Category Archives: Faculty
Helping People Use Data
Lecturer Matthew Bietz took a roundabout path to studying human computer interaction. His undergraduate degree is in cello performance and English, and he has a master’s in musicology. Thinking he would be a music librarian, he attended the School of Information at the University of Michigan to get a library degree. Instead, he earned a doctorate degree in HCI. Bietz now teaches courses on HCI and organizational information systems, including many project courses. “While I changed my major, the interest has always remained the same,” he says. “It’s about helping people find and use information.”
Building Empathy
“My teaching philosophy flows from trying to get students to think about the people at the other end of the systems they’re designing,” says Bietz. “So even as we’re deep in the weeds about what JavaScript function or mobile app framework you need, it’s about building empathy and understanding who’s on the other end of these systems.” He adds that this requires diversity in design. “We’re building a point of view into the technology, so it’s really important that we hear those different views,” he says. “We can’t do that if we don’t have a diverse and open space for creating that technology.”
Understanding Ethics
Bietz stresses that connected to empathy is ethics. “It’s not like a proof or a function, where it either runs or doesn’t, where it’s ethical or not,” he explains. “It’s about a process of understanding how we respect each other and balance the potential risks of the things we’re building with the benefits.” His work on Pervasive Data Ethics (PERVADE) considers how to adapt and adopt ethical codes for computational research. “Billions of people around the world are going to touch the thing that we design,” he says. “The scale means that little mistakes can have really big consequences.”
Communication & Collaboration
Professor Madhu Reddy studies the challenges of using health information technology in clinical settings. “Technologies such as the electronic health record (EHR) are not designed and implemented to support effective communication in these information-rich, complex and highly collaborative environments,” he says, “so users are forced to develop workarounds.” To understand and address these challenges, Professor Reddy’s research examines how clinical staff work with each other and how the EHR supports their collaboration. For instance, he was involved in the development of R-CAST-MED, an agent-based collaborative decision support system for clinical teams.
Tools for Mental Health
Professor Reddy is also interested in improving the delivery of mental health services. “There simply are not enough mental health service providers in the country,” he says. “Digital mental health tools can play a role in helping close this gap, but there have been few, if any, successful large-scale implementations of these tools in healthcare organizations.” Professor Reddy is working to better understand and address the organizational and design challenges related to digital mental health applications as he finds ways to integrate these tools into the healthcare system to improve patient access.
Individual Engagement
Conducting a series of studies of individuals who live with depression, Professor Reddy has started to identify the different approaches that individuals use to monitor depression and how self-management tools can best support these approaches. “We need to design mental health tools that reflect users’ actual needs and goals,” he explains. While most users engage with mobile applications in brief segments, many mental health tools require a much longer engagement period to be effective. Consequently, striking the balance between how users want to engage with mobile applications and what is necessary to deliver effective support is an important challenge. “I’m working on designing and implementing digital mental health interventions that better integrate clinical goals and user preferences.”
Inclusive by Design
Professor Anne Marie Piper researches human-computer interaction and accessible computing, focusing on equitable and inclusive digital experiences for people of all ages and abilities. Much of her work involves building and studying new technologies for individuals with disabilities and older adults. “Frequently, accessibility is a post-hoc adaptation instead of being part of the design from the beginning,” says Piper. By designing for accessibility from the ground up, she creates more inclusive technologies that support collaborative work among ability-diverse teams of professionals and academics.
Tools for Creativity
One project of interest for Professor Piper involves designing new tools that help people with disabilities express their creativity and produce content. “Accessibility is often about providing access to content created by sighted folks,” she says, “rather than about developing tools to help artists, writers, and audio professionals with vision impairments create their own content.” Working with teams of writers who are blind, she has explored how the teams perform collaborative writing and how technology can augment existing workflows to create more equitable practices. She has also worked with a community of weavers who are visually impaired, designing technology based on the sounds of the looms.
Technology for Change
Accessible content production tools challenge norms about who is a content producer. “This speaks to the broader societal importance of addressing employment and education gaps for people with disabilities,” says Professor Piper. A lack of accessible tools can contribute to these gaps, but it’s only part of the challenge. “If you are the only blind person on your team or in your graduate student program,” she explains, “day-to-day challenges with technology are compounded by societal expectations of productivity and power dynamics in those teams.” She views technology design as a way of calling attention to ableism and ageism and advocating for societal change.
Designing for Change
Through human-centered design, Professor Elena Agapie builds tools that empower people to incorporate healthy behaviors into their lives. While there has been a huge increase in technology to support health, such technology doesn’t always balance guidelines from health professionals with users’ individual needs. “I design tools that incorporate evidence-driven interventions from health and behavioral sciences to help people reach and maintain their goals,” says Professor Agapie. For example, she is researching how tools can help patients better integrate into their daily life techniques discussed during a weekly therapy session.
Accessing Expertise
Adopting positive behaviors is a complex process. “It can be very difficult to do on your own,” notes Professor Agapie. So, people reach out to professionals, such as a fitness instructor or mental health provider, as well as to peers who have experience incorporating change into their everyday life. Yet professionals can be expensive or unavailable, and friends might be reluctant to share sensitive experiences. In response, Professor Agapie designs social computing systems that leverage the expertise of different people. For example, she developed a web-based system that helps users plan exercise routines using advice from crowd members informed by expert insights. “With this tool, the advice of crowd members was comparable to experts in several dimensions.”
Tailored Interactions
Professor Agapie also explores how patient information and support needs vary, designing technology that can better support different patients. For example, she has studied how using a conversational agent in a hospital emergency room in place of paper-based forms could help patients with low health literacy or language barriers more easily engage with content about social services. Her work suggests such patients find the conversational agents understandable and engaging. “Understanding the context and background of the user is important in designing technology that fits with their needs.”
Digital Behavior Change
“Why don’t people do things that they know are good for them?” Professor Sean Young, trained as a behavioral and social psychologist, asked this when moving into medicine to research HIV prevention and other health topics. He learned that not only is stigma part of the problem but that technology offers a way to overcome it. “I applied insights from psychology to online behavior change interventions and saw we could change social norms.” Professor Young uses this approach to transform time-consuming and expensive community-based interventions into online variants that more efficiently reach the masses.
Detecting Problems Early
As executive director of the University of California Institute for Prediction Technology (UCIPT), Professor Young is also leveraging social and behavioral data to detect real-world problems. “By analyzing people’s behaviors, we can quickly detect and address problems that might arise from these behaviors,” he says. “For instance, the counties where a lot of people are talking or searching online about behaviors that put them at risk for HIV or opioid overdose are the same counties with higher rates of these issues one year later.” Working with public health officials, he is now developing tools that mine social data to identify potential areas of disease outbreak, crime, and poverty.
Hackathon Help
Professor Young aims to create maps and tools that let public officials identify where to apply interventions, and his citizen-driven approach taps into hackathons for help. Collaborating with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, he organized UCIPT’s Opioid Hackathon at UCI, which produced more than 20 potential software and data-based prototypes in 24 hours. “Normally, the hackathon is where it ends: people return to school or work the next day.” He is extending the reach of hackathons through follow-up activities that keep participants engaged with each other and with researchers to further develop the solutions.
Materialized Learning
With a background in art, Professor Kylie Peppler brings a unique perspective to designing toolkits for complex learning, viewing hands-on creativity as foundational to STEM education. “As we start to pull the crafts out of K-12 education, we weaken embodied understanding into just a flattened space with abstract thinking only,” says Peppler, whose research shows just the opposite is needed. So, in teaching computational thinking, she uses everything from Lego robotics to e-textiles to paper circuits to “materialize” topics such as systems thinking or theories of complexity.
Stitching Circuits
Professor Peppler is also using physical materials to diversify STEM participation, designing toolkits that aim to attract more women and minorities to the field. “The kits that we use shape not only the learning opportunities but also who participates in the field,” she says. “For example, we’ve been looking at traditional female crafts like crochet and knitting, weaving, and the Jacquard loom, and how careful, orchestrated engagement with these crafts can promote algorithmic learning about really advanced mathematics.” Peppler’s studies show that kits for sewing and stitching circuits promote better learning about electric circuits than traditional materials used in classrooms.
Working Smarter
Extending her research into the workplace, Professor Peppler asserts that when it comes to education, “I’ll go not only as young as I can but also as old, because a lot of these things also have implications for workplace learning and ongoing education for adults.” Partnering with a variety of employers, including Boeing, she is researching a platform for simulating interactions between workers, robots and machines in future factories to improve agility and productivity. According to Peppler, instead of displacing workers, technology can “make workers smarter and give them the information they need to create things.”
Rebuilding Software
Professor Joshua Garcia borrows a page from the book of building design in using architecture as a lens to address software evolution. “A building’s architecture is essential to its shape and functioning. Similarly, every piece of software has an architecture that must be designed right for it to last and gracefully absorb future changes,” he observes. Identifying how and why software breaks down at the architectural level, Professor Garcia uses this understanding to design techniques and associated tools for restructuring software architectures so it becomes easier to add new features and fix bugs.
Exposing Vulnerabilities
Software analysis and testing is another area of interest for Professor Garcia, as he studies new ways to identify security vulnerabilities. Rather than waiting for unsavory types to find — and maliciously exploit — problems, he takes a proactive approach. “What I’ve done, particularly in the mobile space, is to create the first technique that automatically generates a broad range of possible exploits, each of which may expose a different program vulnerability.” His techniques are so effective that numerous companies and agencies, including IBM and the Department of Homeland Security, have adopted them to safeguard the software we all use every day.
Automating Security
Pushing further, Professor Garcia is now working on techniques that can automatically repair new vulnerabilities. “Automatic repair frees up developers’ time, letting them focus on developing new features or testing non-security-related functionality.” In particular, he is developing search techniques that leverage test suites of existing applications to identify possible repair operations. He is currently focusing on Android applications but intends to expand to the emerging Internet of Things, recognizing that “automatically securing software systems is a major step forward in protecting user data and privacy.”
Tracking Life
Professor Daniel Epstein’s area of research — personal informatics — examines how people use devices and apps to track things about themselves, from their health and fitness to their finances and productivity. In analyzing how and why people track, he has found that user needs often vary and can differ from the technology’s intended use. For example, a food-tracking app aimed at weight loss could be used by a dieter or someone trying to identify migraine triggers. “I prototype new interfaces and designs to suggest how developers can better support different individuals’ tracking needs.”
Telling Stories
One aspect of tracking that Professor Epstein addresses is data sharing, and his prototype Yarn explores ways to improve that experience. “Right now, if you’re training for a race, you might use Strava and share that you went running,” he explains. “But what’s missing is the broader story.” Yarn exemplifies how apps could stitch together individual moments that are part of a journey, tying daily runs to an upcoming marathon or showing how tasks completed are part of a do-it-yourself project. “When you share these moments, Yarn guides you through adding context and explaining how the moment contributes to the overall story of what you’re doing.”
Putting Users First
Professor Epstein’s overall goal is to be an advocate for the people using these apps. “There’s friction in aligning what users want and what companies want.” For example, users sometimes want a break from fitness tracking, while companies push for continued use. Epstein has explored how apps can let users revisit data after they stop tracking or change visual representations to highlight different aspects of the data. “A part of being a user advocate is understanding when it’s okay to stop tracking or switch to tracking something different.”
Safeguarding Quality
Professor Iftekhar Ahmed’s research into software engineering considers how best to combine software testing, analysis and data mining to ensure today’s software is safe and of high quality. “Software will always have bugs,” he says, “but as it has become a pervasive part of our lives, bugs are affecting more people than ever before.” To identify problems before they hit the market, Professor Ahmed studies what factors lead to bad code in existing programs, ranging from technical factors such as bloated program constructs, to socio-technical factors such as merge conflicts. Using this knowledge, he then develops prediction models that can reveal bug-prone areas in new software projects.
Testing in the Trillions
Through his work, Professor Ahmed is providing developers with efficient tools and techniques for testing today’s increasingly complex systems. “Current techniques do not scale for non-deterministic or machine learning systems, because the possible scenarios that can go wrong number in the trillions,” explains Ahmed. Applying his techniques on the Linux kernel, for instance, revealed critical bugs by systematically exploring program variations and by reducing false positives. This eventually helped developers identify gaps in the testing approach used, which the Linux community subsequently addressed to eliminate the problems.
Building Confidence
“By 2020, there will be around 17 million autonomous vehicles on the street,” notes Professor Ahmed. “And if all of them have bugs in them, that’s really scary.” Of particular concern is finding ways to avoid accidents. How do we ensure that an autonomous vehicle can correctly identify a stop sign or pedestrian, regardless of the weather and road conditions? Stressing that “confidence lies in exhaustiveness,” Professor Ahmed is exploring techniques that help focus on the problem areas — for example, prioritizing images that weren’t correctly classified during testing. Using such techniques, he aims to reduce classification errors and ultimately improve system accuracy and safety.
Understanding the Benefits
Professor Stacy Branham’s work in accessible computing focuses on the interplay of technology, users and their community. Notably, she understands that accessible computing functionalities are not necessarily limited to people with disabilities. “We all have challenges that we overcome through collaboration. For example, when I’m carrying a lot of things, I might rely on systems like the automatic door opener for wheelchair users.” Embracing this idea that technology design that starts with people with disabilities can benefit people of all abilities, she stresses that “people with disabilities are not just the subjects of my research. They’re the actors.”
Designing for Interdependence
Another important tenet of Professor Branham’s work is shifting the focus from “independence” to “interdependence.” For example, in working with researcher Amy Hurst and Toyota to develop a device that helps blind users navigate indoors, she also is considering external influences on the user’s sense of physical and social well-being. When the system makes a mistake, “people who are sighted sometimes step in and try to ‘help,’” she explains, “but it can be scary to have a stranger grab you and interrupt your travel, which can potentially put you in harm’s way.” She now is working to address such interdependent interactions, in this and other devices, to lead to more positive outcomes.
Algorithms and Ethics
In examining how the technology interests of marginalized people are interdependent, Professor Branham’s research also reveals difficult tensions. For instance, while gender recognition algorithms can help a blind woman infer the gender of an approaching stranger, they also can adversely affect the transgender community through miscategorization. By constructing her research team to include people with a variety of disabilities and gender identities, Branham has found a way to better understand the ethical dimensions technologists must consider. She purposefully designs her team “to mirror the communities we’re trying to serve.”
