Newsletter

November 2009

In this issue:

Editorial | Events | Spotlights | News | Conferences | Funding | Groups | Jobs

EDITORIAL

Greetings! Welcome to the November issue of the CTSB Newsletter! The November edition of the newsletter features Professor and CTSB affiliate Steve Franconeri (Psychology). Also featured are first-year Ph.D. graduate student Alina Lungeanu (TSB) and the CTSB's newest postdoctoral fellow, Emilee Rader.

Thanks to everyone who joined us on October 2nd for our monthly TCIF lunch. I hope you enjoy reading this issue and we look forward to seeing you at upcoming events!

- Justine Cassell (Director, CTSB) and Sean Kelly (Newsletter Editor, CTSB)

EVENTS

Upcoming CTSB events to mark in your calendar:

Colloquium Series

The TSB Colloquium continues for Fall quarter with Dr Shinobu Kitayama (Psychology, University of Michigan) The Social Self and the Social Brain: A Perspective of Cultural Neuroscience to be held on Thursday, November 12, at 4:00pm (Frances Searle 1-421). Visit the CTSB colloquium page for further details and event updates. If you would like to arrange a meeting with any of the CTSB speakers, please contact Patti Bao pattibao@northwestern.edu.

Fall Quarter

If you have specific ideas of activities you would like to see or showcase at TCIF this quarter, please contact Sean Kelly at skelly@northwestern.edu.

SPOTLIGHTS

Faculty Spotlight: Steve Franconeri

The world presents our visual system with an overwhelmingly rich image. We cannot fully process everything at once, and instead must focus our attention on the most relevant information. Steve Franconeri's research focuses on the tools that we use to select visual information, and how these tools are applied. How much of selection is automatic, and how much is under our control? Can we select more than one thing at a time? How do we maintain selection of an object when it moves?

He also studies processes that support and interact with visual selection. These processes include visual memory, which helps us store what we have selected in the past, object tracking, which helps us maintain selection of moving objects, and number perception, which relies on selection mechanisms to construct the units underlying the counting process.

Student Spotlight: Alina Lungeanu

Alina Lungeanu is a first year Ph.D. student in the Technology and Social Behavior program. She obtained both her Master and Bachelor degrees in Management Information Systems from the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, Romania. Before joining the program, she worked in IT consulting for over 6 years in Europe and Asia, working with Business Intelligence applications. As a result of working in diverse environments and in distributed teams, as well as her subsequent research experience, Alina developed an interest in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. In her doctoral work, Alina plans to examine how technology can better support interaction across time and space, and knowledge management processes. More specifically, Alina currently studies how communication technologies may affect collaboration in diverse and dispersed groups.

Staff Spotlight: Emilee Rader

Emilee Rader (Ph.D, University of Michigan) is a new post-doctoral fellow in the Center for Technology and Social behavior, funded by a grant from the Computing Innovation Fellows Project. She earned a Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University, and spent five years working with an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Motorola Labs, before completing the doctoral program in the School of Information at Michigan.

Emilee focuses on understanding the social factors that affect information representation, organization, and reuse by people in situations that involve some form of collaboration or collective action. She has conducted qualitative user studies using various methodologies, controlled experiments, computer modeling efforts, large-scale statistical analyses, and designed and evaluated software prototypes.

Her recent work has investigated whether social processes might affect the development of shared meaning in two different types of information sharing systems. In one project, she interviewed users of http://delicious.com about their tagging practices, and was surprised that many users cited personal, rather than social motivations for tagging. These results inspired an analysis of bookmark and tag data scraped from delicious. Despite assumptions to the contrary in the literature, logistic regression analysis and computer modeling results suggest that tags are chosen for personal information management reasons, not as a result of imitation of other users. In another project, she conducted an online experiment to find out whether audience design might impact labeling, organizing, and finding shared files. The results of a Poisson regression allowed her to conclude that under certain conditions, audience design can have a significant impact on information organization, and subsequent finding behavior. In her future work, she will build on these results to develop design guidelines for information sharing systems.

Faculty & Student News Roundup

Justine Cassell (Communication Studies & EECS) CTSB director, gave a demonstration of the ALEX project to the Senate and the Congress in Washington, D.C. on November 4th.

Alan Collins (Education and Social Policy) gave a talk on his new book, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, in October.

Jack Tumblin (EECS) gave two invited talks in September:"Computational Photography for Hand-held Devices" at Qualcomm Corp in San Diego, and "What's Missing from HDR Methods?" at at the Stanford Symposium on High Dynamic Range Imaging, at Stanford University.

Throughout the summer, Kristian Hammond (EECS) regularly appeared on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight to talk about news and technology.

Ian Horswill (EECS) gave an invited talk at Microsoft Research called "Twig: a simple, AI-friendly, character world for believable agents" in September.

A paper by Dedre Gentner (Psychology), Ken Forbus (EECS) and graduate students Andrew Lovett (Computer Science) and Eyal Sagi (Psychology), "Using analogical mapping to simulate time-course phenomena in perceptual similarity," appeared in Cognitive Systems Research: Special Issue on Analogies - Integrating Cognitive Abilities in September.

Funding Opportunities

Note: the following list is not exhaustive. You can help by alerting us to relevant opportunities.

NSF Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering (REESE)

The Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering (REESE) program seeks to advance research at the frontiers of STEM learning, education, and evaluation, and to provide the foundational knowledge necessary to improve STEM teaching and learning at all educational levels and in all settings. This solicitation calls for four types of proposals—Pathways, Knowledge Diffusion, Empirical Research, and Large Empirical Research.

The goals of the REESE program are: (1) to catalyze discovery and innovation at the frontiers of STEM learning, education, and evaluation; (2) to stimulate the field to produce high quality and robust research results through the progress of theory, method, and human resources; and (3) to coordinate and transform advances in education, learning research, and evaluation. REESE pursues its mission by developing an interdisciplinary research portfolio focusing on core scientific questions about STEM learning in current and emerging learning contexts, both formal and informal, from childhood through adulthood, and from before school through to graduate school and beyond into the workforce. REESE places particular importance upon the involvement of young investigators in the projects, at doctoral, postdoctoral, and early career stages, as well as the involvement of STEM disciplinary experts. In addition, research questions related to educational research methodology and evaluation are central to the REESE activity. Proposals due November 12, 2009.

Organization for Autism Research: Applied Research Competition

Research Grants: OAR conducts open grant competitions to select pilot studies for funding in autism research each year. One is for researchers; the other is for graduate students conducting autism research in support of an advanced degree. Both competitions are intended to promote research in the analysis, evaluation, or comparison of assessment or treatment models, focusing on aspects of early education, behavioral, or communication intervention and adult issues such as continuing education, employment, housing models and “later intervention.” In keeping with OAR’s mission, the goal of this sponsored research is to promote studies that yield practical and clearly objective results that contribute to enhanced quality of life for people with autism and provide evidence-based information for use by parents, families, and service providers. … Applied Research Competition: The Applied Research Competition is conducted annually beginning with the publication or the RFP . Researchers can apply for one-year grants up to two funding levels: $30,000 or $45,000 or for a two-year grant with a maximum of $60,000. The competition proceeds in three phases: 1) Phase 1: Receipt and evaluation of pre-proposals, 2) Phase 2: Receipt and evaluation of full proposals, and 3) Final Review and approval. Each phase includes a peer review that includes the members of OAR’s Scientific Council augmented by invited guest reviewers with expertise particularly relevant to the studies under consideration. The Final Review is conducted in person by the Scientific Council during its annual meeting each October. OAR’s Board of Directors approves all grant awards based on the recommendations of the Scientific Council and OAR’s established research priorities.  Contact: (703) 243-9710. pgerhardt@researchautism.org

American Academy of Arts and Sciences Hellman Fellowships

As part of the Initiative for Science, Engineering, and Technology, the American Academy has established the the Hellman Fellowship in Science and Technology Policy for an early-career professional with training in science or engineering who is interested in transitioning to a career in public policy and administration. While in residence, the Hellman Fellow will work with senior scientists and policy experts on critical national and international policy issues related to science, engineering, and technology. The focus of the work will be on one or more of the ongoing projects under the Academy's Initiative for Science, Engineering, and Technology to which the Hellman Fellow will contribute substantively. The mission of the Initiative is to examine, in broad terms, how the world of science and technology is evolving, how to help the public understand these changes, and how society can better adapt. The Initiative brings together scientists and public policy experts in a neutral setting, outside of the constraints of the political process. Applications due January 15, 2009.

Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project

The Project seeks to identify and fund the best innovations using wireless related technology to address critical social issues around the world. The Project is open to projects from universities and nonprofit organizations based in the United States. Projects must demonstrate a multi-disciplinary approach that uses an innovation in wireless related technology to address a critical global issue in one or more of the following areas: access to communication, education, economic development, environment, or health. The technology should have the potential for replication and large scale impact. Teams should have a business plan or a basic framework for financial sustainability and rollout. Winners will be selected for awards of $100,000, $200,000, and $300,000 which will be paid in equal installments over three years. Applications due February 1, 2010.

CTSB Exploration Grants

We encourage faculty and graduate students to collaborate across departments on projects that might potentially lead to larger grant proposals. We are interested in supporting the hire of undergraduates as a part of these collaborative teams. Please contact Justine Cassell justine@northwestern.edu for further details.

Conference Submission Deadlines

WCC 2010 World Computer Congress 2010 in Brisbane, Australia (September 20-23, 2010). Papers due January 31, 2009.

DIS 2010 Designing Interactive Systems in Aarhus, Denmark (August 16-20, 2010). Full paper and workshop proposal submissions due February 15, 2010.

(B-Interface 2010) The First International Workshop on Bio-inspired Human-Machine Interfaces and Healthcare Applications in Valencia, Spain (November 13, 2009). Full paper and workship proposal submissions due November 30, 2009.

Upcoming Conferences and Workshops

NAACL HLT 2010 Annual Meeting of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics with the Human Language Technology in Los Angeles, California (June 6-10, 2010). Papers due December 1, 2009.

CMSPA 2010 Computational Modelling of Sound Pattern Acquisition in Alberta, Canada (February 13-14, 2010). Abstracts due November 20, 2009.

C&AICognition and AI in Daytona Beach, Florida (May 19-21, 2010). Papers due November 23, 2009.

Reading Groups

If you would like to advertise a reading group, write ctsb@northwestern.edu to let us know.

Employment Opportunities

If you would like to advertise job openings within your research group or lab, please e-mail skelly@northwestern.edu, providing a brief description of the position(s) available, and any skills/experience required.

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