Smart Visualization: One picture is worth a thousand words. For thousands of years, people have been using information graphics—visual representation of data—to comprehend and analyze information. However, creating high-quality visualization is a daunting task especially for ordinary people who are neither graphic artists nor computer scientists. To democratize the use of visualization, I am interested in automated visualization design and tailoring the visual responses to highly dynamic user interaction situations and unanticipated information. More recently, I have been working in the area of interactive visual text analytics, which combines state-of-the-art text analytics with novel interactive visualization to empower average business users to analyze massive amounts of textual data and facilitate their decision making (e.g., making a purchase decision based on the visual text analysis of extensive consumer reviews).

Mixed-initiative Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): I believe that the future of HCI is to facilitate the development of a man-computer symbiosis where both humans and machines can leverage their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. I am especially interested in the development of mixed-initiative intelligent information systems, where the humans and computers work together collaboratively to facilitate information seeking an analysis. To enable computers to take sensible initiatives and push this class of systems to main stream applications, I am particularly interested in developing novel and practical computational approaches to the problem. Moreover, I am interested in exploring new interaction paradigms where users can interact with complex system responses (e.g., system-derived text summarization results) and the use of interactive machine learning in support of an adaptive, mixed-initiative human-computer interaction, where both humans and computers can learn from each other.

Opportunistic Social Computing: The use of social software (e.g., social networking, micro-blogging, and online forums) has penetrated the masses. I am very much interested in finding out how such phenomena will change our daily lives as well as its long-term impact on our world. In particular, I am especially interested in how social computing will bring us opportunistic information and collaboration partners whenever we need them but without subjecting ourselves to “constant availability and instant intimacy” as we do today. To achieve this goal, I believe there are fundamental research issues to be addressed.They include but not limited to:

•Understanding, modeling, and automatically deriving social profile of a person, a community, or an organization based on their digital footprints (i.e., online behavior);
•Use of the derived social profiles to objectively reveal key characters of individuals and organizations, assess community/organization dynamics, value, and risks, predict the development or growth of individuals, communities and organizations, and help establish opportunistic collaborations among individuals and organizations;
•Monitoring social channels (e.g., facebook and twitter) and detecting most valuable channel(s) for extracting social intelligence (e.g., knowledge about car repair or the consumer complains/needs); Mining of social messages to distill insight (information or people) for opportunistic information sharing (e.g., sharing the extracted consumer complains), knowledge acquisition (e.g., asking target audience to voice their problems and suggest their solutions), and crowd-sourced problem solving (e.g., social Q&A). See my webpage for more info.

The popularity of web-based mapping services such as Google Earth/Maps
and Microsoft Virtual Earth (Bing), as well as the increasing use of
smartphones, has led to an increasing awareness of the importance of
location data and its incorporation into both web-based search
applications and the databases that support them.

Location data is a subset of the broader area of spatial and
multidimensional data, and my interests lie in developing efficient
representations and algorithms for its use in applications in the
computer graphics, databases, computer vision, geographic information
systems (GIS), image processing, high dimensional data, and search
domains. My work is based on the observation that these
representations invariably reduce to finding ways to sort the data
with the caveat that sorting is a linear process, having a reference
point, which yields an explicit order. The drawback here is that in 2
and higher dimensions, the data must be resorted when the reference
point is changed. This is not the case with methods that use implicit
sorts such as those that sort objects with respect to the space that
they occupy (e.g., quadtrees, octrees, R-trees, etc.). I characterize
the problem as one of “sorting in space”. I am interested in
developing algorithms for problems in the above domains that are based
on the notion of sorting. Some examples include finding nearest
neighbors and shortest paths in spatial networks where the distance is
along the edges of the network rather than as “the crow flies”,
as well as finding similar trajectories.

Although location data is usually specified geometrically, many of
today’s web-based applications increasingly find it being specified
textually as it corresponds to place names. I am interested in
techniques for identifying such data as well as resolving it to the
right geometric location as these specifications are often ambiguous.
I have a number of projects that try to make use of such data for
searching databases such as those in the deep web as well as
spreadsheets, news, tweets, to name a few, and in mobile applications.

Mary (Missy) Cummings received her B.S. in Mathematics from the United States Naval Academy in 1988, her M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2003. A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, she was one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Aeronautics & Astronautics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her previous teaching experience includes instructing for the U.S. Navy at Pennsylvania State University and as an assistant professor for the Virginia Tech Engineering Fundamentals Division. Her research interests include human interaction with autonomous vehicle systems, modeling human interaction with complex systems, decision support design for time-pressured, uncertain systems, and the ethical and social impact of technology.

Bo Begole is a Principal Scientist and Manager of the Ubiquitous Computing Area at the Palo Alto Research Center. He is an applied computer scientiest who aims to create novel systems and capabilities for end-user applications. His past work includes systems that provide synchronous collaboration of single-user applications, computer-mediated communication, distributed interpersonal awareness, sensor-based interruptibility detection, presence modeling and prediction, media device interoperability and control, reducing information overload and context-aware mobile systems.

Bo’s unifying research interest is in the area of Behavior Modeling — Using sensor and data inputs, along with inference algorithms, to identify and predict an individual’s current activity and interest in particular information. He likes to work with people who have broad interests and creative approaches to solutions.

Bo received a B.S. in 1992 in Mathematics from Virginia Commonwealth University, an M.S. in 1994 and a Ph.D. in 1998 in Computer Science from Virginia Tech. Prior to his studies, Bo served in the US Army as an Arabic language translator specializing in Egyptian, Libyan and Iraqi dialects. Bo was recently a co-Chair of the 2008 conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2008) and was the Technical Program chair of CHI 2011.

The research in the 3D Interaction Group spans 3D user interfaces, interaction techniques, and applications, especially in the area of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Interaction in three dimensions is not well-understood, but is crucial to highly interactive VR/AR applications like immersive education, scientific visualization, and immersive design. The mission of our lab is to perform both basic and applied research in 3D interaction and VR/AR technology, and to develop applications of VR/AR in a wide variety of domains.

Current research topics include understanding the effects of display fidelity and interaction fidelity, 3D interface design for gaming, models of 3D pointing performance, high-precision pointing techniques for large displays, free space gesture interfaces, VR applications for sports, and the effects of spatial information presentations on learning.

The Computer Supported Collaboration (CSC) Laboratory conducts research to inform the design of information systems for collaboration.

We investigate the development and use of information infrastructures in science and engineering, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), and computer supported cooperative leisure. Recent projects have explored these themes in domains like environmental microbiology, functional brain imaging, museum exhibit design, and online calendar sharing. Previous exposure to CSCW research and some interest in biological and physical science is desirable for this position.

We use primarily qualitative social science research methods, often conducting interviews or observational fieldwork in places of work and leisure to holistically investigate information systems as evolving social and technical entities. Candidates should have familiarity with literature on to the topics of cyberinfrastructure or boundary objects and independent research experience using qualitative social science methods.

Prototyping? is pivotal to design innovation, collaboration, and creativity. My group’s research empowers more users to design interactive systems, expert designers to be more creative, and programmers to engage in more design thinking. Our research has introduced?techniques for users to demonstrate interactive behavior, sample existing design elements to create new ones, and tightly integrate the creation and evaluation aspects of design. In much of this work, examples – both created and harvested – play a powerful role. We explore these issues on mobile, desktop, web, and sensor-based platforms. We seek to understand the fundamental psychological and social ingredients of design excellence in order to create more effective design tools and practices. We create prototypes that envision future interface styles; a current project looks at the future of mobile interaction.

BIO?·?Scott is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction Group. Organizations around the world use his lab’s open-source design tools, and several books and popular press articles have covered his research. He is a co-recipient of the CHI and UIST Best Paper Awards, Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship, and Sloan Fellowship. He received a dual BA in Art-Semiotics and Computer Science from Brown University, and an MS and PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

My current research addresses two frontiers in design tools.
For experts, I am investigating how to create the ideal design studio of the future. New input technologies and platforms are rapidly proliferating.
These devices are very promising for professional work because of the richness and nuance of input they provide. I investigate how such technologies can be harnessed to augment professional design practice.

For amateurs, I am developing structured ways of sharing tool expertise and knowledge. Empirical data suggests that designers as well as programmers rely heavily on online resources such as tutorials, examples, and Q&A with online peers to gain expertise. We are working on integrating design tools with online platforms.

The focus of my research is information seeking and behavior that goes beyond individuals. Specifically, I am interested in information seeking activities that take place in groups/collaboration, or in online communities using various social media or networking services. My primary objective for studying these topics is to develop a theoretical framework for investigating information seeking and behavior involving multiple actors/participants and their interactions that is lacking for collaborative and social situations. Another related objective is to build a model for evaluating and explaining various aspects of information propagation through interactions among people whether they are working in close collaboration or connected through open online communities. This direction leads to investigations related to “information as a thing” and construction of online communities around information seeking and sharing. A by-product of such investigations would be their applications to analyzing various socio-political issues through social media usage and user participation.

At Rutgers, I run a research group on information seeking (http://www.infoseeking.org), with subgroups on collaborative information seeking (http://collab.infoseeking.org) and social information seeking (http://social.infoseeking.org). I’m also associated with the social media group (http://sm.rutgers.edu) and the NLP group (http://salts.rutgers.edu).

HP Labs Immersive 3D

HP Labs is conducting research using large display walls, 2D and 3D. HP has multiple product and services offerings in the so-called “Big Walls” area ranging from digital signage to large telepresence facilities (such as HP’s Halo). Our research extends this by following two main, intertwined branches. The first examines a new style of 3D entertainment, and the other targets commercial and industrial uses for 3D enabled operations centers, brainstorm or war rooms, and control centers. We are conducting research in:
• Computer vision, image processing, and recognition,
• Robust multi-imager and multi-camera modeling and calibration,
• 3D data visualization,
• High performance computation, transport, and imaging on hardware accelerated platforms (CPUs and/or GPUs),
• Novel human-big wall interaction modalities across heterogenous systems, and
• Local and remote collaboration technologies.

We have publicly shown our Immersive 3D Entertainment efforts with events at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and the Earth Wind and Fire Concert at 2011 CES in Las Vegas (links listed below). HP’s goal is to experiment with non-standard aspect ratios (e.g. 3:1 for concert stage, 5.5:1 for basketball court) to allow the audience to experience the event as though you are seated at the best seat in the house. This is a break from the traditional movie view from the director’s eyes and allows the audience to “look around” and soak up the scene which works so well in 3D. To do this, we are experimenting with large multi-projector 3D displays (Pluribus), multi-imager camera capture (Herodion), and advanced digital image pipelines (Pericles). We conduct in-situ laboratory studies at entertainment events such as concerts, sports events, fashion shows, and other gaming.

We have built an experimental operations center with multiple 2D and 3D walls and other services. Together with many HP customers, we are exploring novel ways to use Big Walls to address issues in areas such as disaster recovery, emergency response, hospital wards, city monitoring and management, mergers and acquisition planning, product planning, and supply chain management. We are creating a next generation capability by using Big Walls together with mobile devices, touch surfaces, 3D data visualization techniques, and techniques for displaying, manipulating and visualizing large amounts of unstructured data. In addition to our research, we participate in the real world by providing support for HP’s worldwide operations centers and the HP supported gallery at the Newseum due to open in 2012.

Links to entertainment reviews
HP 3D Live: CES Earth Wind and Fire concert

http://blogs.forbes.com/oliverchiang/2011/01/08/ces-hp-believes-in-3-d-too-but-on-a-larger-scale-much-larger/

http://www.monstercable.com/events/ces2011/3dexperience.asp

http://h20435.www2.hp.com/t5/The-Next-Bench-Blog/Earth-Wind-and-Fire-Going-Large-Live-and-in-3D-at-CES/ba-p/60745

http://www.hardwaregeeks.com/index.php/site/comments/hp_streams_concert_live_in_3d/

http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/14/hp-streams-earth-wind-fire-in-live-3d-on-a-huge-screen/

2010 Sundance Film Festival

http://philmckinney.com/archives/2010/01/sundance-and-3d.html

http://h20435.www2.hp.com/t5/The-Next-Bench-Blog/Stories-in-3D/ba-p/52743

HP Newseum announcements

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2010/100930a.html

http://www.newseum.org/news/2010/09/hp-announcement.html

I have broad HCI and CSCW interests. I am interested in cognitive/social design principles underlying the design of systems in the following areas:
- large scale social and collaborative systems (e.g. communities)
- personal information management
- digital support for memory/lifelogging
- interactive information retrieval

My university is just 5 mins from the Pacific in a beautiful part of n. California

With the rapid growth of mobile devices, sensing techniques under mobile conditions become more and more important. I am interested in sensor signal processing, analysis, and fusion for portable and real-time health care monitoring and clinical measurements. I am also interested in techniques for smart 3D sensing, interaction, and display. Other directions include security and biometrics, signal retargeting, enhancement, compression, and retrieval, driving safety monitoring, and smart and flexible robot training.

Over the last three decades Prof. Crutchfield has worked in the areas of nonlinear dynamics, solid-state physics, astrophysics, fluid mechanics, critical phenomena and phase transitions, chaos, and pattern formation. His current research interests center on computational mechanics, the physics of complexity, statistical inference for nonlinear processes, genetic algorithms, evolutionary theory, machine learning, quantum dynamics, and distributed intelligence. He has published over 130 papers in these areas, including the following recent, related publications. Most are available from his website: http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/.

My research interests cover a wide variety of topics including Smarter Web, Web Task Modeling, Web Mining and Web accessibility. The distinguishing aspect of my research is that I seek efficient and theoretically sound techniques to solve a problem in a principled way and validate the techniques by implementing them in real systems. One of the key features of my research is to improve the usability of a Web based system by identifying and presenting relevant information to the user. I have developed information presentation techniques (e.g., contextual browsing, model-directed navigation, conversational interface) to improve usability of such a system. I applied those techniques to reduce information overload problem in different areas, such as Web Access using different modalities, Web automation and testing, information retrieval, Email and collaborative task management, social media analysis. Another important aspect of my research is that I have applied machine learning algorithms to get efficient solutions in many instances, e.g., learning relevance model of a Web user, Web task models, Web accessibility models, learning models for website testing.

My research group creates new software and algorithms which enable robots to effectively assist physicians and automatically accomplish healthcare tasks. We focus on developing motion planning algorithms and physically-based simulations with applications to robot-assisted surgery, treatment planning, medical image registration, personal assistance, and physician training. Our research spans the following areas:

(*) Motion Planning for Healthcare Robotics: Our objective is to compute actions that enable a robot to automatically accomplish clinical or assistive tasks. Using sampling-based and geometric approaches, we develop algorithms to automatically maneuver medical devices such as robotic surgical assistants or steerable needles around anatomical obstacles to difficult to reach sites, enabling new surgical and interventional procedures. Our research identifies and exploits parallels between medical problems and traditional robot motion planning problems while explicitly considering the complexity and uncertainty inherent in healthcare applications.

(*) Physically-based Medical Simulation: Human soft tissues are heterogeneous and have nonlinear properties, resulting in complex deformations during clinical procedures. Using finite element methods and mesh maintenance algorithms, we are developing simulations of soft tissues and their interaction with medical devices. These simulations can assist physicians in registering diagnostic and treatment images obtained at different times, and can also be used for interactive physician training and procedure planning.

I’m interested in how users manage their digital information through their multiple devices. My work has studied how people re-find information on the web; how people’s mental workload is affected when they move from one device (desktop) to another (phone); and how people use phones in social settings to satisfy information needs.

The rise of social networks presents an opportunity for the management of personal information. Lately, we have begun exploring how to leverage a user’s social network to improve PIM. Emails in a person’s inbox, for example, are “shared” between the sender and the receiver. What if we could share the PIM practices within our inner personal circle? Could we leverage the power of our social network to be more organized? We currently leverage common email patterns to identify spam… we could leverage common PIM practices (tags, filing, organizing) to help others in our inner circle organize their information?

A second area of research, in education technology, is exploring the future of electronic textbooks, particularly as the intersection with in-class management of education. Imagine if lecture notes, assignments, student note taking, readings, and student-to-student discussions, were all managed from a tablet computer. What would our classroom interactions be like? What tools would teachers need to manage the classrooms? What impact on learning would this system have? Can an app be built that guides students towards “today’s” readings and manage their attention to “tomorrow’s” homework?

Anything to do with information. Have been involved in > 110 research grants, giving hundreds of papers and presentations, initially on information retrieval, including computational linguistics and reasoning under uncertainty. Also worked on multimedia, educational technologies, digital repositories, and extending services related to electronic theses and dissertations (including analyzing references and classifying works and parts, see www.ndltd.org), with machine learning. One of the founders of the digital libraries area, developing formal foundations, prototype systems, user studies especially on interfaces and information visualization, and applications including to archaeology, physics, and education. Leading the Crisis, Tragedy, and Recovery network (www.ctrnet.net), including working with ontologies, focus groups, twitter, focused crawling, filtering.

I do work research in social computing and social media. My approach to research typically centers around using computational methods (e.g., applied NLP) to both understand the social internet and build new systems for it.

Current topics:

* Building new email interactions
* Building new interaction techniques for social networking sites
* Analyzing diffusion through networks over long spans of time
* Analyzing online social behavior through theoretical lenses

My work i is broadly at the intersection of HCI and Information Retrieval/Data Mining. I generally work with extremely large datasets of text (Web, large collections of scientific texts, historical collections of books), behavior (click and search logs), and networks (social systems, Web, P2P, etc.). My work tends to have both an empirical descriptive/modeling component as well as a system-building component (leveraging what know to build better systems). Current areas of focus include:

- Temporal-informatics – providing front ends to users who have data-extraction needs for time-varying data (e.g., http://www.cond.org/zoetrope.html)

- Meme mutation – how information mutates as it moves through networks

- Scientific data evolution – mining large collections of scientific literature to detect evolution and emergence

- Collaborative analytics/visualization – building systems to support users without a great deal of statistical and visual literacy in understanding data

- Privacy – how perceptions shape behavior

Speech recognition, spoken language translation, situated spoken language understanding, machine learning

My work lies broadly at the intersection of HCI, interactive IR and cognitive psychology. The overarching goal is to use the implicit user data in personalization of interaction with information systems.

Current areas of focus include application of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to information seeking (IR and web navigation). The approach is to use rich user interaction logs, eye-tracking and psycho-physiological signals (such as EEG, GSR) to infer user’s states (e.g., cognitive load, affective states) and user’s reaction to information (e.g., decisions).

There are opportunities to :
* study information seeking behavior in novel ways;
* work on creating novel search and navigation interfaces;
* work with large psycho-physiological data sets and apply signal processing and machine learning techniques.

Worth noting: My university is just about an hour away from New York City.

My interests are in the area of computer security: how can we build secure systems, and how can we be confident that the resulting systems will be secure?

I am looking for a strong postdoc to work in one of the following areas:

Smartphone security, especially security of 3rd-party apps. The goal is to support 3rd-party smartphone apps securely and lay a solid foundation for smartphone security.

Usable security for phones. To build secure phone platforms, we need to take a user-centered perspective. I warmly welcome applications or interest from researchers in the area of HCI, usability, human factors, or usability evaluation. No prior background in security needed: you bring the usability knowledge, I’ll bring the security background.

Measuring security. Can we experimentally measure the effectiveness of various security technologies? For instance, it would be useful if we could measure the effect on security of programming languages, frameworks, and tools for developers.

Electronic voting. Can we improve the auditability, usability, or effectiveness of electronic voting technologies? Can we securely vote over the Internet?

I am also interested in general in usable security, software security, and systems security, and I welcome applicants. Also, feel free to contact me separately about paid postdoc positions, apart from the CIFellows program.

My research focuses on culturally appropriate uses of information and communications technology (ICT) to improve delivery of health information and health services in low-income countries. ICT offers many benefits, including access to online resources, electronic data collection, electronic storage and retrieval of patient data, etc. However, there may be social and cultural barriers to acceptance of the technology. Age, gender, class, education level, national or regional culture, level of urbanization, and political climate can all be potential barriers to acceptance. Careful understanding of social and cultural contexts is needed to avert such unintended negative effects. My research evaluates the acceptability and impact of handheld computers, mobile phones, websites, and other ICT in order to understand the social and cultural barriers to accepting ICT in healthcare settings in low-income countries.

My research builds on years of experience working with global health projects in sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, I supervise a program in Rwanda that offers medical and psychosocial care in two hospitals and four clinics throughout the country. I am also on the advisory board of a women’s health website with global reach.

The primary focus of our lab is understanding the work practices of IT professionals to inform the design of improved computational support. As such we have engaged a wide range of domains including healthcare, aerospace, network security, public education and online community management. We take a sociotechnical perspective and engage the full life cycle of research projects, from ethnographically-informed fieldwork through systems development, deployment and evaluation. We are currently engaged with a multi-faceted empirical investigation of the processes virtual organizing, especially with regard to virtual worlds and alternate reality games.

My group works in computer vision with an emphasis on the interpretation of video and the understanding of human behavior, in particular the social behavior of children. I am leading a large multi-institution effort to develop the science and technology of behavior imaging— methods for sensing and modeling behavior to support the diagnosis, treatment, and understanding of developmental disorders such as autism. A related area of interest is video interpretation and dynamic scene understanding, where we have developed novel video segmentation methods based on temporal causal analysis. A third area is perception for robotics, with specific projects in autonomous high-speed driving (the autonomous rally car project) and manipulation in clutter using the PR-2 robot from Willow Garage. Projects are available in all of these areas.

I am broadly interested in topics at the intersection of HCI and AI and Machine Learning. Major areas of focus include:

– Systems that adapt the interaction to the abilities (motor, perceptual, cognitive) of their users; this is to accommodate differences due to activity, health condition, context, culture, and bias;

– Interactive machine learning: we are developing novel interactions and algorithms that enable machines to learn from a small number of interactions with the user;

– Creativity support tools: how can personalized software help people explore the design space more efficiently, create more diverse alternatives, and improve self-efficacy?

The Interface Ecology Lab imagines and develops integral and sensitive human-centered computing to support nuanced and exciting aspects of life, including how we form and express ideas and intentions, how we learn and innovate, how we gesture and communicate, how we coordinate and cooperate, how we participate and share, how we function under stress, and how we respond to crises. We connect diverse methodologies, engaging an interface ecosystems approach to engage computing in holistic avenues of human experience.

We have just developed an innovative multi-finger sensor, ZeroTouch. We are now poised to integrate ZeroTouch into interactive environments, developing new embodied bi-manual and free air interaction techniques and experiences.

We have released the open source meta-metadata language and architecture, for authoring platform-independent wrappers for heterogeneous information sources. Meta-metadata supports information extraction and knowledge integration. It facilitates writing programs that enable new human experiences of information visualization, physically-based modeling, and embodied interaction. Research here involves new knowledge semantics and modeling, on the one hand, and new interactive visual applications, on the other. Social media and digital libraries are connected.

We are developing special relationships with disaster response organizations. Texas Task Force 1 engages in major disasters, such as 9/11, and hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Ike. TEEX Disaster Preparedness and Response runs an internationally-renowned academy for first responders. We are engaged both in developing zero fidelity simulation games for education, and in creating innovative multi-surface information systems for crisis response.

The typical search interface is great for finding a single element of information, but weak for information-based ideation tasks, in which the human goal is to to develop ideas with support and stimulus from information. The combinFormation platform reconceptualizes information-based ideation support as mixed-initiative information composition, integrating browse-search-collect-visualize-and-organize, while representing each collection as a connected whole. To validate composition, information-based ideation metrics and grounded theory are extended and synthesized, developing formative and summative evaluation methodologies. Application contexts include thesis writing in computer science, and design in architecture and mechanical engineering.

Seeking postdoctoral fellow to work on predictive dynamic models of language and nonverbal behavior and integrating them into Embodied Conversational Agents. The candidate should have a background in Computational Linguistics (NLG, Dialogue); should be willing to do significant reading into current approaches (both symbolic and probabalistic) to generating dialogue, should be capable of incorporating recent linguistic and psychological insights into the dyadic, dynamic nature of dialogue, and the integral role played by eye gaze, gesture, posture; and should be willing and able, therefore, to develop more innovative and adequate approaches to generating dialogue. The result will be a radically new way of generating embodied dialogue moves, for an embodied agent that can be more tightly integrated into collaborative scenarios with humans. Applications will include embodied peers that teach literacy and scientific reasoning behaviors, embodied peers that scaffold social behavior in children with autism, and embodied agents that give directions in real and virtual environments.

Professor Cassell is currently faculty at Northwestern University, but will be joining the Carnegie Mellon Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Fall, and so the postdoctoral candidate would be located at CMU HCII in Pittsburgh, with access to colleagues in Natural Language Technologies, Machine Learning, and Graphics.

My main area of research is Natural Language Processing (NLP), and its application to human-computer interaction, educational technology, and multimedia systems. My goal is to use NLP to support both education and instruction, and collaboration between human or artificial agents. My group focuses specifically on semantics, and discourse and dialogue processing. All my research has its empirical foundations in both qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis, including data mining techniques. In the last decade I have worked on language interfaces for educational technology, on discourse structure / dialogue act recognition, and on summarization. I am currently exploring a new exciting application area, that of health care, e.g. for assistive robotics, decision support systems for patients, and medical education.

I recommend you go to the Healthcare Robotics Lab website (http://healthcare-robotics.com) to learn more about my lab’s research. There are many opportunities for postdoctoral researchers to make high-impact contributions. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

My lab’s research seeks to advance the capabilities of real robots so that they can provide valued assistance to people in the context of healthcare. Specifically, we work with semi-autonomous mobile robots that physically manipulate the world (mobile manipulators). Our current efforts include research into human-robot interaction, autonomous mobile manipulation, machine perception, machine learning, and haptics.

The following three large-scale efforts are especially exciting to us and we would welcome a postdoc to become involved:

1) Assistive Mobile Manipulation for Older Adults at Home: This is the PR2 Beta Program project at Georgia Tech for which I’m the principal investigator. It involves several initiatives with the overall goal of providing assistance to older adults in their homes. Our PR2 is currently in the Aware Home, where it will be interacting with older adults this summer (2011).

2) We have a new project that is not yet public that is very exciting in terms of helping people with severe motor impairments. Please contact me for details.

3) Haptically-guided Manipulation within Extreme Clutter: We are investigating the possibility of a new foundation for robot manipulation using compliant actuation and whole-body skin. This project is also new and not much is public, so please contact me for details.

My lab is multi-disciplinary with members from computer science, biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering. We are also collaborative. We are active in the Robotics PhD program and the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (RIM@GT), and we work closely with other labs on campus, including the Human Factors and Aging Lab in the School of Psychology and the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab in the College of Computing. Although much of our research has a long time horizon, we actively engage industry and look for opportunities to make an impact.

We have several state-of-the-art robots, including a PR2 from Willow Garage, the custom humanoid robot Cody, and a variety of smaller assistive robots that we have developed. By the end of the summer (2011), we also expect to have an additional sophisticated human-scale mobile manipulator. Our other facilities include rapid prototyping equipment (3D printer and laser cutter), a machine shop, and a force and motion capture studio.

Best of luck with your application.

- Charlie

The research goal of the Music Computation and Cognition group at USC is to systematically study, computationally model, and scientifically explain human abilities in music perception and cognition, and in music making, such as music performance, improvisation, and composition.

Research projects at the laboratory address the three main areas of music analysis, performance, and composition/improvisation. They include:

• decoding and generation of decisions and gestures in music performance;
• analysis of musical ensemble in networked music performances;
• multi-modal interaction in human-machine musical improvisation; and,
• automatic analysis and visualization of musical structure.

The MuCoaCo website — http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~mucoaco — and the MuCoaCo blog — http://mucoaco.blogspot.com — contain detailed project descriptions, video demonstrations, and lists of publications and awards. The broad areas spanned by the research projects are mirrored in the seminar course on Topics in Engineering Approaches to Music Cognition — http://www-scf.usc.edu/~ise575 .

The successful postdoctoral researcher is expected to engage in music computing research, and to have completed graduate-level training in at least one of the following quantitative analysis areas: mathematics, computer science, operations research, signal processing, statistics, or neuroscience. It is highly advantageous for the candidate to possess graduate-equivalent practical or theoretical knowledge in music analysis, performance, composition, or music perception and cognition. Preference is given to individuals with prior experience in music computing research.

MuCoaCo affiliates have had backgrounds in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Industrial and Systems Engineering, Music Composition, Music Performance, Neuroscience, and Psychology.

The Linguistic and Assistive Technologies Laboratory (LATLab) at The City University of New York (CUNY), Queens College, conducts research in computational linguistics and human-computer interaction with a primary focus on accessibility applications and assistive technology for people with disabilities. In particular, we study the design of computer technology to address language and literacy impairments of people with disabilities – with a focus on two groups: people who have intellectual disabilities (ID) and people who are deaf.

Animations of American Sign Language for People who are Deaf:

Our research at CUNY has focused on sign language animation technologies for people who are deaf. American Sign Language (ASL) is a primary means of communication for one-half million people in the U.S, and it is a distinct language from English – with its own unique word-order, grammar, and vocabulary. A majority of deaf high school graduates in the U.S. have only a fourth-grade English reading level or below, yet many of these adults have sophisticated fluency in ASL. Therefore, software that can present information in the form of ASL animations would improve these individuals’ access to websites, communication, and information. Using our motion-capture recording studio, we are collecting a corpus of ASL performances, linguistically annotating them (with the help of a team of native ASL signers), and analyzing this data to create models to underlie ASL animation technologies (to make them more natural-moving and understandable for deaf viewers). We conduct experimental studies at the laboratory on a regular basis in which native ASL signers evaluate animations synthesized using alternative models. We have studies models of speed/timing, use of signing space, verb inflection, and we are beginning a project on facial expression in ASL. We are also interested in issues relating to linguistic generation of ASL and English-to-ASL machine translation. Further, we are interested in studying other forms of signing communication, including various forms of Signed English used by people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing in the U.S.

Text Readability Detection / Text Simplification for People with Intellectual Disabilities:

Many people with ID have limited English literacy and could benefit from software that could help them automatically identify information sources or websites that are at an appropriate level of difficulty or that could automatically simplify complex texts. Based on linguistic features of a text that can be automatically calculated through NLP software (the part-of-speech of different words, the syntactic parse-tree of the sentences, etc.), we are designing software to assign a difficulty score to a text to indicate whether it would be accessible for an adult with ID to read. We are also experimenting with various experimental designs to gather ground-truth data about how difficult-to-read texts are for these users; this is non-trivial because it can be difficult for these users to participate in a traditional comprehension experiments.

Other Projects:

We are interested in other projects related to applications of computational linguistics or human computer interaction to accessibility or assistive technology for people with disabilities.

Videogaming for Rehabilitation:
Striatal dopamine release during video game play may facilitate brain plasticity following perceptual learning. By combining visual distortion with video game environments and multimodal sensory feedback, we may be able to effect faster and more widespread learning during motor rehabilitation. Although videogaming techniques for rehabilitation have been applied to the upper limb with success, there are many disorders of the voice, speech, and swallowing system that may be amenable to this technique. Our work in this area is to develop and test novel videogame-based interventions for these disorders in order to improve the quality of life in individuals with sensorimotor disorders.

Novel Neurotechnology for Speech Assistance and Rehabilitation:
Rehabilitation of communication through novel human-machine-interfaces is the “next frontier” in neural technology. A multidisciplinary understanding of the neural dynamics during speech production and real-time signal processing techniques is essential for the advancement of these technologies. The long-term research agenda of our lab is to bridge speech science with engineering to design new approaches to advance speech human-machine-interfaces to a reliable and intuitive state for populations that are currently severely restricted in their ability to communicate.

Noshir Contractor (http://nosh.northwestern.edu) is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University.

Professor Contractor is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in a wide variety of contexts including communities of practice in business, translational science and engineering communities, public health networks and virtual worlds.

Research in the SONIC (Science of Networks in Communities) http://sonic.northwestern.edu which he directs seeks to understand and enable multidimensional social networks. Multidimensional networks include different types of nodes (such as people, documents, data sets, and tags) and the different types of relations that connect them.

In order to understand the emergence and dynamics of multidimensional social networks, research in the SONIC lab combines (social science) theory driven and data driven (statistically modeling, data mining and machine learning) approaches.

In particular the lab is interested in the statistical modeling of networks using p* /Exponential Random Graph Modeling (ERGM) techniques and stochastic actor orient modeling techniques (implemented in SIENA). In addition, there is a strong emphasis on conducting these analysis on large scale networks. The lab has access to many large scale server-side sources of data such MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online games) and the Web of Science. The insights gained from understanding the emergence and dynamics of multidimensional networks is used to enable networks by building sophisticated recommender systems that provide individualized suggestions on who to collaborate with or what team to assemble.

His research program has been funded continuously for over 15 years by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional current funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Air Force Research Lab, Army Research Institute, Army Research Laboratory and the MacArthur Foundation.

Professor Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers dealing with communicating and organizing. His book titled Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge and published by Oxford University Press, and translated into simplified Chinese in 2009) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. He is the lead developer of C-IKNOW (Cyberinfrastructure for Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), a socio-technical environment to understand and enable networks among communities, as well as Blanche, a software environment to simulate the dynamics of social networks.

I have broad research interests covering the impact of technology on work, social interactions and economics. As a user experience researcher, my specific interests include the design of knowledge management systems and online communities, secure mobile applications, workflow orchestration, and business process modeling by non-programmers.

My research interests are very broad, covering all aspects of enterprise security. I am currently particularly interested in insider threat research, the application of anomaly detection to improving security algorithms, usable security (particularly in large data centers), and improvements in identity and access management. Other related areas include visualization of data for security purposes, security as it pertains to cloud services, and data leak prevention. A postdoc will be expected to help define an appropriate research direction based on a combination of personal interest and ongoing consultation and collaboration with CA researchers and the applicable business units.

Researchers at the Lab work closely with the security business unit to ensure that the research is going in a direction that is likely to produce results that can be used to improve products and thus impact the security postures of our clients. (CA products are currently used by 98% of the Fortune 1000.)

This position provides the opportunity for a postdoc to perform research that has the possibility of improving security for a large number of government and private organizations internationally, as well as providing the opportunity to publish in journals, present at conferences, and patent innovations.

Anita Komlodi is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director for Human-Centered Computing. Most of her current research focuses on user diversity in technology use and attitudes: age, gender, and cultural differences in technology interactions. She is also interested in the study of Human Information Behavior and the design and evaluation of user interaction methods in information retrieval and information visualization.

At the technology, open organizing, & learning sciences laboratory (toolsLAB) we examine how digital tools afford new ways of reorganizing knowledge sharing and knowledge building and impact learning and work practices. Through a fundamental understanding of the change occurring within the workplace and learning envirnments, we aim to design tools and technologies that can support creativity and innovation. Our current projects are looking at the use of Tablet PCs in engineering design, the use Wiki-based platforms for student advising, social network analysis of research collaborations, and learning practices in open source communities. Another major thrust of our lab is examination of communication and collaboration in virtual and globally distributed teams. This position will provide experience with field studies, technology development, and an opportunity to shape the education of future engineers.

Additional areas of interest: ICT for development, design for social empowerment.

Crowdsourcing, human computation, and collective intelligence are having profound implications for computing, posing many tantalizing research questions. Not only does the topic provide fertile land for research, it is also a topic where the time frame of a CI Fellowship can permit results with the significance and recognition that can help propel a career forward.

As one example direction, we now face micro-labor markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk that allow us to write algorithms whose “subroutines” are people performing tasks at pennies a shot. How do we program this kind of “social computer”? What are the crowdsourcing analogs to the programming languages and IDEs that we rely on in traditional programming? I’m particularly (but not solely) interested in the role that machine learning can play here. For example, what’s the right way to do classification learning for problems that no longer need to assume that obtaining human labels on data is excessively costly, where people are now instead cheap albeit unreliable or differently motivated? This area not only poses new questions but also offers answers of relevance not just to the computational but also the behavioral sciences.

usability, creativity, design methods, participatory design, design rationale, community networks, mobile community networks, online community, virtual organizations, common ground, social capital, awareness, activity awareness, case-based learning,

I work on projects related to the design and evaluation of large-scale software infrastructure in support of data collection and analytics of social media information during times of crisis and/or mass emergency. My work makes use of techniques and technologies found in software engineering, software architecture, Web application frameworks and REST-based Web services.

The goal of our research is to understand the impact that children can have on the design of new technologies and to understand the impact of that these technologies can have on children’s learning experiences. Our interdisciplinary lab of computer and information scientists collaborate with a variety of partners (e.g., The U.S. National Park Service, UNICEF, Sesame Workshop, The Mongolian Ministry of Education through the World Bank, Microsoft, Discovery Communications, etc.) to develop new educational technologies that range from digital libraries to mobile storytelling experiences.

Our newest work focuses on developing mobile technologies for the “iChild.” The iChild is international, expects to be interactive, is information-active, and intensively social. The mobile technologies we are creating are not for children to consume information, but to create and share information. We are currently working with Nickelodeon Inc., Carnegie Hall, and the U.S. National Park Service to create new mobile technologies that integrate the physical and virtual experiences to tell stories, explore the physical world, and enhance the traditional web experience. Our mobile app building is oniPhones and Android phones.

My research and educational career straddles the border between computational theory and mechatronic engineering. Motivated by applications in confined spaces, my group pursues a comprehensive program in mechanism design, path planning, motion planning, and estimation. These research topics are important because once the robot is built (design), it must decide where to go (path planning), determine how to get there (motion planning), and use feedback to close the loop (estimation). Already, we have directly applied this body of work to challenging and strategically significant problems in diverse areas such as surgery, manufacturing, infrastructure inspection, and search and rescue.

Many of the research fundamentals support the development of snake robots, highly articulated mechanisms that can thread through tightly packed spaces reaching locations that people and conventional machinery otherwise cannot. We have developed snake robots for minimally invasive cardiac surgery; recently, we completed our first in human procedure. Current work includes further mechanism development for natural orifice surgery, and prescribing estimation/filtering approaches, based on Kalman and Bayes filtering, to map the internals of the body, i.e., it is SLAM on the inside.

We are also addressing the motion planning of snake robots and all underactuated systems. Our approach takes recourse to the fundamentals, drawing from advanced concepts in differential geometry to prescribe gaits. Examples of results in this work are applying Stokes Theorem to the local form of the connection on shape spaces to efficiently design gaits. Recently, we have shown that many biological systems, including fish and lizards, can be modeled this way.

By taking recourse to the fundamentals, we have been able to address other problems such as multi-agent planning. Recently, we have developed an efficient provably complete optimal multi-agent path planner that can plan paths for 40+ robots in large spaces (note that the size of the configuration space makes it impossible for A* to even search one step, let alone complete a path). We have also developed an algorithm for multi-agent manipulation. Current work includes applying these techniques to distributed manufacturing. We are also working with a biologist to use these concepts to model swarms.

It is the excitement of working with students that continues to draw me to academia. I am certain that a casual tour of my lab reveals a feeling of energy and productivity. My students, both graduate and undergraduate, work hard to provide fresh new insights within the framework of mathematical and experimental rigor endowed by my research program.

Storytelling Tools to Teach Computer Programming
Computing has become a fundamental tool in nearly every career field. Yet there are few opportunities for children to learn basic computer programming. We are building a programming environment called Looking Glass (the successor to Storytelling Alice) which provides a fun context for learning to program (building short animated movies) and support for children to learn from each other’s programs. If a Looking Glass user finds a movie on the internet that contains an animation or effect she would like to learn, she can use special tools within Looking Glass to quickly identify the commands responsible for that effect. Then, Looking Glass can generate a custom tutorial that will guide her through building that effect in her own program. We believe that the combination of a motivating context and the ability to find and effectively use examples in programs created by peers will enable many more children without access to formal computer science courses to learn basic computer programming.

Rapid Development Environments for Stroke Therapy Games
Each year there are approximately 700,000 new or recurrent cases of stroke, a number that is expected to rise as our population continues to age. Approximately 50% of stroke survivors experience hemiparesis, the decreased ability to perform purposeful movement. Stroke survivors’ difficulties with purposeful motion often lead to a loss of independence and an increased need for health and social services. Intensive therapy can help stroke survivors to regain motor control lost through a stroke. But, recovery can often involve daily sessions of hundreds of motion repetitions, a process that can often be tedious for stroke survivors. Computer games present an opportunity to embed therapy motions within a motivating context. However, given the unique attributes of individual patients, it can be difficult to create therapy games that are appropriate for a wide range of patients. We are building programming environment that will enable occupational and physical therapists to quickly design therapy games (~1 hour) to suit the rehabilitation needs of individual patients. The games will run on a home computer and require only off the shelf accessories such as webcams, making them broadly accessible to stroke patients. Providing fun therapeutic activities can help to increase the numbers of patients able to fully recover from a stroke. Additionally, the computer games will enable large scale data collection on the effectiveness of different types of therapy.

Information assurance, cybersecurity, social networking

My interests are in the application of information and computing technology in organizations, particularly unconventional applications in the service sector. My work has mostly been in applying both quantitative and qualitative modeling to various aspects of an organization, so that we can gain insights from the large volume of data that we are now able to collect. Possible topics of joint investigation include mathematical/empirical models for business performance scorecards, models for organization design, numerical solutions to Markov models.

This is a general invitation on behalf of the Information Systems Research Community at NJIT. We have a large variety of NSF-funded and other research projects in HCC and III (human-centered computing / information integration & informatics) topics. Details are on individual faculty pages, accessible through http://is.njit.edu/people/faculty.php – see the research keywords listed here and on the faculty pages.

Overview: I lead a multidisciplinary group that examines a range of human-centered computing issues. A main area of current research is in “crisis informatics.” This line of research combines human-centered computing and socio-technical empirical study with software engineering; natural language processing and information extraction; information visualization; and network security, privacy and scalability. My group conducts empirical research of on-the-ground emergency activities as well as CMC-based interaction, which has had national and international impact. We continue to drive our results toward design and implementation of new forms of Computer-Mediated Communication for use in crisis situations by both citizens and responders. Our goal is to break new ground on delivering technology innovation to those who are most in need of it.
Background: In an increasingly global society and on a planet experiencing effects of climatic change, large-scale emergencies both instigated by humans and arising from nature can devastate human life and a tightly-woven social fabric. A prevailing hope is that information and communication technology (ICT) aimed at official responders can help reduce impacts of large-scale disruptions, including political crises, natural disasters, pandemics, and terrorist threats. Our program builds on the hopes of ICT, but takes a different approach, focusing instead on an understudied but critical aspect of large-scale emergency response—the needs and roles of members of the public. By viewing the citizenry as a powerful, self-organizing, and collectively intelligent force, ICT can play a transformational role in crisis. Our research aims to leverage the knowledge of members of the public through reuse of publicly available computer mediated communications. The research that our multid isciplinary group will conduct includes the study and integration of heterogeneous information and–with techniques of information extraction through natural language processing as well as trust and reputation modeling–add meta- information to help users assess context, validity, source, credibility, and timeliness to make the best decisions for their highly localized, changing conditions.

Intellectual contributions include the expansion of broad thinking about societal-scale interaction in the area of crisis informatics, and bridging information, cognitive and computer science. This work also includes consideration of implications to emergency management and telecom policy. Innovation will be based on empirical study of CMC and citizen information needs in a range of international crisis events, with the development of methods to analyze such behavior in light of privacy, security, ethical and policy issues. Our project integrates technology and emergency management partners in its mission.
Skills. A CI Fellow working with me is first and foremost encouraged to establish a line of independent research that follows their PhD research trajectory. However, I invite applicants to extend their current research to bridge with our large research venture that includes 7 faculty and numerous graduate students for mutual benefit.

To that end, a number of skills would fit well into our larger research effort: ethnographic research on sociotechnical systems; policy and institutional considerations; systems building of collaborative environments; social network analysis; information visualization; data mining and natural language processing. Previous knowledge and experience with emergency and disaster response is welcomed but not required.

I invent and evaluate software development tools, especially those that make it easier to find, fix, and understand bugs and usability problems. To do this, I do extensive studies of the contexts in these tools will be used, including studies of novice programmers, professionals software developers, and everyone else who programs. I use a variety of research methods, including lab studies, field work, artifact analysis, and design work.

We are interested in investigating how cognitive design principles can be used to improve the effectiveness of visual displays. The goals of this work are to discover the design principles and then instantiate them in both interactive and automated design tools. Recent projects based on this methodology include automated map design algorithms, systems for designing cutaway and exploded view illustrations of complex 3D objects, tools for crowdsourcing data analysis, perceptual studies of charts and diagrams, and interactive tools for manipulating digital photographs and video.

Electrical-engineering (ee) degrees. Learning in fields such as art/architecture.
Widely published in archival journals. Three edited books. Authored encyclopedia articles.
Doctorate: dissertation in stochastic control (ee); mathematics and statistics minors; reading knowledge of Russian and French. Now use Google-translate to write Russian.
Rand Corporation employment and UCLA projects on applied problems ranging from operations research to biomedical computing.

Emeritus Professor since 1994.

My research is in Human Centered Computing. The goal of my research is to design, implement and evaluate innovative solutions to real world problems. My research integrates people, culture and technology to address societal issues. In general, Human Centered Computing research is highly interdisciplinary and applied. My areas of specialization within HCC are Natural Interactive Systems, Advanced Learning Technologies/Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Ethnocomputing/Culturally Aware Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, Databases and Data Mining.

In Natural Interactive Systems (NIS), I am interested in creating user interfaces where the user interacts with the system using speech or multimodality. I am researching design, implementation and the evaluation of naturally interactive systems. One of my research projects in NIS is called Prime III. Prime III is a secure, multimodal electronic voting system. Prime III provides an easy to use multimodal user interface that allows greater participation in the electoral process. Voters that can’t read, hear, have visual impairments or physical impairments, can still vote using Prime III.

In Advanced Learning Technologies/Intelligent Tutoring Systems, my research aims to create and study applications that employ intelligent strategies that personalize instruction. In some implementations, this involves the use of spoken language systems and Animated Pedagogical Agents (APAs). I am researching the use and impact of culturally relevant environments that use culture in the education or training environment. This is a form of Ethnocomputing or culturally releveant computing. In my latest research efforts, I am researching game-like interfaces that provide naturally interactive instruction using animation, artificial intelligence, and speech. An example of this work can be seen at http://www.aadmlss.com.

In Ethnocomputing or Culturally Aware Computing, I am investigating the use and impact of culture in computing. Our research suggests that culture can be used to increase interest, user satisfaction and ease of use in computing applications. I am also working on information technology workforce issues. Specifically, I am investigating pedagogies and programs that broaden participation in computing for people in underrepresented groups. I am studying effective practices that help recruit, retain and graduate people from underrepresented groups in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

In Databases and Data Mining, I am investigating data mining for human centered applications, e.g. applications where the data represents people, and tools that answer complex questions from business intelligence, education, and society in general. For example, I use clustering algorithms to process admissions applications in order to increase holistic diversity. This tool is called Applications Quest, http://www.ApplicationsQuest.com. I am also interested in educational data mining.

I am particularly interested in these topics: Pattern recognition applied to mobile health technologies; wellness technologies; context-aware mobile devices; personal health informatics; home sensing and activity recognition; wearable accelerometers; physical activity measurement; novel health interventions; persuasive computing; technologies that motivate behavior change; exergames; games for health. I moved to Northeastern recently from MIT to start a new Ph.D. program in Personal Health Informatics and I’m very interested in working with postdocs who want to work on that topic.

My research interests lie in human-computer interaction in scientific collaborations, collaborative creativity, cyberinfrastructure, eScience, information visualization, usability in daily life, and how social media and computer-mediated communication are changing scientific practice.

1. Distributed and local research collaborations, and what makes them successful (archival, survey, and qualitative research).
2. Communication and services using human-robot interaction (see Snackbot.org).
3. Visualizations for collaborative analysis.
4. Social Computing.

We are working on understanding the features that make for successful remote collaboration. We have field data, and will be collecting more as well. We have an “organizational simulation” (Shape Factory) running in the laboratory. We have plans for building tools to support “Virtual Radical Collocation,” where people have a mix of tools to support their being aware of their team members work, their current state, etc., while being in different locations. Our more recent emphasis is on cross-cultural collaboration, especially of teams with members on the Pacific Rim.

My research lies in the areas of
- personalized systems and user modeling (with applications in information environments, expert finders, personal health maintenance, and user interfaces for disabled and elderly people)
- privacy, in the context of personalized systems, awareness systems, etc.
- the usability of security solutions
- the usability and usefulness of information visualization systems

CIFellows can work on existing projects in these areas or carry out their own research programs.

We are working actively in medical informatics on Electronic Health Records and data analysis of temporal event sequences such as found in patient histories. Our other major effort is on network visualization, related to the NodeXL (www.codeplex.com/nodexl) and other tools, especially as applied to Technology-Mediated Social Participation.

I am interested in designing, developing and analyzing systems that can improve the accessibility of information for a wide spectrum of users, driven by the passion of making information systems usable. My current research towards this direction involves a number of disciplines, most notably databases, natural language processing, human-computer interaction and machine learning.

You can learn more about me from my website: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/yunyaoli/index.html

Online Communities:
How can one structure early experiences in online communities to lead new members to become committed and contribute?

Social impact of computing:
What kinds of social media use by what kind of people influence their psychological well-being and their social relationships.

Virtual organizations:
Groups are inherently different from individuals performing the same task because of a need to coordinate. How can one organize work online to improve coordination?

Health support groups:
How do people generate social support in online support groups and what is its impact?

I specialize in interactive visualization and visual analysis of large and complex data. In addition, I maintain an active research agenda in 3D urban modeling and spatial awareness.

Currently, I’m investigating human + computing in visual analytics where I look to identify the roles of human interactions and automated analysis techniques. This area of research has led me to think more about the nature of interaction (in analytical tasks), and how to interpret the interaction in a machine-readable way. On the other hand, I am also looking at incorporating data mining and machine learning methods into the analysis loop, while investigating how to combine the two (human computing and computer computing).

More generally, I am interested in pushing the boundary of using automated methods in creating visual interfaces and quantifying the semantics behind the visual representations that the user would interact with. Much of this work relies on developing metrics in order to evaluate the automated methods, which is an open challenge in the visualization world, and is a topic that I’d like to investigate further.

Mobile technology for resource-constrained environments. Open source software to help organizations build community-based grassroots information services. Open Data Kit (ODK) is our latest software now in use on 6 continents in areas as diverse as public health and human rights monitoring. We build systems that are easy to use, extend, and maintain from both commercial and custom components. Our group publishes in development technology conferences (ICTD and DEV), mobile systems (HotMobile, Mobisys), and HCI (CHI).

Applications-driven research in ubiquitous computing, with particular emphasis on home and health domains. I have a personal passion for research connected with autism. I have also been very successful at mentoring students interested in pursuing academic research careers.

I am interested in applications of ubiquitous computing to everyday life, with specific focus on applications in the home and health domains. I have a particular focus, due to personal reasons, on technology and autism.

Our multidisciplinary team at Cornell is interested in using mobile devices to influence healthy behaviors. The goal of our research is to refine and evaluate behavioral interventions to reduce obesity. We are looking at the effect of positive affect, social networks (co-PI on NSF HCC Kleinberg, PI), social support systems, and cell phone apps on creating sustainable eating and physical activity.
We are using mobile devices and feedback tools to collect data on mood and activities and designing visualization tools for participants to reflect on their own patterns and behaviors over time. These tools could be applied to help monitor, change behavior or create awareness in multiple contexts.

http://idl.cornell.edu/index.php

Computer security and privacy, with a special interest toward emerging technologies, mobile devices, and human values.

I believe that Post-docs are a time for a newly graduated Ph.D. student to explore and take more independence in their research. I’d like to support a post-doc to accomplish this through the CI Fellows program. That is my primary objective, to help develop a career.

My research interests are in the application of empirical methods to problems in HCI and beyond. I enjoy working on problems that others select where I can provide help and guidance. You can learn more about the types of problems I have worked on at my website (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki). So, if you are interested in empirical methods, particularly qualitative methods, and you have an idea for a project that you think I could help you with, or is related to something I am or have done, send me email!

I’m currently investigating two related areas of work. The first is integrating social networking information plus smartphone data (communication logs + sensor data) to understand human behavior at a fine-grained level and at a large scale. In our past work, we’ve shown how collocations can be used to infer friendships, and how mobility patterns can be used to predict privacy preferences. We want to examine how social graphs plus smartphone data can be used to rigorously understand human phenomena such as leadership, depression, friendship, and what people do in a city, all with an eye towards using this information to create compelling new services for people.

The second area is privacy. One research thrust is managing the privacy of all of this gathered information. Another research thrust is using this smartphone and social graph information to help people manage their privacy and security. For example, how can we use this kind of information to help people manage the 100+ passwords they have, or help configure their privacy and security preferences?

ANDREA: I am a scholar of Public Informatics. This is a term I have coined to best situate my work at the intersection of people, information and technology in a public setting. My work in Public Informatics has contributed to the understanding of the patterns, behaviors and barriers to coordination through technologies among public institutions and contributed to addressing some of the most critical social problems facing the world today, such as humanitarian relief, emergency response, and social and economic development.

DISTAER RESPONSE COLLABOATION: In 2007 I received a grant from the US National Science Foundation to study collaboration and decision-making through technologies among humanitarian relief organizations. This initial seed has spurred my research team to eventually gain three additional grants, and to published five articles and fourteen conference papers from this research. My early findings of this research point to unique network structures and barriers that exist in this form of technical coordination in this sector at various levels of participating organizations. It is in these collaboration efforts that I find global collaboration processes, projects and challenges that are both unique in their context and setting and similar to other IT collaboration efforts more universally. Within this context, information systems collaboration is itself a goal, but it also frequently serves a supporting role in fostering collaboration in other units by promoting enhanced information sharing.
The question that I seek to answer in all of these cases is in what form would technologies have to take to enable fruitful collaboration and information sharing among organizations to improve the delivery of emergency services and goods immediately post disaster.

MICROBLOGGING DISASTER RELIEF: Much has been written concerning the value of using messaging and microblogging data from crowds of non-professional participants during disasters. Often referred to as microblogging, the practice of average citizens reporting on activities “on-the-ground” during a disaster is seen as increasingly valuable. Data produced through microblogging is seen as ubiquitous, rapid and accessible and it is believed to empower average citizens to become more situationally aware during disasters and coordinate to help themselves. However, despite the evidence of strong value to those experiencing the disaster and those seeking information concerning the disaster, there has been very little uptake of message data by large-scale, international humanitarian relief organizations. The real-time message data being contributed by bystanders and those affected by a disaster has been deemed as unverifiable and untrustworthy, and it has not been incorporated into established mechanisms for organizational decision-making. Due to the perceived lack of authentication, large-scale responders have been reluctant to incorporate microblogged data into the process of assessing a disaster situation and the subsequent decision-making process to send aid workers and supplies to disaster locations. Committing to the mobilization of valuable and time sensitive relief supplies and personnel, based on what may turn out be illegitimate claims, has been perceived to be too great a risk. We propose three socio-technical solutions to surpassing adoption bottlenecks, namely bounded microblogging, data as contextual data, and/or use of computational solutions.

Social and psychological aspects of human-computer interaction and computer-mediated communication in a variety of media interfaces, ranging from websites and social media to mobile devices and robots. Current focus is on studying cognitive processing of online information as a function of four classes of technological affordances (Modality, Agency, Interactivity, and Navigability), as predicted by MAIN Model, Interactivity Effects Model, and the Agency Model of Customization. Laboratory-based research emphasizing theoretical contribution to our understanding of how interfaces affect user psychology, with implications for design of future interfaces.

I study motivations and incentives in social media. Specifically, I look at why people contribute to social media systems, and how the underlying technology can influences those motivations and the resulting behavior. I have a major NSF-funded project studying crowdfunding websites (like Kickstarter.com), trying to understand why people contribute, and how we can better design such websites so that people participate. I’m also involved in studying why people make computer security related decisions, looking in particular at their mental models of what threats exist.

My research focuses on three inter-related streams: the creation of home-based technologies for wellness and health across the lifespan, innovative design methods for ensuring technology development is sensitive to human values, and evaluation of user needs and acceptance of emerging technologies, particularly in residential settings. I also have ongoing research interests in HCI research methods and public policy as it relates to information technology.

Especially seeking postdocs interested in HCI applied to the domains of child & family health, technology use in domestic settings, and video game design.

Anything that involves transforming images into descriptions (or vice versa)

My work centers on two areas:
1. Often domestic interactions involve technology and center around gender norms, which makes homes highly gendered spaces. Gender is critical not just in our interpersonal relationships but in how we interact with our environment. The objects and technologies in our homes themselves are gendered, and we respond to social norms regarding gender in our interactions with them. We have additional gender norms surrounding programming of technology devices in the work place, which in turn affect programming of these gendered technologies in the home. As we increasingly introduce programmable technologies into the home, gendered attitudes become enmeshed in how we discuss and use these technologies.

I use ethnographic approaches to create grounded theory that examine gender and domestic end-user programming for computer security, amongst other things. My work discusses how the relationship between technology and identity is negotiated, especially gendered identity and the presentation of an individual’s technical ability. Further, I explore what this negotiation process means for design and evaluation of new technologies.

2. I enjoy working with teams to engage in participatory design in the ubicomp and tangible computing space trying to take the next step beyond fieldwork to create prototypes and engage in iterative interface design. I believe there is work to be done to discuss how the UCD process for ubicomp differs from GUI design, and this needs to be documented and discussed further in the academic literature. This innovative work has led me to recognize the limited applicability of existing usability evaluation methods (UEM), which were largely developed for GUIs. Thus I have developed a strong interest in adapting existing techniques and establishing new methods for evaluating these emerging technologies.

My research focuses at the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory focusses on usable privacy and security. My current projects fall into several overlapping areas: privacy decision making (including applications of P3P), user-controllable security and privacy (including location-sharing privacy and file access control in the home), and usable cyber trust indicators. See the CUPS website for more information.

This is joint work with Lada Adamic (Computer Science, School of Information, Complex Systems). We have an on-going project looking at question-and-answer communities (e.g., Yahoo Answers, Stack Overflow, Baidu, Naver) and social search (e.g., Aardvark, kgb). We are looking for a post-doc who is interested in (1) combining ethnographic and large-scale social network analysis techniques in the analysis of these systems, and/or (2) developing mechanisms and components for augmenting the expertise-finding and question-routing in these systems. For the analysis, we are especially interested in cross-cultural issues.

Deborah McGuinness is the Tetherless World Constellation (tw.rpi.edu) Chair and professor of computer science and cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She has also just been named the director of the new Web Science Research Center at RPI, Prior to joining RPI in 2007, she led the knowledge systems laboratory (ksl.stanford.edu) at Stanford University and prior to that, was part of the AI Research Department at Bell Labs / AT&T Labs.
She co-directs the Tetherless World along with Jim Hendler and Peter Fox.

Her current interests center around making the next generation web more usable and useful. Projects focus on designing semantic tools and applications that help access, integrate, understand, and use data. Current projects include emphasis on semantic technologies, knowledge provenance, privacy, policy, and workflow transparency, semantic eScience, linked open data, trust, social networking, and collaboration technologies, ontology evolution environments, and ethical, policy, and social aspects of web use and usability.

My current research focuses on the design and engineering of mobile ubiquitous information systems, from software architecture to application design and user studies. My NSF CPS project “CitiSense – Adaptive Services for Community-Driven Behavioral and Environmental Monitoring to Induce Change” comprises a multi-disciplinary team including software engineering, HCI, embedded systems, AI, security, and medicine. We are designing, implementing, and deploying a mobile sensor system for community-based environmental monitoring. This project will offer excellent collaborative opportunities to a post-doc in software engineering or ubiquitous computing.

Henry Lieberman has been a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory
since 1987. His interests are in the intersection of artificial intelligence
and the human interface. He directs the Software Agents group, which
is concerned with making intelligent software that provides assistance to users in
interactive interfaces.

Many of his current projects revolve around applying Common Sense Reasoning
to interactive interfaces. He is using a large knowledge base of Commonsense facts
about everyday life to streamline interfaces, provide intelligent defaults,
and proactive help. Application areas include predictive typing, multilingual communication,
management of photo and media libraries, product recommendation and e-commerce tools.

My research is to apply the methods, lessons, and ways of seeing and acting of design to the realm of Human-Computer Interaction research. Design is a central element in my career: I study the practices of design, I have created tools for design collaboration, I am an architect (registered in California), and I am an award-winning designer. HCI is rapidly changing with new paradigms of technology and use, the only way to teach students for life-long adaptability is for them to understand how they can design the process of design.

This unique approach produced the seminal computer supported cooperative work system known as the media space and contributed to the development of a number of shared drawing tools, culminating in the Drawstream Station, all of which employ video in novel ways. Being a student of media, as well as design, has led to instrumental applications of media, most recently in developing exhibits and the overall program for “XFR: experiments in the Future of Reading”. These have been reported in numerous technical publications and conference proceedings, as well as the popular press. The studies of process and the technological interventions I’ve created have resulted in a number of novel insights; “RePlacing Space” (Harrison and Dourish, 1996) is an oft-cited paper on the behavioral framing of real and virtual space.

Building on this, I am currently (1) looking at how to integrate design thinking and practices into computer science; (2) developing theories of meaning-making with regard to power structures (e.g. design for marginalized populations, the role of cheats in on-line games, and gendered forms of technology); and (3) investigating domestic media spaces. I invite researchers to contact me about opportunities to pursue these areas.

The Expressive Intelligence Studio (EIS) at UC Santa Cruz has four affiliated faculty: Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Arnav Jhala and Jim Whitehead. We do fundamental technical and design research to enable new kinds of interactive art and entertainment forms. Current research directions in EIS include automatic content generation, interactive storytelling, and advanced game authoring tools.

Automatic content generation. The current state of the art for game development involves the hand-creation of much of the content in a game, such as hard-coded scripts, level designs, models, sounds, and animations. As hardware capabilities and consumer expectations increase, ever larger team-sizes are needed to produce the number and quality of assets required, resulting in ever more expensive production costs. Automatic content generation resolves this production crisis in the games industry; additionally it enables games that dynamically adapt to the specific play styles and goals of individual players as well as making it possible for high-quality games to be produced on much smaller budgets, broadening game creation. Current EIS research in content generation includes generation of quests, based on an analysis of gameplay history, level generation for platform games, and scenario generation driven by learning goals for training games.

Interactive Storytelling. Games have the potential to be an incredibly powerful storytelling medium, combining the cathartic pleasures (and reflection on the human condition) of well-formed stories with the exploratory power and high-agency experience of interaction. Game-based storytelling, however, is still in its infancy. In almost all games and virtual worlds, the story itself does not change as a function of the choices the player makes; there are no game mechanics at the story-level that make the story itself playable. Fundamental research is required to enable the creation of rich, autonomous characters; dynamic, compelling storylines; and intelligent, automatic cinematography—so that character interactions and story arc depend on player actions, yet are presented as compellingly as today’s scripted experiences. EIS research in interactive storytelling builds on the foundations of the award-winning interactive drama Façade (www.interactivestory.net), to create next-generation autonomous characters and drama-management technologies.

Advanced Game Authoring Tools. Game designers currently lack software-based tools to facilitate the design process. While game engineers have game engines and middleware libraries to bootstrap game implementation, and artists have tools to facilitate the creation of 3D models, textures, and animations, designers have no tools that explicitly support their specialized work. In the early stages of professional game design, designers work out the interactions and implications of their game mechanics by building stripped-down playable prototypes, either computationally or with physical materials. But gaining design insights from such prototypes, particularly insights regarding game rule interactions, is notoriously difficult, even for expert designers. Further, there is increasing interest in supporting game development novices in creating game content, including supporting domain experts in creating serious games. Current EIS research in this area includes intelligent game prototyping tools that can reason about first-class models of game mechanics, design brainstorming tools for quest design, and storytelling tools that help novice authors create interactive stories.

General research area: Cognitive, social and computational perspectives on designing and evaluating software for learning, collaboration, and community.

Current focus: Representational affordances in computer supported collaborative learning. Specifically, designing software interfaces to enable learners to construct, discuss, and manipulate representations of their evolving knowledge, and the study of how the notations used in these interfaces affect discourse between learners and learning outcomes.

Uncovering how intersubjective meaning-making can take place through multiple notational tools in computer workspaces, and the roles of language-based and visual/symbolic representations.

Social affordances for online communities, including support for multiple communities and pathways by which participants can discover synergistic value in the larger community.

Prior Activity and Related Interests: Coaching agents, component technology and interoperability (especially at the semantic level), computer mediated communication, networked architectures for collaborative and intelligent learning systems, usability.

My research team is engaged in projects involving design, meta-design, virtual worlds, virtual teams, and collaborative work. We often work on this research in the context of software engineering and particularly, collaborative software engineering. However, we also work in a number of other contexts, such as the knowledge work carried out in large organizations and communities of practice, or the play and work carried out in online games and virtual worlds. Depending on the research context, we perform field (ethnographic-like) studies, laboratory studies, and usability inspections to gather data about people’s behavior. Often our work involves developing prototype software tools or new user interfaces and evaluating them. Sometimes our work is only about observation and analysis.

Recently, we constructed visual tools to help software developers and managers maintain an awareness of distributed software development activities. We are currently investigating ways these same tools can support trust in global software development teams. We also are carrying out a small scale ethnographic study to better understand design in virtual worlds and extend theories of meta design based on our findings.

I have always been keenly interested in what technology and structure imply about human behavior and have a desire to craft work environments that augment human capabilities. An example was my dissertation work about a software tool that improved the performance of otherwise poorer performers on programming tasks without hindering better performers. Thereafter, I was always interested in projects that informed on how individual differences could be reduced. In addition to augmenting human capabilities, I am interested in user interfaces that improve the human experience for their end users. I sometimes think of this in terms of creating more humane interfaces or interfaces that support our humanity. Increasingly, I am drawn to research in the humanities for insight.

I am greatly influenced by the writings of Carl Jung, Herbert Simon, Douglas Engelbart, Donald Schoen, Donald Norman, Marvin Minsky, Mitch Walker, my own graduate advisor, Gerhard Fischer, and his colleagues at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a number of researchers in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Queer Studies, Activity Theory, Participatory Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Science and Technology Studies.

Technology is rapidly changing the nature of work as we know it. These changes have made possible a variety of new organizational forms but increased the demands on human attention.



We are interested in understanding and optimizing allocation of attention in networked organizations. Our research includes: qualitative study of attention and coordination in networked knowledge work, experiments on task and social influences on direction of attention, quantitative analysis of log data on communication and task-switching behaviors in information centric work settings, and development of novel tools for self-regulation, productivity support, communication management, and coordination in creative work.

Today’s interfaces limit our use of computers in two key ways: 1) they are optimized for short tasks rather than the long term activities we carry out in our everyday lives, 2) they constrain where and how computers can be used by not taking advantage of mobility, context, and natural human communication. Our research in activity-based computing addresses these issues. Our systems-oriented HCI research methodology is guided by an iterative design process that can be broken down into design methods, design tools, infrastructure, evaluation tools, and applications.

We are exploring topics in the above areas by developing applications in three domains: 2nd language learning, green behavior, and health and wellness. We are also interested in the cross cultural issues in designing for these domains.

Our approach is to observe target customers in the field, using both traditional and more novel means (e.g., context-aware ESM), and then use the resulting information as a basis for concept design. Designs are then prototyped and deployed on working devices in an iterative manner. Our current focus is on using activity and location inference technologies running on mobile phones to support new applications that help support customer’s everyday lives. We are also building the tools and design methodologies to support these applications as well as the evaluation methodologies required for deploying and testing these applications in the field over long periods (e.g., 3-6 months).

Postdoctoral researchers can explore topics in these areas in the field with me in Beijing, China for the first year and in Seattle for year two. I am happy to work with postdocs whose expertise might be in a range of different HCI subfields, e.g., technical HCI, field work, or design.

I am interested in the use of digital technologies, especially social technologies, by citizens to participate in civic and government activities including voting, activism, and political discourse. I am also interested in understanding voters’ strategies for searching information about candidates and issues and how various types of digital information influence the process of voter decision making. I combine empirical research methods in the usability lab and field with design research on novel interfaces and search systems.

I work broadly in the area of human-computer interaction with a specific focus on information visualization and visual analytics. In particular, my research helps people and organizations who have large datasets that they seek to analyze and understand. We build interactive visualization systems that allow people to explore the data and examine it under different perspectives.

More recently, my work has focused on visual analytics of datasets that are composed of unstructured, semi-structured, or structured textual documents. Large document collections can be found in areas such as intelligence and law enforcement, academic disciplines, consumer product reviews, investigative reporting, etc. We are inventing visualization techniques and building systems to help people who work in these areas to make sense of large sets of documents.

I would, however, be interested in exploring almost any type of data visualization that helps people with analysis. I bring an HCI perspective to these types of problems and my research typically involves much user and task analysis as well as evaluation.

For more examples of my work and the types of projects I do, please see my research group’s webpage at http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/ii.

I want to enable everyone to access, use and benefit from technology.

My research is at the intersection of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence and web engineering. I seek a better understanding of how to more effectively present and combine web information sources and have a particular interest in tools that support more accessible, usable and available access for people with disabilities.

I believe human computation and crowdsourcing is part of the solution, and build tools that explore how people can help one another more effectively access the web and deliver information on-the-go. My group has recently been exploring mobile tools for connecting people disabilities to remote workers in nearly real-time to bridge the gap in areas that automated tools are not yet good enough to do.

Finally, research does not happen in a vacuum and I support releasing technology early not only in order to let people benefit from it immediately but also as a way to understand its broader social context.

Dr. Mohler’s research interests are focused on the implications if spatial ability and visual thinking on the development and production of computer graphics. He also delves into interactive media use for communication and education.

I am looking for a postdoc for either of two current projects. The first concerns how to better support public engagement and participation in interacting with government. The second concerns improving public transit usability and satisfaction, particularly by providing real-time arrival information, and assessing the effects — see www.onebusaway.org. We are also interested specifically in how to better support deaf blind transit riders with such systems.

Dr. Stephen C. Hirtle directs the Spatial Information Research Group at the University of Pittsburgh, which conducts research on the structure of cognitive maps, navigation in real and virtual environments, and models for spatial cognition. In particular, our lab is interested in the role of semantic concepts, such as landmarks, neighborhoods, and familiarity, on navigation behavior and their role in designing navigational aids.

My research interests currently span the areas of Information Visualization and HCI. I am largely interested in supporting end-users (e.g. knowledge workers, scientists, or children) in both creating visualizations and analyzing data.

We have most recently developed and evaluated a novel method for visualizing the diversity and depth of a pool of objects. This work may apply not only in areas such as university admissions and team building/management but possibly to other areas of ‘design’ such as drug design, or investment portfolio design.

In forward looking research, I am generally interested in understanding how the everyday user is affected by the large amount of data available to them and how they can and do use this data to solve problems and inform decisions and behavior change in their everyday lives. I am particularly interested in the use of visual interaction methods to facilitate this process.

For example, it is becoming clear that sensor technology is going to play an important role in aging at home. Smart homes are being built to monitor elderly individuals, help them in their everyday tasks (activities of everyday life), and to provide feedback to their community of caregivers (care managers, physicians, and family) so that this community can make informed decisions regarding care and to simply put their minds at ease in the specific case of immediate family. Unfortunately, very little work has investigated the use of this vast amount of data to help elderly individuals take care of themselves. With the Center for Healthy Aging Research at OSU, I am currently investigating techniques to better support self awareness through technology. This work applies not only to aging, but to fitness and consumption behaviors as well.

While these are particular projects of interest to me, I am interested in exploring data visualizations in general with a focus on the everyday end-user. For more information, please visit my web page at http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/~metoyer.

My research areas include auditory neuroscience, music psychology, music technology and dynamical systems theory. My interdisciplinary research combines behavioral experimentation, neurophysiology, and neuroimaging with nonlinear dynamical systems modeling, to gain a deeper understanding of the neural underpinnings of musical experience. In the Music Dynamics Laboratory, we create computer models to explain the structure of music, and its interaction with brain dynamics. Current research projects include the perception of pitch, the perception of tonality, the perception of rhythm, auditory attention, communication of affect and emotion, and the neural basis of song.

About the Music Dynamics Laboratory: Researchers at the Music Dynamics Laboratory are working to uncover the general principles of neural dynamics that underlie music perception and cognition. Music is a high-level cognitive capacity, a form of communication that relies on highly structured temporal sequences comparable in complexity to language. Music is found among all human cultures, and musical ‘languages’ vary across cultures with learning. Unlike language, however, music rarely refers to the external world. It consists of independent, i.e., self contained, patterns of sound, aspects of which are found universally among musical cultures. Thus, our experiences of musical sound patterns may directly reflect the dynamic interaction of musical sounds with the physical brain. We are investigating the neural processes underlying pitch, rhythm and tonality, as well as the perception of song and the experience of emotion in music.

We are looking for a postdoctoral research associate to work in one of two areas: 1) pulse and meter perception, or 2) perception of musical tonality. The ideal candidate would have a background in music cognition and/or music theory, with computational training (e.g., music technology), and strong interest and aptitude for learning about neurodynamic modeling of brain processes.

My goal is to use technology, and specifically robotics, to improve the quality of life of individuals with neurological disease or injury. Current projects in my lab include the use of robotics for assessment of Parkinson’s disease and intuitive methods of interaction with an assistive robotic arm.

Titles of current projects:
* Robustness of Simulations in Model Based Design Environments
* Robust Testing for System Validation
* Temporal and Modal Logics for Dynamical and Hybrid Systems
* Hybrid System Synthesis from High Level Specifications
* Task and Motion Planning for Mobile Robots
* Natural Language Interfaces for Robotics

My recent interests have been broadly interdisciplinary, with a particular interest in ways in which computing technology changes the ways we interact and work. Recent projects have included work with humanists in areas such as textual criticism but ranging to affiliated areas such as nautical archaeology and art history. A current project is examining the use of visual materials by scholars in a wide range of disciplines. In more traditional digital libraries, I am involved in a multi-institutional project that is bringing a computing portal to the National Science Digital Library. These research interests are reflected in my other activities, which include key roles in the international digital libraries research community; most recently program chair of the 2009 ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.

I am interested in working with CIFellows in two areas: human computation and computing education.

1) Human Computation: An enormous potential exists for solving certain classes of computational problems through rich collaboration between humans and computers. Currently, countless open computer science problems remain in artificial intelligence, computer vision, and natural language processing. While we continue to work towards completely automating these tasks, for many real-world problems we need an approach today that offers a high quality, inexpensive, and scalable solution.

I am looking for a post-doc that can help build and study systems, help develop a deeper understanding of human participation and the quality of their contribution. I am working in the area of translation, motivated by the need to translate thousands of books from my International Children’s Digital Library project (www.childrenslibrary.org), but expect to broaden the scope to include other domains. I am also interested in developing mobile forms of human participation to reach people where they are.

2) Computing Education: Introductory (and advanced for that matter) computer science students spend a significant amount of their learning time writing programs for class assignments. In recent years, a trend has been to make these programming assignments graphical and interactive in order to make them engaging and show the potential of computers. This has been a positive factor in the recruitment of women, minorities and those students not as interested in computing for its own sake. I propose to go one step further by supporting competitive and cooperative multi-player games among students with the goal of leveraging student’s strong social interests.

Most existing computing competitions (i.e. Netflix, programming contests, TREC, VAST, etc.) are based on having a single input where each competitor produces a solution, runs it against the input, and uses a metric to determine a ranking of winners. Instead, I am building a generic, scalable, gaming engine that lets student write simple independent programs that can compete with each other. I already have deployed it to our freshman programming course this semester in the form of competitive two-player games, but now I’d like to broaden it to include simulations, social and creative systems to have broader reach – and to formally study it to understand how it affects student work.

Jodi Forlizzi is an Associate Professor of Design and Human-Computer Interaction and the A. Nico Habermann Chair of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, PA. She is an interaction designer contributing to design theory and practice. Her theoretical research examines theories of experience, emotion, and social product use as they relate to interaction design. Other research and practice centers on notification systems ranging from peripheral displays to embodied robots, with a special focus on the social behavior evoked by these systems.

My research falls into the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI), human-robot interaction (HRI), and computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). I focus on designing social behavior for socially interactive systems, particularly humanlike robots and agents. This work combines technology development (including machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing) with exploratory and experimental studies with people (including field and lab studies in which people interact with robots and agents). I am also interested in applications of robots and agents in education, collaboration, communication, disability, and autism therapy and collaborate with domain experts and researchers in these areas, mainly at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

My research is in the general area of Human Centered Computing. My research interests include virtual reality, virtual worlds, 3D user interface design, multi-modal interaction, virtual human/human interaction, and HCI. Current projects include creating and testing virtual patients for training nursing students in interview skills (with the School of Nursing), developing procedures and evaluating technology to improve vehicle inspection on the assembly line (with Department of Mechanical Engineering and BMW), an experimental investigation of social inhibition and facilitation in avatar interactions in virtual worlds, and the design and construction of multi-touch display hardware and applications (joint with Juan Gilbert’s research group).

I have supervised 10 Post Doctoral Fellows and Visiting Researchers in addition to a number of Research Scientists. Our current research group includes three Ph.D. students (Lauren, Toni, and Jerome), two undergraduates (Austen and Adam), one Post Doctoral Fellow (Dr. Amy Ulinski), Assistant Professor Sab Babu, and myself. During the summers we are joined by 5-8 more undergraduates supported by a NSF REU Site Grant and the DREU program. Our group philosophy stresses team projects, mutual support and mentoring, interdisciplinary research, and frequent meals together.

In addition to my research and teaching, I am also Director of the School of Computing at Clemson University. The School consists of three Divisions: Computer Science, Visual Computing, and Human Centered Computing. Further information of the School is available at: www.clemson.edu/computing .