Congratulations to the stellar (no pun intended) undegraduate students who recently got funding for summer research:

Ryan Wallace, ”Evaluating Innovative Technologies for Supporting the Needs of Children with Autism”

Jared Haren, “Visualizing Personal Digital Traces Using Mobile Phone Logs”

Alex Bretana, “Understanding and Envisioning Ubiquitous Computing Systems in Volunteer Management and Coordination”

Chris Combs, “Evaluation of Health Information Systems at UC Irvine Medical Center”

Tom Lilleho, “Developing a Storytelling Game to Enhance the Social Skills of Children with Autism”

For more information on UCI’s undergraduate research program, check out http://www.urop.uci.edu/.

Our paper on the design of a mobile tool based on the Social Compass Curriculum was accepted for publication at this year’s Ubicomp conference. The citation and abstract are below…. look for the camera ready version of the paper to show up on our publications page as soon as it is done.

Tentori, M. and Hayes, G.R. Designing for Interaction Immediacy
to Enhance Social Skills of Children with Autism To Appear Proc Ubicomp 2010. Copenhagen, Denmark. September 26-29, 2010.

Abstract:

Children with autism often require therapeutic interventions to support engagement in effective social interactions in different contexts. In this paper, we present the results of a study conducted in three public schools that use an educational and behavioral intervention for the instruction of social skills in changing situational contexts and ongoing social interactions. The results of this study led to the concept of interaction immediacy to help children maintain appropriate spatial boundaries, reply to conversation initiators, disengage appropriately at the end of an interaction, and identify potential communication partners. We describe design principles for Ubicomp technologies to support interaction immediacy and present an example design. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, we present an understanding of social skills in mobile and dynamic contexts. Second, we introduce the concept of interaction immediacy and show its effectiveness as a guiding principle for the design of Ubicomp applications.

Ever wondered if Pippin has Wifi? Does the campus Starbucks take gift cards if so, then “UCI Dining” is the app for you!

UCI Dining has just been named one of six finalists from across the nation in the Google “Juicy Ideas Collegiate Competition.” Teams from MIT, Stanford, and University of Washington are among the other finalists.

UCI Dining grew out of experience gained in Informatics 133 and some student munchies.

Congratulations to Jared Haren and Adrian Guzman and Sabel Braganza

vSked: An Interactive Visual Schedule System for use in Classrooms for Children with Autism
Michael T. Yeganyan, Meg Cramer, Lou Anne Boyd and Gillian R. Hayes

Children with autism often experience substantial challenges in understanding, structuring, and predicting the activities in their daily lives. The use of symbols to represent a series of activities, also known as visual schedules, have been shown to be an effective intervention technique for helping individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In this paper, we describe the design and technical architecture for vSked, an interactive visual scheduling tool that allows group interactivity with content generated through end-user programming. We also outline a scenario that demonstrates how vSked extends the benefits of traditional visual schedules through both interactivity and automatic logging of use. This scenario also indicates the type of experience a user might have during a demonstration session.

This highly competitive program comes with three years of funding.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing

Call for Papers:  Theme Issue on Technologies for Autism

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), also known as Pervasive Development Disorder, includes impairments in social interaction, communication—both verbal and non-verbal—and stereotypical or repeated behavior, interests and activities. A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control using data from the United States in 2006 indicated a rise in prevalence of ASD to 1 in 110 children: 1 in 70 boys and 1 in 310 girls.  Individuals across the Spectrum can potentially benefit from the use of novel computing technologies, including assistive and augmentative technologies, social computational systems, sensing and context-aware systems, capture and access applications, wearable systems, and more.

This special issue calls for original research and methodology papers on the integration of personal and ubiquitous computing technologies in support of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The purpose of this special issue is to bring together a set of research papers that will (1) advance our understanding of technologies for autism, (2) discuss the role of technology in supporting individuals with ASD, their friends and families, and (3) provide examples of effective technologies for autism. Through this special issue, we hope to bring together a diverse set of researchers working in autism, pediatrics, computer science, cognitive science, education, sociology, psychology, anthropology, information science, and more.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

* Empirical studies exploring issues related to autism that might be amenable to technological intervention;

* Empirical studies of technologies in use to support individuals with ASD;

* Methodologies for conducting research on technologies for autism;

* New designs and technologies that support individuals with ASD, their friends, relatives, co-workers, and acquaintances;

* Evaluation techniques for technologies for autism;

* Case studies on the deployment and long-term use of technologies for autism.

Important Dates:

* Papers to be submitted: August 16, 2010

* Peer reviews completed: November 16, 2010

* Revisions completed and submitted: January 1, 2011

* Publication date: March/April 2011

Length of the paper: 15-30 manuscript pages (double spaced)

Guest Editors:

* Gillian Hayes, University of California, Irvine

* Karrie Karahalios, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

To submit your paper, please email it in PDF format to gillianrh@ics.uci.edu and kkarahal@cs.uiuc.edu

Information about Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing

Editor-in-Chief: Peter Thomas

Journal web site: http://www.springer.com/computer/hci/journal/779

http://www.facebook.com/personalubicomp

How can UC Irvine’s students, faculty, and staff make a greater difference in the world, locally and globally?

Entries can be in the form of a dance choreography, film production, literature, musical composition, photograph, visual artwork, or essay to be judged by UC
Irvine professors. Visit http://www.due.uci.edu/engagement_minor/ for entry forms and specific rules/guidelines. For questions, contact UCIConnect@uci.edu.

An excerpt from the article….

Although mobile technologies are nearly ubiquitous in the lives of teenagers in modern industrialized nations, they are rarely used in schools—places where these youth spend a significant percentage of their time. Today’s teenagers, 75% of whom own cell phones, are considered by many to be responsible for the rampant uptake of mobile social applications .Despite the increased capabilities of these systems and their arguable potential to improve learning, most public schools are far from the environments envisioned in pervasive computing. In the United States, more than 1200 hours annually are spent by the most connected generation in some of the least-connected places—schools.

Within formal school settings, teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders negotiate a complex set of issues in regards to supporting the use of mobile phones and other portable networked devices. Efforts at technology integration in schools include installation of new networks, risk assessment surrounding use and abuse of networked communication, purchase and installation of new software, and more.  In addition to the technical challenges of bring new pervasive computing systems into schools, there are numerous legal and policies issues that surround the use and abuse of networked communication and applications.  These enormous challenges have meant that, to date, most learning designs for mobile phones have been developed for outside of the classroom use.

To fully explore the potential of mobile and social applications for learning, the community at large must consider use of mobile devices and networked applications in public schools to compliment our understanding of the use of these systems and services for youth and learning outside the schools. Specifically, Acceptable Use Policies in schools represent the current legal basis and historical precedents that define the climate of classroom mobile phone and social media use. Understanding these policies is an important first step to engaging with design and pedagogical practices as a joint community of teachers, researchers, and designers.  Rather than lay the responsibility of adapting teaching practices to technologies on teachers or the responsibility of adapting technologies to teaching practices on designers, in this paper, we explore how these issues can be addressed together.

Cramer, M.D. and Hayes, G.R. Acceptable Use in the Age of Connected Youth: How Risks, Policies, and Promises of the Future Impact Student Access to Mobile Phones and Social Media in Schools To Appear IEEE Pervasive Computing.

Interactive Visual Supports for Children with Autism

Gillian R. Hayes, Sen Hirano, Gabriela Marcu, Mohamad Monibi, David H. Nguyen, and Michael Yeganyan

Interventions to support children with autism often include the use of visual supports, which are cognitive tools to enable learning and the production of language. Although visual supports are effective in helping to diminish many of the challenges of autism, they are difficult and time-consuming to create, distribute, and use. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study focused on uncovering design guidelines for interactive visual supports that would address the many challenges inherent to current tools and practices. We present three prototype systems that address these design challenges with the use of large group displays, mobile personal devices, and personal recording technologies. We also describe the interventions associated with these prototypes along with the results from two focus group discussions around the interventions. We present further design guidance for visual supports and discuss tensions inherent to their design.

Gillian had the privilege of joining Gary McGraw, Kim DeVries, Jim Routh, and Avi Ruben in a great panel at RSA.  The panel was largely about how to negotiate Acceptable Use Policies and technical infrastructure for security given the mounting pressure for people in the workplace–especially those who are on the younger side of things–to make use of these tools, as part of their work and as part of multi-tasking.  Gillian also talked a bit about the challenges of and opportunities for educating people about these issues, especially when they are really young.  Meg’s great work on both Acceptable Use Policies in schools and teaching kids about identity, security, and privacy is highly related to these issues as well.

This panel has generated some online chatter:

The Computer World article did a great job of describing some of the generation gap issues in the workplace today and how these manifest in policies around technology and security.  They also translated it into Portuguese (at least we think they did, we can’t read that article.  InfoSecurity also provided some interesting commentary on the panel.  Finally, the CyLab blog from CMU gave probably the most detailed reporting on the event, even going so far as to describe our skits.  For those of you who weren’t there, yes, thats right, there were two skits…. thankfully, they were authored by Gary’s brother Walt McGraw, with help from Gary and Jim.  So, they turned out to be pretty funny, despite the limited acting experience of Gillian and the rest of the panel.