Gregory D. Abowd, Regents’ Professor and J.Z. Liang Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia
Tech, has had a profound impact in computing research over his career. In 2018, his 30th PhD student graduated, marking a major academic milestone for Abowd. His academic family extends even further with more than 100 students who have been advised by his graduates at some of the world’s top universities.
Read the full story at the Georgia Institute of Technology website.
Informatics Professors Sam Malek and Joshua Garcia recently started working on a three-year $1.66 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant, “Constructing a Community-Wide Software Architecture Infrastructure,” is a collaborative project involving faculty from UCI, the University of Southern California and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Malek and Garcia will lead the UCI team, comprised of graduate student researchers working out of the Institute for Software Research (ISR).
A space-exploring robot crashes on a distant planet. In order to gather the pieces of its damaged space ship, it needs to build emotional rapport with the local alien inhabitants. The aliens speak a different language but their facial expressions are remarkably human-like.
Reactions on text threads and social media aren’t that different from smiling or nodding while someone is talking. “They are niceties that express that we’re listening, signal interest, and keep the conversation going,” says Paul Dourish, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine.
Read the full story at Wired.
Felienne interviews Marian Petre & André van der Hoek on their book Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think. We talk about the software design process, which Petre & van der Hoek en discuss about in their book too. While there are a lot of books about software design, their books address designers rather than the design process itself. What do great designers do differently? Petre and van der Hoek distilled 66 insights about design from scientific research, such as ‘experts keep it simple’ and ‘experts try the opposite’. We talk about how to get better at designing, and how to work together on a design as a team of developers.
Listen to the interview at Software Engineering Radio.
Being a student is tough. On top of trying to succeed academically, one has to navigate the social aspect of making friends, interacting with others, and figuring out one’s identity. Now, imagine doing all that while being homebound. UC Irvine Informatics Professor Emeritus Judy Olson and NIH-funded Postdoctoral Fellow Veronica Newhart can help. They use groundbreaking technology – telepresence robots – to help students with chronic illnesses go from homebound to school bound.
Read the full story at UC IT Blog.
A space-exploring robot crashes on a distant planet. In order to gather the pieces of its damaged spaceship, it needs to build emotional rapport with the local alien inhabitants. The aliens speak a different language but their facial expressions are remarkably humanlike.
This fantastical scenario is the premise of a video game developed for middle schoolers by University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers to study whether video games can boost kids’ empathy, and to understand how learning such skills can change neural connections in the brain.
Read the full story at the University of Wisconsin-Madison website.
Since 2014, the Lasting Impact Award has been awarded annually at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). It recognizes a paper published at the CSCW conference at least 10 years prior that has been extremely influential. This year’s award goes to “Interaction and Outeraction: Instant Messaging in Action,” a paper written in 2000 by Informatics Professor Bonnie Nardi, UC Santa Cruz Professor Steve Whittaker and former Informatics Ph.D. student Erin Bradner, now the director of robotics at Autodesk.
An interview with Rosalva Gallardo, manager of privacy programs for the Google Cloud: In 1998, while studying engineering in Lima, Rosalva dreamed of working in Silicon Valley. In 2006, she got a scholarship that allowed her to earn a doctorate in California (at UCI), which led to her working at Intel before being hired last year by Google.
Read the article at El Comercio.
Nonetheless, despite all the different paths, the conference felt like one community, something conference organizer Constance Steinkuehler, professor of education and game-based learning at the University of California–Irvine, emphasized on a panel. She said the conference was about building relationships. … Another conference organizer, Kurt Squire, Professor at The University of California, Irvine, member of the Connected Learning Laboratory, commented that the conference was about people coming together on equal footing to solve problems.
Read the full story at Discover.