Newsletter

February 2009

In this issue:

EDITORIAL

In February's issue of the CTSB newsletter, the faculty spotlight features Associate Professor and CTSB affiliate Jack Tumblin (EECS). You also have the opportunity to meet graduate student Ericka Menchen Trevino and become acquainted with Assistant Professor Joan Chiao's (Psychology) research project, Cultural Variation in Amygdala Response to Emotional Scenes. The CTSB colloquium series continues with Pierre Dillenbourg (EPFL) who will talk about Two Facets of Collaboration Technologies: Dual Eye Tracking and Interactive Furniture on February 26th at 4pm (Frances Searle 1-483).

Our current newsletter editor, Elisa Revello, will be moving to the Communication Studies department to work as an Accounting Specialist. I and the rest of the CTSB executive team want to thank Elisa for her hard work and many contributions to the CTSB. It is my pleasure to introduce you to the new program assistant and newsletter editor, Lindsey Lumley, who will be featured in the upcoming issue. Enjoy reading this issue and we look forward to hearing from you.

— Christopher Riesbeck (Acting Director, CTSB)

EVENTS

Upcoming CTSB events to mark in your calendar:

Colloquium Series

On February 26th, Pierre Dillenbourg (EPFL) will talk about Two Facets of Collaboration Technologies: Dual Eye Tracking and Interactive Furniture. Shortly thereafter, Brian Scassellati (Yale) will visit Northwestern on March 5, 2009. 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 [at] northwestern.edu>.

Thank CTSB It's Friday!

TCIF will be on February 6th in the CTSB (Frances Searle, 2-431) from 12pm-2pm. If you have specific ideas of activities you would like to see or showcase at TCIF this winter quarter, please contact ctsb <ctsb [at] northwestern.edu>.

Panel discussion: The Truth about the Academic Job Search - Female Researchers in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (FREECS) On February 19th from 5pm-7pm, there will be a panel discussion on The Truth about the Academic Job Search. You'll hear from graduate students who are currently applying for academic jobs, junior faculty who have recently applied for positions, and faculty who have served on faculty search committees. The venue is TBD. For further information, e-mail <nufreecs [at] gmail.com>.

SPOTLIGHTS

Faculty Spotlight: Jack Tumblin

Jack Tumblin is an Associate Professor in the EECS Department at Northwestern University, where his "Look Lab" group pursues research on new methods to capture and manipulate the appearance of objects and surroundings, in the hope that hybrid optical/computer methods may give us new ways to see, explore, and interact with objects and people anywhere in the world. His research interests include: Computational Photography & Illumination, Computer Vision and Interactive Computer Graphics, High Dynamic Range (HDR) Images and Image Processing, Digital Archives of Visual Appearance for Museum Collections, and Human Visual Perception, Psychophysics, and Physiology. Funded projects (NSF, MERL, Adobe, NU) and research publications include novel photographic sensors, optics, and lighting devices; projects exploring lightness / brightness separation, constancy, and tone mapping; gigapixel image representations for scene capture, rendering and display; and low-cost self-contained systems to help museum curators explore, archive, and share their collections digitally.

He joined Northwestern as an Assistant Professor in 2001, after post-doctoral studies at Cornell (1999-2001) from his Ph.D at Georgia Tech (1999) and from earlier originating work on tone mapping and perception topics in high dynamic range imaging (HDR). His MS in Electrical Engineering (December 1990) and BSEE (1978), also from Georgia Tech, bracketed his work as co-founder of IVEX Corp., (more than 45 people as of 1990) where he developed what may have been the first FAA-certified image-based flight simulators. This work stemmed from his early (1983) videodisk-based 3D-flying video-game device and work as a television engineer (KTLA) and cinema/fine arts student at Univ. of Southern California (1980).

Student Spotlight: Ericka Menchen Trevino

Ericka Menchen Trevino is a second year Ph.D. student in the Media, Technology & Society program. Ericka graduated from Loyola University Chicago in 2001 with a major in anthropology and minors in fine art photography and English. She received her M.A. in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2006. She has worked as an ethnographic research assistant, a grant writer, and a technical writer. Her research interests include political communication and how it might be changing, as well as information credibility perception online. In her free time, Ericka likes to take long walks in the area around her downtown Chicago home.

Research Spotlight: Cultural Variation in Amygdala Response to Emotional Scenes

Professor Joan Chiao (Psychology) and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Tokiko Harada are examining cultural variation in amygdala response to emotional scenes. Culture affects how people perceive and experience the emotional salience of events, such as threat in the environment. The human amygdala is critical to the evaluation of and response to threat-relevant signals. Although much is known about the role of the amygdala in emotional evaluation and response, little is known about how culture affects amygdala response to threat-relevant signals in the environment. To examine the effect of culture on amygdala response to emotion, in Study 1 they used cross-cultural neuroimaging at 3T to measure neural response within the human amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) during emotional evaluation and cognitive inhibition in Caucasian-Americans (CA) and native Japanese (JP). Results indicated greater bilateral amygdala response during evaluation of negative emotional scenes, but not cognitive inhibition, in JP relative to CA participants. There was no cultural variation in VLPFC during either emotional evaluation or cognitive inhibition. To determine whether the cultural variation observed in Study 1 was due to race rather than cultural environment per se, in Study 2, they measured neural response within the human amygdala and VLPFC during emotional evaluation and cognitive inhibition in Japanese-Americans (JA). Results showed no difference in bilateral amygdala or VLPFC response during emotional evaluation and cognitive inhibition between CA and JA participants. Critically, JP showed significantly greater response within bilateral amygdala during emotional evaluation, but not cognitive inhibition, compared to JA participants. Taken together, these findings provide convergent evidence of cultural variation in human amygdala response that is emotion-specific.

Faculty & Student News Roundup

Daniel Diermeier (Kellogg), Luís Amaral (McCormick), Tom Rietz (University of Iowa), and Saikat Majundar's (University of Iowa) research on modeling prediction markets was featured in the January 21st issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Patti Bao, 2nd year PhD student (TSB), and Darren Gergle's paper What's "This" You Say? The Use of Local References on Distant Displays will appear in the proceedings of CHI 2009.

Jason Hartline (EECS) was awarded the NSF CAREER grant for his project entitled "Mechanism Design."

Lauren Scissors, Alastair Gill, Kathleen Geraghty, and Darren Gergle (Communication) collaborated on the paper In CMC We Trust: The Role of Similarity to be published in the proceedings of CHI 2009.

Alice Eagly has received the 2009 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association.

Brooke Foucault, Mengxiao Zhu, Yun Huang, Zeina Atrash, and Noshir Contractor (Communication) wrote Will You Be My Friend? An Exploration of Adolescent Friendship Formation Online in Teen Second Life to appear in the Proceedings of ICA 2009.

Funding Opportunities

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

NSF - Petascale Computing Resource Allocations

In 2011, a new NSF-funded petascale computing system, Blue Waters, will go online at the University of Illinois. The goal of this facility is to open up new possibilities in science and engineering by providing computational capability that makes it possible for investigators to tackle much larger and more complex research challenges across a wide spectrum of domains. The purpose of this solicitation is to invite research groups that have a compelling science or engineering challenge that will require petascale computing resources to submit requests for allocations of resources on the Blue Waters system. Proposers must be prepared to demonstrate that they have a science or engineering research problem that requires and can effectively exploit the petascale computing capabilities offered by Blue Waters. Proposals from or including junior researchers are encouraged as one of the goals of this solicitation is to build a community capable of using petascale computing. Full proposals due March 17, 2009.

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 [at] northwestern.edu> for further details.

Conference Submission Deadlines

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.

IVA 09 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (September 14-16, 2009). All papers due April 17, 2009.

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

Upcoming Conferences and Workshops

CSIUI 2009 Common Sense and Intelligent User Interfaces 2009: Story Understanding and Generation for Context-Aware Interface Design in Sanibel Island, USA (February 8, 2009).

WSCD09 Workshop on Web Search Click Data in Barcelona, Spain (February 9, 2009).

ESAIR09 Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval in Barcelona, Spain (February 9, 2009).

DESIGN 09 Third International Conference on Design Principles and Practices at Technical University in Berlin, Germany (February 15-17, 2009).

Reading Groups

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

Employment Opportunities

The CTSB is looking for undergraduate computer programmers to assist in the creation of virtual peers who engage children by telling stories and doing fun activities. Tasks include developing procedural animations, developing cognitive architectures, and making improvements on the graphics realization engine. Must be skilled in python, C# or C++. Knowledge of communication protocols and sockets, and GUI programming experience is a plus. E-mail Alberto Gonzalez <berto [at] u.northwestern.edu> to apply for this position.

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