As such, some students at the University of California are concerned that — despite reassurances to the contrary — their institution’s new financial relationship with Thoma Bravo will mean their personal data can be sold or otherwise misused. “It appears that the UC may be invested — however indirectly — in the monetization of data collected from their own students,” Mustafa Hussain, a PhD candidate in Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, told Salon in a statement.
Gloria Mark, a digital distraction expert and professor at the University of California, Irvine found that an average office worker gets only 11 minutes between interruptions, and that it takes 25 minutes for us to return to what we were doing before the interruption.
If getting the whole team on the same schedule isn’t feasible, remote workers should still try to make regular appearances at the office. “Ideally you should go into work once a week if you are going to be at home,” said Judith Olson, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine.
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, which aims to “bring together the sharpest, most thoughtful people from around the globe to tackle the biggest challenges presented by the Internet,” recently announced its incoming cohort. Joining BKC as an affiliate for the 2020-2021 academic year is informatics Ph.D. candidate Phoebe Chua, who was thrilled to get the news.
To gain a better understanding of the impacts of COVID-19, Professor Gloria Mark of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) is turning to Twitter. In particular, she and her colleague, Computer Science Professor Chen Li, have teamed up with Suellen Hopfer from UCI’s School of Public Health on a new NSF-funded grant, “Leveraging Twitter Data for Real-time Public Health Responses to Coronavirus: Identifying Affective Desensitization, Loneliness and Depression, and Trust.” Working with ICS students Qiushi Bai, Ted Grover and Yicong Huang, along with public health students Emilia Fields and Magdalen Ramirez, the researchers aim to leverage the immediacy of Twitter data to provide signals in real time of citizen responses to the pandemic.
History is a story told by the victors: until it’s not. The story landscape is changing. There is more space in the narrative world for stories both by and about people with diverse experiences. Join our lively panel debate to see how that re-storying is emerging; in academic institutions, in live performance, in digital experiences, and in a proliferation of creative tools that empower people to tell their stories.
Informatics Professors Stacy Branham and Iftekhar Ahmed are among 10 faculty members nationwide selected by Teach Access to receive its 2020-2021 Teach Access Curriculum Development Awards of $5,000 each. The awards will be used to develop modules, presentations, exercises or curriculum enhancements or changes that introduce the fundamental concepts and skills of accessible design and development in existing, classroom-based courses. Teach Access hopes that the teaching of these concepts will help close the accessible technology skills gap that the Partnership on Employment & Accessible Technology (PEAT) identified in 2018. According to Teach Access, they selected applicants who would have the largest impact, had the strongest outreach plans, were the most sustainable, and had clearly laid out evaluation plans. The organization is a collaboration of leading educational institutions, the technology industry and advocates for people with disabilities whose mission is to make the fundamentals of digital accessibility, including design principles and best practices, a larger part of undergraduate education.
With the emergence of the global pandemic, UCI’s Office of Inclusive Excellence (OIE) reached out to the campus community with a call for proposals, urging researchers to use COVID-19 as “a lens through which to explore fault lines of inequities.” The call, part of OIE’s Confronting Extremism program, led to more than $500,000 in funding spread across 13 individual and team faculty projects, including a project from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), “Distance Based Support for HBCU and HSI Students.”
For over two decades Prof Judith Olson, Bren professor of information and computer sciences at the University of California Irvine, has been looking at how teams that are not co-located function. Her “collaborator” on the research has been her husband, psychologist Gary Olson, and they are the co-authors of Working Together Apart, which investigates the factors that differentiate successful from unsuccessful distributed collaborations. (This book also contains tips for those who are part of distributed teams and those who are managing them).
