Friday, April 13th, 2:30-4:00pm
Representing Digital Scholarship Digitally: Creating the Web Campaigning Digital Supplement
ABSTRACT: Representations of knowledge generated through methods of digital scholarship can take various forms, each providing a different lens on the phenomenon that has been studied. Representing digital scholarship digitally and online raises questions concerning technical, social, epistemological, and legal issues. The Web Campaigning Digital Supplement (http://mitpress.mit.edu/webcampaigning), was produced in cooperation with an academic publisher and built on a tiddly-wiki platform. It presents research on the Web production practices of U.S. electoral campaigns, and was released alongside a traditionally-published monograph (Web Campaigning, MIT Press, 2006). Lessons learned from the creation of this digital installation will be the focus of this iSchool Research Conversation, in the hopes of both advancing understanding of the process and implications of digital representation, and inspiring further innovation.
BIO: Kirsten Foot (PhD, UC San Diego) is an Associate Professor in Communication at the University of Washington. She co-edits the "Acting With Technology" series at MIT Press, and as co-director of WebArchivist.org, she is developing new methods and tools for studying social and political action on the Web and representing digital scholarship digitally.
Wednesday, April 11th, 10:00-11:00am, Allen Auditorium
Platform Envelopment
ABSTRACT: In markets with network effects, transactions typically are mediated by only a few platform providers; often, a single platform prevails. Once entrenched, platform providers are difficult to displace. To dislodge them, standalone entrants generally must offer revolutionary products and services. We explore a second path to platform leadership change that does not rely on Schumpeterian creative destruction: platform envelopment. Platform providers that serve different networked markets often have overlapping user bases. By leveraging shared user relationships, one platform provider can move into another’s market, combining its own functionality with the target’s in a multi-platform bundle. Dominant firms that otherwise are sheltered from entry by standalone rivals due to strong network effects and high switching costs may be vulnerable to an adjacent platform provider’s envelopment attack. Envelopment is a powerful force in platform evolution. The strategy is frequently employed when firms wrestle for control of a shared platform across industry layers. Likewise, convergence—the blurring of boundaries in industries that produce, process, and distribute digital information—is almost always the product of envelopment strategies. We present a taxonomy of envelopment attacks based on whether the participating platforms are complements or substitutes, and analyze conditions under which each attack type is most likely to succeed.
BIO: Dr. Geoffrey Parker is an associate professor of Economic Sciences, specializing in Information and Operations Management at the A. B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University. Parker teaches information systems and operations management courses in the undergraduate, full-time MBA, professional MBA, and executive MBA programs. Prior to graduate school, Parker completed the General Electric Company Financial Management Training Program and held jobs at GE as an electrical engineer, financial analyst, and business development analyst. In July 2006, Parker was appointed Director of the Entergy Tulane Energy Institute. The Institute is chartered to establish a systematic research program aimed at improving the understanding of the integration of energy markets, policy, technology, and the environment. Parker's recent research includes a cross-industry study of outsourced engineering projects, a study of pricing information products in two-sided markets with network externalities (two-sided networks), an exploration of online exchange investments, a study of internet winner-take-all markets, an analysis of the effect of copyright duration on innovation in software development, and an analysis of the performance of markets for electricity financial transmission rights.
Friday, April 6th, 2:30-4:00pm
Should We Consider New Approaches to Information Ethics?
ABSTRACT: This research conversation is an exploratory discussion about several emerging trends and how these trends may suggest that we rethink the more traditional approaches to information ethics. Consider these factors:
- The information behavior of the generation now in school will be formed from their experiences as they grow up in a rich communication environment. The increasingly complex network of communications possibilities enabled by information and communications technology (ICT) enables many different approaches to forming professional networks, working in networks of practice, and contributing to organizational objectives. Information about how this new generation will choose to use this variety of capabilities is just now emerging.
- This generation can expect that they will create value as members of global networks. In these networks, multiple—and seemingly incompatible—world views and value systems may come into conflict.
- As individuals tend to use more public spaces, and as organizations increasingly look to free/libre/open source software (“FLOSS”) and alternatives to copyright and patents, our past concepts of privacy and intellectual property may take on different levels of urgency.
Ethical issues such as those faced by HP managers who tried to investigate information leaks from the boardroom undoubtedly will arise again. Also continuing will be the ethical concerns articulated by Richard Mason in his now-ancient (by Internet time standards) “PAPA” framework: fundamental issues of privacy, access, property, and accuracy. This means we can continue to expect—even demand—ethical behavior from information professionals. However, we may need to reexamine the values underlying our past guidelines and policies. New approaches, such as those termed “pragmatic,” may warrant our attention.
boyd, danah, http://www.danah.org/papers/WhyYouthHeart.pdf
Mason, R. O. (1986). "Four Ethical Issues of the Information Age." MIS Quarterly 10(1): 5-12.
Keulartz, J., Maartje Schermer, Michiel Korthals, Tsjalling Swierstra (2004). "Ethics in technological culture: a programmatic proposal for a pragmatist approach." Science, Technology & Human Values 29(1): 3-29.
BIO: Robert M. Mason (moderator) is professor and associate dean for research for the Information School at the University of Washington. His educational background is engineering and technology management, and his recent research has focused on cultural aspects of knowledge management and on the social and ethical dimensions of information technology and its applications, especially unstated values that may be entrenched in management practices and technical designs.
Friday, March 30th, 2:30-4:00pm
Spiritual Computing
ABSTRACT: A leader in the worldwide effort to close the Digital Divide, Craig Warren Smith now looks beyond social impacts of technology to consider its spiritual impacts. In the past year he has been on a world tour, interacting with computer scientists at Nokia, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and Intel, as well as technology-oriented universities in Europe, North America and Asia. His purpose has been to get ideas from computer scientists themselves about how technology design could be invigorated through perspectives derived from spiritual traditions. He will report on these interactions.
In the wake of Dr. Smith's tour, interdisciplinary clusters of corporate and academic lab researchers have begun to work on projects that address the spirituality/technology relationship. For example, at Nokia Research in Helsinki, he has been working with researcher on the formulation of an operational definition of "spirituality" that makes this term meaningful to technology designers. A member of the Google Earth team who attended his recent talk at Google is exploring how to link GPS applications with the experience of "sacred space." At the University of Wisconsin, colleagues from a neuroscience lab are considering how fMRI studies of meditation adepts could yield measures needed in research regarding human-computer interaction. In Bangkok, he is helping Thailand's prime minister consider new regulations that would reward companies whose applications generate measurable happiness in users. At Electronic Arts, Dr. Smith is working with producers to develop a genre of "spirit warrior gaming" that taps open source technology so that users can self-create their own online spiritual experiences.
BIO: A Seattle native, Craig Warren Smith is currently Senior Advisor to the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Washington. Since 1999 he has occupied global leadership roles in the effort to close the Digital Divide, as the founder of a nonprofit organization (Digital Partners), as technology policy professor at Harvard, as a consultant to Kofi Annan in the UN, as a philanthropic advisor to Microsoft, and as an advisor to the Information Communications Technology (ICT) ministers of India, China, Thailand and Indonesia. When he isn't promoting spiritual computing (Spiritual Computing.com), he spends much of his time in Asia where he is working with private sector stakeholders on a plan to bring the benefits of digital technology to the bulk of Indonesia's 257 million citizens. More information can be found at www.craigwarrensmith.com.
Thursday, March 29th, 3:30-4:30pm
Beyond "Bag of Words": Towards a Framework for Conceptual Retrieval
ABSTRACT: Although the field of information retrieval has made enormous progress in the last half century, virtually all systems are still built on the remarkably simple concept of "counting words", under assumptions of term independence. Although these methods have been empirically validated (e.g., in TREC evaluations), it is a simple fact that words alone cannot capture the semantic content of documents and information needs. In this talk, Jimmy will discuss a framework for "conceptual retrieval" that articulates the types of knowledge that are important for information seeking. This general framework is instantiated in a clinical question answering system that operationalizes the principles of evidence-based medicine (EBM). Experiments show that an EBM-based scoring algorithm outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline that employs only term statistics. Ablation studies further yield a better understanding of the performance contributions of different components. Jimmy will conclude by discussing how other domains can benefit from knowledge-based approaches and the general applicability of this proposed framework.
BIO: Jimmy Lin is an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies (CLIS) at the University of Maryland, and is also a member of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) laboratory in UMD's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He graduated with a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 2004. Jimmy's research lies at the intersection between information retrieval, natural language processing, and information science. In addition, he has also worked on theoretical linguistics at the syntax-semantic interface.
Friday, March 9th, 3:30-5:00pm*
iSchool Search Engine Simulation
Please join us for a special research conversation event that combines research with practice: we will have an iSchool Search Engine simulation with roles played by the second year executive MSIM cohort.
This session will be a discussion of the politics and policies associated with searching on the Internet, particularly, the ethics and policies in context of digital divide, privacy and free speech that are associated with search engines. Ten teams (as an assignment from the Executive MSIM 550 class) will present their research on what has become a controversial topic, simulating the perspectives of Google, MSN, Yahoo, different users, US authorities, Chinese authorities, etc. The simulation should provoke an interesting discussion among everyone about different roles in one of the most current examples of how policies, ethics, and politics are intertwined in the knowledge age.
Moderators for the event will be: Dean Emeritus Mike Eisenberg and Prof. Efthimis Efthimiadis
You are invited to join this unique event and participate in the simulation by raising issues and making the discussion even more alive!!!
For background information on the issues, see the class website: http://courses.washington.edu/imt551/content/searchengines.html
For additional information about the simulation it self click here: http://courses.washington.edu/imt551/assignments/simulation.html
Thursday, March 8th, 9:30-10:30am
Practice into Theory: from serious work about learning in classroom environments to serious questions about the playful nature of control and coordination in information handling
Deborah Tatar (Ph.D. Psychology, Stanford, 1998; BA English, Harvard, 1981) is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Psychology at Virginia Tech. In high school, she was surprised to win an award for intellectual curiosity and has been trying to live up to it ever since. Stemming from her experiences as a senior software engineer at DEC, a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC, and a cognitive scientist in the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International, her work can be thought of as falling into three categories: Making Mechanisms (designing new ways to do things with information), Making Meaning (analyzing complex new systems), and Making Methods (creating new ways of coming to know about phenomena of interest). Recent mechanisms focus on the potential of handheld connectivity to help classroom learning, and the Anywhere Museum, a suite of projects that provoke inquiry in situated everyday environments. Recent meaning includes the analysis of online argumentation and emotion, the relationship between shared visual space and peripheral participation in learning conversations, and an analysis of the notion of a place with implications for the online world. Recent methods focus on the idea of project tensions as an important focus for coming to understand complex design problems. At the juncture of making meaning and methods lies the Scaling Up SimCalc project, a multi-year randomized controlled experiment to test whether SimCalc, a math learning environment developed in the cauldron of the cognitive revolution, has the potential to bring benefit to students in a wide variety of classrooms. She has the distinction of having edited the proceedings of the first two conferences on Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (1988 and 1990), and is currently convening the doctoral consortium for CHI 2007. She is a voracious reader and loves books (the kind made with paper).
Abstract
The current talk reports on work that starts with a pressing social problem---the problem of maximizing equity and excellence in K-12 education---and one strategy for addressing this problem---the development of mobile, wirelessly connected tools to support classroom learning. It mentions the development and use of tools in real classrooms. These wirelessly connected, mobile devices raise important theoretical issues about the nature of information support for coordination. How can we support disseminated control, volunteer behavior, and a close coupling of content and coordination? One technological answer is Tuple Spaces, a programming framework for parallel, distributed actors. These desired control structures are well described by analogy to playground games. However, the idea of playground games (along with the values it presupposes) is at variance with the object world of software engineers, which foregrounds the capabilities of the software rather than the situation of use and the importance of informational integrity rather than the actions of the users in constructing information.
Friday, March 2nd
Building Document Recommender Systems to Meet User Information Seeking Needs
Sean M. McNee received his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Minnesota in June 2006. Working under Professor Joseph A. Konstan in GroupLens Research, Sean has explored several aspects of recommender systems from the new user experience to the integration of recommenders into digital libraries. Sean is currently a Computing Research Scientist at Attenex Corporation, a leading provider of e-discovery software and electronic discovery solutions that dramatically reduce the time, expense and risk of document review during litigation, investigations and regulatory response projects. This talk is based on research published at ACM CSCW 2002, ACM/IEEE JCDL 2004, and ACM CSCW 2006 as well as from Sean's Ph.D. dissertation.
Abstract
Recommender systems help people find items of interest in a domain by making suggestions of which items to consume and which items to avoid. Examples of recommenders include “People Who Bought This Also Bought That” from Amazon, Netflix’s “Movies You’ll Love”, and “Find New Music” from Pandora. In this talk, I will first review the current state of recommender systems, talking briefly about algorithms used for recommenders, some user interface issues, and social implications of recommenders. Next, I will move into a new domain, that of recommender systems for semi-structured documents in a digital library environment. Here I will review research on generating recommendations for peer-reviewed computer science research papers. Finally, I will present a new theory of Human-Recommender Interaction and discuss its implications for recommender systems, digital libraries, and user information seeking needs.
Friday, February 23rd
Digital Home and Digital Health groups, Intel Research Seattle
Dr. Beverly Harrison received degrees in B. Mathematics (Computer Science, Waterloo), M.A.Sc and Ph.D. (Human Factors Engineering, Toronto). She has worked in industrial research labs for over 15 years including Nortel, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, and most recently Intel Research Seattle. In 1998-2000, she spent 2 years at a successful startup company in the e-book space, SoftBook Press/Gemstar International as Director of User Experience. She has numerous publications, holds over 25 patents and serves on a number of HCI related conference committees. Her research interests include the design and evaluation of novel mobile and/or sensor-based technologies for ubiquitous computing applications. Most recently Beverly has been focusing on healthcare related applications for wearable sensor-based systems.
Abstract
Five years ago Intel founded its university-affiliated research labs (CMU, Berkeley, Seattle, Cambridge) under an open collaborative research agreement (meaning generally non-propriety research). Last year, Intel had a major corporate re-organization creating several new divisions and moving away from the traditional technology and processor oriented structure to one that reflected large functional domains (e.g., Digital Home, Health, Enterprise, Mobility. Emerging Markets). Intel has strong design, ethnography and prototyping capabilities in all of these groups. This talk will present a selection of projects going on at Intel Research Seattle, in the Digital Home and Digital Health groups that emphasize ethnographic studies, design and HCI and the multi-disciplinary approach Intel is taking.
Friday, February 16th - Part I
Facilitating User-System Coordination by Exploring Linguistic Evidence, Community Membership Information, and Perceptual Evidence
Hongyan Ma's research interests are information organization, intelligent information retrieval, semantic web, and automatic text categorization. In 2006, she received the Dissertation Year Fellowship from UCLA for her dissertation project, " User-System Coordination in Unified Probabilistic Retrieval: Explore Linguistic Evidence, Community Membership, and Perceptual Evidence to Construct Common Ground". She is also the recipient of Chun Hui Plan Fund, awarded by Ministry of Education, China.
Education
Ph.D. Candidate, Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
MLIS, University of California, Los Angeles
Master in Management, BeiJing University, China
Double Bachelor's in Information Science, BeiJing University, China
Double Bachelor's in Economics, BeiJing University, China
Minor in Law, BeiJing University, China
Abstract
The performance of web search engines may often deteriorate due to the diversity and noisy information contained within web pages. User click-through data can be used to introduce more accurate description (metadata) for web pages, and to improve the search performance. In this talk, Hongyan Ma will present a coordination model, paying particular attention to three types of information evidences and their relationship to common ground construction in information retrieval as well as how a proof-of-concept system, Unified Probabilistic Information Retrieval (UPIR) is designed and implemented to exploit linguistic evidence and shared-interest community information from real user queries and click-through data. She will also report results of a large scale evaluation and an exploratory users study.
Friday, February 16th - Part II, MGH 241*
Experiments in Query Expansion
Speakers: Efthimis N. Efthimiadis, Associate Professor, UW - The Information School; David G. Hendry, Assistant Professor, UW - The Information School; Chong-Ki Tsang, Microsoft
In this study we evaluate different QE approaches using the TREC collection. We employed the half collection evaluation methodology and evaluated three relevance feedback approaches (pseudo-relevance feedback, simulated user feedback, random feedback), multiple term selection methods and QE combinations. We further compared the effect of stemming (Porter vs. Krovetz vs. not stemming) and the use of stop lists vs. non-stopping to retrieval effectiveness.
Friday, February 9th, MGH 254*
Title: Issues in Lifestyle Computing
Arnold Lund (Arnie) has spent the last 3 years working on personal technologies and natural interaction as Director of User Experience for Microsoft’s Mobile and Tailored Platforms Division. The previous 20+ years largely involved creating new user experiences as much of his career has followed the ebb and flow of the telecommunications industry. Freshly minted with his PhD from Northwestern, he began his professional life in applied research at AT&T Bell Labs and ever since has had one foot in research and one foot in turning that research into products. He is a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), and has been active in both ACM SIGCHI and HFES for many years. His research has been recognized by groups as diverse as SMPTE, the Smithsonian, and National Easter Seals.
Abstract
In the last few years, a variety of technologies have been rapidly evolving from utilitarian to personal. This evolution should transform the way technologies influence how we live. This talk will provide an opportunity to share observations about some of the forces that have been driving that evolution and the issues that will need to be resolved to continue it; and to discuss some of the likely implications that will arise as a result. It will be grounded in a high level review of the work that has led to the Tablet PC, the ultra-mobile PC (known as Origami), and other devices. We’ll also talk about areas of research that we identified in the course of that work that we believe could yield new user experiences and new sources of user value. Of particular interest is the growing importance of emotive and expressive design, intimacy in product experiences, brand relationships, and storytelling.
Friday, February 2nd
Research for Action- the Institute for Innovation in Information Management
Started in 2005, the Institute for Innovation in Information Management (I3M) is supported by organizations interested in taking advantage of the research interests of the faculty at the Information School. Through projects funded by the partners, faculty and students explore areas of interest to the member organizations, and bring their results to semi-annual research symposia held on the University of Washington campus. Results are also published in research journals and other venues. Examples of past research projects include: Demystifying the Link between Innovation and Business Value, Leveraging Ideas for Organizational Innovation, and Beyond Knowledge Exchange: The Case of Practice Area Networks (PANs) at Parsons Brinckerhoff. Further information on I3M is available on the I3M website: http://www.ischool.washington.edu/i3m
The panel will provide a synopsis of the projects, discuss their reflections on lessons learned from the I3M experience to date, and initiate a discussion on the benefits and limitations of the I3M model for engaging external partners in research efforts.
Panel members include: Hala Annabi, Michael Crandall, Kevin Desouza, Robert Mason, and Hazel Taylor.
Bios for panel members can be found at https://www.ischool.washington.edu/people/facdirectory.aspx
Friday, January 26th
Title: Exploring the Design Space of Web Credibility Tools
Shaun Kane is a second year Ph.D. student in the Information School. He is currently project manager for the Credibility Commons and a member of the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab. His research interests include assistive technology, end-user programming and web credibility. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Abstract
The Credibility Commons is a multidisciplinary research project that endeavors to improve access to trustworthy information on the Internet. Since its inception, the Commons has created a variety of online tools to help users evaluate the information that they find online. The purpose of this discussion is to explore possibilities for new classes of tools that support credible information online. After a brief introduction to our current projects, we will discuss some of the assumptions underlying current credibility tools, and attempt to explore how new perspectives can lead to new tools and systems to help users find trustworthy information on the Internet.
Friday, January 19th
The Center for Human-Information Interaction
WHO: The Center for Human-Information Interaction, Jochen Scholl, Raya Fidel, Monica Liu, Kris Unsworth and Kari Holland
WHAT: Discuss aspects of organizational analysis that are relevant to the design of information systems in the context of Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA).
WHY: CWA is a framework for investigating the work people do and their interaction with information. This analysis leads to design requirements for information systems that could be integrated harmoniously with work and workers. For instance, our project Fully Mobile City Government (mCity) is using CWA to look at fieldwork and fieldworkers using mobile and wireless technology in the City of Seattle. In this project we are also seeking to conceptually further develop CWA by looking at the organizational dimension. We would like for this particular research conversation to: (1) discuss organizational analyses, theories and issues that might be interesting to look at under a CWA lens, and (2) demonstrate the challenges and discoveries encountered when integrating frameworks and methods from different disciplines.
As a background reading, participants in this conversation may want to look at an issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, which includes a special section on CWA (the Bulletin, vol. 33, no.1, 2006, Special Section on Cognitive Work Analysis): http://www.asist.org/bulletin.html
Date: Friday, September 29th, 2006
More Info:
Objectives of this first meeting of INSC 599:
Robert M. Mason (moderator) is professor and associate dean for research for the Information School at the University of Washington. His educational background is engineering and technology management, and his recent research has focused on cultural aspects of knowledge management and on the social and ethical dimensions of information technology and its applications, especially unstated values that may be entrenched in management practices and technical designs.
Date: Friday, October 6th, 2006
More Info:
Objectives
Summarize and discuss a presentation to be made as part of a panel at the iConference at the University of Michigan next month
The first research conversation for the fall quarter will help shape the discussion at a panel we’re preparing for the iSchool conference at the University of Michigan. The title of the panel is Politics and Ethics of Information as a Reflection of iSchool Identity. As described in the program,
The panelists’ presentations are viewed as a way to stimulate, rather than conclude, an exchange about the strategic choices that shape how iSchools “make a difference” in the future.
Panelists include Karine Barzilai-Nahon (UW), John N. Gathegi (FSU College of Information), Jose-Marie Griffith (Dean, UNC Library School), John King (Vice Provost for Information, U. Michigan), and Bob Mason (UW).
Each panelist will start with a short (5 minute) presentation based on this premise: if iSchools used legal, political, and ethical lenses as a way of approaching research questions, what might be our impact as we examine questions related to:
· The digital divide?
· Information and the quality of life?
· The power relationships among stakeholders as new technologies that facilitate information sharing are designed and implemented?
· Manipulation and control of information and information access by service provider?
· Social networks and collective forms of information sharing, enabled by Web 2.0 platforms, wiki, and blog technologies—to what extent do they preserve established power structures and to what extent do they enable equalization of power among users?
Bob plans to emphasize the importance of metrics and how we may allow ourselves to be defined by others. While it is necessary to communicate with different constituencies using appropriate assessment tools (measures), if we only use others’ measures, we fall into the trap of allowing others to define us as schools, and he will argue that this is too constraining. Karine will also present her perspective on the value of the political, ethical, and legal lenses for our research and teaching.
This will be an opportunity to help shape the presentations at the panel and begin a discussion within our own school on an issue that is central to our strategic planning process.
Date: Friday, October 13th, 2006
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TOPIC
Jeffrey Cheek, Associate Vice provost for Research Compliance and Operations, and Karen Moe, Acting Director of the Human Subjects Division (HSD) and Associate Research Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, will provide an overview of the transitions underway at the Office of Research and HSD, respectively. Topics will include the upcoming accreditation in human subjects research and resulting assessment of current HSD policies and procedures, optimizing informational and educational tools to provide investigators with proactive consultation on applications to HSD, and proposed metrics to identify areas for overall quality improvement in UW's oversight of human subjects research. Presentation slides
Jeff Cheek is the Associate Vice Provost for Research Compliance and Operations, whose responsibilities include providing leadership for the development and implementation of research compliance programs within the authority of the UW Office of Research (specifically those relating to human subjects protection and conflicts of interest). Ensuring that University compliance measures conform to state and federal regulations, agency guidance and accreditation standards while providing a high level of service to investigators, the Office of Research seeks to promote awareness of legal, regulatory and ethical issues within the UW research community through comprehensive training and education, outreach and quality assurance programs. Duties also include working with other UW offices on institution-wide coordination on compliance-related issues, serving on executive advisory councils and committees, and fostering effective relationships with UW staff and faculty to create a culture of compliance.
Dr. Cheek received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in Public Health from the University of California at Los Angeles. Prior to his appointment at UW, he was the Assistant Vice President for Research and Learning Innovations at the University of Colorado System and the Director of the Colorado Tobacco Research Program, and he held an attendant faculty appointment in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics at the University of Colorado Denver Health Sciences Center. With a research background in pulmonary toxicology, Dr. Cheek’s current interests center on environmental health sciences and the translation of public health research into practice.
Karen Moe, PhD, is the Acting Director of the Human Subjects Division and a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. She received her PhD in Psychology (Behavioral Neuroscience). She had an active program in human sleep research for 15 years before joining the Human Subjects Division in August 2004 as the Assistant Director. Her work with older subjects and cognitively-impaired subjects in that research led to a strong interest in the issues of (1) risks to research subjects and (2) effective communication with subjects.
Date: Friday, October 20th, 2006
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Batya Friedman is a Professor in the Information School and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington where she Co-Directs the Value Sensitive Design Research Laboratory. She received both her BA (1979) and Ph.D. (1988) from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Friedman’s research interests include human-computer interaction, especially human values in design, social and cultural aspects of information systems, and design methodology. Her 1997 edited volume (Cambridge University Press) is titled Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology. Her work on Value Sensitive Design has focused on the values of informed consent, privacy in public, trust, freedom from bias, moral agency, and human dignity, and engaged such technologies as web browsers, large-screen displays, urban simulation, robotics, open-source code bases, and location-enhanced computing. She is also Co-Director for The Mina Institute (Covelo, CA).
ABSTRACT
For the past decade, the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab has had, as one focus, the design of information technologies that support people’s privacy. Our approach is grounded in interactional theory, systematic analyses of direct and indirect stakeholders, and an integrative tripartite methodology that comprises conceptual, technical and empirical investigations. In this talk I discuss our approach in the context of three on-going projects: (1) The Watcher and The Watched, an empirical study of people’s perspectives on the real-time display of a public place on a large semi-public screen, (2) An Open Source Privacy Addendum, a legal strategy for integrating privacy commitments into open source licenses, and (3) Value Hot Spots and Opportunities, a method for using value analyses to enhance groupware system adoption.
For more information on Value Sensitive Design, please see: http://www.ischool.washington.edu/vsd/
Date: Friday, October 27th, 2006
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Stuart Weibel has been in the OCLC Research since 1985, and in that time he has managed projects in automated cataloging, document structure analysis, electronic publishing, and persistent identifiers. Dr. Weibel has been an active participant in Internet standards development including work in the Internet Engineering Task Force on Uniform Resource Identifiers and metadata. He was also a founding member of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee. From 1995 to 2004, he was convener of the Dublin Core Metadata series of international workshops and conferences and helped to establish the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) as an open, international, consensus building organization focused on development of cross-disciplinary metadata standards for the Web. Dr. Weibel is a visiting scholar at the University of Washington iSchool for calendar year 2006, where he is writing about persistent identifiers and exploring the domain of social software.
ABSTRACT:
Librarianship:
Creating (Library) Value in the age of the Amazoogles
Patrons are changing, and the technologies they live with are changing, but the mission of libraries is constant. How do we retain the traditional values of librarianship in a new environment -- keeping the patrons that sustain us, attracting new ones that will in the future, and upholding the traditions of information access in a wireless world?
The answer consists in exploiting the largest collection of structured, semantic data on the Web while surfacing the social values that sustain librarianship in the new technologies of Web 2.0.
Stuart Weibel, OCLC Senior Research Scientist, and visiting scholar at the University of Washington Information School, will share his thoughts on these topics, and lead a discussion of yours. Please bring your passions.
Date: Friday, November 3rd, 2006
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Background:
Does the term "serious games" sound like an oxymoron? Many don't think so. Games are receiving increasing (serious) attention as a way to learn, even to transform US education. In this Nov. 3 colloquium/conversation, Ruth Fruland will discuss what people are saying and doing about "serious games." In the meantime, you might want to check out these two sites:
http://www.seriousgames.org/index2.html
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ja06schollmeyer_100
Bio:
Ruth Fruland recently completed her Ph.D. in Education from the University of Washington and is a research scientist at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HITLab). Her studies include how students learn about complex natural phenomena with immersive virtual environments (Virtual Puget Sound), how to facilitate human adaptation to a unique VR interface called VirtuSphere, and how teachers and students respectively, use and learn with LegSim (a simulation of a federal legislature).
Synopsis:
Ruth's research and background in science have led her to appreciate the potential power of games to teach, not only because of their ability to engage students in experiential learning, but also because of their underlying structure and computational capacity, which make games and simulation games particularly well-suited to learning about ill-defined, or "wicked problems" of the sort you find in complex, dynamic systems, and, of course, real life.
Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture
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Date: Monday, November 6th, 2006
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Presenter: Tarleton Gillespie, Asst. Professor, Communication, Cornell University
For additional info see http://depts.washington.edu/mcdm/news/nov_2006_gillespie.html
Beyond Self-monitoring: Designing Systems to Support Sustained Behavior Change
[top of page]Date: Friday, November 17th, 2006
More Info:
Predrag (Pedja) Klasnja is a second year PhD student at the Information School. He is interested in self-regulation and personal information management, and is currently working on the Keeping Found Things Found project with William Jones and Harry Bruce.
Abstract
From humble to-do lists to electronic diet and exercise logs, we have long used information technology to help us manage our activity and bring it more in line with our long term goals. Yet, these tools offer only limited support for behavior change, especially when the desired change requires significant lifestyle adjustments. The need for such changes is far from rare, however. Managing chronic diseases such as diabetes, reducing the risk of a heart attack, and losing weight (and keeping it off) are just some examples of cases when a person needs to significantly change behavior not just for a few days or weeks, but over the long term.
The November 17th Research Conversations will explore possible directions for designing tools that can better support efforts at such sustained behavior change. Rather than being a formal, full-length talk, this session focuses on research-in-inception, and is intended to help generate and clarify ideas about promising directions for studying this rich area.
Date: Friday, December 1st, 2006
More Info:
Pictures of traces of places, people, and groups:
Recent work from the Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group
http://research.microsoft.com/community/
MSR CTG Researchers:
A.J. Brush studies human-computer interaction with a focus on computer supported cooperative work. Her projects include a building digital family calendar, exploring the use of social information to help people triage their email. A.J. graduated Summa cum Laude from Williams College and then earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Washington.
Scott Counts focuses on building social software based on social psychological principles in order to facilitate online social interactions and networks. Current projects focus on mobile social software, including group-based mobile messaging and media sharing and supporting sports communities through sensor-annotated GPS routes, as well as the application of phenomena and methods of social psychology to the study of social software. Scott received his Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Washington where he studied personality and the unique and stable patterns of emotion and behavior each person shows in response to social situations.
Danyel Fisher specializes in social network analysis and information visualization: how to analyze and visualize both individual and collective activity in order to both learn about how online systems are used, and as a guideline for future design. His dissertation examined social networks in email; his more recent research has looked at social networks in Usenet newsgroups (“You Are Who You Talk To”); email priority through social cues (“SNARF”); and research into making online geography both user-editable (“mapcruncher”) and reflective of user behavior (“Attentional Topographies”). He earned his MS in computer science from UC Berkeley and his PhD from UC Irvine, working with Paul Dourish.
CTG Manager Marc Smith specializes in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction, particularly the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. His goal is to visualize social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. Marc received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001.
Tammara Combs Turner focuses on social types and information behavior in online support-based threaded discussion environments. Also an iSchool PhD student, Tammara received her Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science from Xavier University and her Master’s of Science in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park. She won the 2006 Science Spectrum Magazine Emerald Honors President’s Award.
Abstract: This fall Microsoft Research (MSR) celebrated its 15th Anniversary and is world renowned for its innovation and leadership in computing technology. Come hear how MSR works, including opportunities for student internships and employment. Learn about projects of the Community Technologies Group (CTG), which builds technology to study and enhance social systems, especially those involving computer mediated collective action. CTG combines social theory with data mining and information visualization techniques to explore alternative interfaces to collectively constructed content. A common theme is thus to reflect measurements of collective activity back into the systems that support it. CTG’s two main goals are: (1) to collect, measure, map, and explore data about social cyberspaces focusing on conversation and discussion environments. And (2) to design and prototype collective interaction tools, interfaces, and visualizations that help people understand and interact cooperatively with potential partners.
CTG researchers will discuss such specific projects as Netscan, SNARF, AURA, SLAM, LINC, and Hotmail.
Netscan manufactures “social accounting metadata” about Usenet newsgroups and web boards, providing reports about discussion spaces and individuals that highlight patterns of activity and contribution in tabular and graphical forms.
SNARF manages personal collections of email, specifically through “social sorting”–reordering email collections based on the strength of different dimensions of the relationship between sender and receiver.
AURA is a platform for Pocket PCs, Smartphones and mobile PCs that have various kinds of sensors such as barcode readers, digital cameras, WiFi signal strength detection, radio frequency identification (RFID) tag readers, and GPS. Users can scan the barcodes on everyday objects in the home, office, or store and gain access to related information and services such as competitive pricing and product reviews.
SLAM is social software for communicating and sharing media with groups of friends and family, primarily on mobile devices. SLAM enables real-time communication, location awareness and photo-sharing.
Hotmap visualize what parts of the world people are viewing when using interactive maps. Data can be used to enhance imagery, user experience, understand the social topography of the world, and find Bill Gates’ house.
LINC is an Inkable Digital Family Calendar designed for the kitchen to help families organize, plan, and stay aware of activities. Findings are shared of user studies with 20 moms and field deployment of LINC in 4 family homes.
What is the Internet Doing to Community -- and Vice Versa
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Date: Friday, December 8th, 2006
More Info:
Video Stream of Presentation: [Windows Media Stream]
Video Stream of Q and A Session: [Windows Media Stream]
(Note: Video streams require Windows Media Player)
Barry Wellman learned about social networks and computing as a Harvard grad student in the mid-1960s. Now S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, he directs NetLab -- a network of a score of faculty and students interested in the intersection of social, community and communication networks. Wellman founded the International Network for Social Network Analysis in 1976. He's received career achievement awards from research bodies in social networks, community, ICTs, and Canadian sociology. His most recent book is _The Internet in Everyday Life_ (edited with Caroline Haythornthwaite). Recent relevant papers include "Connected Lives: The Project," "The Networked Household" and "Visualizing Personal Networks." http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
Abstract
This is a breadth talk, integrating 39 years of research (with an emphasis on the current), rather than a depth talk about one research project. In recent months, the centuries' old fear about "social isolation" in modern times has re-emerged. To address this fear, I use the evidence from our NetLab's research (especially the Netville, "Strength of Internet Ties" and "Connected Lives" projects) to address five debates:
1. Was community "local" before the Internet?
2. Is online connectivity replacing face-to-face and phone connectivity?
3. Is social isolation increasing? Because of the Internet?
4. Has there been a "death of distance" in community? Has locality become portable?
5. Have households become borderless networks?
Prof. Wellman's visit is made possible by the Information School and the Department of Communication at UW and by Microsoft Research (the Open Source Software Lab and the Communities Technology Group)
- Briefly outline and discuss the goals and objectives for INSC 599 (the course) and our research conversations;
- Clarify the roles of the faculty, PhD students, and other participants in these meetings; and
- Resolve any questions about the course—e.g., evaluation, registration, etc.
This will get us started and on the same page with our expectations for what is both a seminar course for PhD students and a regular session in which all the iSchool community can participate. I expect that these sessions will become an exciting and stimulating component of the research culture of the iSchool.
Allyson Carlyle is Associate Professor at the Information School, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA. Her primary research areas are evaluation and use of online catalogs, conceptual foundations of descriptive cataloging, and document modeling for library catalogs. One of her papers, "Fulfilling the Second Objective in the Online Catalog: Schemes for Organizing Author and Work Records Into Usable Displays" won the 1998 Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research given by the Library Research Round Table of the American Library Association. She is also the recipient of the 2000 OCLC/ALISE Research Paper Award, for "Developing Organized Information Displays for Voluminous Works: A Study of User Clustering Behavior." Dr. Carlyle is currently working on several research projects, including a project investigating user perceptions of IFLA's recently promulgated document model, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR).
Planning for Univeristy of Michigan iSchool Presentation
[top of page] Goals of this conversation: To explore assumptions and ideas underlying current credibility tools, and to brainstorm new directions. Together we'll discuss disciplinary and personal perspectives about trust online, and brainstorm new ideas about how technology can help with such a complicated and often personal issue.