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 26

Interrogating the Role of Belief in Technology Design and Use

( 2020-10-26) Brock, André L.

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.
Designing Socio-technical Systems for Learning in the Third Place

( 2020-10-15) Clegg, Tamara

Oldenberg (1989) characterizes Third Places as the gathering places outside of home, work, and school where informal public life (e.g., friendship, laughter, light-heartedness, civic participation) develop dynamically. Indeed informal learning research has shown these spaces to be fruitful settings for learning. Yet, less is known about how socio-technical systems can be designed to integrate deeply into such hyper local environments and support community-based learning. In this talk, I will consider this question in the context of two research projects. First, in Science Everywhere, with colleagues, I have spent over six years designing, developing and situating a social media app, large community displays, and life-relevant science learning experiences for youth in two urban, low-SES neighborhood settings. From this project, I will highlight case studies of child and adult community members that illuminate the role of the Science Everywhere socio-technical system for influencing science disposition shifts in communities. Second, in the Data Everyday project, my research team is seeking to understand the opportunities for data literacy development within NCAA Division I sports. Drawing on an interview study with Division I athletes and athletics staff members across sports, I will highlight key tensions that reveal opportunities and challenges for designing socio-technical systems for data literacy development in elite athletics. Looking across these studies, I will then discuss guidelines for designing socio-technical systems that are deeply embedded in communities to engage a wide range of community members in sustained learning endeavors.
Advances in Social Media Safety and Integrity

( 2020-09-17) Kumar, Srijan

The web enables people to interact with one another and shape opinion at an unprecedented speed and scale. However, the prevalence of disinformation and malicious users makes the web unsafe and unreliable. In this talk, I will present advances made to improve the trust, safety, and integrity of web and social media platforms. I will showcase data science methods to extract knowledge from the graph, content, and behavior signals to characterize, detect, and mitigate the harms of bad actors and false information. I will end the talk by highlighting the open challenges in the area.
Smart and Connected Soft Bioelectronics for Advancing Human Healthcare and Human-Machine Interfaces

( 2020-09-10) Yeo, Woon-Hong

In this talk, Dr. Yeo will share the results of the fundamental study in soft materials, flexible mechanics, nanomanufacturing, and machine learning to develop soft electronics. In addition, he will talk about the details of how the basic knowledge can be applied to develop smart and connected wearable electronics. He will share some of the applications that used soft electronics for advancing human healthcare, persistent human-machine interfaces, and advanced therapeutics.
Using digital technologies to support pandemic response on campus: A case study in the opportunities and challenges of WiFi

( 2020-08-27) Abowd, Gregory D.

Our campus operations were abruptly shut down on March 13, 2020 due to Covid-19, and the campus has not been the same ever since. This has impacted our educational and research mission at Georgia Tech. On the bright side, it has activated a number of collaborative efforts to help Georgia Tech prepare itself for re-opening safely. Whether or not we are successful this Fall 2020 semester, our efforts now will undoubtedly be useful for the future. Everyone has heard about the practice of contact tracing now, and the mad rush for digital solutions to fight against the spread of infectious disease. The CampusLife effort in the School of Interactive Computing (Profs. Abowd, Plötz and De Choudhury) found an opportunity to pivot our research in this direction We are exploring the opportunity to support manual practices of contact tracing with information from the campus wireless network infrastructure. I will give an overview of this effort and report on progress to date. This is very much a work in progress, but it demonstrates some important lessons for all of the GVU community. First, solutions to real problems involves lots of different skills sets and perspectives. Second, there is very interesting balance between public health and privacy, a conversation I hope to engage our community as a way of determining potential solutions.
GVU/IPaT Research and Engagement Grants

( 2020-03-05) Anderson, David V. ; Beteul, Adam ; Bosely, Brooke ; Glass, Lelia ; Levy, Laura M. ; Morris, Susana ; Mulvanity, Sean ; Partridge, Andrew ; Riedl, Mark O. ; Sanford, Jon ; Sullivan, Anne ; Swarts, Matthew E. ; Weigel, Emily

The GVU Center and the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), with additional support from GTRI support two separate types of grant proposals. Research Grants provide seed funding for new research collaborations, and Engagement Grants provide support for new forms of internal and external community engagement and collaboration. We’re pleased to announce that the following projects were selected for 2019-2020: 1) "From #hashtags to Movements: Performance, Collective Narrative, and Erasure, a Black Feminist Perspective", by Brooke Bosley and Susana Morris (Digital Media); 2) "Workshop on Language, Technology, and Society", by Lelia Glass (Modern Languages); 3) "Getting Good: Using esports to inspire students in developing STEM skills", by Laura Levy (IMTC), Andrew Partridge (GTRI), and Sean Mulvanity (GTRI); 4) "Detecting and Measuring the Impact of Food Insecurity at Georgia Tech", by Jon Sanford (Industrial Design) and Thomas Ploetz (Interactive Computing); 5) "Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment 2019", by Anne Sullivan (Literature, Media, and Communication) and Mark Riedl (Interactive Computing); 6) "Acoustic Sensor Deployment in the EcoCommons", by Emily Weigel (Biological Sciences), Adam Beteul (Atlanta Audobon Society), David Anderson (ECE), and Matthew Swarts (GTRI).
Human-Focused Reinforcement Learning

( 2020-02-27) Brunskill, Emma

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.
Twisted Topological Tangles or: the knot theory of knitting

( 2020-02-20) Matsumoto, Elisabetta A.

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.
Sustainable Campus Development - Why it Matters

( 2020-02-13) Wertheimer, Howard S.

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.
Rico and Beyond: A Mobile App Dataset for Interaction Mining and Machine Learning

( 2020-02-06) Nichols, Jeffrey

Rico is a publicly available dataset of user interfaces from 9.7k Android apps produced in a collaboration between Google and UIUC. The dataset contains screenshots, user interface hierarchies, and interaction traces from approximately 72k unique screens across these apps, and was collected using a hybrid approach that employed both crowd workers and automated techniques. This talk will briefly describe the dataset, how it was collected, and some projects that were built using it. The focus will be on projects done at Google, but also touch on what others have done with the dataset since it was released publicly in 2017.