Minhnhut Thanh Vo will receive the 2012 Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research.

Only one ICS student receives this award each year.

Minhnhut works as an undergraduate research assistant with Lynn Dombrowski, creating web-based applications dealing with issues of food insecurity.

Congratulations to Minhnhut Thanh Vo!

Dr. Hayes is the newest Fellow to join CCREC (The University of California’s Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California).

Here is an excerpt about the CCREC organization:

“a multi/transdisciplinary and collaborative effort to address the state’s interconnected crises in the economy, education, employment, environment, health, housing, and nutrition. These crises intensify inequities, threaten the state’s intellectual, technological and economic competitiveness, and make it difficult for the University of California to meet its public service mission”.

Please read the accompanying article and website for more information.

Congratulations to Gillian!

Informatics recently hosted it’s annual Rectuiment Welcoming Weekend event at Aliso Beach.

Thanks to Helen He (a prospective recruit) for sharing some delightful photos from the event.

More photos can be seen at the Luci blog.

Jed Brubaker’s recently published ICWSM paper was highlighted in the ReadWrite Web Article, “A Life Lived Online: How We Talk About Death on Social Media”.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Rather than take an obvious, trendy turn toward Facebook, the study looks at MySpace users, many of whom died young. Using a coding system, the researchers identifies emotionally distressed content and an analysis of that language, which lays a foundation for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including automatic detection of bereavement-related distress. The researchers discovered that linguistic style can also indicate messages demonstrating distress in the space of post-mortem social media content.

After a user dies, friends visit the page and express their sadness, shock and grief. Later many return and continue updating and conversing with the user, often times sharing events and feelings as if the person were still alive. It’s kind of like talking with a ghost.

By examining user-generated content, the researchers were able to observe the grieving process in a naturalistic, public setting. What’s more is that this study focuses on “extreme expressions of grief and mourning in SNS following the death of a friend or loved one.” This means more than just a few Twitter-esque RIPs, trending topics and the dead popping up in one’s Facebook friend list. The researchers sought to expand the current knowledge base around the use of language in online grieving, rather than focus on the fact that people do express their grief on social media.”

Please read the article for further details, “A Life Lived Online: How We Talk About Death on Social Media”.

(Congrats, Jed!)

Jed Brubaker’s work was highlighted in ReadWriteWeb’s article ‘”I Wanna Live Forever,” or How We Die on Social Networks’, alongside other work highlighting the ways in which death is experienced on different social networking sites, including LinkedIn and Twitter.

Technorati, also highlighted Jed’s work in their article “Over 30 Million Accounts on Facebook Belong to Dead People“.

Congratulations, Jed!

STAR Group members will be presenting a paper at the ICWSM 2012 conference.

Brubaker, J. R., Kivran-Swaine, F., Taber, L., and Hayes, G. R. (2012). Grief-Stricken in a Crowd: The language of bereavement and distress in social media. Proc ICWSM-12. Dublin, Ireland. June 4-8, 2012.

Congratulations to the authors! We hope to see you all in Dublin!

STAR group members will be presenting five papers at CHI this year:

Dombrowski, L., Voida, A., Hayes, G.R., Mazmanian, M. (2012). The Labor Practices of Service Mediation: A Study of the Work Practices of Food Assistance Outreach. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012). Austin, Texas (May 5-10, 2012). New York: ACM Press. To appear. [acceptance rate: 23%]

Escobedo, L., Nguyen, D.H., Boyd, L., Hirano, S.H., Rangel, A., Garcia, D., Tentori, M., & Hayes, G.R. (2012). MOSOCO: A Mobile Assistive Tool to Support Children with Autism Practicing Social Skills in Real-Life Situations. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012). Austin, Texas (May 5-10, 2012). New York: ACM Press. To appear. [acceptance rate: 23%]

Tang, K.P., Hong, J.I., and Siewiorek, D.P. (2012). The Implications of Offering More Disclosure Choices for Social Location Sharing. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012). Austin, Texas (May 5-10, 2012). New York: ACM Press. To appear. [acceptance rate: 23%].

Hayes, G.R. The Relationship of Action Research to Human-Computer Interaction. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. In press.

Lindtner, S., Chen, J., Hayes, G.R., and Dourish, P. Towards a Framework of Publics: Re-encountering Media Sharing and its Use. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. 2011. 18(2): 5.

We hope to see you all in Austin!

Congratulations to Jed Brubaker on advancing to Ph.D. candidacy on February 29, 2012. Jed presented his work on Identity, Post-mortem social networking, and a framework for social, spatial, and temporal expansions on social networking sites.

Jed’s committee was comprised of Drs. Gillian Hayes, Melissa Mazmanian, Paul Dourish, Geoffrey Bowker, and Martha Feldman.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to Meg Cramer on advancing to Ph.D. candidacy in the Fall quarter of 2011! Meg presented her work on the tools and technology practices in elementary classrooms and designing to support reflection in learning.

Meg’s committee was comprised of Drs. Gillian Hayes, Melissa Mazmanian, Bill Tomlinson, Mimi Ito, and Beth Van Es.

Congratulations!

Research Team: Sen Hirano, Karen P. Tang, Dini Baker (EDAC/CHOC), Marni Nagel (CHOC)
Past Collaborators: Monica Tentori, Leslie Liu, Sheba George (CDU)

PIs: Gillian R. Hayes, Karen Cheng (CDU)

Premature birth is associated with long term health impairments including neurological and cognitive deficiencies, chronic lung disease, and altered growth patterns of lean, fat, and bone tissues. Furthermore, parents of premature infants may experience excessive stress, post-partum depression, and other challenges associated with the birth of and caring for their child.

We are designing, developing, and deploying an innovative and feasible mobile solution called Estrellita. This system is an automated capture and access tool that allows parents of premature infants to capture relevant information of their newly born child and share it with their healthcare providers, close relatives, and friends.

Estrellita includes two interfaces: a mobile application (Figure 1) and a web-based clinical interface (Figure 2). Using the mobile application, users can record observations of daily living (ODLs) for the infant and caregiver, share these data with clinical providers, and visualize past recorded ODL data. Through the website, healthcare providers can interact with the caregiver and keep abreast with the infant’s ODLs through a series of simple visualizations and data summaries.

Figure 1. Screenshots of Estrellita mobile application: main overview screen (leftmost), input screen for recording infant’s weight information (second from left), inbox for exchanging messages between caregivers and clinicians (second from right), a widget placed on the phone’s home screen (rightmost).

Figure 2. Screenshots of Estrellita’s web interface.

The mobile application allows caregivers to update their baby’s health information (Figure 1, leftmost), consult system-generated or clinical-generated warnings (Figure 1, second from the left), and update data about their own health and well-being (Figure 1, second from the right). Estrellita uses a widget to provide a glanceable view of their data and a quick way to access previously recorded information (Figure 1, rightmost). Caregivers can also flag data points that are troubling them so they can discuss them later with their clinicians.

The web-based interface allows clinicians to consult patient information through a dashboard-like interface (Figure 2). Representations of the patient’s data must be made accessible to caregivers as well as to healthcare professionals. These representations include both alerts and visualizations at levels appropriate for both caregivers and healthcare providers. The Estrellita website also allows caregivers and healthcare professionals to exchange messages with one another.

We are currently in the process of evaluating this system in a public clinic at Orange County, CA, USA.

This work is supported by Project HealthDesign, a national program of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Check out our posts on the Robert Wood Johnson Project HealthDesign blog:

• Interpreting the Absence of Data (Nov ’11)
• The Challenges of Locating Parents of Preterm Infants (Oct ’11)
• Creating a Better World for Premature Infants (Sep ’11)
• Observing Fussy Babies and Their Fussy ODLs (Aug ’11)
• Using Cell Phones to Improve the Health of Babies and Children Around the World (Jul ’11)
• What’s in a Name? (Mar ’11)
• FitBaby on Cutting Edge of Affiliation Between University and Hospital (Dec ’10)
• A Reminder of the Important Work We Do (Oct ’10)
• Action Research: A cyclical intensity for sustainable social change (Sep ’10)
• In Assimilating ODL, Data Personal Experience Plus an Open Mind Equals More Effectiveness (Aug ’10)
• Strengthening Parent-Infant Bonds (Jul ’10)
• The relationship between ADLs and ODLs (this one is in Spanish too!) (Jun ’10)
• Are there ODL’s in Diapers? (Apr ’10)
• An introduction to our team (Mar ’10)

Recent publications and talks:
Tang, K.P., Cheng, K.G, Hirano, S., Nagel, M., Baker, D., and Hayes, G.R. (2011) Addressing the Design Challenges for a Clinically-Informed Data Capture Tool Targeted for Caregivers of Premature Infants. In Proceedings of Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH 2011), 14-18.

Liu, L.S., Hirano, S.H., Tentori, M., Cheng, K.G, Park, S., and Hayes, G.R. (2011) Improving communication and social support for caregivers of high-risk infants through mobile technologies. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ’11), 475-484.

Hayes, G.R., Patterson, D.J., Singh, M., Gravem, D., Rich, J., and Cooper, D. Supporting the Transition from Hospital to Home for Premature Infants Using Integrated Mobile Computing and Sensor Support. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. In press.

Watch a talk Gillian gave at Microsoft Research that covers some of the autism and FitBaby work:   http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=121512 (March 2010)