Monthly Archives: December 2020

What does the future of job training look like for manufacturing? With current innovations in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), it should look nothing like today’s inefficient and expensive processes based on paper pamphlets and in-person training from experts.

“The existing standard is the worst educational experience that I’ve ever seen,” says Kylie Peppler, a professor of informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). Peppler is part of a multi-organizational team, led by Professor Karthik Ramani of Purdue University, that aims to greatly improve manufacturing workforce education with Skill-XR, a new training platform that leverages AR, VR and mixed reality (XR) applications.

Rainforest Scully-Blaker, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Informatics, was awarded a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in Canada. The $40,000 award will fund the next two years of his doctorate, supporting his research into the cultural, political and economic affordances of gameplay.

On Dec. 16, 2020, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) introduced 64 new Distinguished Members, selected by their peers for outstanding scientific contributions that “propel the digital age.” Two faculty members from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) are among the 2020 inductees: Gillian Hayes and Sharad Mehrotra.

Earlier this year, as the global pandemic started shutting down much of the world, medical researchers quickly moved to better understand the virus and work on a vaccine. Researchers from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) took a different approach. As Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sameer Singh explains, “work started as an outlet for the students to positively contribute to the fight against COVID-19 the one way we know how — by throwing machine learning at it!”