CTSB Newsletter May 2008 In this issue: Editorial | Events | Spotlights | News | Conferences | Funding | Groups | Jobs EDITORIAL Welcome again to the Center for Technology & Social Behavior (CTSB) newsletter! In this month's edition, our feature spotlights turn to CTSB faculty affiliate Jennifer Richeson and first year Ph.D. student Lauren Scissors. In addition, this month's first Friday event, Thank CTSB It's Friday, has a special theme - read below to find out more. We also overview the EC'08 Conference chaired by CTSB faculty member Lance Fortnow, and co-sponsored by the Center for Technology and Social Behavior. We hope you find the newsletter a useful resource for information about other CTSB affiliates, about upcoming conference and grant deadlines, and about reading groups and other activities. If you would like to publicize any news, achievements or announcements in the newsletter, then please get in touch with CTSB newsletter editor, Alastair Gill . We would also like to know of any resources or employment opportunities. Until next month, we hope you enjoy the newsletter, and look forward to seeing you at one of the CTSB events. -- Justine Cassell (Director, CTSB) and Alastair Gill (Research Scientist, CTSB) EVENTS Upcoming CTSB events to mark in your calendar are: Colloquium Series The final CTSB Colloquium Series talk of 07-08 will be given by Wendy Kellogg, who will be speaking on 'Ten Years of Social Computing at IBM', is the Manager of Social Computing at IBM's Watson Research Center. Her current work involves designing and studying systems for supporting computer-mediated communication (CMC) in groups and organizations. Kellogg's work in human-computer interaction (HCI) over the last two decades has spanned several areas, including theory, evaluation methods, design, and development. Please note that this final talk in the 2007-2008 colloquium series will take place in the Frances Searle Building (Room 1-483). As usual, the CTSB colloquium speakers are available for individual meetings with faculty and students. The CTSB also organizes a graduate student-only lunch. To meet with Dr Kellogg or attend the lunch please contact CTSB program assistant Elisa Revello . For more details of this year's colloquium series, please see the CTSB colloquium page. Details of next year's colloquium speaker series will be announced shortly - keep your eyes on the CTSB newsletter! Thank CTSB it's Friday! Our regular first Friday event, Thank CTSB It's Friday (TCIF), continues into the spring quarter. This month, it will take place this Friday, May 2, from 4-6pm at the CTSB meeting room (2-431, Frances Searle Building). As advertised last month, the May TCIF will see us discussing research themes for CTSB, with a view to exploring potential larger collaborative and center grant possibilities. To start the discussion off, here are some potential CTSB main areas of focus, from our IGERT proposal: * Interpersonal Grounding - Coordinating interaction with technology and through technology on the basis of a consideration of the other. * Identity and Social Cohesion - Understanding and facilitating construction and maintenance of identity and social groupings with and through technology. * Scale & Diversity - how technological developments change when the size, timing and sociocultural composition of a group varies. Please join us for the usual good food, conversation and drinks, and help us to find common ways of linking our research! If you have specific ideas of research you would like to discuss, please get in touch with Alastair Gill . TCIF dates for the rest of the quarter are: May 2, and June 6 from 4pm - 6pm in the CTSB. SPOTLIGHTS Faculty Spotlight: Jennifer Richeson Jennifer Richeson is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Department of African American Studies, as well as a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) where she is actively involved in the Center on Social Disparities and Health (C2S). Prior to joining the faculty at Northwestern, she was a visiting fellow at the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. Richeson received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University in 2000. She received the 2005 Louise Kidder Early Career Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and in 2006 was named one of 25 MacArthur Fellows for her work as a leader in "highlighting and analyzing major challenges facing all races in America and in the continuing role played by prejudice and stereotyping in our lives." Richeson's research focuses on prejudice, stereotyping, and intergroup relations. Her work generally concerns the ways in which social group memberships such as race and gender impact the way people think, feel, and behave. More specifically, her research investigates antecedents and consequences of prejudice and stereotyping from dual perspectives: traditionally stigmatized and dominant groups. In addition to her work being featured in journals such as Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Nature Neuroscience, and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Richeson's work has also appeared in popular publications such as The Economist and The New York Times. Student Spotlight: Lauren Scissors Lauren Scissors is a first year student in the Media, Technology & Society PhD program in the School of Communication. Lauren was previously an undergraduate at Northwestern and graduated in 2006 with a double major in psychology and sociology. Before returning to Northwestern for graduate school, Lauren spent the summer of 2007 working at the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington DC. Lauren's primary research interest is in understanding the role technology-mediated communication plays in interpersonal relationships. Lauren is currently working with Darren Gergle in the CollaboLab looking at interpersonal trust in computer-mediated environments. She recently submitted a paper examining the effects of linguistic mimicry on trust outcomes in text chat to the CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) conference. In her spare time, Lauren enjoys traveling, spending time with friends, and watching the Food Network. CTSB Event Spotlight: EC'08 In July, CTSB is co-sponsoring the 9th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'08), taking place in Chicago, and chaired by CTSB faculty affiliate Lance Fortnow. EC'08 is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGECOM), which focuses on the advancement of electronic commerce, both principles and practices, and "seeks to promote the informed development of commerce automation technology, employing the best available engineering methods and economic understanding". EC'08 is interdisciplinary in nature, addressing topics ranging from game-theoretic aspects of network formation on the Internet, economics of online textual content, human factors in security and privacy, and the development of recommendation, reputation, and trust systems. The conference takes place 8-12 July, and will feature invited speakers, paper presentations, workshops, and tutorials. For further details, check the EC'08 conference website. In order to volunteer at the conference, please contact conference chair Lance Fortnow. Faculty News Roundup Pablo Boczkowski (Communication) will be presenting a paper entitled 'The Choice Gap: The Softening of News and the Divergent Preferences of Journalists and Consumers' at the International Communication Association's (ICA) conference in Montreal later this month. Justine Cassell (Communication, EECS, Learning Science) was interviewed on ABC television for her work with graduate student Andrea Tartaro on virtual peers for children with autism. The research was also covered online by MSNBC. Ed Colgate's (EECS) paper the 'Investigation of Motion Guidance with Scooter Cobot and Collaborative Learning' (with Boy, Burdet, and Teo) appeared in last month's edition of IEEE Transactions on Robotics. Darren Gergle (Communication) will present a paper 'Communication Breakdowns in Collaborative Settings: The Influence of Visual Delay on Distributed Communication' and a paper on trust establishment in CMC (with Alastair Gill) at the ICA conference in Montreal. Bryan Pardo (EECS) had a paper entitled 'Image Spam Hunter' in last month's IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing conference (with Gao, Yang, Zhao, Wu, Pappas, and Choudhary). Funding Opportunities Note: the following list is not exhaustive. You can help by alerting us to relevant opportunities. NSF - Developmental and Learning Sciences (DLS) - The DLS programsupports studies that increase our understanding of cognitive, linguistic, social, cultural, and biological processes related to children's and adolescents' development and learning. Research supported by this program will use multi-disciplinary methods and will incorporate community and demographic approaches in order to add to basic knowledge of how people learn and the underlying developmental processes that support learning. The objective of the program is to lead to better educated children and adolescents who grow up to take productive roles as workers and as citizens. Full proposals are due July 15 (pre-proposal not required). NSF - Cognitive Neuroscience - This NSF program seeks highly innovative proposals aimed at advancing a rigorous understanding of how the human brain supports thought, perception, affect, action, social processes, and other aspects of cognition and behavior. Topics may bear on core functions such as sensory, learning, language, reasoning, emotion, and executive processes, or more specialized processes such as empathy, creativity, representation of self and other, or intentionality, among many other possibilities. Topics may also include how such processes develop and change in the brain. The program is particularly interested in supporting the development of new techniques and technologies for recording, analyzing, and modeling complex brain activity. Such projects should include a plan for sharing new software and other technologies with the research community at large. Full proposal deadline is July 14 (pre-proposal not required). NSF - Perception, Action & Cognition - This NSF program supports research on perception, action and cognition including the development of these capacities. Emphasis is on research strongly grounded in theory. Research topics include vision, audition, haptics, attention, memory, reasoning, written and spoken discourse, motor control, and developmental issues in all topic areas. The program encompasses a wide range of theoretical perspectives, such as symbolic computation, connectionism, ecological, nonlinear dynamics, and complex systems, and a variety of methodologies including both experimental studies and modeling. Research involving acquired or developmental deficits is appropriate if the results speak to basic issues of perception, action, and cognition. Full proposal deadline is July 15 (pre-proposal not required). American Honda Foundation - The Foundation aims to promote projects that are imaginative, creative, youthful, forward-thinking, scientific, humanistic, and innovative. Grants are provided in the fields of youth education and science education, and focus on those with the broadest interest and support and, therefore, the highest potential for success. After taking a brief test of eligibility, applications may be submitted throughout the year . Annenberg Foundation - The Foundation provides support for projects within its grant-making interest areas of education and youth development; arts, culture and humanities; civic and community; health and human services; and animal services and the environment. After comparing their project with funding restrictions and previously funded projects, potential applicants applicants should submit a letter of inquiry (following the foundation's guidelines). The Annenberg Foundation accepts letters of inquiry at all times during the year (except for environmental projects). Applicants will then be contacted, and if appropriate, requested to send a full proposal. Unsolicited proposals are not accepted. CTSB Exploration Grants A further reminder about the CTSB "exploration grants" program. Any interdisciplinary project qualifies. In particular, we encourage faculty and graduate students to collaborate across departments on projects that might potentially lead to larger grant proposals. 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 . Conference Submission Deadlines ICMI 2008 10th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces Chania, Greece (October 22-26). Submission deadline for abstracts is May 9, and for papers is May 16. CSDL 9 9th Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language Cleveland, Ohio (October 18-20). Submission deadline is May 15. VRST 2008 15th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology Bordeaux, France (October 27-29). Submission deadlines are May 28 (Full Papers), June 4 (Short Papers), July 13 (Demonstration and poster). CyberGames 2008 4th International Conference on Games Research and Development Beijing Normal University, China (October 27-30). Paper submission deadline is May 31. ECAG08 Facial and Bodily Expressions for Control and Adaptation of Games workshop Amsterdam, The Netherlands (September 16), held in conjunction with 2008 IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition. Submission deadline is June 15. NN2008 Neural Networks in Classification, Regression and Data Mining Summer School Porto, Portugal (July 7-11). Submission deadline for poster proposals is June 15. Reading Groups If you would like to advertise a reading group, let Alastair 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 May 2 and 16. If you would like to join the group, please contact Alastair. The Grounding Reading Group meets on the second and fourth Fridays of the month, at 1pm, in the CTSB. Grounding is the process of building common knowledge between interlocutors. The reading group focuses on the process of grounding and applications for computational systems. Meeting dates for May are the 9th and 23rd. If you would like to join the group, please contact Kino Aguilar . The Children's Collaborative Problem Solving Reading Group is being organized to help us better understand children's cognitive and behavioral processes in the context of collaborative peer problem solving. Meeting time and place are yet to be confirmed, but anyone interested in participating in the group should email Francisco Iacobelli . Employment Opportunities If you would like to advertise any kind of job openings within your research group or lab, then please contact Alastair Gill , 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