Monthly Archives: April 2022

On April 21, 2022, UCI’s Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI) recognized faculty, instructors and teaching assistants at its annual Celebration of Teaching event. This year, three faculty members from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) were recognized: 

• Stacy Branham received the Digital Accessibility Innovator Award;
• Jennifer Wong-Ma was selected as a Dean’s Honoree for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching; and
• Roderic Crooks received an Inclusive Excellence Teaching Award.

What if, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, just as you’re searching online for a local bar, an ad pops up that says, “Help prevent the spread of the virus by staying home!” Might that ad affect your plans? And would tracking individual-level mobility data allow public health officials to gauge whether such ads were actually encouraging people to stay home?

These are questions Informatics Professor Sean Young helped address in a recent study. Young, who has a joint appointment between UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) and the School of Medicine (SOM), collaborated on the study with Renee R. Garett of ElevateU and with Ph.D. student Jiannan Yang and Professor Qingpeng Zhang of City University of Hong. Their findings are available in an open access version of the article, “An online advertising intervention to increase adherence to stay-at-home-orders during the COVID-19 pandemic: An efficacy trial monitoring individual-level mobility data,” which will appear in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation.