Newsletter

April 2009

In this issue:

EDITORIAL

Welcome back to campus for Spring quarter! This month's faculty spotlight features Assistant Professor and CTSB affiliate Liz Gerber (Segal Design Institute). You also have the pleasure of meeting first year graduate student Rachel Plotnick (MTS) and will learn about this month's featured research project, Brussell, an online news interface that provides context to news stories.

We regret that April's CTSB colloquium talk with Emmanuel Schegloff (UCLA) has been cancelled due to scheduling conflicts. We look forward to the colloquium series continuing in May for the final 2008-2009 talk by Judy Olson on Distance Collaboration: What makes it successful?

This month's Thank CTSB It's Friday event is back on schedule and will take place on Friday, April 3rd. Enjoy reading this issue and we look forward to seeing you at upcoming events.

— Christopher Riesbeck (Acting Director, CTSB) and Lindsey Lumley (Newsletter Editor, CTSB)

EVENTS

Upcoming CTSB events to mark in your calendar:

Colloquium Series

Emmanuel Schegloff's talk has been cancelled for April. Please join us on May 21st at 4pm for a talk on Distance Collaboration: What makes it successful? by Judy Olson (UC Irvine). Location TBD. Visit the CTSB colloquium page for further details. If you would like to arrange a meeting with any of the CTSB speakers, please contact Patti Bao <pattibao@ northwestern.edu>.

Thank CTSB It's Friday!

TCIF will be on April 3rd in the CTSB (Frances Searle, 2-431) from 12pm-2pm. Join us for a delicious lunch and engaging conversations! If you have specific ideas of activities you would like to see or showcase at TCIF this spring quarter, please contact Lindsey Lumley at <l-lumley@northwestern.edu>.

SPOTLIGHTS

Faculty Spotlight: Liz Gerber

Dr. Liz Gerber conducts research on human-centered design and innovation practices.  She uses the behavioral sciences to understand and inform the design of innovative products and services.  Currently, Dr. Gerber is investigating how individuals become devoted to the human centered innovation process through the enactment of the core work practices, social networks that support innovative design work, the role of empathy with peers and users in the design process, and tools that support creative confidence.

While design has always been an interest for Dr. Gerber, she became interested in the organizational context for innovation when working at a toy company in San Francisco. She observed both her colleagues and children working collaboratively to create toys that would inspire the imagination. She was intrigued by both the diversity of individual approaches to the innovation work and the contextual issues that influenced this process.

Dr. Gerber left industry to pursue a master’s degree in mechanical engineering with a focus in product design at Stanford University where she focused on illustration as an insight generation tool for human-centered innovation. Following the completion of her master’s degree in Product Design with advisor and IDEO founder, David Kelley, Dr. Gerber began her doctoral studies working with organizational researcher, Dr. Bob Sutton. In 2007, she became a post doctoral scholar at Stanford’s d.school, teaching and conducting ethnographic research in the field of human-centered innovation. At Northwestern, she serves on the Segal Executive Committee, where she is helping to expand design education and research on campus and beyond.  She holds courtesy appointments in Kellogg’s Management and Organizations Group as well as McCormick's Industrial Engineering and Management Department.

When not in the lab or classroom, Dr. Gerber enjoys tandem bike riding with her husband, seeking out the fastest playground slides with her daughter, drawing illustrations of interesting people she meets, improvising, and jogging without a snowsuit.

Student Spotlight: Rachel Plotnick

Rachel Plotnick is a first-year graduate student in the Media, Technology and Society program.  Prior to coming to Northwestern, she received her B.A. in English and Journalism from Indiana University-Bloomington and her M.A. in Communication, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University.  Her master’s work investigated how individuals in online communities about cancer use humor as a means of resistance.  Rachel has also worked in the areas of print and web design/strategy and writing, both for the National Sleep Foundation and Discovery Communications.  She is currently interested in studying the intersections of medicine and technology, particularly with an historical focus.  In her free time, Rachel likes to paint, watch movies and spend time with her family.

Research Spotlight:

Brussell: Rich Interfaces for Reading News on the Web

As the newspaper industry adapts to readers used to accessing a wealth of news online, the development of new ways for readers to interact and engage with news become increasingly important.  Today, people interested in reading more about a news event read scattered news articles, or turn to news search engines for a flood of articles.  But what if they could more easily see the "big picture" of an event including the relevant events that preceded it?  When you read about a person receiving a guilty verdict in a legal trial and want to find out more, how can you get more information about how the trial began and how it proceeded?  As part of research at the Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab) on new interfaces for viewing news, Professor Larry Birnbaum (EECS) and graduate student Earl J. Wagner are working to provide richer interfaces for navigating the context of news content, specifically focusing on related sequences of news events or "news situations".  The system they have developed, Brussell, reads online news to create and present timelines for extended situations in business including legal trials and corporate acquisitions, as well as terrorism-related topics such as kidnappings.  This work was recently presented in February 2009 at the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI'09) in Sanibel Island, Florida.  For more information visit the Brussell Webpage.

Faculty & Student News Roundup

Darren Gergle (Communication) and Ph.D. student Brent Hecht (Computer Science) co-wrote "Measuring Self-Focus Bias in Community-Maintained Knowledge Repositories," which was accepted for the Communities and Technologies (C&T) 2009 Conference to be held in June at Penn State University.

Ying Wu (EECS), along with Junsong Yuan and Zicheng Liu wrote "Discriminative 3D Subvolume Search for Efficient Action Detection" to appear in the proceedings of IEEE CVPR in June.

Chris Riesbeck (EECS) and Ph.D candidate Kevin Livingston (Computer Science) co-authored "Resolving References and Identifying Existing Knowledge in a Memory Based Parser" which appeared at the AAAI 2009 Spring Symposium on Learning by Reading and Learning to Read in March.

Darren Gergle's (Communication) and post-doc researcher Yoram Kalman's paper, "Letter and Punctuation Mark Repeats as Cues in Computer-Mediated Communication", was accepted to the National Communication Association (NCA) 2009 Conference to be held in November in Chicago.

Funding Opportunities

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

NSF - Science and Technology Centers: Integrative Partnerships

The Science and Technology Centers (STC): Integrative Partnerships program supports innovative, potentially transformative, complex research and education projects that require large-scale, long-term awards. STCs conduct world-class research through partnerships among academic institutions, national laboratories, industrial organizations, and/or other public/private entities, and via international collaborations, as appropriate. They provide a means to undertake important investigations at the interfaces of disciplines and/or fresh approaches within disciplines. STC investments support the NSF vision of advancing discovery, innovation and education beyond the frontiers of current knowledge, and empowering future generations in science and engineering. Proposals may only be submitted by the following: Preliminary proposals and invited full proposals may be submitted by U.S. academic institutions that have research and degree-granting education programs in any area of research supported by NSF. The lead institution is expected to develop multi-institutional partnerships or arrangements with other universities/colleges, national laboratories, research museums, private sector research laboratories, state and local government laboratories, and international collaborations that enable the Center to attain its strategic goals. Applications due April 30, 2009.

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 Chris Riesbeck <c-riesbeck@northwestern.edu> for further details.

Conference Submission Deadlines

IDC 2009 International Conference on Interaction Design and Children in Como, Italy (June 3-5, 2009). Workshop position papers due April 8, 2009.

PACLING 2009 Conference of the Pacific Association of Computational Linguistics in Sapporo, Japan (September 1-4, 2009). Submissions due April 15, 2009.

UBICOMP 2009 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing in Orlando, Florida (September 30 - October 3, 2009). Submissions due April 17, 2009.

ACL-IJNLP 2009 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing in Suntec, Singapore (August 2-7, 2009). Short papers due April 26, 2009.

IVA 2009 International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents in Amsterdam, Netherlands (September 10-12, 2009). Submissions due April 26, 2009.

MT Summit Machine Translation Summit XII in Ontario Canada (August 26-30, 2009). Research papers due April 28, 2009.

DCM 2009 Developments in Computational Models (July 11, 2009) in Rhodes, Greece. Submissions due April 30, 2009.

HAI 2009 Human Aspects in Ambient Intelligence workshop at the International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT) 2009 in Milan, Italy (September 15, 2009). Submissions due April 30, 2009.

GESPIN 2009 Gesture and Speech Interaction at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland (September 24-26, 2009). Papers due May 1, 2009.

ALT 2009 Algorithmic Learning Theory at the University of Porto, Portugal (October 3-5, 2009). Papers due May 10, 2009.

Upcoming Conferences and Workshops

CHI 2009 Computer Human Interaction Conference at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA (April 4-9, 2009).

PALC Practical Applications in Language and Computers Conference in Lodz, Poland (April 6-8, 2009).

ECIR 2009 European Conference on Information Retrieval in Toulouse, France (April 6-9, 2009).

New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction in Edinburgh, Scotland (April 6-9, 2009).

AISB 2009 Symposium on Mental States, Emotions, and their Embodiment in Edinburgh, Scotland (April 7-8, 2009).

IEEE ICASSP 2009 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in Taipei, Taiwan (April 19-24, 2009).

CAW 2.0 Workshop on Content Analysis in Web 2.0 in Madrid, Spain (April 20-21, 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 <l-lumley@northwestern.edu>, providing a brief description of the position(s) available, and any skills / experience required.