Newsletter

February 2008

In this issue:

EDITORIAL

Welcome again to the Center for Technology & Social Behavior (CTSB) monthly newsletter. We trust you have had a productive start to the quarter and that you are managing to stay warm.

This month we have a feature-packed issue, including spotlights on CTSB faculty member Don Norman and new Ph.D. student Patti Bao. Additionally, we turn the resources spotlight on the CTSB computer programming support available to faculty affiliated with the Center.

As usual, we feature upcoming events, including details of CTSB talks by Luis von Ahn and Sara Kiesler. In addition, we remind you of our regular first Friday event, Thank CTSB it's Friday! We look forward to having you join us.

Finally, we hope you find this newsletter a useful resource for upcoming grant and conference deadlines, as well as for news about reading groups and employment opportunities. If you have announcements, news, and achievements you would like to share, or resources or employment you'd like to offer, please contact the CTSB newsletter editor, Alastair Gill <alastair [at] northwestern.edu>.

Again, we hope you enjoy reading our newsletter, and we look forward to meeting you at one of the forthcoming CTSB events.

-- Justine Cassell (Director, CTSB) and Alastair Gill (Research Scientist, CTSB)

EVENTS

CTSB is continuing to host a range of exciting events this year. Here are a few upcoming dates to mark in your calendars:

Colloquium Series

In 2007-2008 the CTSB Colloquium Series has the theme of 'Social Technologies'. The full program of Colloquium Series speakers for the year can be found online, and here you can also find abstracts of any talks that you may have missed.

On February 7 the CTSB hosts Luis von Ahn, recent MacArthur fellow, who will talk about harnessing Human Computation. On February 28 we host Sara Kiesler who will talk about Collaboration and Coordination in Interdisciplinary Research Teams. Please note that the winter talks will take place in the ITW auditorium on the 2nd floor of the Ford Building.

Each colloquium speaker is available for individual meetings with faculty and students. In addition, CTSB hosts a graduate student-only lunch. If you are interested in meeting with any of the following speakers please contact CTSB program assistant Elisa Revello <e-revello [at] northwestern.edu> as soon as possible, since schedules fill up quickly. Upcoming talks are:

• Luis von Ahn (Carnegie Mellon) - Feb. 7 (4pm)
• Sara Kiesler (CMU) - Feb. 28 (12pm)
• Wendy Kellogg (IBM Research) - Mar. 27 (4pm)
• Roz Picard (MIT) - April 17 (4pm)

Thank CTSB it's Friday!

Following the success of the inaugural Thank CTSB It's Friday (TCIF), we welcome you all back for more of the same this month. We will be meeting this Friday, February 1, from 4-6pm at the CTSB HQ (room 2-431, Frances Searle Building). Please come along and join us for drinks, good food and conversation. Although TCIF is primarily social in nature, this month we could use your help in setting down a list of overarching themes that you use to describe your research, and that we can use to describe the intersection among our various research programs. This list will help the new CTSB sponsor liaison and grant writer (more about that at the party!) in finding potential collaborators, partners, and CTSB grant and sponsor opportunities. If you can't attend this week but have some ideas, please get in touch with Alastair Gill <alastair [at] northwestern.edu>.

TCIF dates for this quarter are: February 1, March 7, and April 4 from 4pm - 6pm in the CTSB.

SPOTLIGHTS

Faculty Spotlight: Don Norman

Don Norman is the Breed University Professor in the School of Engineering at Northwestern University and co-director of MMM, the joint MBA and Engineering program which emphasizes design and operations. He is also a co-director of the Segal Design Institute. Aside from his Northwestern activities, Norman's busy schedule also includes working with the Nielsen Norman group (which he co-founded), writing books promoting human-centered design, and serving on advisory boards, such as the editorial advisory board of Encyclopedia Britannica and the Industrial Design Department of Korea's Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

Norman describes himself as "a fellow of many organizations and former lots of things". Some of these former things include being a VP at Apple Computer, executive at Hewlett-Packard, and even President of a startup. He has honorary degrees from the University of Padova (Italy) and the Technical University Delft (the Netherlands). He was awarded the Benjamin Franklin medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. He is the author of "The Design of Everyday Things" and "Emotional Design". His newest book, "The Design of Future Things," discusses the role that automation plays in our everyday lives. More information can be found at www.jnd.org.

Student Spotlight: Patti Bao

Patti Bao is a first year student in the Technology and Social Behavior joint PhD program. Before coming to Northwestern, she studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where she created her own degree in Information Technology for Society and worked with Ken Goldberg to build a massively multiplayer online game for birdwatching in the backyard of San Francisco's very own Craigslist founder.

Patti is currently working with Darren Gergle in the CollaboLab, where she is excited about exploring the use of information visualization in collaborative environments. She eventually hopes to create better user experiences all around, but she will be happy to tackle just one at a time. In her spare time, Patti enjoys visiting countries she's never been to, and trying to catch up on her never-ending RSS feeds.

Resources Spotlight: Computer programming support

CTSB staff are available to offer support to CTSB affiliates. In this issue, we spotlight John Borland, CTSB's full-time Information Systems Architecture and Software Engineer, and all round computer support superstar. John received his B.S. in Computer Systems engineering from Stanford University in 1995, and his M.S. in Computer Science from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2001. John has been with CTSB since last year, and before that he worked in industry for several startup companies in addition to being a contractor to the US Department of Defense research labs. From these experiences, John has as wide variety of skills that he brings to CTSB. These include cross-platform programming in C, C++, Java in Linux, Mac and Windows/cygwin environments, and also Microsoft Visual Basic and .NET. In addition, John has a range of web scripting skills (PHP, ASP, Javascript; CGI programming) and also database design and connectivity experience (MySQL, PostGreSQL, SQLite, SQL Server and Microsoft Access).

As a CTSB staff member John is available to assist CTSB affiliates with their programming projects. To date, John's work with CTSB research projects has included setting up video capture, programming the NUMACK embodied conversational agent with Justine Cassell, setting up an aimbot text-chat environment for Darren Gergle's online collaboration studies, and preparing the CTSB Mobile Tracking Lab for your use.

If you would like John to assist with your research projects, please contact Justine Cassell <justine [at] northwestern.edu>, giving a description of the project for which you would like computing support, and brief details of the computing assistance you require.

Faculty News Roundup

Justine Cassell received a grant from the NSF ALT (Advanced Learning Technologies) program to support her research investigating whether code-switching virtual peers may play a role in reducing the achievement gap.

Steve Franconeri's (Psychology) paper entitled 'Objects on a collision path with the observer demand attention' (with Jeffrey Lin and Jim Enns, both University of British Columbia) due to appear in Psychological Science.

Dedre Gentner's (Psychology) paper 'Developmental changes in children's understanding of the similarity between photographs and their referents' (with David Uttal, Linda Liu and Alison Lewis) appeared in the January edition of Developmental Science.

Eszter Hargittai's (Communication) paper 'The Role of Expertise in Navigating Links of Influence' which will appear in The Hyperlinked Society (Edited by Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui) published by The University of Michigan Press. Eszter has also been busy recently with a live interview on the Chicago Tonight television program.

William (Sid) Horton (Psychology) has a paper 'The influence of partner-specific memory associations on language production: Evidence from picture naming' due to appear in Language and Cognitive Processes.

Funding Opportunities

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

NSF - International Research and Education: Planning Visits and Workshops - The program The program provides educational opportunities for Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students, Postdoctoral Fellows. Indirect funding is available for students or educational developments such as curricula development, training or retention. Check the active awards for this program for more ideas about possible opportunities. Forthcoming closing dates for full proposals are February 20, May 20, and September 20 annually, with proposals for planning visits accepted anytime.

NSF - Advanced Learning Technologies (ALT) - Through the Advanced Learning Technologies (ALT) program, the CISE and EHR Directorates of NSF support research that (1) enables radical improvements in learning through innovative computer and information technologies, and (2) advances research in computer science, information technology, learning, and cognitive science through the unique challenges posed by learning environments and learning technology platforms. Integrative research approaches that build across disciplines and establish tight linkages among theory, experiment, and design are strongly encouraged. Educational foci for ALT projects must include an area of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM), or general cross-cutting skills directly relevant to STEM. Closing date for full proposals is April 25 (letter of intent not required).

DARPA - Wireless Network after Next (WNaN) - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office (STO) is soliciting proposals for BAA 07-07, Wireless Network after Next (WNaN) Adaptive Network Development (WAND). The goal of the WAND effort is to design and develop the network technologies necessary to establish ultra-large (tens of thousands of nodes), highly-scalable, highly-adaptive ad-hoc networks that provide robust networking across densely-connected deployments of inexpensive wireless nodes. The WNaN premise is that WAND-enabled networks will adapt to changing conditions and mission requirements by adjusting the topology of the network and the operational mode of the wireless nodes, particularly at the physical and link layers, to create and maintain a rich, multiply-connected network fabric. Current closing date for applications is February 22.

NEH - Digital Partnership Grants - The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) invite proposals for innovative, collaborative humanities projects using the latest digital technologies for the benefit of the American public, humanities scholarship, and the nation's cultural institutions. These grants require substantive collaborations among libraries, museums, archives, universities, and other cultural organizations. Grants support projects that explore new ways to share, examine, and interpret humanities collections in a digital environment; that develop new uses and audiences for existing digital resources; or that result in extensible and transferable methodologies or tools. Closing date for applications is March 18.

SMARTer Kids Foundation - Research funding - The SMARTer Kids Research program supports action-based research projects conducted by educators. Action-based research allows educators to assess the effects of technology on teaching and learning, explore and test new ideas in the classroom, and investigate and practice new teaching styles. Over a minimum of six months, each participant conducts a study of a learning environment that uses either the SMART Board interactive whiteboard, a Senteo interactive response system or a combination of the two. The project concludes with a final research paper detailing the study's findings. Applications should focus on the learning environment, learning outcomes or changes in students' behavior and attitudes. The next deadlines are April 1 and July 1.

CTSB Exploration Grants

A reminder about the recently launched CTSB "exploration grants" program. If you would like to collaborate with another CTSB-affiliate from a department other than your own (faculty, research scientist or graduate student) on a project that might potentially lead to a larger grant proposal, then you are eligible to apply for these funds. We are particularly interested in supporting the hire of undergraduates as a part of these collaborative teams. If you are interested, please contact Justine Cassell <justine [at] northwestern.edu> to discuss possibilities.

Conference Submission Deadlines

AAAI-08 Nectar Program, Chicago, Illinois (July 13-17, 2008), is designed to make the most significant AI results presented at other conferences in the last two years available to a broad AI audience. Paper Submission Deadline is February 19.

EMOT-08 Sentiment Analysis: Emotion, Metaphor, Ontology and Terminology workshop will be held at LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco (May 27, 2008). Submission deadline is February 20.

WAC4 The 4th Web as Corpus Workshop entitled 'Can we beat Google?' is at LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco (June 1, 2008). Submission deadline is February 29.

DSV-IS 2008 Design, Verification and Specification of Interactive Systems Kingston, Ontario, Canada (July 16-18, 2008). Submission deadline March 7.

ACL-08: HLT the Human Language Technology Conference (HLT) of the North American Chapter of the ACL at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Columbus, Ohio (June 16-20, 2008). Deadline for short paper submission is March 14 (long paper deadline passed).

CSCW 2008 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work San Diego, CA (November 8-12, 2008). Deadline for papers and notes is April 18.

Reading Groups

If you would like to advertise a reading group, let Alastair <alastair [at] northwestern.edu> know. 

Currently the autism reading group meets on Fridays at 3pm in the CTSB (Frances Searle, room 2-431). This month's meetings will take place on February 1, 15, and 29. If you would like to join the group, please contact Alastair.

Employment Opportunities

If you would like to advertise any kind of job openings within your research group or lab, then please contact Alastair Gill <alastair [at] northwestern.edu>, providing a brief description of the position(s) available, and any skills / experience required.