Event

Three before CHI

Jason Wiese (Utah) Eliane Wiese (Utah), Dan Lockton (CMU)

Friday 3rd May 3pm-5pm Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh

Ahead of CHI2019 in Glasgow next week, we are lucky to have three international scholars passing through Edinburgh.

Please join us for an extended seminar in which each speaker will have 30 mins to present their research:

 

 

Jason Wiese: Empowering People with their Personal Data

Everyday, people generate lots of personal data, including communications (e.g., e-mail, Slack, Facebook), plans and coordination (e.g., calendars, Trello, to-do lists), entertainment consumption (e.g., YouTube, Spotify, Netflix), finances (e.g., banking, Amazon, eBay), activities (e.g., steps, runs, check-ins), and health care (e.g., doctor visits, medications, heart rate). Collectively, these data provide a highly detailed description of an individual. Personal data afford the opportunity for many new kinds of applications that might improve people’s lives through deep personalization, tools to manage personal well-being, and services that support identity construction. And yet, today the “killer app” for personal data seems more focused on marketing and targeted advertising, rather than helping people improve their lives. In this talk, I’ll discuss the potential presented by personal data, ongoing projects in this area, the challenges that exist, and what we can do to help.

 

Jason Wiese is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Dr. Wiese’s research excellence has been recognized by awards including: recognition as a Yahoo Fellow in 2014, the Stu Card Fellowship in 2012, a Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy and Security IGERT trainee, and the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Award in 2011. He publishes work in top Computer Science and HCI venues including CHI, CSCW, and UbiComp. He received his Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University in 2015.

 

Eliane Wiese:  Programming with Style: Code that works vs. Code that’s nice to work with

Intro programming classes focus on teaching students to write programs that work. But, in professional environments, functionality isn’t enough. The code’s structure also needs to be easy for other humans to understand and change. It needs to have good style. Before we can design instruction to teach students to use good style, we need to understand why students in their 2nd and 3rd programming class use poor style. Do students not recognize what structures experts prefer? Is expert style harder for students to understand? This talk will discuss these questions in relation to seven common style problems.

 

Dr. Eliane Wiese is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. She earned her Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon (advised by Dr. Ken Koedinger) and worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar with Dr. Marcia Linn in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Eliane Wiese researches computer science education and educational technology.

 

Dan Lockton: Imaginaries and Interaction Design

How we think about the world affects what we do. The imaginaries we have—the stories we tell ourselves and each other, the mental models and metaphors we use, and the mental imagery that comes to mind when we think about concepts—make a difference to how we approach issues that affect us, from interacting with technology in everyday life right up to global challenges such as climate change. “How do we understand?” is becoming increasingly important as we become enmeshed in complex systems of nature, technology and society, from ecosystems to AI to our own health. Interaction design focused on people’s behaviour has largely ignored this dimension, and yet it potentially offers a deep and rich understanding of the human condition within the socio-technical ecologies of our lives. In this talk I’ll cover some of the work we’re doing in the Imaginaries Lab, a new initiative at Carnegie Mellon using Research Through Design methods to investigate imaginaries, including projects around students’ sleep, mental health, and more qualitative kinds of interface design.

 

 

Image: Mental Landscapes by Delanie Ricketts and Dan Lockton. Students used landscape metaphors to visualise a group project they had worked on.

 


Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB