Newsletter

October 2008

In this issue:

EDITORIAL

Welcome again to the Center for Technology & Social Behavior (CTSB) newsletter. We hope that you have had a great start to the academic year. An especially warm welcome (in spirit and in weather) to our new students!

This October we are turning the spotlight on Center for Technology and Social Behavior faculty affiliate William (Sid) Horton, first year Ph.D. student Sheena Lewis, and program assistant and newsletter editor, Elisa Revello. At the end of September, we kicked off the colloquium series with Jonathan Grudin from Microsoft Research. Coming up next is Gloria Mark from UC Irvine. We have another stellar group of speakers this year and encourage everyone to attend one of the talks.

We hope that you enjoy this issue and look forward to seeing you at the events this fall.

— Christopher Riesbeck (Acting Director, CTSB) and Elisa Revello (Newsletter Editor, CTSB)

EVENTS

Upcoming CTSB events to mark in your calendar:

Colloquium Series

Thank you to our first CTSB speaker, Jonathan Grudin, who spoke about Enterprise Uses of Emerging Technologies and shared with us 20 years of experience of studying technology adoption. On October 25th, we welcome Gloria Mark (UC Irvine) whose work examines multi-tasking in the workplace. Michael Tannenhaus (Rochester) joins us on November 13th to discuss the mechanisms underlying real-time spoken language and reading comprehension. Please 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!

The next first Friday event will take place on October 3rd in the CTSB (Frances Searle, 2-431) from 12pm-2pm. During lunch, the human modeling group in the ArticuLab will demonstrate their new work on believable agents, incorporating Panda3D and SmartBody into interactive virtual humans, and will lead a discussion on graphics for human figure animation. If you have specific ideas of activities you would like to see or showcase at one of these events, please contact Elisa Revello <e-revello [at] northwestern.edu>.

Wii and Brie - Female Researchers in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (FREECS)

Northwestern Female Researchers in EECS (FREECS) presents Wii and Brie on Friday, October 3rd from 4-6pm here in the CTSB (Frances Searle, 2-431). This is an excellent opportunity to meet other women with similar research interests in EECS, TSB, and MTS. Attendees will enjoy free wine, cheese, and some friendly Wii Competition. If you are interested in attending other FREECS events, for questions or more information, please contact <nufreecs [at] gmail.com>

SPOTLIGHTS

Faculty Spotlight: William ("Sid") Horton

Sid Horton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Chicago, followed by postdoctoral positions at SUNY-Stony Brook and Georgia Tech. His research interests fall within the field of psycholinguistics, with a particular emphasis upon pragmatics in discourse processing and language production. The majority of his research to date has been aimed at understanding the cognitive and social processes that support "audience design," which refers to how speakers tailor utterances to suit the communicative needs of particular listeners. In a number of studies on referential communication, he has shown that successful audience design may be mediated in part through fundamental processes of memory encoding and retrieval.

Professor Horton is currently expanding on this memory-based model of conversational grounding by examining the discourse of elderly adults. Recent work in this area has examined whether younger and older adults differ in when and how much they attend to visual feedback from communicative partners during task-oriented dialogue. In other research, he has examined how perspective taking and social attributions play a role in the processing of figurative language and narrative texts. More details of Professor Horton's research can be found on his webpage.

Student Spotlight: Sheena Lewis

Sheena Lewis is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Technology and Social Behavior program. She obtained her Master degree in Computer Science specializing in Human Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech and Bachelor degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Spelman College in Atlanta, GA.

She is the co-founder of the RAHER Achievement program, a non-profit organization that focuses on increasing the number of underrepresented students that attend 4-year colleges and universities. In her doctoral work, Sheena plans to study sociocultural environments in an effort to design technology that socially, economically, and politically empowers low-income communities.

Staff Spotlight: Elisa Revello

Elisa Revello is the program assistant in the Center for Technology and Social Behavior where you'll find her performing a variety of tasks. Elisa is the current newsletter editor, coordinates the monthly TCIF meetings and speaking events, manages purchasing, accounting, and hiring for the CTSB. If you have any questions about CTSB resources or events, Elisa is more than willing to help. If you have any news you'd like to share or other ideas for the newsletter, Elisa would like to hear from you.

Apart from her many responsibilities at the Center, Elisa is currently applying to graduate programs to study creative writing. Elisa is an art and music enthusiast, enjoys reading and writing fiction, and would like to learn more about web design from her friends here. She lives in Chicago with her goldfish, Henry II.

Faculty News Roundup

Brady Clark (Linguistics) and David I. Beaver's (University of Texas at Austin) book Sense and Sensitivity: How Focus Determines Meaning was published in September by Wiley-Blackwell. The book examines the semantic and pragmatic effects of focus in natural language discourse.

Ezster Hargittai (Communication) is a fellow this year at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Alice Eagly (Psychology) and Linda Carli's (Wellesley College) book entitled, Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, received the 2008 Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology.

Don Norman (EECS) will talk about Patient Safety at Northwestern University's Domain Dinner on October 2nd. Dr. Norman is the keynote speaker on October 7th at the 6th International Design and Emotion Conference in Hong Kong.

William Revelle (Psychology) was elected President of the Society for Research in Personality.

Justine Cassell (Communication, EECS, Learning Science, Linguistics) was a plenary speaker at Interspeech 2008 in September at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Dr. Cassell is a fellow this year at the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Kristian Hammond (EECS) was featured last month in Crain's Chicago Business.

Funding Opportunities

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

NSF - Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service The Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service (SFS) program seeks to increase the number of qualified students entering the fields of information assurance and computer security and to increase the capacity of the United States higher education enterprise to continue to produce professionals in these fields to meet the needs of our increasingly technological society. The SFS program is composed of two tracks: The Scholarship Track provides funding to colleges and universities to award scholarships to students in the information assurance and computer security fields. The Capacity Building Track provides funds to colleges and universities to improve the quality and increase the production of information assurance and computer security professionals. Professional development of information assurance faculty and development of academic programs can be funded under this track. Full proposals due December 2, 2008 (preproposals not required).

NSF - Partnerships for Innovation The goals of the Partnerships for Innovation Program are to: 1) stimulate the transformation of knowledge created by the research and education enterprise into innovations that create new wealth; build strong local, regional and national economies; and improve the national well-being; 2) broaden the participation of all types of academic institutions and all citizens in activities to meet the diverse workforce needs of the national innovation enterprise; and 3) catalyze or enhance enabling infrastructure that is necessary to foster and sustain innovation in the long-term. To develop a set of ideas for pursuing these goals, this competition will support 12-15 promising partnerships among academe, the private sector, and state/local/ federal government that will explore new approaches to support and sustain innovation. Letter of intent due October 31, 2008. The deadline for full proposals is December 31, 2008.

REMINDER: NSF - Science of Science and Innovation Policy - This solicitation aims to foster the development of the knowledge, theories, data, tools, and human capital needed to cultivate a new Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP). The SciSIP program underwrites fundamental research that creates new explanatory models, analytic tools and datasets designed to inform the nation’s public and private sectors about the processes through which investments in science and engineering (S&E) research are transformed into social and economic outcomes. SciSIP’s goals are to understand the contexts, structures and processes of S&E research, to evaluate reliably the tangible and intangible returns from investments in research and development (R&D), and to predict the likely returns from future R&D investments within tolerable margins of error and with attention to the full spectrum of potential consequences. Full proposals due December 16 (preproposals not required).

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 Chris Riesbeck <c-riesbeck [at] northwestern.edu>.

Conference Submission Deadlines

HCI 2009 in San Diego, USA (July 19-24, 2009). Abstract submissions for paper and tutorial proposals due October 20, 2008.

CHI 2009 Workshop: Whole Body Interaction in Boston, USA (April 4-9, 2009). Submit position papers by October 23, 2008.

ICC 2009 IEEE International Conference on Communications in Dresden, Germany (June 14-June 18, 2009). Workshop paper submissions due on November 1, 2008.

AISB 2009 Adaptive & Emergent Behavior & Complex Systems Convention in Edinburgh, Scotland (April 6-9, 2009). Submission deadline for full papers is December 19, 2008.

Upcoming Conferences

AIIDE-08 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, USA (October 22-24, 2008).

ICMI 2008 in Chania, Crete, Greece (October 20-22, 2008).

Reading Groups

The Grounding Reading Group will resume meeting this year, but dates and times are TBD. Please visit the Grounding Blogspot for more information and / or e-mail Kino Aguilar <kino [at] northwestern.edu> for more details.

If you would like to advertise a reading group, let Elisa <e-revello [at] northwestern.edu> know. 

Employment Opportunities

Calling all undergraduates! The Articulab and Collabolab are currently looking for paid undergraduate research assistants to help with a variety of research projects. Research assistants will help collect, annotate, and analyze data and will get hands-on research experience working directly with Articulab or Collabolab graduate students and staff. Students with social science and/or computer science backgrounds are encouraged to apply. For more information, email < b-foucault [at] northwestern.edu> or < k-geraghty [at] northwestern.edu>.

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