Faculty candidates speak at SI
The School of Information interviewed the following individuals for faculty positions during the winter semester. Their presentations were open to all. You can view detailed descriptions of the ICT4D and Digital Environments positions. SI faculty, staff, and doctoral students may view videos of each presentation on the SI intranet.
Joyojeet Pal
Ph.D.: University of California-Berkeley
“ICTD in Motion: Computers and Rural Schools in India”
ICT4D position
4 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 21
Ehrlicher Room, 411 West Hall
(videocast to 1202 SI North)
Pal is a National Science Foundation computing innovation fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his doctorate in city and regional planning at the University of California-Berkeley in December 2008, where his dissertation research examined technology and social inclusion in India and Brazil. Within design, his interest is primarily in computer-sharing behavior among children. In the broader field of technology and development, his interest is in the perception of technology as an artifact of modernity and aspiration.
The speaker provided the following abstract of his talk:
Since the early 2000s, there has been a rapid increase in investment on computer-aided learning in schools throughout the world, including in rural India where schools are frequently short of basic resources. This presentation discusses four years of research in India, starting with an examination of the functioning of computer classes in rural schools and the perceptions of computers among adults and children alike. These perceptions relate to a range of issues of immediate consequence in the village ecosystem, from parents’ aspirations for their children and their disposition to invest in technology to children’s computer sharing behavior in class. In conclusion, Pal will discuss the design-related outcomes of this research: the development of shared computing applications for children’s learning material.
Susan Wyche
Georgia Tech
“Extraordinary Computing: Investigating Religion, ICT Use and Design”
ICT4D position
Noon Wednesday, Jan. 27
Atkins Room, 1202 SI North (videocast to 3076 West Hall)
Wyche is a human-centered computing doctoral candidate in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research investigates how technology can support a more diverse range of activities than it currently does and how computing use varies among different cultural groups. In her dissertation, she uses religion as a lens to investigate technology use in different cultures. To do this she has conducted design-oriented fieldwork in the U.S., Kenya, and Brazil. Prior to returning to school, she worked as a professional industrial designer in the housewares industry. She has also worked as a design researcher for Intel’s
User-Centered Design Group, Microsoft Research, and S.C. Johnson, Inc. Wyche has a master’s degree from Cornell University and an undergraduate degree in industrial design and history from Carnegie Mellon University.
The speaker provided the following abstract of her talk:
She will highlight three examples of research that illustrate “extraordinary computing,” or systems that promote and honor the special value accorded to some aspects of life. First, she will describe an empirical study investigating how Protestant Christians in the U.S. use computing to support their religious activities. Secondly she will describe a similar study conducted in Nairobi, Kenya, to demonstrate how extraordinary computing can manifest in new technologies for users in developing countries. She will then present Sun Dial, a commercially available mobile phone application that supports salah — or the obligatory prayers practicing Muslims perform five times a day — and present findings from a real-world deployment of the system. Finally, she will describe how this research is a starting point for establishing a research agenda in information and communication technology for development.
Winter Mason
Indiana University (Ph.D. ’07)
“Inferring Social Networks from Interpersonal Communication”
Open position
Noon Wednesday, Feb. 3
Atkins Room, 1202 SI North
Mason received his doctorate from Indiana University in cognitive science and social psychology. He has been a post-doctoral research fellow at Yahoo! Research in New York from 2007-10. His research is focused on the bridge between individual psychology and group behavior, especially with respect to social influence, and uses methods and theories from social network analysis. He is also interested in group behavior in new technologies such as peer production sites and social media sites.
The speaker provided the following abstract of his talk:
In order to construct and study large social networks from communication data, one must infer unobserved ties (e.g. i is connected to j ) from observed communication events (e.g. i emails j ). Often overlooked, however, is the impact this tie definition has on the corresponding network, and in turn the relevance of the inferred network to the research question of
interest. We studied the problem of network inference and relevance for two email data sets of different size and origin. In each case, we generated a family of networks parameterized by a threshold condition on the frequency of emails exchanged between pairs of individuals. After demonstrating that different choices of the threshold correspond to dramatically different network structures, we then defined the relevance of these networks with respect to a series of prediction tasks that depend on various network
features. In general, we find: a) that prediction accuracy is maximized over a non-trivial range of thresholds; b) that for any prediction task, choosing the optimal value of the threshold yields a sizable (30%) boost in accuracy over naive choices; and c) that the optimal threshold value appears to be (somewhat surprisingly) consistent across data sets and prediction tasks.
Ryan Shaw
University of California-Berkeley
“Conceptualizing the Past: Historical Events and Knowledge Organization”
Digital Environments position
Noon Wednesday, Feb. 10
Ehrlicher Room, 411 West Hall
Shaw is a student in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley, pursuing a doctoral degree in information management and systems with a designated emphasis in new media. After studying symbolic systems at Stanford as an undergraduate, he worked for five years in Tokyo as a software developer before returning to graduate school in 2003. From 2005-07. he worked at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, where he invented social media and mobile media technology that enabled people to create, describe, find, share, and remix media on the Web. He is working with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative to develop new kinds of digital tools for humanities scholars. He has also been involved in a number of new media arts projects, most recently developing the software for The Builders Association’s production, Continuous City.
The speaker provided the following abstract of his talk:
We understand the past in two ways: through the study and interpretation of documents that have survived into the present from the past, and through texts that exhibit these interpretations and represent the past. Both ways of understanding necessarily involve knowledge organization systems. These systems codify the concepts and relationships through which the past is made intelligible. Of particular importance are those concepts that make historical change intelligible: periods and events. Yet historical periods and events have received relatively little attention from designers of knowledge organization systems. As a result, existing systems are rooted in impoverished theories of the historical past. Drawing on his dissertation work, Shaw will argue that critical theories of history can clarify and guide the design of new systems for historical knowledge organization. Looking forward, he will frame this work as a point of departure for a research program in which humanistic inquiry into the production of meaning informs the design of digital tools and environments.
Janet Vertesi
Cornell University (Ph.D. ’09)
“‘Seeing like a Rover’: Visualization, Embodiment and Organization on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission”
Digital Environments position
Noon Wednesday, Feb. 17
Atkins Room, 1202 SI North
(videocast to Connector Conference Room at West Hall)
The speaker provided the following abstract of her talk:
Working with their “robotic geologists,” Spirit and Opportunity, a distributed team of scientists and engineers rely on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers to do science on another planet. But work with the Rovers requires “learning to see like a Rover,” a term encompassing both the visualization strategies that support Rover planning, and enacting the Rovers’ activities on Mars. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork behind the scenes with the Mars Rover mission, I show how this widespread adoption of robotic attributes both affirms the social structure and decision-making practices of the distributed team, and draws analytical attention to the organizational context of complex sociotechnical systems such as unmanned spacecraft.
Nama Budhathoki
University of Illinois
“GeoWiki: Contributors’ Characteristics and Motivations”
ICT4D position
12:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 24
Atkins Room, 1202 SI North
Budhathoki is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has an undergraduate degree in computer science and a master’s degree in geographic information science. Before coming to his doctoral program, he worked for six years in the Ministry of Land Reform and Management in Nepal where he contributed to the design and implementation of land information systems in five districts. During the same period, he worked as a senior GIS consultant in World Distribution Nepal, a leading IT company, and as a visiting faculty member in Kantipur City College. He also served as a member of the metadata and standardization committees for the development of National Geographic Information Infrastructure in Nepal. Budhathoki’s work practice and dissertation research follow multidisciplinary paths. For the Ph.D. dissertation, he is studying users’ motivations to contribute geographic information in GeoWiki. His research interests lie at the intersection of information science, social science, and geographic information science.
The speaker provided the following abstract of his talk:
Web 2.0 has created an enabling infrastructure for people to share their everyday experiences, including those with spatial aspects. An increasing number of people are using Google Maps, Google Earth, OpenStreetMap, Yahoo! Map, Microsoft Virtual Earth and other tools to create and share geographic information on the web. Following phases of desktop GIS, then Internet GIS, this latest phase involves volunteered geographic information (VGI) or GeoWiki. Many people now turn to GeoWiki for valuable, user-contributed geographic information. However, little is known about who the contributors are and why they invest their effort to contribute geographic information in GeoWiki. This presentation addresses these questions based on a case study of OpenStreetMap. Knowledge about motivations in GeoWiki supplements work on motivations in text-based systems to increase our understanding of the phenomenon of social production of knowledge. I will conclude the presentation by discussing the implications of this emerging phenomenon in the context of developing countries and setting an initial research agenda.
Eric Gilbert
University of Illinois
“Computing Tie Strength”
Open position
Noon Wednesday, March 10
Atkins Room, 1202 SI North (videocast to Culliton Conference Room in West Hall)
Gilbert is a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Illinois. His research is in social computing, but might be better described as computer science inspired by sociology. He chose it because he found people and their social contexts more interesting than computers alone. His research has examined tie strength, product reviewers, rural social media use, and argumentation in blog comments. Gilbert received the best paper award three times from ACM SIGCHI, and he holds the Google Fellowship in Social Computing.
The speaker provided the following abstract of his talk:
Relationships are the heart of social media: they make it social. Yet, from a computational standpoint, we understand very little, if anything, about the relationships expressed there. Within Facebook, for instance, what makes two people close? Is it mostly a function of how long they’ve been friends? How often they talk? What they say? Or the people they mutually know? Sociologists refer to the strength of a relationship as tie strength, the difference between a best friend and a distant colleague. I will present my work on modeling tie strength computationally, and how it can act as a tool in both design and analysis. Specifically, I’ll present We Meddle, a Twitter application I built that puts tie strength at the heart of its design. We Meddle explores both the generalizability and design utility of computational tie strength. Finally, I’ll present a research agenda comprising exciting problems facing social computing, such as how ultra-successful communities can guide new contributions by learning from old ones.
Nicholas Diakopoulos
“Computational Journalism: Commenting on the News”
Digital Environments position
Noon, Friday, March 12
Ehrlicher Room, 411 West Hall (videocast to 3244 SI North)
Diakopoulos is a computing innovation fellow at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. He received his doctorate in computer science from the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests span human-computer interaction, information visualization, and multimedia content analysis with
themes from media, including journalism, collaborative authorship and annotation, and games.
The speaker provided the following abstract of his talk:
What is the impact that computation can and will have on the changing landscape of news production and consumption? In this talk I will introduce computational journalism as the application of computing to the processes of journalism, including information gathering, organization and sensemaking, communication and presentation, and dissemination and public interaction with news information, all while upholding values of journalism such as balance, accuracy, and objectivity. I will then focus on my recent work related to public interaction with news information. In particular I will present (1) the development of visual and analytic tools to understand the aggregate commenting activity around televised news events such as debates or speeches, and (2) the large scale investigation of barriers to quality discussion in a specific online newspaper commenting system from both newsroom and community perspectives. These studies suggest opportunities for computing to enhance both the ability of journalists to leverage public response to news events, as well as for the public to have more meaningful experiences when participating in online news comments.
Fred Stutzman
Doctoral Candidate, University of North Carolina
“Disclosure, Privacy, and Support: An Integrative Perspective on Social Media”
Digital Environments position
4 p.m. Thursday, March 18
1202 SI North
(videocast to Culliton Conference Room, West Hall)
Stutzman is a doctoral candidate studying social media at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science. His dissertation explores the supportive role social network sites play during a life transition. Additionally, he studies the privacy implications of identity management in digitally mediated spaces. Stutzman is the co-founder of ClaimID.com, a social web identity management system, and the designer of Freedom, a productivity application. He has advised or worked with such organizations as the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media Competition, and the presidential campaigns of Wesley Clark, John Kerry, and, as he says, “a certain North Carolina senator we won’t mention.” His work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Wired Magazine, on National Public Radio, and in other venues.
The speaker provided the following abstract of his talk:
As an increasingly diverse population adopts social media, researchers and designers seek to understand and enhance the beneficial aspects of participation. However, the shifting contexts of digitally mediated spaces present a challenge: social media users must feel comfortable participating and disclosing to draw value from the systems. To learn from and inform the design of supportive online spaces, I adopt an integrative approach, studying the interaction of disclosure, privacy, and support in social network sites. In this talk, I draw on a research lifecycle that explores the context of online participation through mixed-methods research and the design of large-scale system such as ClaimID.com. With this work as backdrop, I then describe an interdisciplinary research agenda exploring supportive online participation. Particularly, I am interested in the research and design of systems that facilitate health interventions, foster civic participation, and support individuals during a life transition.
Serge Egelman
Ph.D.: Carnegie Mellon University
“Usable Security Lessons for Creating Effective Browser Warnings”
Open position
Noon Wednesday, March 24
1202 SI North
(videocast to Culliton Conference Room, West Hall)
Egelman is a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, working on access control mechanisms that minimize human error. He also dabbles in behavioral economics in order to better understand why people make poor security choices. He holds a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. His main research area is on usable privacy and security, which has included work on phishing detection, authentication systems, online privacy, user account models, and online shopping behaviors. He was a summer intern at Xerox PARC in 2006, as well as an intern at Microsoft Research twice during 2008. While at Microsoft, he helped the Internet Explorer team redesign the IE8 phishing warning based on the results of his dissertation research.
The speaker provided the following abstract of his talk:
In a world where making an incorrect online trust decision can mean the difference between checking your account balance and transferring it to criminals, Internet users need effective security warnings to help them identify risky situations. In a perfect world, software could automatically detect all security threats and then block access to high
risk Web sites. Because there are many threats that we cannot detect with 100 percent accuracy and false positives are all too frequent, Web browser vendors generally opt to warn users about security threats. In this talk I cover the common pitfalls of Web browser security warnings and draw parallels with warnings in the physical world. I describe the results of laboratory phishing studies I performed in order to examine users’ mental models, risk perceptions, and comprehension of current security warnings. Finally, I show how I used these findings to design and test a more usable SSL warning that better conveys risk and uses context to minimize habituation effects.
Divya Ramachandran
University of California-Berkeley
“Designing Mobile Persuasive Technologies for Rural Health Promotion”
ICT4D position
Noon Monday, April 5
Ehrlicher Room, 411 West Hall (videocast to 3244 SI North)
Ramachandran is a doctoral candidate at the Berkeley Institute of Design and the Computer Science Department of the University of California-Berkeley. She works in the area of human-computer interaction, with a special focus on international development. She has worked on a number of projects in the fields of rural communication, education and health. Her dissertation examines the use of mobile, persuasive technologies for
maternal health promotion. For this work, she conducted qualitative research, iterative prototype design, and evaluation over three years in rural India. Within the broader ICTD space, she is interested in how ICTs can be designed to motivate local change agents to achieve development outcomes. She holds a bachelor¹s degree in computer engineering from the University of Utah.
The speaker provided the following abstract of her talk:
Explore posts in the same categories: Faculty, Guest speakersSocial, cultural, and political factors often pose barriers to achieving the intended outcomes of rural health interventions. In this talk, Ramachandran discusses the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to address these barriers and strengthen local health initiatives. Rather than view ICT solely as a vehicle for information transfer, she instead takes a human-centered approach to understand how technology can change attitudes, behaviors and practices. She presents three years of field research studying gaps in the maternal health care system in rural India, and designing persuasive mobile applications to build the capacity and motivation of rural health workers. Based on her experiences, she describes her agenda for future ICTD research focusing on in-depth ethnographic study, human-centered theories of behavior, and in-context evaluation of development outcomes.
