CTSB logo Newsletter January 2009 In this issue: Editorial | Events | Spotlights | News | Conferences | Funding | Groups | Jobs EDITORIAL Welcome back to winter quarter! In the first issue of 2009, we introduce you to assistant professor (EECS) and CTSB affiliate Nicole Immorlica. You also have the chance to meet graduate student Will Barley and read about this issue's featured research project Internet Use and Social Inequality led by Eszter Hargittai. The CTSB colloquium series resumes with Michael Schober (The New School) who will talk about Being Copresent with Virtual Partners on January 15th at 4pm (Frances Searle 1-483). Please add this to your calendars as well: Thank CTSB It's Friday will be held the first week of winter quarter on January 9th (Frances Searle 2-431). Happy reading and happy new year! — Christopher Riesbeck (Acting Director, CTSB) and Elisa Revello (Newsletter Editor, CTSB) EVENTS Upcoming CTSB events to mark in your calendar: Colloquium Series Michael Schober (The New School) comes to Northwestern on January 15, 2009 at 4pm (Frances Searle 1-483) to discuss the effects of partial and limited copresence in experimental comparisons of face to face and virtual/mediated interactions. On February 26th, Pierre Dillenbourg (EPFL) will talk about Two Facets of Collaboration Technologies: Dual Eye Tracking and Interactive Furniture. 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 Thank CTSB It's Friday! The next TCIF event will take place on January 9th in the CTSB (Frances Searle, 2-431) from 12pm-2pm. Kick off the winter quarter with familiar faces and a warm, hearty meal. If you have specific ideas of activities you would like to see or showcase at TCIF this winter quarter, please contact Elisa Revello . SPOTLIGHTS Faculty Spotlight: Nicole Immorlica Nicole Immorlica is an assistant professor and member of the computer science theory division in the McCormick School of Engineering. Before joining Northwestern this fall, Immorlica was a postdoc at Microsoft Research and at Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005. Professor Immorlica is interested in problems at the intersection of game theory and algorithms. Much of her recent work has been motivated by Internet applications, particularly the design of ad auctions for search engines such as Google's AdWords, Yahoo! SearchMarketing, or MSN's AdCenter. Immorlica has also worked on approximation algorithms for problems in network design and clustering. Student Spotlight: Will Barley Will Barley (B.S. Cognitive Science from University of California, San Diego) is a first year PhD student in the Media, Technology, and Society program. He is interested in the use of new media communication technologies for the support of informal organization; particularly the implications these social structures have for the exchange and sharing of technical knowledge. While mostly experienced in ethnographic methods, he is interested developing a mixed-method approach that encorporates larger scale social-networking analysis. Before coming to Northwestern he spent two years as a researcher studying automobile culture for General Motors R&D. When not swamped with school work, Will enjoys playing mandolin and working on bicycles. Research Spotlight: Internet Use and Social Inequality While information technologies have become a staple of many people's everyday lives, there has been little focus on examining usage trends of various services across different population segments. Work being done in the Web Use Project research group is looking at how people's background characteristics such as socio-economic status relate to what they do online. In addition to survey data, the analyses also include information about people's digital media uses gathered through interviews, observations and an innovative method using text-messaging for time-diary data. Results suggest that people from less privileged backgrounds tend to use digital media in less diverse ways than their more privileged counterparts. Additionally, details about access (e.g., various levels of freedom to use media when and where one wants to) also relate to types of uses. Eszter Hargittai met with some people from the Presidential Transition Team in December to discuss some of the implications of this work. The research has been funded by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as well as the National Science Foundation. Collaborators include CTSB faculty member Peter Miller from the Department of Communication Studies as well as graduate students Ericka Menchen-Trevino, Chris Karr, Gina Walejko, Patrick Hsieh, Kristin Thomas and Lindsay Fullerton. Faculty & Student News Roundup Jennifer Richeson (Psychology), is the 2009 winner of the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of social psychology. Aggelos Katsaggelos (EECS), M. Luessi, M. Eichmann, and G.M. Schuster wrote "A Framework for Efficient Optimal Multilevel Image Thresholding," to appear in the Journal of Electronic Imaging in January 2009. James Schwoch (Communication) published a new book entitled Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946-69 (University of Illinois Press). Jason Hartline (EECS) along with Nina Balcan, Avrim Blum, and Yishay Mansour co-authored the paper "Reducing Mechanism Design to Algorithm Design via Machine Learning" which appeared in the December 2009 issue of the Journal of Computer and System Sciences. Funding Opportunities Note: the following list is not exhaustive. You can help by alerting us to relevant opportunities. University of Chicago - Science of Virtues In what ways might the humanities and the sciences cooperate to develop richer understandings of virtue for modern societies? The Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago is pleased to announce a new $3 million research program on a New Science of Virtues. This is a multidisciplinary research initiative that seeks contributions from individuals and from teams of investigators working within the humanities and the sciences. We support highly original, scholarly projects that demonstrate promise of a distinctive contribution to virtue research and have the potential to begin a new field of interdisciplinary study. In 2010, about twenty (20), two-year research grants will be awarded ranging from $50,000 to $300,000. Scholars and scientists from around the world are invited to submit Letters of Intent (LOI) as entry into a research grant competition. Application deadline March 2, 2009. NSF - Research to Aid Persons with Disabilities The Research to Aid Persons with Disabilities The Research to Aid Persons with Disabilities (RAPD) program supports research that will lead to the development of new technologies, devices, or software for persons with disabilities. Research may be supported that is directed to the characterization, restoration, and/or substitution of human functional ability or cognition, or to the interaction of persons with disabilities and their environment. Areas of particular recent interest are disability-related research in neuroscience/neuroengineering and rehabilitation robotics. Emphasis is placed on significant advancement of fundamental engineering and scientific knowledge and not on incremental improvements. Proposals should advance discovery or innovation beyond the frontiers of current knowledge in disability-related research.Applicants re encouraged to contact a program director prior to submitting a proposal. Undergraduate Engineering Design Projects are also supported, especially those that provide prototype "custom-designed" devices or software for persons with disabilities. Submission window dates February 1, 2009 - March 1, 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 for further details. Conference Submission Deadlines C&T 2009 4th International Conference on Communication and Technologies at Penn State University, University Park, PA (June 25-27, 2009). Doctoral consortium and workshop proposals due February 15, 2009. EICS ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems in Pittsburgh, USA (July 14-17, 2009). Submission deadline is February 25, 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). Full paper submissions due February 22, 2009. Short papers due April 26, 2009. MTT'09 Fourth International Conference on Meaning-Text Theory in Montreal, Canada (June 16-18, 2009). Submissions due March 1, 2009. FREECS Undergrad Research Initiative Research suggests that women may be overlooked for employment in computer-related fields because, despite having equal capabilities, they do not have the previous work experience of their male counterparts. Incentive programs have been shown to be successful for encouraging hiring of highly talented women, and have resulted in recruitment and retention of women in the EECS fields. Therefore, FREECS (Female Researchers in EECS) is offering $1000 incentives for faculty to hire undergraduate women in work-study or other research jobs on EECS-related projects. All professors with appointments in EECS (courtesy or part-time acceptable) who are hiring undergraduate women to work on a research project are eligible. For more information, contact FREECS president Wendy Yip at: 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 , providing a brief description of the position(s) available, and any skills / experience required. You can sign-up, manage the way you receive the CTSB newsletter, or forward the current newsletter to a colleague, via the CTSB newsletter management page CENTER FOR TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR Northwestern University | Frances Searle Building, #2-431 | 2240 Campus Drive | Evanston, IL 60208 | USA http://ctsb.northwestern.edu