Undergraduate lab member Megan Torkildson gave a well received talk at HCDE’s Corporate Affiliates Day (CAP Day) yesterday morning. CAP Day is a time for faculty and students to share research projects and connect with industry partners including Microsoft, Mosaic, Boeing and others. Megan spoke about the department’s emphasis on community involvement in research and shared her recent work on text and social media analysis, discussing the development of the ALOE (Affect Labeler of Expressions) tool and research on social media Twitter posts around an oil spill.
Monthly Archives: October 2013
“Let’s share food and flavors we care about, and learn new recipes,” so began the entreaty by lab member and CSE PhD student Katie Kuksenok to start a lab tradition of sharing healthier homemade foods. Out with the pizzas and sodas and in with the fresh soups, salads, breads, and grains. The SCCL’s inaugural lab meal was a huge success, featuring delicious dishes fresh from Katie’s kitchen, including a savory pumpkin curry soup with lentils, a sweet potato cranberry arugula salad, and a chai spices mango bread pudding. Lab member Michael Brooks contributed warm corn bread, the perfect addition to this fall meal. SCCL director Cecilia Aragon commented, “judging from everybody’s delighted commentary and lip-smacking, it was a tremendous success.” Looking around at the empty dishes and big smiles after the meeting, we couldn’t agree more.
On next week’s menu: Korean style rice balls with vegetables, meats, and fish, and a mapo tofu side contributed from the kitchen of lab member and PhD student Ray Hong. Yum!
SCC lab member Megan Torkildson has received the College of Engineering’s Emerging Leaders in Engineering Scholarship and HCDE’s Boeing Scholarship. The Emerging Leaders Scholarship is awarded to undergraduate students in the Emerging Leaders in Engineering program who demonstrate leadership potential.
Megan is currently an undergraduate in Human Centered Design & Engineering and was previously a National Science Foundation S-STEM Scholar. Her main academic interests are interaction design, information visualization, crowdsourcing, and social media research. She placed second in the CHI 2013 Student Research Competition for her work on visualizing machine learning errors. Megan also works as a PEERs (Promoting Equity in Engineering Relationships) leader, educating the engineering community about the importance of diversity in engineering.
SCC lab member John Robinson received the Sakson Diversity Undergraduate Scholarship in the Human Centered Design & Engineering Department. The scholarship was established to award undergraduate students in HCDE that are expanding diversity in the educational and professional setting.
