Speaker: Jamie Gorman

Date: 2016-12-01 11:30:00

Location: TSRB - 1st Floor Ballroom

Abstract:
In settings ranging from business, sports, medicine, and the military, working in teams allows people to accomplish tasks that no individual could accomplish working alone. By its very nature, much of teamwork is distributed across, and not necessarily stored within, interdependent people working toward a common goal. In this light, I advocate a systems perspective on teamwork that is based on general coordination principles that are not limited to cognitive, motor, and physiological levels of explanation within the individual. The dynamical systems approach is based on general coordinative principles such as synchronization, long-memory, and attractors and stability that motivate new ways of conceptualizing and assessing human performance. In this talk, I will review some empirical findings on teams as dynamical systems and describe how they coalesce into a theory of team performance that has practical implications. Throughout the presentation, I will provide examples of how we characterize teamwork with fundamental equations and/or modeling techniques that capture the dynamics and what this means for teamwork. By emphasizing dynamics, process, and the interrelatedness of the systems in which team members operate, a dynamical approach contributes to a fuller understanding of human performance.

Speaker Bio:
Jamie Gorman received his PhD in Psychology from New Mexico State University and is an associate professor in Engineering Psychology at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on how human performance is constrained by working with other people and in complex settings. In particular, he focuses on team dynamics that occur in many settings-medicine, sports, military-that permeate a variety of human tasks. Research in his lab seeks to understand and enhance human performance using a variety of methodological approaches, including communication analysis, kinematics, physiological, and neural approaches. He has over 30 refereed articles and book chapters and is most well-known for his applications of dynamical systems theory to the problem of team coordination. His research has been funded by ONR, NSF, and DARPA. He is a member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), serves on the editorial board of the journal Human Factors, and serves on the HFES Human Factors Prize panel. In 2011 he and his coauthors received the Jerome H. Ely award from HFES for the best paper published in the 2010 volume of Human Factors.

No video.

Speaker: Evan Suma Rosenberg

Date: 2016-11-17 11:30:00

Location: TSRB - 1st Floor Ballroom

Abstract:
Virtual reality has incredible potential for the creation of powerful and compelling experiences, but only when the user's body is fully engaged does the virtual begin to feel real. However, body movement through the virtual world is one of the most significant practical challenges for VR, because the user is restricted by the boundaries of the physical space. In this talk, I will introduce a number of perceptual illusions that can overcome the spatial limitations imposed by the real world. This approach, known as redirected walking, has stunning potential to fool the senses. I will discuss a series of perceptual experiments that have convinced users they were walking along a straight path while actually traveling in a circle, or that the virtual environment was much larger than would be possible in the real world. Additionally, I will present the Redirected Walking Toolkit, an open-source virtual reality research and development platform that can automatically redirect users in physical space as they walk through potentially infinite virtual worlds.

Speaker Bio:
Evan Suma Rosenberg is the Associate Director of the MxR Lab at the Institute for Creative Technologies and a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on techniques and technologies that can enhance virtual reality experiences, with particular interests in human locomotion, perception, and cognition. He has co-authored over 70 academic publications, eight of which have been recognized with conference awards, and is a six-time SIGGRAPH presenter. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Additionally, he has directed the development of several publicly available free software projects that have been widely used by the research and hobbyist communities, and his online research videos have been viewed over 2.4 million times. He received his Ph.D. in 2010 from the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

No video.

Speaker: Gregory D. Abowd

Date: 2016-11-10 11:30:00

Location: Centergy Building 3rd Floor Hodges Connections Room

Abstract:
Most of us think of Moore's Law as a trend in which computers will dramatically shrink in size and cost over time. While that is not exactly what Gordon Moore put forth as an empirical observation of the shrinking cost of the transistor, it is nonetheless how we designers of interactive technology think of it. This naive, but powerful, interpretation causes us to think about the future in a particular, and I would argue, narrow way. Plenty of mounting evidence reveals that we are past the era of Moore's Law, and I will argue that this is a good thing. Why? Because it is going to force us to think about computing in an alternative, possibly more impactful, way. A team of colleagues from around Georgia Tech envisions a new form of computing artifact, a computational skin. This “skin” is manufactured at scale as a computationally-enabled, self-sustaining material. The COSMOS (Computational Skin for Multi-Object Systems) project brings together expertise in materials, manufacturing, computing, electrical engineering and design to explore the challenges of this exciting post-Moore's Law era of computing. This talk will motivate the vision for COSMOS and explore some of the early ideas of this computer for the coming decades, a more extreme and literal interpretation of Weiser's vision for the computer of the 21st century.

Speaker Bio:
Gregory D. Abowd is a Regents' Professor and J.Z. Liang Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, where he has been on the faculty since 1994. An applied computer scientist, his research interests concern how the advanced information technologies of mobile, wearable and ubiquitous computing impact our everyday lives when they are seamlessly integrated into our living spaces. His work has involved applications as diverse as education (Classroom 2000), home life (The Aware Home) and health (technology and autism, CampusLife). He and his current and former students are active inventors of new sensing and interaction technologies. He has recently helped to co-create an interdisciplinary research effort, COSMOS, which investigates the collaboration of materials, manufacturing, electronics, computing and design to explore an alternative future computing industry.

Dr. Abowd received the degree of B.S. in Honors Mathematics in 1986 from the University of Notre Dame. He then attended the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom as a Rhodes Scholar, earning the degrees of M.Sc. (1987) and D.Phil. (1991) in Computation. From 1989-1992 he was a Research Associate/Postdoc with the Human-Computer Interaction Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York in England. From 1992-1994, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Software Engineering Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He has graduated 25 PhD students who have gone on to a variety of successful careers in academia and industry. He is an ACM Fellow, a member of the CHI Academy and recipient of the SIGCHI Social Impact Award and ACM Eugene Lawler Humanitarian Award. He is also the founding President of the Atlanta Autism Consortium, a non-profit dedicated to enhancing communication and understanding across the varied stakeholder communities connected to autism.

No video.

Speakers: Mark Braunstein, Tim Buchman, Vjollca Sadiraj, and Paula Braun

Date: 2016-11-03 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ballroom)

Abstract:
Students in CS 6440 Introduction to Health Informatics now work with real world clinicians and researchers to solve challenges they pose using FHIR, the new web services based approach to health data sharing. Mark Braunstein will provide some basics of FHIR, Georgia Tech's unique Tech on FHIR server as well as the course. After his introduction Tim Buchman Director of Emory's eICU, Vjollca Sadiraj, Associate Director, Experimental Economics Center at GSU and Paula Braun, Entrepreneur in Residence at CDC will each present their challenge and show the FHIR-based app solution they developed with their student team.

Speaker Bio:
Mark Braunstein teaches health informatics as a graduate seminar in the college and as an elective in the Online Masters of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program. His latest book, Practitioners Guide to Health Informatics, a guide to health informatics for physicians and other non-technical readers, was published in the spring of 2015. His text, Contemporary Health Informatics, was published in the spring of 2014. Health Informatics in the Cloud, a brief guide to health informatics for non-technical readers, was published in 2012. Tim Buchman is the founding director of the Emory Critical Care Center (ECCC), which is integrating ICUs throughout the Emory Healthcare system and bringing together clinicians and investigators from diverse disciplines to conduct research to define best clinical practices and inform public health policy. His research spans the bench-to-bedside and encompasses studies of physiological dynamics, predictive biology, patient monitoring, the genetics of sepsis, and ICU end-of-life care. Before joining Emory, he was the Edison Professor of Surgery, Anesthesiology and Medicine at Washington University in Saint Louis, where he founded and directed the Section of Acute and Critical Care Surgery and Barnes-Jewish Hospital's nationally verified level 1 trauma center. Prior to his 15 years in Saint Louis, Tim Buchman was on the faculty of Johns Hopkins Medical Institution in Baltimore, where he built the SICU service and founded the Adult Trauma Service. He completed the Halsted Residency in General Surgery at Hopkins and his trauma/critical care training at Baltimore's Shock Trauma Center. Vjollca Sadiraj is involved in research programs in public choice, public economics, individual social preferences and decision theory. She is interested in both theoretical modeling and experimental testing of the theory. Her current projects include: emergence and role of interests groups in spatial models of electoral competition, effects of rotation schemes on committee performance, effects of benefit taxation and ability to pay on excess burden, theoretical modeling of social preferences, conditional and unconditional altruism, and small- and large- stakes risk aversion. Paula Braun is Entrepreneur in Residence at CDC and Instructor in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory. Prior to this she was data scientist at Elder Research Inc., analyst in charge for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, analyst in charge for the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, analyst for the GAO and statistician and Presidential Medal Fellow at the CDC.

No video.

Speaker: Douglas Bowman

Date: 2016-10-27 13:00:00

Location: TSRB

Abstract:
The last two years have seen an explosion of new virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices and applications in the consumer electronics world. VR/AR are seen by many to represent a disruptive new paradigm in interactive computing that will revolutionize the way we play, relax, socialize, learn, and work. But these technologies have been around for a long time, and similar claims about their impact have been made before. Will VR/AR truly realize their potential this time around? And what barriers still stand in the way? In this talk, I reflect on some of my own personal history in VR/AR research to understand where we've been, where we are now, and where we might be going. I argue that perfect levels of realism are not critical to most VR/AR applications, but that designing for a good user experience is key. The talk will discuss big open challenges in VR/AR user experience, and review some of the projects in my lab that are addressing them

Speaker Bio:
Doug A. Bowman is the Frank J. Maher Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech. He received a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Emory University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, where he worked in the GVU Center's Virtual Environments Group. Doug's research centers on human performance and user experience in 3D user interfaces, using technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). He and his students in the 3D Interaction Group design, prototype, and evaluate novel 3D interaction techniques; run experiments to understand the effects of VR/AR system design parameters on user experience; and explore diverse applications of VR/AR technologies in domains such as scientific visual data analysis, history education, architecture, and construction. Doug's research accomplishments have been recognized with the IEEE VGTC technical achievement award in virtual reality, an ACM Distinguished Scientist designation, and an NSF CAREER award.

No video.

Speaker: Susan Wyche

Date: 2016-10-06 11:30:00

Location: TSRB - 1st Floor Ballroom

Abstract:
Substantial public and academic interest is focused on efforts to use mobile phones to address longstanding socioeconomic goals such as reducing poverty, improving education, and disseminating health and agricultural information to marginalized populations in the developing world. While technologists have been quick to embrace the mobile phone as an ICT that can benefit the poor, there has been far less attention devoted to the problems inherent in these devices' design. I will talk about research, which draws on my long-term fieldwork in rural Kenya, that demonstrates shortcomings in traditional approaches to designing for this context, and then discuss alternative approaches to designing for this region

Speaker Bio:
Susan Wyche is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University and is affiliated with MSU's African Studies Center. Her research focuses on human-computer interaction (HCI) and information and communication technologies and development (ICTD). Her work has been supported by Google, Facebook, USAID, and the National Science Foundation. Wyche is a 2015 recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. She received her Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech, an MS from Cornell University and an undergraduate degree in Industrial Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

No video.

Speaker: James Fogarty

Date: 2016-09-22 11:30:00

Location: TSRB - 1st Floor Ballroom

Abstract:
The applications we create are framed by the tools we use to create them. On one hand, tools codify effective practice and empower design. On the other, that same codification eventually constrains design. My research examines new approaches to interactive systems in light of this tradeoff, often with an emphasis on unlocking existing codifications to enable new designs. This talk will focus on three examples: - I will first present our work on unlocking data with interactive machine learning. Dominant models of interaction fail to support expressiveness and control in many emerging forms of everyday data. Exploring such domains as web image search and gesture recognition, our work shows how interactive machine learning can support people in extending the underlying language of an interaction. - I will then present our work on using pixel-based reverse engineering to unlock existing graphical interfaces, allowing runtime modification of those interfaces without their source. Pixel-based methods allow prototyping new possibilities atop the existing ecosystem of applications and tools, accelerating innovation and informing the next-generation ecosystem. - Finally, I will consider how these challenges combine in the emergence of self-tracking and personal informatics. Data is no longer a distant concept, but an everyday barrier to interaction, self-knowledge, and personal empowerment. The tools we create to support these applications will define the future of everyday interaction with personal data. Given these examples, I argue research must consider not only specific applications, but also the assumptions codified by underlying tools and how those tools frame our understanding of what application designs are even possible.

Speaker Bio:
James Fogarty is an Associate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington (https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jfogarty). His broad research interests are in engineering interactive systems, often with a focus on the role of tools in developing, deploying, and evaluating new approaches to the human obstacles surrounding everyday adoption of ubiquitous computing and intelligent interaction. He is also Director of the DUB Group, the University of Washington's cross-campus initiative advancing research and education in Human-Computer Interaction and Design (http://dub.washington.edu).

No video.

Speaker: Beth Mynatt

Date: 2016-09-15 11:30:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ballroom)

Abstract:
Since 2008, I have served as a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and now chair this organization for the next two years. The CCC (cra.org/ccc), has the mission to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. We are a standing committee of the Computing Research Associates (CRA) and are primarily funded by the NSF. It has been an amazing journey to unpack and then facilitate the formation, articulation and eventual implementation of important computing research programs that capture the innovative spirit and societal relevance of the computing field. In this journey, I've learned a bit more about how good ideas sow good partnerships that enable computing research. In this talk I'll describe my view from this bleeding edge of the computing research horizon. I'll unpack examples of the evolution of ideas to programs and speculate what may be ahead of us still. Our field is changing and its relevance to national and societal priorities is growing in importance. However, we live in challenging times, not to mention facing a pivotal election in November. As a community, we must continually work to foster audacious visions for our field and to align our visions with national and societal priorities.

Bio:
Elizabeth Mynatt is the Executive Director of Georgia Tech's Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), a College of Computing Professor, and the Director of the Everyday Computing Lab. She investigates the design and evaluation of health information technologies including creating personalized mobile technology for supporting breast cancer patients during their cancer journey, evaluating mobile sensing and mHealth engagement for pediatric epilepsy patients and their caregivers, and investigating the positive and negative influence of social media on self-harm behaviors such as eating disorders. She is also one of the principal researchers in the Aware Home Research Initiative; investigating the design of future home technologies, especially those that enable older adults to continue living independently as opposed to moving to an institutional care setting. Mynatt is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of ubiquitous computing and assistive technologies. Her research contributes to ongoing work in personal health informatics, computer-supported collaborative work and human-computer interface design. Mynatt is also the Chair of the Computing Community Consortium, an NSF-sponsored effort to engage the computing research community in envisioning more audacious research challenges. She serves as member of the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and as an ACM Council Member at Large. She has been recognized as an ACM Fellow, a member of the SIGCHI Academy, and a Sloan and Kavli research fellow. She has published more than 100 scientific papers and chaired the CHI 2010 conference, the premier international conference in human-computer interaction. Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 1998, Mynatt was a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC, working with the founder of ubiquitous computing, Mark Weiser. Her research is supported by multiple grants from NSF and NIH including Smart and Connected Health, CHS, HCC and CAREER awards. Other honorary awards include being named a Mobility Star in 2014 by the Atlanta Metro Chamber of Commerce, the Top Woman Innovator in Technology by Atlanta Woman magazine in 2005 and the 2003 College of Computing's Dean's Award. Mynatt earned her Bachelor of Science summa cum laude in computer science from North Carolina State University and her Master of Science and Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech.

No video.

Speaker: Michael Hoffmann

Date: 2016-09-08 11:30:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ballroom)

Abstract:
In a complex world, problems are often “wicked,” meaning that it is not even clear what the problem is. Wicked problems are framed differently by different stakeholders depending on their interests, needs, knowledge, available methods, world-views, or values. Our ability to cope with wicked problems-and with the conflicts they usually create-is crucial for corporate, political, and legal decision making but also for the design of technologies. Given the difficulties and multi-perspectivity of wicked problems, a deliberative paradigm for decision making and democratic governance seems to be most promising. Based on this paradigm, decisions and policies are legitimate only if they are generated through a process of deliberation and open exchange of opinions. This requires that everyone who effects or is effected by a decision have a voice in making it. A deliberative approach to decision making requires publicity, transparency, equal inclusion for participation, and the justified expectation that outcomes will be reasonable and fair. The talk will present some of the strategies that have been developed in recent years to cope with wicked problems by means of deliberation. The focus will be on a new strategy that pursues three goals: 1) To bring together a large variety of people from diverse walks of life and to provide them opportunities to express their specific points of views so that new and useful knowledge can be generated through collaborative reasoning; 2) To stimulate-for each participant-critical reflection on weaknesses, gaps, biases, and hidden assumptions in one's own thinking, as well as efforts to correct these limitations, as it is required for achieving consensus; and 3) To achieve all this with a web-based platform that supports and structures reflective deliberation online.

Bio:
Michael Hoffmann is an Associate Professor for Philosophy at Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy, Director of the School's Philosophy Program and of the AGORA Project, and Associate Director of the Center for Ethics and Technology, responsible for the area Deliberative Technology Assessment. Dr. Hoffmann's research focuses on reasoning with diagrammatic representations and the design of representational guidance in human-computer interaction. Recent projects include the development of the collaborative argument mapping tool "AGORA-net" (http://agora.gatech.edu); an approach to problem-based learning in which reasoning in teams of students who collaborate on wicked problems is structured and guided by the AGORA software; and research on how reflection and self-correcting reasoning can be stimulated by deliberative argument mapping.

No video.

Speaker: Maysam Ghovanloo

Date: 2016-09-01 11:30:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ballroom)

Topic:
Human tongue and oral musculature have a huge representation in the motor cortex that rivals that of hands and fingers. They also have their own direct hotline to the brain through cranial nerves, which are well protected against physical damage and rarely affected by neurological diseases. They are naturally evolved to be part of both human digestive system and speech apparatus, and offer many degrees of freedom. Over the last few years we have developed a wireless and wearable technology at GT-Bionics lab that can harness the power of voluntary tongue motion in people with the most severe physical disabilities (tetraplegia) for human-computer interaction and environment control. Now, we have gone further and adopted the tongue motion for neuro-rehabilitation of the upper limbs and speech to remedy some of the most common consequences of stroke, which is the leading cause of serious, long-term disability in the United States, affecting 795,000 people per year. It turns out that by marrying the tongue motion and an exoskeleton, we can have those suffering from hemiplegia directly participate in their own rehabilitation paradigm with little or even no input from their physical therapists. The active participation of the patients in the therapy may accelerate the rate of recovery from stroke even beyond the customary care with only a fraction of its cost. It has also been shown that visualizing the tongue motion, and providing it to the patients suffering from speech disorders in the forms of an effective biofeedback can assist and accelerate the rate speech-language therapy. I will talk about some of the new technologies that we are developing for these purposes, and some of the preliminary results we have achieved so far. There are also several opportunities to get involved with this research, which I will mention at the end.

Bio:
Maysam Ghovanloo received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, and the M.S. degree in biomedical engineering from the Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 1997. He also received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2003 and 2004. Dr. Ghovanloo was an assistant professor in the Department of ECE at the North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC from 2004 to 2007. Since 2007 he has been with the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he is an associate professor and the founding director of the GT-Bionics Lab. He has authored or coauthored more than 200 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications on implantable microelectronic devices (IMD), integrated circuits and microsystems for IMD applications, and modern assistive and rehabilitation technologies. Dr. Ghovanloo was the general chair of the IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCAS 2015) in Atlanta, GA in Oct. 2015. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering and IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems. He served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Part II (2008-2011), as well as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. He has also served on the Imagers, MEMS, Medical and Displays subcommittee of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) from 2009-2014. He has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Tommy Nobis Barrier Breaker Award for Innovation, and Distinguished Young Scholar Award from the Association of Professors and Scholars of Iranian Heritage.

No video.

Speaker: Keith Edwards

Date: 2016-08-25 11:30:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ballroom)

In the first GVU Brown Bag Seminar of the academic year, Keith Edwards, GVU Center Director and Professor of Interactive Computing, will kick off our talk series with an overview of the GVU Center detailing its unique resources and opportunities, and previewing some of the events coming up this semester. Come, enjoy lunch, and learn about some of the ways you can connect with GVU. Following the brown bag talk, stick around for our fall ice cream social. Also, each year, the GVU Center and IPaT announce funding for the Research and Engagement Grants, which support early stage work by Georgia Tech researchers. This year's winners will give brief overviews of the work they will be doing over the coming academic year.

Research and Engagement Grant Projects:

Passive Haptic Rehabilitation for Stroke
Thad Starner (Interactive Computing); Steve Wolf (Emory Rehab Medicine)

We aim to develop a low-cost, mobile, wearable device for Stroke rehabilitation. Over 5 million people are disabled by stroke each year. Current techniques for stroke rehabilitation are costly and time-consuming, require cumbersome machinery, access to clinicians, and put strain on patients. However, using our lightweight and mobile computerized gloves, patients may be able to get rehab on-the-go. In our initial work, we found that tactile stimulation, like vibration, can improve sensation and mobility when applied to the impaired hands of people with partial Spinal Cord Injury. We now apply this "Passive Haptic Rehabilitation" to stroke. Using this technique, these patients can simply wear a vibrating glove to stimulate their affected hand while they go about their daily life. After two months, function improved in those that wore the glove.

(T)racing Eyes and Hearts: An Installation to Explore the Physiology of Empathy
Anne Pollock (Literature, Media and Communication); Lewis Wheaton (Applied Physiology); Nassim JafariNaimi (Literature, Media and Communication)

Eyes darting, or maintaining a steady gaze straight ahead. Heartbeat racing, or maintaining a slow, even rhythm. If we encounter these phenomena in another, how do we respond – not just affectively, but physiologically? Eye movements and heartbeats are among the most intuitively meaningful physiological characteristics that humans observe in one another. Without necessarily consciously realizing it, we often respond empathetically. This project brings together humanities scholars and physiology scholars to create an art installation that uses representation, tracking, and visualization to investigate and reflect upon the physiology of empathy. The installation renders video of eye movements and audio of heartrate of a virtual person, and tracks the eye movements and heartrate of an observing user. We anticipate a mirroring, empathetic physiological response from the user, in which their heartrate also speeds and slows in conjunction with the virtual person. Immediately after the experience, the user will be provided a visual and auditory representation of the data, in order to see and reflect on this empathetic engagement, and also provided with a link to a copy of the video by email if they so choose. The playback could be either in real time, or in a time that is set to either the virtual person or the user's heartrate as a metronome, to allow a distinctively human-centered exploration of the data.

Collision of Creatives
Laura Levy (IMTC), Maribeth Gandy (IMTC), Clint Zeagler (WCC), Madison Cario (Arts@Tech), Lane Conville-Canney (Arts@Tech)

This engagement grant addresses the need to 1) understand how artists and technologists ideate, communicate and create within their groups and 2) create effective methods and design processes that provide collaborative access points for artists and technologists to effectively work together. The methods in this proposal seek to create a bridge between artists looking to integrate advanced technologies in their process with the designers making these technologies. Additionally, this project will find ways to showcase past, current and future technology projects developed at Georgia Tech through the vehicle of artistic expression (e.g., visual, dance, musical). This project aims to make effective Dr. Bolter's quote that “the arts are the tip of the HCI sword” by enabling effective communication, creating useful artifacts, and engaging the Tech community to catalyze processes by technologists and artists in showcasing the work happening here at Georgia Tech.

Date:
2016-04-21 12:00:00

Location:
Centergy Building, IPaT, Suite 600

The GVU Center and Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) support 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 the research prospers.

The GVU Center and IPaT 2015-2016 Research and Engagement Grants Program awarded funding for four projects. The following three will present their research efforts and results from the year. The final project presented at the April 14 Brown Bag. The grants are designed to support two separate types of collaborations: Research Grants support seed funding for research, and Engagement Grants seek to grow new forms of internal and external community engagement and collaboration.

Applying Design Studio Pedagogy in STEM Learning with Novel Presentation and Sensing Technologies

Betsy DiSalvo, Mark Guzdial, Blair MacIntyre
(Supported by GVU and IPaT)
This project takes the open collaboration teaching methods of design studios and uses them in STEM learning, with the goal of creating more motivation to learn.

Promoting Cognitive Systems Research at Georgia Tech

Ashok Goel, Elizabeth Whitaker
(Supported by GVU, IPaT, and GTRI)
The recent advent of famous cognitive systems such as Apple's Siri and IBM's Watson has ushered a new era in the development of artificial intelligence. Cognitive systems are intelligent systems characterized by human-level, human-centered and human-like intelligence. We seek to foster internal collaboration and enhance external visibility in cognitive systems with the goal of establishing an interdisciplinary Center for Cognitive Systems. In particular, we will organize a seminar series on cognitive systems with distinguished external speakers, monthly meetings of the internal cognitive systems faculty and staff, and yearly workshops of the local cognitive systems community including research students. In addition to the two PIs, the proposal also includes Timothy Boone, Michael Hoffmann, Margaret Loper, Julie Linsey, Keith McGreggor, Janet Murray, Amy Pritchett, Mark Riedl, Eric Schumacher, and Alan Wagner, indicating both the deeply interdisciplinary nature of cognitive systems research and broad support across the institute.

Real-Time Control to Replace Schedules on the Atlanta Streetcar

Kari Watkins, Russ Clark
(Supported by GVU, IPaT, and the Center for Urban Innovation)
Almost all public transportation in the US runs on a schedule, but schedule-based service may not be the most effective way to control operations. When transit routes are very frequent, passengers tend to arrive at stations randomly and typically disregard the schedule. Maintaining a schedule, however, requires long buffer time that wastes passengers' time and agencies' resources. To avoid the need for schedules while maintaining stable operations, we have developed a bus dispatching system that uses real-time information to maintain even spacing between transit vehicles. In partnership with GVU Center, IPAT, Center for Urban Innovation, and City of Atlanta, we will test this control method on the Atlanta Streetcar using tablets inside the streetcars to communicate driving instructions to the operators. The objective will be to maximize the quality of service only using available resources. The implementation has the potential to drastically reduce passenger waiting time on the Streetcar corridor, and later on other transit routes in Atlanta, and throughout the country.

Speakers: Lauren Klein, Yanni Loukissas, Carl DiSalvo

Date: 2016-04-14 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ballroom)

ABSTRACT:
Humanities Data Visualization, a GVU-sponsored workshop held at Georgia Tech in March 2016, brought together leading humanities scholars with visualization designers and researchers to explore a range of meanings of humanities “data,” and to prototype new methods for their visual display. The goal was to encourage these otherwise unlikely collaborators to imagine new forms and platforms capable of portraying the humanistic dimensions of culturally significant data-- an increasingly important challenge in the fields of digital humanities and information visualization alike.

This talk will report on the outcomes of the workshop, and begin to trace the contours of the emerging area of research we might call humanities data visualization. We will provide examples of the range of data that humanities scholars employ in their work, the challenges of their content and structure, and the variety of research questions they can help to explore. Through these examples, we hope to prompt an expanded conversation about data visualization and its possibilities- and limits--for humanities research.

BIOS:
Lauren Klein is an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Her research interests include early American literature, food studies, media studies, and the digital humanities. She is at work on two book projects: the first on the relation between eating and aesthetics in the early American archive, and the second that provides a cultural history of data visualization from the eighteenth century to the present day. Her writing has appeared in American Quarterly, American Literature, and Early American Literature. Her digital humanities projects have been supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities (Univ. of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. The next volume in the series, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, is forthcoming in print and online in March 2016.

Yanni Loukissas is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. His research draws together information design and information studies. He is a contributor to Simulation and its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009) and the author of Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture (Routledge, 2012). 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. 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 and the Media Lab. He also completed postdoctoral work at the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society.

Carl DiSalvo is an Associate Professor in the Digital Media Program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2008 he established The Public Design Workshop, which is a design research studio that explores socially-engaged design practices and civic media. His work draws together science and technology studies, the humanities, and design research to analyze the social and political qualities of design and prototype experimental systems and services.

Speaker: Brent Harrison

Date: 2016-04-07 16:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ballroom)

ABSTRACT:
In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has become more prevalent in our everyday lives. Presently, it is not unusual for AI systems (such as Siri and Cortana) and humans to interface with each other on a daily basis. This phenomenon will continue as technologies such as self-driving vehicles and robots for healthcare integrate themselves into the general public. Given this newfound emphasis on human interaction, it is imperative that modern AI systems be imbued with an improved understanding of human behavior, decision making, preferences, etc. Doing so allows these systems to better communicate and interact with humans.

In this talk, Brent will discuss his general research approach to improving AI systems by imbuing them with a greater knowledge of human decision making, behavior, and preferences in order to facilitate positive interactions between humans and these systems. He will focus on two projects that show how data describing humans can be used to improve AI-human interaction. The first project involves using human replay data in video games to create a system that dynamically adapts virtual environments in order to reduce churn. Brent will also discuss his more recent work on the Quixote system, which uses the procedural knowledge contained in stories to train virtual agents to exhibit believable behavior. In addition, Brent will discuss the future of this work and how it will further improve the complex relationship between humans and AI systems.

BIO:
Brent Harrison received the B.S. degree in Computer Science and the B.A. degree in English from Auburn University in 2008, and the M.S. degree in computer science from North Carolina State University in 2012. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from North Carolina State University in 2014 for his work on creating adaptive virtual environments using data-driven models of player behavior.

He is currently a Research Scientist in the Entertainment Intelligence Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he studies how the knowledge contained within stories can be used to train virtual agents. His primary research interests involve developing better interactive AI systems and machine learning algorithms by leveraging different types of human data.

Speaker: Lauren Wilcox

Date: 2016-03-31 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ballroom)

Abstract:
The recent trend toward patients' participation in their own healthcare has opened up numerous challenges and opportunities for computing research. In this talk, I will introduce the Health Experience Lab, a research group focused on discovering how technology can be designed to foster this participation. I will provide an overview of projects in the Health Experience Lab and describe our efforts to facilitate health-related information awareness and understanding through effective design and use of technology. I will report on formative studies with collaborators at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) focused on designing technology for a critical yet under-supported group: teens with complex chronic illnesses. Finally, I will discuss opportunities in the emerging area of consumer health informatics, and describe a future in which transformative interventions will better support communication of multi-faceted health-related information to a variety of end users.

Bio:
Lauren Wilcox is an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on designing, building, and evaluating technology to support the needs of people working both individually and together to achieve health-related goals. Lauren received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2013. Her studies related to communicating patient-centered health information have been recognized by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) through a Dissertation Award in 2012 and by the NSF through a CISE Research Initiation Initiative award in 2015. Prior to her academic career, Lauren worked as a Software Engineer at IBM, where she was recognized with an Early Tenure Inventor award. She is a member of the technical program committees for PervasiveHealth 2016 and ACM CHI 2016 and serves on the scientific program committee for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA).

Speaker: Eric Gordon

Date: 2016-03-10 12:00:00

Location: Hodges Room, Centergy Building, 3rd Floor

Abstract:
Recent years have seen a shift in people's expectations of public institutions – from city government, to schools, to hospitals. What media critic Jose van Dijck calls “a culture of connectivity,” fueled by ever efficient platforms for interaction, has enhanced expectations of responsiveness in nearly every aspect of social and civic life. When a text is sent, a response is expected within minutes; when a button is clicked, a response is expected instantaneously. So what we expect from institutions is informed by what we expect from each other and all the technologies that mediate our encounters.

In this changing context, there is emerging a culture of engagement - a renewed, sometimes abstract, emphasis on public engagement. This is partly a result of enhanced expectations for immediacy and responsiveness, and partly a clamoring for relevance at a time when trust in institutions is in severe decline. This culture of engagement suggests a shift in institutional thinking whereby institutions are responsible for building and maintaining relationships with individuals and groups through common tools of interaction, from face-to-face conversation to social media exchanges. Government, for example, is no longer given a free pass to be a faceless institution; it is now, along with other institutions such as churches and schools, expected to engage with people in a human readable way. Perhaps ironically, the more communication is mediated by new technologies, the more people demand human-scale relationships with their institutions.

But there are fewer opportunities for human encounter within civic systems as new technologies are pushing public institutions to more and more efficient means of facilitating, monitoring, and promoting interactions. Moments for relation, deliberation, and learning are sidelined for the certainty of big data analytics and proscriptive tools. The culture of engagement is programmed within the neoliberal fantasy space of civic technology. Borrowing from philosopher Bernard Suit's definition of games as highly inefficient systems, I propose a process of civic intervention called meaningful inefficiencies, wherein encounters within systems are designed as moments of play within rule-bound constraints. A meaningful inefficiency, I argue, is a strategic intervention into institutions where social interactions have become data points to be processed. It inserts the quality of play into technologically efficient systems and challenges the predictability of outputs promised by this new culture of engagement.

In this talk, I explore several case studies of meaningful inefficiencies, where strategically reimagining institutions as games and interactions as play, enable relation, deliberation and learning to emerge.

Bio:
Eric Gordon is an associate professor in the department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College where he is the founding director of the Engagement Lab. He is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Eric studies civic media and public engagement within the US and the developing world. He is specifically interested in the application of games and play in these contexts. He has served as an expert advisor for the UN Development Program, the International Red Cross / Red Crescent, the World Bank, as well as municipal governments throughout the United States. In addition to articles and chapters on games, digital media, urbanism and civic engagement, he is the author of two books: Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (Blackwell 2011, with Adriana de Souza e Silva) and The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google (Dartmouth 2010). His edited volume (with Paul Mihailidis) entitled Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice will be published by MIT Press in 2016. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

No video.

Speaker: Mark Braunstein

Date: 2016-03-03 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ballroom)

Abstract:
With Electronic Health Records (EHR) adoption now exceeding 75% of US hospitals and providers, attention has turned to the inability of these systems to share data for care coordination, patient engagement, research and other critical priorities. This lack of interoperability also often locks data away even from the clinicians who created it and their patients. Clinicians also often complain about usability and workflow/process issues with their EHRs.

Many feel the solution to all of these challenges will only come through API-based health data sharing like that commonly used in other industries. This is now a topic of serious discussion in Congress and even at the White House.

This talk will explore these challenges and the latest standards for API-based health data sharing. It will also showcase the latest in open standards-based health apps for providers and patients, including cutting edge work being done here at Georgia Tech.

Bio:
Mark Braunstein teaches health informatics as a graduate seminar in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and as an elective in the Online Masters of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program. His latest book, Practitioners Guide to Health Informatics, a guide to health informatics for physicians and other non-technical readers, was published in the spring of 2015. His text, Contemporary Health Informatics, was published in the spring of 2014. Health Informatics in the Cloud, a brief guide to health informatics for non-technical readers, was published in 2012. As Associate Director for Health Systems at the Institute for People and Technology he fosters interdisciplinary research and teaching directed at re-engineering the healthcare delivery system. At the Tennenbaum Institute he is involved in research in healthcare process mining. At the Interoperability & Integration Innovation Lab (I3L), he is involved in community and industry outreach projects with lab partners aimed at more facile adoption of HIT to improve the quality and efficiency of care delivery.

Speaker: Bob Kraut

Date: 2016-02-04 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ballroom)

Abstract:
Many people with serious diseases use online health groups to exchange social support. For these groups to be effective, members must both seek support and provide it, and the support they exchange must have some benefits. For the groups to be sustained, some members must continue to participate. This talk describes analysis of behavior in two large, online cancer communities examining how people get support and the impact of support on members' satisfaction, commitment and psychological well-being. We use machine learning techniques to automate content analysis of millions of messages, measuring the extent to which messages contain such support-related actions as seeking and providing informational and emotional support, asking questions, expressing empathy and self-disclosing personal thoughts and feeling. These variables are used in longitudinal regression analyses to predict the type of support people receive, their satisfaction with the exchanges and their commitment to the group. The research illustrates differences in the how informational and emotional support are produced and their effects on satisfaction and commitment.

Bio:
Dr. Robert E. Kraut is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science and Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. He has broad interests in the design and social impact of computing and has conducted empirical research on online communities, the social impact of the internet, the design of information technology for small-group intellectual work and related topics. He has a PhD in social psychology, and previously was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University and as a research scientist as Bell Laboratories and Bell Communications Research.

Speaker: Ashok Goel and the GT Watson+ Research Group

Date: 2016-01-28 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
GT Watson+ is a set of cognitive systems designed, developed and deployed at Georgia Tech on top of IBM's Watson cognitive system. It includes cognitive systems for question answering in support of biologically inspired design, ecological modeling, and education and training in artificial intelligence. GT Watson+ adds layers of semantic processing to Watson and explores the use of external data sources. For example, in the project on ecological modeling, it exploits Smithsonian Institution's Encyclopedia of Life, the world's largest database of biological species. In this team talk, we will present several instances of GT Watson+.

Bio:
Ashok Goel is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Interactive Computing and Director of the School's Design & Intelligence Laboratory. DILab's GT Watson+ group presently consists of Parul Awasthy, Jose Delgado, Ashok Goel, Lalith Polepeddi, Spencer Rugaber, Bradley Sheneman, Divya Vijayaraghavan, and Bryan Wiltgen.

Acknowledgements:
Watson is IBM's cognitive system for question answering (http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/). Encyclopedia of Life is Smithsonian Institution's database of biological species and other biodiversity information (www.eol.org). This research is supported by a Georgia Tech IDEAS pilot grant.

Speaker: Dave Fracchia

Date: 2016-01-21 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
I have had (and still have) a wonderful career. I was once asked by someone fresh out of school and looking to get into the digital media industry, what the keys were to my success. After a slight pause, I said: “Well, it takes a lot of hard work, perseverance, networking, know what you want and go for it….and a good bit of luck!” We laughed, she politely thanked me, and then, not liking silence, I launched into one of my stories of some amusing event that impacted my career. Then the conversation changed, and I saw the story's message resonate in a way that certainly made my “hard work” speech feel like bull dung. This prompted me to trace the steps through my career and the pivotal knowledge, people, and events that were responsible for it. And now you have to sit through my stories. But I heard there's food…

Bio:
Dave Fracchia is Acting Director and Professor of Professional Practice at the Centre for Digital Media and a digital media consultant. Prior to this he was the Studio Head and Vice President of Technology at Radical Entertainment, Vice President of Technology at Mainframe|Rainmaker Entertainment, Associate Professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, and Postdoctoral Associate / Lecturer in the Mathematics and Computer Science Departments at Yale University. Dave has authored 50+ journal and conference papers, and is credited in 35+ video games, direct-to-video movies, and television series. He is currently a member of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, the International Game Developers Association, and ACM SIGGRAPH.

Speaker: Keith McGreggor

Date: 2016-01-14 12:00:00

Location: TSRB 132 (Ball Room)

Abstract:
Everywhere one turns, it seems as if everyone is starting their own startup. What about you? Will you start a startup? Do you know how to begin?

Come learn how to build your startup using techniques of evidence-based entrepreneurship, and how the assembled resources of Georgia Tech, the Georgia Research Alliance, and the NSF can help.

Bio:
Keith McGreggor is the director of VentureLab, Georgia Tech's comprehensive center for technology commercialization that is open to all faculty, research staff, and students who want to form startups based upon their research. VentureLab transforms those innovations into startups by developing engaging business models, connecting researchers with experienced entrepreneurs, locating sources of early-stage financing, and preparing these new companies for global markets. With more than 140 active startups based on Georgia Tech's technology, VentureLab has been consistently ranked as one of North America's top ten university-based incubators for the last several years.

McGreggor is a Professor of the Practice in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where his research explores artificial intelligence, visual reasoning, fractal representations, and cognitive systems. He is the Associate Director of the GVU Center, which inspires and enables interdisciplinary research in people-centered computing technology, creating new innovations for society. McGreggor is a lead instructor for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, the head of the Georgia Tech I-Corps node, and is an internationally recognized leader in entrepreneurship education.

McGreggor has been an entrepreneur for the last three decades. His first company, Artificial Intelligence Atlanta, was the first AI company in the southeast, which led to a gig in robotics for Lockheed. He has been a founder or co-founder of six software companies and holds three core patents in computer graphics. McGreggor wrote and shipped the first 3D program and first color paint program for the Macintosh. He developed the color architecture for the Macintosh, wrote substantial portions of the graphics system, and managed the graphics group at Apple Computer in Cupertino. A stint as co-founder of an internet company in the mid 1990s led to McGreggor becoming a director of engineering at Yahoo in 1999.

McGreggor holds a BS, MS, and PhD in computer science from Georgia Tech.