation of new models of service implementation in juvenile justice systems, focusing on the expansion and implementation of evidence based social services. She was recognized by the Academy of Management in both 2001 and 2002 for excellence in research by the Healthcare Management and Public and Nonprofit divisions, was awarded the “Best Article Award” in 2005 by the American Review of Public Administration, and participated in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Mental Health Policy Research Network as a network associate. Isett has worked with elected officials and policymakers at all levels of government on a variety of issues through professional positions and consulting roles. She completed a National Institute of Mental Health sponsored post doctoral fellowship at the Cecil G. Sheps Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, under the mentorship of Joseph P. Morrissey.

This work is done in collaboration with Dr. Kim Isett (Public Policy), Loren Crawford (MS Public Policy, 2014), and Brighton Vino Jegarajan (MS HCI, 2015) and Binjie Sun (MS ID, 2015) supported in part by a GVU seed grant.

Title:

Supporting Collaboration and Social Interaction in Motion-based Games for Autism

Abstract:

For the past eight months, we have been working closely with teachers at the Lionheart School in Alpharetta to design and evaluate motion-based Kinect games that can encourage students with autism to better engage in collaborative game play. Our project is exploring different game interaction and feedback mechanisms to support collaborative actions among players, and documenting the extent to which such actions further facilitate social initiations and responses---such as looks, gestures, and verbal comments---between play partners. In this talk, I will describe preliminary quantitative and qualitative data that shows the impact of the game on student interactions, and I will summarize the lessons we have learned thus far, such as the role of peer play partners in facilitating collaborative game play.

This work is done in collaboration with co-PI Dr. Brian Magerko, MS CS student Arpita Bhattacharya, and CS undergraduate students Lauren Winston and Zack Littke-Smith, supported by a GVU seed grant.

Bio:

Dr. Agata Rozga is Research Scientist in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, with a research focus on autism. Broadly defined, her research bridges computing and developmental psychology, with the goal of developing novel ways to capture and quantify behaviors relevant to studying autism, and to develop and evaluate technologies to support this population. Dr. Rozga founded and directs the Georgia Tech Child Study Lab which, among others, serves as the main data collection site for an NSF-funded Expeditions in Computing grant on Computational Behavioral Science: Modeling, Analysis, and Visualization of Social and Communicative Behavior. Dr. Rozga obtained a PhD in Developmental Psychology from UCLA in 2007, and completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship through Georgia State University's Center for Behavior Neuroscience, before joining the School of Interactive Computing in 2010.

Title:

Meeting the Challenge: The Path Towards a Consumer Wearable Computer

Abstract:
Meeting the Challenge: The Path Towards a Consumer Wearable Computer is a traveling exhibition on the history of wearable computing sponsored by GVU / IPAT / WCC / SID. We are cataloging this exhibition along with video content from experts discussing wearable technology and creating a rich electronic book. The E-Book version of the exhibition will be given away for free across multiple platforms and can also be used along with educational/curriculum materials as a STEM outreach tool for K-12. The goal is an e-book catalog of the exhibition which is not only informative, but also beautiful and inspirational.

Bio:

Clint Zeagler's diverse background in fashion, industrial design and textiles drives his research on electronic textiles and on-body interfaces with the Contextual Computing Group of the GVU center of Georgia Tech. As a Research Scientist for the Georgia Tech Interactive Media Technology Center and Instructor for the Georgia Tech School of Industrial Design he teaches courses on Wearable Product Design and an ID section of Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing (MUC). Recently he co-curated the traveling exhibition Meeting the Challenge: The Path Towards a Consumer Wearable Computer.

Title:

Move Lab: A STEAM Community of Learners

Abstract:

Studies suggest that underrepresented populations in computing often do not perceive the identity of a computer scientist as aligning with their interests or value system. This often leads to rejection of opportunities to participate within the discipline. To engage diverse populations in computing disciplines, we must understand how we can support students in forming identities with computing that are personally relevant and meaningful. Our investigation centers around a community of African American females as they begin to form self-perceptions with computing and dance in a five day STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) workshop called the MoveLab. Within the workshop the students work with dance, choreography, computer science, and engineering leaders to create a technology enhanced dance performance. To understand how the students form self-perceptions around computing we look closely at the varying self-presentations of students and leaders in a community of learners. Throughout the workshop we observed students self-presentations that would support either forming or rejecting computing identities. We found that the diverse roles of participation, the trusting and engaging social environment, and the leaders modeling behaviors were essential to many of the girls as they began to form self-conceptions with computing. By looking closer at these aspects and the process through which the students begin to associate themselves with conceptions about computing, we believe we can uncover insights into how to better support underrepresented populations in creating computing cultures that are personally meaningful.

Bio:

Dr. Betsy DiSalvo is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech she leads the Culture and Technology (CAT) Lab, which focuses on research studying cultural values and how they impact technology use, learning, and production. Currently, the CAT Lab is exploring parents' use of technology for informal learning. In its first stages, this research is developing an understanding of how and why parents use or don't choose to use computers, mobile devices, and other technology for learning. DiSalvo is also the PI for an NSF funded project exploring how maker oriented learning approaches may increase transfer and reflection in undergraduate computer science courses and a exploring related projects that tie art and technology to increase learning across disciplines. DiSalvo's work has included the development of games and programs for the Carnegie Science Museum, the Children's Museum of Atlanta, the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, Eyedrum Art Center and the Walker Art Center. DiSalvo received a Ph.D. in Human Centered Computing from Georgia Tech in 2012. Previous to coming to Georgia Tech she was a research scientist at the University of Pittsburgh Learning Research and Development Center.

Speaker: Mason Bretan, Deana Brown, Alexander Zook

Date: 2015-04-09 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

GVU Center Brown Bag Seminar: GVU Center Brown Bag Seminar Series: Foley Scholar Talk
The James D. Foley GVU Center Endowment provides graduate fellowships of $5,000. The scholarship is awarded on a merit basis for overall brilliance and potential impact of student research. The scholarship is made possible through the generous contributions of donors committed to supporting the GVU community's student scholars and their work.

The Foley Scholars were selected from a group of eight accomplished finalists, all showing tremendous potential and impact in shaping technology for a broad range of challenges in modern society.

Presenter :

Mason Bretan

Title:

Motion Planning for an Improvising Musical Robot

Abstract:

Proprioception is the sense of one's own body and the physical effort necessary to complete an action. Embodied cognition is a theory stating that the processes and functions comprising the human mind are influenced by a person's physical body. These concepts are discussed in the context of robotic musicianship and a system that jointly optimizes for higher level musical parameters and physical constraints is described. The system demonstrates why bodies matter and how physical embodiment can influence a robot's perceptual and generative musical behaviors.

Bio:

Mason Bretan is a Ph.D. candidate in Music Technology and is part of Gil Weinberg's Robotic Musicianship group. His research focuses on human-robotic musical interaction, artificial intelligence, and music information retrieval. He designed the functionality for several projects including the marimba playing robot, Shimon, the robotic musical companion, Shimi, and the robotic drumming prosthesis for an amputee drummer. Bretan and his work have been featured in several news sources including the Washington Post, Mashable, and New Scientist.

Presenter:

Deana Brown

Title:

Rivrtran: Mediating Communication in Refugee Support Networks to Overcome Language Barriers

Abstract:

Every year up to 70,000 refugees arrive in the United States for resettlement (UNHCR). The first three months of a refugee's arrival are the most critical as they will need to interact with well over 2 dozen individuals-doctors, case workers, teachers, mentors. These people are key to helping new refugees accomplish tasks that lead to self-sufficiency such as getting a social security number and driver's license, enrolling their children in school, acquiring medical coverage, opening a bank account, getting a job and so on. Many refugees however, arrive with low levels of literacy, unable to speak English and often speaking a lesser known language or local dialect for which professional interpreters are harder to acquire. To this end we developed Rivrtran, a simple Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application meant to support the exchange of asynchronous voice and text messages between new refugees and members of their support network. Rivrtran uses volunteer interpreters to provide culturally­sensitive translation support for the messages exchanged. In this talk I will discuss the design and development of Rivrtran and the most recent findings from the current deployment with new Burmese refugee families living in Atlanta and their American mentors.

Bio:

Deana Brown is a PhD Candidate in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Tech. Her research spans Human-Computer Interaction, Social Computing and Technologies and Emerging Markets. In 2014, Deana received numerous competitive awards for her work including the Intel PhD Fellowship, the Google Anita Borg Fellowship and the GVU Foley Scholarship. Deana has conducted research in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States. She most recently interned at Google UK (London) where she worked on improving multiple language search in select emerging markets and prior to that on the Google+ team in Mountain View, California. Deana holds a Masters in Information Technology (HCI) from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Spanish (dual majors) from Lawrence University.

Presenter:

Alexander Zook

Title:

Improving and Formalizing Game Design through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Abstract:

Games are used for an ever-broadening array of purposes: educating, training, citizen science, and even data collection. Yet our ability to make games for these diverse purposes remains limited: game design and development practices are poorly understood and tools for making games are very limited. I will present research on artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for supporting and automating game design and development practices. I will discuss this approach in the context of active learning to improve playtesting technologies, automated game generation, constraint solving for formal game mechanic modeling and generation, and general game playing for analyzing how design decisions shape the space of player behavior in a game. These tools enable new development practices while contributing formal, computational models of game design that lead to a future science of game design. Concluding the talk I will discuss the potential for this approach to enable new game designs and design practices through the next generation of intelligent game development technologies.

Bio:

Alex Zook is a PhD candidate in Human-Centered Computing in the School of Interactive Computing. He researches technologies to improve game design and development and formally model game design through artificial intelligence and machine learning. Alex has been a recipient of Georgia Tech's Foley Scholarship, outstanding graduate research assistant award, and Presidential Fellowship, as well as the International Game Developers Association Game Developers Conference scholarship. Alex has published at diverse, high-impact venues including AAAI, CHI, the Foundations of Digital Games, and ACM Creativity & Cognition. He founded the Experimental AI in Games workshop and has co-chaired the Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop and Workshop on the Global Game Jam. His work has been recognized with licensing by the Army Research Labs and an exemplary paper at FDG 2014. Alex received his BA in biology with a specialization in neuroscience from the University of Chicago and has interned as a data scientist at Blizzard Entertainment and Bioware.

Speaker: Katherine Behar

Date: 2015-04-02 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
In this lecture, interdisciplinary artist Katherine Behar presents her artwork and discusses how she leverages art in an “underhanded” critique of digital culture. Spanning high and low tech, and old and new media, her performances, videos, and installations draw our attention to the material realm, and scramble digital fingers with fleshy digits. Working hands reveal the urgency for memory in digital labor and ethics in user-tool relationships. Far from erasing embodiment, digital technologies reinscribe robotic surrogacy with gendered forms of servitude and production like “manual labor” or “handicraft.” The preciousness of the handmade collides with throwaway object culture and is inverted in the cruel disposability of the human work force. Even in the post-industrial shift to affective labor, a human touch is paramount. But what new hand-off is in store as we approach the logical extension of nonhuman scales of production: ecological collapse and the extinction of human life? Through deadpan extrapolation, and sensuous imagination, Behar's art exposes an inglorious psychology in the objects and practices that surround technologies, as they waver briefly in the gap between emerging and obsolete. Using object-oriented feminism, Behar's art connects feminist and post-colonial histories with posthuman solidarity.

Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery in Atlanta will present “Katherine Behar: E-Waste,” a solo exhibition of sculptures and videos on view from April 3 through May 3, 2015, with an opening reception on April 3, 2015, from 7:00 to 11:00 PM.

Bio:
Katherine Behar is a Brookyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose work includes performance, interactive installation, video, and writing about digital culture. Behar's work appears at festivals, galleries, performance spaces, and art centers worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Judson Church in New York; UNOACTU in Dresden; The Girls Club Collection in Miami; Feldman Gallery + Project Space in Portland; De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam; the Mediations Biennale in Poznan; the Chicago Cultural Center; the Swiss Institute in Rome; the National Museum of Art in Cluj-Napoca; and many others. She is the recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Art Journal and the Rubin Museum of Art; and grants including the Franklin Furnace Fund, the U.S. Consulate in Leipzig, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Cleveland Performance Art Festival. Her ongoing projects include two collaborations, the performance art group Disorientalism, with Marianne M. Kim, and the art and technology team Resynplement, with Ben Chang and Silvia Ruzanka. Behar's writings on technology and culture have been published in Lateral, Media-N, Parsons Journal for Information Mapping, Visual Communication Quarterly, and EXTENSIONS: The Online Journal for Embodied Technology. She is Assistant Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College.

Date: 2015-03-26 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

The ACM CHI conference is the world's premiere conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, presenting a highly selective showcase of the very best advances across the disciplines of computer science, cognitive psychology, design, social science, human factors, artificial intelligence, graphics, visualization, multi-media design and other disciplines.

Georgia Tech, a Top Ten institution at CHI 2015, has accepted research coming from half a dozen labs across the GVU Center and which represents the innovative approaches to this complex discipline.

The 13 papers accepted into this year's proceedings broadly cover a dynamic range of areas, including Family and Community, Social Media, Crowdsourcing, Interfaces, Privacy and Security, Design and Games.

The GVU Center Brown Bag talk gives a preview of these selected papers from this year's conference.

Presenter: Catherine Grevet

Title: Piggyback Prototyping: Using Existing, Large-Scale Social

Computing Systems to Prototype New Ones

Authors: Catherine Grevet, Eric Gilbert

Type: Paper

Presenter: Christina Masden

Title: Understanding the Role of Community in Online Dating

Authors: Christina Masden, W. Keith Edwards

Type: Paper

Presenter: Jessica Pater

Title: This Digital Life: A Neighborhood-Based Study of Adolescents'

Lives Online

Authors: Jessica Pater, Andrew Miller, Beth Mynatt

Type: Paper

Presenter: Edison Thomaz

Title: Barriers and Negative Nudges: Exploring Challenges in Food

Journaling

Authors: Felicia Cordeiro, Daniel A. Epstein, Edison Thomaz, Elizabeth

Bales, Arvind K. Jagannathan, Gregory D. Abowd, James Fogarty

Type: Note

Speaker: Amy Hurst

Date: 2015-03-12 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Assistive Technologies empower individuals to accomplish tasks they might not be able to do otherwise. Unfortunately, a large percentage of Assistive Technology devices end up unused or abandoned, leaving many people with Assistive Technology that is inappropriate for their needs. My students and I are working to help more people gain access to the Assistive Technology they need by empowering non-engineers to “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) and create, modify, or build their own solutions. In this talk I will discuss our work understanding the potential for DIY in this domain, and present tools we have developed to support solving these accessibility challenges.

Bio:
Amy Hurst is an assistant professor of Human-Centered Computing in the Information Systems Department at UMBC and studies accessibility problems and builds assistive technologies. Most of her research focuses on solving accessibility problems through developing new assistive technologies and understanding diverse user's abilities, habits, and preferences. She created the Prototyping and Design Lab ("the pad”) at UMBC, which is a collaborative making space. Amy received her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the HCII at Carnegie Mellon in 2010 with Scott Hudson and Jennifer Mankoff. Before that, she was an undergraduate in Computer Science at Georgia Tech and worked with Thad Starner in the Contextual Computing Group.

Speaker: Brooks Buffington

Date: 2015-03-05 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Creating online communities is hard. Creating online communities where users are anonymous is even harder. This talk will follow the ups and downs of attempting to build thousands of online communities across the country. When we started Yik Yak we had no idea what it meant to build online communities or reputation systems, we had to figure it out along the way. We made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of lessons, the main one being that community always comes first.

Bio:
Cofounder and COO of Yik Yak Brooks Buffington, originally from Atlanta, Georgia, co-founded Yik Yak in 2013 with his fraternity brother Tyler Droll shortly after graduating from Furman University. Brooks was initially interested in a degree in the arts, but during his sophomore year at Furman switched to accounting to work toward a career in finance. Shortly after graduating though, Brooks decided to put his finance career ambitions on hold to pursue app development full time. Brooks was listed as one of Forbes 30 under 30 for consumer technology in 2014.

Video is not available for this event.

Speaker: Jonah Bokaer

Date: 2015-02-19 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Jonah Bokaer, Georgia Tech Artist-In-Residence (2013-2015) will present a framework for student, faculty, and professional conversation around 21st century integration of choreography, digital media, and visual art.

Designed as an experiential dialogue with the Brown Bag participants, Bokaer will also discuss Why Patterns, and RECESS (on view at the Ferst Center on February 21), a collaboration between choreographer Jonah Bokaer and artist/architect Daniel Arsham is a constantly evolving and fluid dialogue between the two, exploring movement, representation, temporality, memory, and space.

While never the same performance from venue to venue, each iteration of RECESS looks at the historical work of art, dance and architecture through the combined solo and collaborated work of Bokaer and Arsham. Through conversation, video, and performance, ideas and statements are built upon utilizing still and moving images of both artists' work, as well as each of them explicitly and implicitly performing for the audience. With measured movements, intentional ellipses, improvisational performativity, the artists seek to engage the audience into a deeper relationship than that of either a strict performance or lecture.

EDUCATIONAL VALUE
During the presentation, Bokaer and Arsham discuss the history of dance, concepts of art and architecture, notions of theatrical representation and performance, as well as the frisson that can come from the sometimes seamless, sometimes awkward, integration of the two. Utilizing a large video screen behind the stage, they reference their own work as examples of, or contrary to, artistic concepts that come up during the performance. By opening up the lecture to questions from the audience, RECESS can change at a moment's notice from exploring the human body's limitations within the context of computer image mapping to how the brain processes memory and where technology can recontextualize something as simple as looking at a wall.

Because of its interactivity with the audience and participants, RECESS has the potential to be limited only by the intervention of the viewers. The more playful, inquisitive, and engaged an audience is, Bokaer and Arsham's open-ended performance can grow into something that will resonate with both the audience and performers.

Bio:
Jonah Bokaer (Choreography & Performance) has been creating dances for stage, museum, gallery, and outdoor spaces throughout the world since 2002. He is the author of 34 choreographies, ten videos, three motion capture works, three interactive installations, two mobile applications, and one film. His work has been produced throughout theaters in Belgium, Canada, Cuba, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, India, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, the U.K., and the U.S. Often created to accommodate museum spaces, Bokaer's dances have been performed in New York City at The New Museum, MoMA PS1, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Museum of Arts and Design. His dances and films have also been seen at the Asia Society Texas Center, MASS MoCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (Florida); the Musée d'Art Contemporain (Marseille, France); Carré d'Art (Nimes, France);; La Ferme du Buisson (Marne-La-Vallée, France); Palazzo delle Arti (Napoli, Italy); IVAM (Valencia, Spain); Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (St. Gallen, Switzerland); MUDAM Luxembourg; La Triennale di Milano; and others. Bokaer was the first dance artist to be inducted a Young Leader of the French American Foundation (2008–2009) and was among the very few dance artists to ever be recognized with the prestigious Crain's NY Business “40 Under 40” (2011). Between 2013-2015, Bokaer is among 10 United States artists to receive a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation “Building Audience Demand” Grant Award, in partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology. He worked with Merce Cunningham Dance Company between 2000-2007. www.jonahbokaer.net

Video is not available for this event.

Speaker: Kevin Dellsperger

Date: 2015-02-12 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

The overall objectives of this presentation are to provide insight into the safety of the health care environment, impact of public reporting on quality and clinical outcomes, roles of public and private partnerships and understanding where the gap is for health care organizations. Specifically, the presentation will provide an overview of safety from the eyes of a patient as they use the health care system. We will discuss errors in care and some of the causes of those errors. Through understanding the root cause of errors, systems of care can be designed to improve the care process. The role of the Federal Government in driving quality and safety will be discussed as it relates to financial penalties in the Medicare program. In order to accelerate growth and improvement a new model of care using public and private partnerships and how they may help transform the health environment of the future. A key component of these partnerships is to address the massive amount of information needed by the clinicians to provide decision support for high quality and safe care.

Bio:
Kevin C. Dellsperger, MD, PhD is Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Georgia Regents Health System and Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. A native of New Orleans, LA, he received his BS from Tulane University in Biomedical Engineering. He received his MD and PhD from LSU Medical Center in Shreveport, LA. After completing his Residency and Chief Residency in Internal Medicine and Fellowship in Cardiovascular Diseases at the University of Iowa, he joined the faculty where he was promoted to Professor. During his time at Iowa, he served as Chief of Staff at the Iowa City VAMC and Associate Dean for Veterans Affairs of the Carver College of Medicine from 1997 to 2003. In 2003 he moved to Columbia, MO to lead the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Missouri for 6 years and served as Associate Dean for Clinical Outcomes until he was recruited to Georgia Regents Health System in 2013. He served as President of the AHA, Heartland Affiliate and Governor for Iowa of the American College of Cardiology. He served as a Member of the Board of Examiners for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for four years and as a Senior Examiner in 2013 and 2014. As an academician, he has been active in research in the broad areas of coronary and pulmonary arterial and microvascular function in health and disease, exercise physiology in metabolic syndrome and education and patient safety. He serves on the Editorial Board for 3 Journals. He is the author of more than 120 papers, review articles and book chapters in the fields of basic research, clinical cardiology and patient safety. In November, 2013, Dr. Dellsperger joined GR Health and has the overall responsibility for the Medical Staff, Quality and Safety Programs. Since his arrival he worked to restructure the Quality programs in the Medical Center. In addition, his programmatic changes are emerging into a medical, clinical and support staff cultural transformation to implement reliable process and performance improvement throughout the organization.

Speaker:
Martin Eppler

Date:
2015-02-05 12:00:00

Location:
TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

How can experts share and integrate their knowledge more effectively? How can you generally make people's knowledge more easily accessible in meetings, workshops, or virtual conferences? And how can you foster creativity and mutual understanding among diverse professionals? These questions are addressed in a new emerging field called knowledge visualization that integrates findings from information visualization, communication studies, and cognitive sciences. In the talk, we'll examine the premise and promise of this field and look at both seminal concepts, as well as real-life application examples of collaborative knowledge visualization. Key seminal concepts that will be discussed are the notion of "diagrammatic free ride", "representational guidance", and "law encoding diagrams". Application contexts of the shown examples include planning, ideation, project learning, and decision making.

Bio:
Martin J. Eppler is currently a visiting professor at Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy. He is the Chair of Communications Management at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), where he is also the director of the university's International Study MBA program and of the =mcm institute for media and communications management. He has been a guest professor at Cambridge University (UK), Aalto University (Finland), Pacifico University (Peru), and at the Central University of Finance & Economics in Beijing. His research focuses on knowledge management, knowledge creation and innovation, knowledge visualization in teams, and knowledge communication among experts and decision makers. He is the author of 14 books (among them 'Managing Information Quality', Creability, 'Management Atlas', and 'Sketching at Work') and more than 150 academic articles in journals such as IEEE Proceedings, Long Range Planning, Harvard Business Manager, Organization Studies, the Journal of Knowledge Management, The Information Society, Innovation Management, or the Journal of Business Communication. He is the inventor of the visualization software en.lets-focus.com and he has been an advisor and trainer to organizations such as the United Nations, the European Central Bank, Siemens, Daimler, UBS, eBay, Swarovski, GfK, UBS, Roche, AXA, Louis Vuitton or Ernst & Young. Some of his books and articles have been translated into Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Italian, and French.

Speaker: Jeff Rick

Date: 2015-01-29 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Multi-touch devices are starting to replace PCs as the dominant form of computing, particularly for children. As a result, serious efforts are underway to investigate and integrate tablets into the classroom. Most of these research efforts are software agnostic, assuming that the current software ecology is sufficient to realize and study the potential of the hardware. In such a research mode, it is natural to think of tablets as personal devices since the vast majority of software is built around that premise (e.g., tablets as ebooks). Can they be more? Can tablets support collaborative learning?

In this talk, I present a vision of tablets as tiny tabletops to support at-device collaboration. We developed the Proportion iPad app to realize and study this vision. In Proportion, two children work at one tablet to complete a series of increasingly difficult ratio / proportion problems. In our studies at German primary schools (grade 4, age 9-11), we used Proportion to study the role of collaboration and multi-touch. I will present both early empirical findings across conditions and a case study of a particularly successful group.

Bio:
Jochen "Jeff" Rick is an alumni of the College, graduating in 2007 (PhD CS, advisor Mark Guzdial, area Learning Sciences and Technology). From 2007 to 2010, he was a research fellow on the ShareIT project (led by Yvonne Rogers and Nicola Yuill) at the Department of Computing, The Open University, UK. There he investigated how interactive surfaces (tabletops, tablets, networked devices) can support collaboration. From 2010 to 2014, he was a founding member of the Department of Educational Technology, Saarland University, Germany. There his focus shifted to applying these technologies in Learning Sciences and bridging the gap between the HCI and Learning Sciences communities. In October, he moved back to Atlanta to start a company, badDesigner, to put this research into practice. Among other projects, he is planning a commercial distribution of Proportion.

Speaker: Jim Herbsleb

Date: 2015-01-22 11:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Collectively creating digital things these days often means hoards of people collaborating in open, transparent environments, loosely organized in ecosystems of interdependent projects. Splitting work across large collections of people has great potential benefits such as tapping a larger talent pool, enabling better matches between tasks and skills, and reducing schedule bottlenecks. But it also gives rise to difficult coordination problems while disabling coordination mechanisms that rely on overarching hierarchies of authority. In this talk, I will develop a socio-technical theory of coordination, and show how colleagues and I empirically validated it in a geographically distributed software development organization. I will then show how the theory can be adapted to help interpret the results our qualitative study of coordination practices in GitHub, an open, transparent work environment in which millions of people collaborate on millions of interdependent projects.

Bio:
James Herbsleb is a Professor in the Institute for Software Research in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he serves as Director of the PhD program in Societal Computing. His research interests lie primarily in the intersection of software engineering, computer-supported cooperative work, and socio-technical systems, focusing on such areas as geographically distributed development teams and large-scale open source development. He holds a PhD in psychology, and an MS in computer science. His research has won several Best Paper, Distinguished Paper, and Most Influential Paper awards, as well as the Alan Newell Award for Research Excellence. For no apparent reason, he also holds a Juris Doctor degree and is a member of the Michigan Bar Association. For about two decades, he has worked with assorted colleagues and minions to try to understand the complex and dynamic relationship between human collaboration and the software that the humans are designing and using. On his optimistic days, he feels he has made a bit of progress.

Speakers: Russ Clark and Siva Jayaraman

Date: 2015-01-15 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

In this talk we will give a brief overview of living labs at Georgia Tech and introduce the Research Network Operations Center (RNOC) and the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). We will cover the various resources available to the students, staff and faculty at Georgia Tech and delve briefly into several initiatives including GT Journey, Midtown Alliance, Magic Window, GT mobile. Finally, we will introduce the Convergence Innovation Competition (CIC) and the categories and timeline for the Spring 2015 CIC. The CIC is open to all Georgia Tech students and offers an exceptional opportunity for GVU students to extend their research and class projects for the purposes of commercialization or industry engagement.

Bio:
Russ Clark, PhD is a Senior Research Scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology with a joint appointment in the College of Computing School of Computer Science and the Office of the CTO. His 25 year career includes significant experience in academia and industry. Russell is the Associate Director of the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center where he leads diverse research projects in networking, mobile communications and converged systems. He leads the Georgia Tech GENI project initiatives for both campus and regional networking activities. He jointly created and leads the Convergence Innovation Competition, an annual student competition that brings student innovators together with industry partners to create new, commercially viable applications. Siva Jayaraman is a Research Scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology and is the Director of Strategic Partnerships for the GT RNOC as well as the Program Manager for Development at the Institute for People and Technology. He has worked in Consulting and Telecommunications for over 10 years before starting at Georgia Tech in 2012. He is a co-principal in the Convergence Innovation Competition.
 

Speaker: Kim Nolte

Date: 2015-01-08 11:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
Each year in Georgia over 11,000 girls between 15-19 become pregnant and about half of sexually active youth under age 25 experience a sexually transmitted infection. Comprehensive sex education is effective at assisting young people to make healthy decisions about sex and to adopt healthy sexual behaviors. Yet, for so many youth in Georgia medically accurate, age appropriate sex education is not available to them in their school systems. Less than 10 of the 180 school districts in Georgia provide comprehensive sex education.

For so many years professionals in the field of health education have been trying to get sex education in the school systems, but have run into road blocks related to policy, budgets, political will, and fear of controversy.

While adults continue to argue over whether young people should have access to comprehensive sex education in schools, the billion dollar porn industry has made sexual content easily accessible to young people through technology. With the rapid change of technology and young people's access to it, now is the time the field of health education to abandon its 1970's model of sex education and begin to reach young people through the media they use most.

In this Brown Bag lunch seminar, Kim Nolte, President and CEO of Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power & Potential will discuss their current work in Georgia to institutionalize sex education in schools, their use of technology to reach young people and open a discussion for other ways to use technology to give young people the tools and skills they need to make healthy sexual decisions.

Bio:
Kim M. Nolte, MPH, MCHES is the President and CEO of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power & Potential, a state-level organization that focuses on the health and well-being of young people. GCAPP was founded in 1995 by the actor, activist and philanthropist Jane Fonda. Kim obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Hispanic Language and Literature from Boston University and her Master of Public Health from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. She began her career in public health as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala working with Maya Indians. It was that two year experience that transformed her life and ignited her passion for public health. As a Peace Corps volunteer, Kim saw firsthand how civil war, poverty, lack of education, limited access to health services including access to contraceptives, and chronic malnutrition adversely affected children, families, communities, and an entire country. Kim is a nationally recognized public health professional with over 25 years of demonstrated leadership, results, and commitment to adolescent health. She has worked both domestically and internationally on maternal child health and adolescent health programs at the local, state, and national levels. Kim has been working for GCAPP for eight years, first as the Vice President of Programs and Training and now as the President and CEO. Previously she worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kim has lived in Spain and Guatemala, is fluent in Spanish and has studied four other languages including Mam, a Maya Indian language. She is a life-long dancer and has performed in two professional dance troupes. She is currently working on her black belt in taekwondo. Please join Kim and several of her staff to brainstorm ways in which we can partner with GCAPP. Course projects, MS-HCI projects, dissertations, foundation grant proposals - the sky's the limit. Brainstorming starts immediately following the brown bag, in the GVU Cafe - TSRB second floor, next to the stairway.