Animation Career Review (ACR) has released its 2020 Game Design School Rankings, and UCI is ranked fourth best for game design in California, fifth best on the West Coast, fifth best (top 8%) among U.S. public schools and colleges, and 13th best (top 9%) in the nation. UCI also remained ranked ninth best in the nation among schools offering a games-related B.S. degree program.
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Twitch announced its Research Fellows for 2020, and Informatics Ph.D. candidate Amanda Cullen was one of just five students selected. Fellowship recipients each receive a $10,000 award from the livestreaming company, as well as a full-time paid internship at its headquarters in San Francisco.
Continue readingJazette Johnson, a recipient of the fellowship who is a PhD student at University of California, Irvine, is hoping to improve the mental, emotional, and social health of people with dementia. Johnson’s research seeks to understand how to better support people with dementia and their caregivers through the design of virtual support technologies. “This fellowship will not only ease the financial burden that sometimes comes with being in graduate schools, but it will also give me the opportunity to solely focus on the research that has interested me for years,” Johnson says.
Read the full story at the Microsoft Research Blog.
Can a game about Hall of Fame football players encourage self-reflection in teens? Can a game-design competition built around artifacts in a museum lead to increased youth civic engagement? These are questions UCI’s Connected Learning Lab (CLL) is exploring in two new multiorganizational, multidisciplinary projects aimed at supporting youth development and community engagement through game-based programs.
Continue readingLast month, Informatics Professor Geoffrey Bowker attended a unique conference in Paris called “A Book Defying Classification: Sorting Things Out’s Legacy, 20 Years After.” The event, held Dec. 19, 2019, celebrated Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences, a book coauthored by Bowker and the late Susan Leigh Star in 1999.
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On Feb. 7, 2020, the Department of Informatics is partnering with UCI School of Law in hosting Ruha Benjamin, associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University. This blending of multidisciplinary perspectives is at the heart of Benjamin’s research into the social dimensions of science, medicine and technology and the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, and knowledge and power. Her talk, “A New Jim Code? Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life,” will explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity as she discusses biased bots and altruistic algorithms, challenging participants to more closely examine their own technology designs.
Continue reading“Screen time is a popular carry-over measure from the context of a TV-centered era, developed around health and parenting concerns,” says Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist who studies technology use at the University of California. Even the American Association of Pediatrics, which first popularized the term, has moved away from screen time as a core measure, she says.
Read the full story at MIT Technology Review.
When André van der Hoek, chair of the Department of Informatics, received an email from the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins about its Fellows Program, he sent out his own email, notifying students of this opportunity to work with Silicon Valley companies. “Andre sent an email to the informatics department encouraging students to apply to the KP fellowship,” recalls Emma Anderson, a fourth-year informatics student. Anderson applied and will now be joining Zumper, an apartment rental startup, as a KP Fellow.
Continue readingI will never forget the excitement of attending the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC), the largest gathering of women in computing, for the first time in 2014. While I wasn’t sure what to expect, I never anticipated the energy and inspiration I felt, nor the influence that GHC would have on me lasting far beyond those incredible days at the conference.
Read the full story at Medium.