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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GVU Center

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 13

Computing, Ethics and the Public Interest - What does this even mean?

( 2019-11-21) Pham, Kathy

The talk will range from ethics and responsibility in computer science, to honoring expertise across disciplines, to applying computer science and engineering skills to the civic and public sector. Georgia Tech and the College of Computing prepared Kathy Pham for broad impact across large tech companies, government, and the public sector. This talk will touch on opportunities for deep impact in society using our computing skills, and the many different ways a degree from Georgia Tech lays a strong foundation for the impact. Kathy will pull from her experience at Google, IBM, and the White House, and share observations from the current landscape of computing, ethics, and the public interest.
The Urban Improvise: Improvisation-Based Design for Hybrid Cities

( 2019-11-14) Kloeckl, Kristian

The built environment in today’s hybrid cities is changing radically. The pervasiveness of networked mobile and embedded devices has transformed a predominantly stable background for human activity into spaces that have a more fluid behavior. Based on their capability to sense, compute, and act in real time, urban spaces have the potential to go beyond planned behaviors and, instead, change and adapt dynamically. These interactions resemble improvisation in the performing arts, and this talk presents a new improvisation-based framework for thinking about future cities. Kristian Kloeckl moves beyond the smart city concept by unlocking performativity, and specifically improvisation, as a new design approach and explores how city lights, buses, plazas, and other urban environments are capable of behavior beyond scripts. Drawing on research of digital cities and design theory, he makes improvisation useful and applicable to the condition of today’s technology-imbued cities and proposes a new future for responsive urban design. This talk is a preview of the forthcoming book, "The Urban Improvise. Improvisation-Based Design for Hybrid Cities“ by Kristian Kloeckl and published by Yale University Press. http://www.urbanimprovise.com/
Supporting Craft with Parametric Design Techniques

( 2019-11-07) Marks, Lisa

As industrial design continues to embrace digital manufacturing, we are in constant danger of losing the culturally indicative crafts that express individual cultures. As global wealth inequality grows, can we create low tech, parametric tools to bring products to global market? Does the spread of generative design in products have to mean a drop in artisanal jobs that support entire towns and regions? Can we blur the line between designer and maker by working collaboratively? In this talk we look at ways that new design tools can go to emerging and potential markets to create opportunity without losing jobs, skills, and traditions. This topic can connect design to production by looking upstream, encourages socially sustainable practice. This can allow us to design for production near the material source taking advantage of embodied skills instead of homogenizing design.
Everyday Materials Transformed by Computing

( 2019-10-31) Oh, HyunJoo

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.
Disney Animation: Story and Technology

( 2019-10-24) Madej, Krystina

Walt Disney is described variously as an American entrepreneur, a film producer, a pioneer of the American animation industry, the founder of the theme park industry. Public perception of him is of a filmmaker with an uncanny ability to create entertaining family oriented animated films and experiences. More than that Walt Disney was a visionary who believed technology should be pushed to its limits to realize stories, provide experiences, and build worlds. That a technology did not exist or was not yet ready to solve a problem was not an obstacle – his answer was always – build it. "Disney Stories: Getting to Digital" (Lee & Madej, 2012) discusses how Walt Disney and then the Walt Disney Company narratives evolved from traditional animation to computer games and online narrative experiences. In the upcoming second edition (January 2020) I look at technology as it has been used to enhance story from the first feature animation "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" to the first VR short "Cycles". This talk first provides an overview of the technological innovation that has driven the many arms of the Disney empire, most recently the animatronics for the new Star Wars worlds at Walt Disney World and Disneyland. This is followed by a presentation of Disney advances in technology made in the genre of animated films from the 1940s to today as Disney moved from the traditional methods of integrating animation and live action in "Song of the South" and later "Mary Poppins", to CGI assisted films beginning with "Tron", through many iterations to "Big Hero Six", and finally to VR and its use in shorts such as "Styles".
All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society

( 2019-10-17) Loukissas, Yanni

In our data-driven society, it is too easy to assume the transparency of data. Instead, Yanni Loukissas argues in All Data Are Local, we should approach data sets with an awareness that data are created by humans and their dutiful machines, at a time, in a place, with the instruments at hand, for audiences that are conditioned to receive them. The term data set implies something discrete, complete, and portable, but it is none of those things. Examining a series of data sources important for understanding the state of public life in the United States—Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, the Digital Public Library of America, UCLA's Television News Archive, and the real estate marketplace Zillow—Loukissas shows us how to analyze data settings rather than data sets. Loukissas sets out six principles: all data are local; data have complex attachments to place; data are collected from heterogeneous sources; data and algorithms are inextricably entangled; interfaces recontextualize data; and data are indexes to local knowledge. He then provides a set of practical guidelines to follow. To make his argument, Loukissas employs a combination of qualitative research on data cultures and exploratory data visualizations. Rebutting the “myth of digital universalism,” Loukissas reminds us of the meaning-making power of the local.
Designing Human Machine Interfaces in Future Vehicles

( 2019-10-10) Wang, Wei

Digital technologies have increasingly begun to permeate the driving experience in recent years to support continually increasing information and cognitive needs associated with driving and non-driving activities in the car. With recent pilot projects like Waymo, Uber, and Tesla, we can anticipate that autonomous driving technology will have a significant impact on accelerating the transformation of the automobile interface in its more than one hundred years long history. As the technology matures, and initial public enthusiasm wanes, designing a better user experience within this new mode of travel will be of critical importance for our future. In this talk, we examined the user experience issues that will arise with the introduction of autonomous driving including the attention-activity changes and related design considerations. We then discuss current disciplinary-specific design methodologies and introduce a more comprehensive approach to the design space to optimize the opportunities for user interaction with examples to meet the changes in the vehicle and the associated transportation service.
Materialized AI: Robotic Morphing Matter

( 2019-10-03) Yao, Lining

Morphing matter harnesses the programmability in material structures and compositions to achieve transformative behaviors and integrates sensing, actuation, and computation to create adaptive and responsive material systems. These material systems can be leveraged to design soft robots, self-assembling furniture, adaptive fabrics, and self-folding foods. In this talk, Lining presents the recent works in the Morphing Matter Lab, Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and highlights several robotic morphing materials that weave advanced manufacturing with computational tools. Her team believes that the term “robotics” does not only refer to conventional robotic forms and controls but also connects to the artifacts’ ability to make decisions, adapt, move, and respond to different stimuli. More information from the lab site: https://morphingmatter.cs.cmu.edu/.
Designing Technologies to Drive Curiosity

( 2019-09-26) Roberts, Jessica

When we think about technology mediating human interactions with data, we often think about how it improves the practices of people’s usual activities, from making them more mindful of their daily movements through step-tracking devices, to improving capabilities to make informed business decisions using data-rich analytics in a digital dashboard. This talk explores how technologies can expand people to look beyond what they usually do: how can a zoomable interface spark wonder about aquatic insects to engage non-scientists in water quality monitoring, and how can a touchscreen inspire new questions about familiar objects to foster cross-cultural dialogues? I will present multiple projects integrating interactive technologies as mediators of informal, social learning and argue for the importance of technology’s role in provoking empathy, curiosity, and engagement to drive and expand interest in unfamiliar domains.
Playdate: Creating a new handheld video game console

( 2019-09-12) Maletic, Greg

Playdate — a tiny, yellow, handheld game console — made a bigger splash than its creators envisioned when it was announced this past May. Relying on a combination of old tech (a 1-bit black-and-white display), new design (from Sweden’s renowned Teenage Engineering) and some just-plain-weird ideas (a side-mounted crank as a game controller), software maker Panic Inc. hopes that Playdate can carve itself a niche in a video game marketplace where giants dominate. The story is still in-progress — Playdate won’t be released until next year — but Greg Maletic, Panic’s Director of Special Projects, will give you an insider’s peek at the decisions that have driven Playdate’s conception, design, manufacture, and marketing.