GVU Brown Bag Seminars

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GVU Brown Bag Seminars

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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/70896

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Event Series

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GVU Center

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 68

Everyday Materials Transformed by Computing

( 2019-10-31) Oh, HyunJoo ; Georgia Institute of Technology. GVU Center ; Georgia Institute of Technology. School of Industrial Design ; Georgia Institute of Technology. School of Interactive Computing

Look around at some of the familiar objects and materials in your surroundings. These things can be transformed. By combining everyday materials with computing, we can extend and reimagine their expressive and functional possibilities. We can also invite people to explore a new design space through making. In this talk, HyunJoo will present her recent work in integrating paper and recycled materials with computing and discuss a suite of computational design tools her research team has developed. She will describe how combinations of everyday materials with computation can expand creative possibilities while leveraging familiarity to empower designers and learners.
Interrogating the Role of Belief in Technology Design and Use

( 2020-10-26) Brock, André L. ; Georgia Institute of Technology. GVU Center ; Georgia Institute of Technology. School of Literature, Media, and Communication

While STEM fields possess the capacity to analyze the technical and organizational properties of digital interfaces, services, and their associated user practices, they are underequipped to evaluate or interrogate the cultural mediation of design, discourses, and meaning of digital technologies. This presentation describes a possible methodological intervention: critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA). CTDA employs critical cultural frameworks (e.g. critical race or feminist theory) with philosophy of technology and science and technology studies to interrogate digital artifacts, their practices, and the beliefs of the users employs them.
Design as Democratic Inquiry

( 2022-01-20) DiSalvo, Carl ; Georgia Institute of Technology. GVU Center ; Georgia Institute of Technology. School of Interactive Computing

In this talk, I’ll share my new book, Design as Democratic Inquiry. This book discusses a series of projects grounded in collaborations with communities and institutions. In these collaborations, I explore the potentials and limitations of design to participate in democracy through what I call design experiments in civics. In particular, I explore how, as engaged designers, we might contribute to the work of communities and institutions who explore alternative civic imaginaries, which keep our democracies vibrant. This requires rethinking the stories we tell about design, how we practice design, and how we theorize design. Rather than repeating the heroic tales of innovation, I argue for embracing design as fragile, contingent, partial, and compromised: designing becomes a way to care for our collective futures together.
Studying Intersectional Challenges in Gig Work: Lessons From the Global South

( 2021-11-11) Raval, Noopur ; Georgia Institute of Technology. GVU Center ; AI Now Institute ; New York University. School of Engineering

With the rise and proliferation of gig economy platforms providing ride hailing, food delivery and other app-based services on-demand in major urban centers of the world, there have been major transformations in work and life globally. Gig platforms have certainly disrupted and redefined the discovery and allocation of casual work through algorithmic management, creating grave concerns for regulating the future of work. Simultaneously, especially in the global South, gig platforms have also emerged as important avenues for gaining temporary paid work and socio-economic mobility for low income individuals, women and migrant workers. Drawing on over five years of ethnographic research with a variety of stakeholders in the gig economy including workers, managers, consumers and regulators, my work shows how platformization produces heterogeneous effects on the lives, livelihoods and productive and reproductive capacities of different individuals in urban India. This talk will draw on multiple case studies of gig work to show these heterogeneous effects and how everyday technology practice also informs platform design in return. I will also offer some considerations for HCI scholars looking to study the effects of emerging technologies in global South settings.
Human-Focused Reinforcement Learning

( 2020-02-27) Brunskill, Emma ; Georgia Institute of Technology. GVU Center ; Stanford University. Dept. of Computer Science

There is increasing excitement about reinforcement learning--a subarea of machine learning for enabling an agent to learn to make good decisions. Yet numerous questions and challenges remain for reinforcement learning to help support progress in applications that involve interacting with people, like education, consumer marketing and healthcare. I will discuss our work on some of the technical challenges that arise in this pursuit, including sample efficiency, counterfactual reasoning, robustness, and applications to health and education.
Sustainable Campus Development - Why it Matters

( 2020-02-13) Wertheimer, Howard S. ; Georgia Institute of Technology. GVU Center ; Piedmont Park Conservancy ; Georgia Institute of Technology. Capital Planning & Space Management

Georgia Tech has been at the forefront of sustainability since its inception in the 1880's. This is evidenced by the fact that the original brick buildings on campus were made from indigenous Georgia red clay, and Grant Field was the home to football, baseball and track. Fast forward to 2019 where we have just built the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, slated to be one of the most sustainable buildings in the southeast, on the path to meet the stringent requirements of the Living Building Challenge. Come learn about the evolution of Georgia Tech's 400-acre ecosystem and our commitment to sustainable campus development.
Ignorance is Bliss: A Retrospective On My Career at Georgia Tech

( 2021-02-11) Abowd, Gregory D. ; Georgia Institute of Technology. GVU Center ; Georgia Institute of Technology. College of Computing

On July 15, 1994, I began my career on the faculty in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Throughout my career, I have cherished the over half a dozen opportunities I have had to give GVU Brown Bag talks on various research activities. My time as full-time faculty at Georgia Tech ends at the end of February 2021, and I will begin a new chapter of my career as the Dean of Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. I would like to reflect on the 26+ years I have spent at Georgia Tech, the College of Computing, and the GVU Center and try to explain why I think this place is so special. In thinking about a theme for this talk, I was reminded that my career has been a series of shifting research agendas, each one inspired by some life events. In all cases, I was buoyed by a bevy of talented and supportive colleagues and students who gave me the courage to jump into a research topic that I didn’t know much about. That “ignorance” has allowed me to be more fearless that I had the right to be. As I jump into my next career, for which I am also blissfully ignorant, I hope I am lucky enough to be surrounded by excellence that inspires success.
Foley Scholars

( 2020-01-23) Hong, Matthew K. ; Martin, Lara J. ; Wall, Emily ; Georgia Institute of Technology. GVU Center ; Georgia Institute of Technology. School of Interactive Computing ; Georgia Institute of Technology. College of Computing

Matthew K. Hong: "Personalizing Health Management Through Human-Centered Data Augmentation" During complex chronic treatment, adolescent patients (ages 10-19) must communicate all illness needs to the care team so they can access relevant health resources when most needed. This communication is challenging because patients, family caregivers and clinicians have unmatched experiences, conceptions and linguistic representations of indicators of health. Most importantly, patients lack the means to capture and represent their felt illness experience. My colleagues and I addressed these challenges by advancing personalized computing technology and human-centric methods that inform collaborative approaches for managing personal health data. In this talk, I will describe how technology can be designed to effectively scaffold patients’ gradual participation in managing their illness. I draw from Health Informatics, Participatory Design, and Human-Computer Interaction to show how we can augment clinically-generated, and patient-generated data in ways that cater to personal health needs. I will discuss how human-centered data-augmentation can help designers create intelligent systems to improve chronic care for pediatric patients.
Twisted Topological Tangles or: the knot theory of knitting

( 2020-02-20) Matsumoto, Elisabetta A. ; Georgia Institute of Technology. GVU Center ; Georgia Institute of Technology. School of Physics

Imagine a 1D curve, then use it to fill a 2D manifold that covers an arbitrary 3D object – this computationally intensive materials challenge has been realized in the ancient technology known as knitting. This process for making functional materials 2D materials from 1D portable cloth dates back to prehistory, with the oldest known examples dating from the 11th century BCE. Knitted textiles are ubiquitous as they are easy and cheap to create, lightweight, portable, flexible and stretchy. As with many functional materials, the key to knitting’s extraordinary properties lies in its microstructure. At the 1D level, knits are composed of an interlocking series of slip knots. At the most basic level there is only one manipulation that creates a knitted stitch – pulling a loop of yarn through another loop. However, there exist hundreds of books with thousands of patterns of stitches with seemingly unbounded complexity. The topology of knitted stitches has a profound impact on the geometry and elasticity of the resulting fabric. This puts a new spin on additive manufacturing – not only can stitch pattern control the local and global geometry of a textile, but the creation process encodes mechanical properties within the material itself. Unlike standard additive manufacturing techniques, the innate properties of the yarn and the stitch microstructure has a direct effect on the global geometric and mechanical outcome of knitted fabrics.
GVU Center Overview and Funded Research Projects

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-08-22) Edwards, W. Keith ; Mynatt, Elizabeth D. ; Trent, Tim ; Morshed, Mehrab Bin ; Sherman, Jihan ; Glass, Lelia ; Partridge, Andrew ; Swarts, Matthew E. ; Georgia Institute of Technology. GVU Center ; Georgia Institute of Technology. School of Interactive Computing

In the first GVU Brown Bag Seminar of the academic year, Keith Edwards, GVU Center Director and Professor of Interactive Computing, will kick off our talk series with an overview of the GVU Center detailing its unique resources and opportunities, and previewing some of the events coming up this semester. Come, enjoy lunch, and learn about some of the ways you can connect with GVU. Also, each year, the GVU Center and IPaT announce funding for the Research and Engagement Grants, which support early stage work by Georgia Tech researchers. This year’s winners will give brief overviews of the work they will be doing over the coming academic year.