Congratulations to David Nguyen, STAR’s first PhD graduate as he has just accepted an offer from Nokia Research Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale, CA as a Senior Researcher.

Congratulations David!

Congratulations to Garnet Hertz for successfully debuting Outrun in Denmark!

Video of Debut:

More about Outrun:

http://conceptlab.com/outrun/

Bren latest Spotlight highlights Star’s new Ph.D. student, Sen Hirano. The article highlights Hirano’s recent NSF Fellowship award and Hirano’s research and graduate work.

The article can be found here:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/community/news/spotlight/spotlight_hirano.php

Congratulations Sen!

Congratulations to Lucas Kam for being awarded the UCI undergraduate award of “Outstanding Contribution to Research”.

Kam has done research with a variety of graduate students, including working Jed Brubaker and his social media and identity projects and Lynn Dombrowski and her backyard bounty project.

Again, congratulations to Lucas Kam!

Congrats to Boaz Grudin and team for winning $5000.00 in this year’s Butterworth Competition.

More information about the competition:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/community/events/butterworth/

Congratulations to David Resnick for showcasing Pulse in ACE 2011!

Pulse will be on display until June 11th, 2011.

About ACE 2011:

Electromotive is an interactive exhibition featuring the masters thesis projects of students in the Arts Computation Engineering program in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine. Please come celebrate with us and enjoy the complementary food and beverages. This will be the final ACE show as the program is closing after this year.

About Pulse:

Pulse is a multi-modal transduction system designed to bring the participant into a flow-state, improve the participant’s health through integrative medicine, foster a connection to subtle energies, and explore a new medium for interactive media arts. Solenoids (linear pulsing electromagnets) are placed around the participant’s body at acupressure points and act as automated acupressure fingers. The solenoid pulsing patterns are coupled to a generative music program with playback through headphones. Resnick conducts the experience as the Vibrationist–someone who plays vibrations. As Resnick moves his hands about the space around the participant’s body performing biofield energy work, a Microsoft Kinect tracks the movements and actuates the solenoid pulsing patterns and speed, as well as the generative music.

The participant is connected to an EKG machine that displays heartrate information. The heartrate is analyzed and then used as an entrainment mechanism for the solenoid pulsing and music. Resnick can also see in real-time how the experience is affecting the participant. A study to gauge the feasibility and effectiveness of multisensory therapeutic/artistic experiences has been conducted prior to the June 2nd opening and the results will be on display at the show.

Learn more at http://www.davidresnick.me/ace2011/

Technologies and tools for electronic tracking and recording personal data have become easier to use, less expensive, and more pervasive in recent years. These tracking and recording technologies (TRTs) often work implicitly, in the background, without explicit effort nor full understanding on the part of the users (or those being tracked and recorded). Little is understood about how individuals make decisions about adoption or rejection of such implicit TRTs. A significant challenge then is to understand the processes by which the general public perceives and responds to these technologies, balanced along with their concerns for information privacy. Using multiple methods – interviews, the day reconstruction method, and paratyping, in concurrence with the deployment of a validated survey instrument for the concern for information privacy (CFIP) – this dissertation shows that participants are simultaneously highly concerned about information privacy and not always concerned about the specific technologies they use everyday that can track and record their personal data. There are three primary contributions in this dissertation. One, I catalog in situ perceptions and attitudes towards the concern for information privacy and TRTs. Two, by showing that traditional models of information privacy, such as CFIP, can be helpful but not sufficient to analyze the perceptions and attitudes towards TRTs, I identify the issues associated with applying the CFIP model to analyze TRTs. And three, I provide recommendations for the expansion of the CFIP model for use on TRTs.

David is the first PhD student to graduate from our group. Congratulations David! We look forward to the hooding on June 4!

We would like to congratulate one of our newest STAR members, Robert Greg Rodriguez, and his team, for taking second place at the IEEE’s Student Ethics Competition! Well Done Robert!

Photos of the event.

IEEE’s Student Ethics Competition

UCI IEEE

Congrats to Leslie Liu who now joins the ever growing ranks of STAR researchers winning prestigious fellowships. Leslie will be continuing her studies as a PhD student in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Washington next year, supported by an NLM training program.

Congratulations to STAR member, Sen Hirano, for being accepted into the coveted National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) for 2011.

Congratulations, Sen!