HDS Lab director Cecilia Aragon and lab member Brittany Fiore-Gartland recently helped organize the Human-centered Data Science Workshop held in advance of the 2016 Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference in San Francisco. Over 40 participants representing more than 20 institutions and a wide range of disciplines spent the day developing a research agenda for human centered data science. Position papers submitted by workshop participants can be found here.
HDS Lab PhD student Nan-Chen Chen participated in the UW Data Science Poster and Networking Session held on February 10th. The campus-wise event provided an opportunity to share work with the academic community and regional partners, and to connect with other people who work in data-intensive domains. Her poster, Building Visual Analytics Tools for Enabling Human-Centered Data Science, briefly introduced the domain of Human-Centered Data Science (HDS) and illustrated a few visual analytics projects she has been working on. The PDF file of her poster can be found here.HDS Lab members, Ray Hong and Katie Kuksenok, have passed their exams and advanced to PhD candidacy. Ray’s doctoral research in Human Centered Design and Engineering is focused on developing a methodology for distance cartograms, and Katie’s Computer Science dissertation is titled, “Adoption and Adaptation of Programming Practices in Oceanography.”
The University of Washington is launching a new master’s degree program in data science. The program was designed in collaboration between six UW departments and the eScience Institute, with input from data science hiring managers from around the country. HDS Lab Director, Cecilia Aragon, serves as co-chair of the UW Interdisciplinary Data Science Group that is coordinating the formation of the Master of Science in Data Science program.
The 45-credit MSDS program will launch in autumn 2016, and will accept full and part-time students. The curriculum covers a range of skills that are in high demand in today’s job market, including statistical modeling, machine learning, software engineering, data management, data visualization and user interface design. A full description of the program can be found here, and a press release is available here.
Two HDS Lab members, Daniel Perry and Michael Brooks, completed their PhD’s from the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering in 2015. After graduating, Daniel took a position as lecturer and postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley’s Information School, where he continues to study ways that gaming and virtual environments can be used for science learning, data visualization, and creative design practices. Michael is now a data scientist at Dato, a startup company specializing in machine learning platforms. His interests include the development of novel visual analytics techniques and systems to improve understanding of social media and communication.
Cecilia Aragon co-led a workshop for graduate students as part of the series in the Career Track presented by the Computing Research
HDS Lab Director Cecilia Aragon and Lab Member Daniel Perry co-authored a paper along with Marco Pritoni, Alan K. Meier, and Therese Peffer that was recently published in the journal, Energy Research & Social Science and covered in The Washington Post.
The study, “Energy efficiency and the misuse of programmable thermostats: The effectiveness of crowdsourcing for understanding household behavior,” recruited participants from the crowdsourcing service Mechanical Turk. These participants self-reported thermostat usage and took pictures of their programmable thermostats. The researchers found that misunderstanding and misuse of programmable thermostats was widespread, undermining their potential to contribute to energy efficiency and cost savings.
The research also revealed flaws in self-reported survey data, which raises questions about the validity of thermostat-related studies that rely solely on traditional surveys. And compared to traditional surveys, this crowdsourcing method allowed the study to be completed rapidly and at low cost.
Citation:
Pritoni, M; Meier, A. K.; Aragon, C.; Perry, D.; Peffer, T. (2015). Energy efficiency and the misuse of programmable thermostats: The effectiveness of crowdsourcing for understanding household behavior. Energy Research & Social Science, 8, 190-197.
HDS Lab member Katerena Kuksenok recently returned from travels that took her all over the world in the name of research. In mid-March, she attended the Computer Supported Cooperative Work Doctoral Colloquium in Canada to get feedback and critique on her dissertation proposal (extended abstract PDF). From there, she was off to Germany to join the Berlin United Nao Team Humbolt (NaoTH), which traveled together to Tehran to compete in the IranOpen humanoid robotic soccer competition. The team took a couple of weeks to travel around Iran, which they found to be a beautiful, friendly, and fascinating country. Then they returned to Germany for the GermanOpen in Magdeburg, another humanoid robotic soccer competition. There, the team slept in a hostel with quite a lot of goats and sheep, and a very pretty calf, and spent all waking hours eating and working in the conference center. So, Katerena has no idea about the rest of Magdeburg, which is probably not just a stretch of pleasant German countryside. In both Tehran and Madgeburg, the NaoTH team earned third place, though the GermanOpen match was so close (see 8:00 and on for the heat and the drama) that it necessitated an awkward, hilarious penalty shoot-out: the penalty shooter code had never been tested in a competition, and was written a year ago.
HDS Lab member Daniel Perry recently attended the Bio-IT Conference & Expo in Boston and delivered a talk called, “Human-Centered Game Design for Science Learning Games: A Bioinformatics Game Case Study.” His presentation provided a case study of the game MAX5, a bioinformatics learning game designed for youth. Daniel discussed a human centered design process as an applicable approach to the creative design of science games for diverse player types.
Lab Director and HCDE Professor Cecilia Aragon was recently invited to present seminars on data science at the two leading universities in Chile. She gave an invited talk on human-centered data science at the Millennium Project in Semantic Web Research (http://ciws.cl) at the University of Chile and then presented an interactive seminar on applications of human-centered data science to business and innovation in the Innovation Center at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. During her stay in Santiago, Aragon collaborated with researchers in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Mathematical Modeling at the University of Chile and in the School of Design and Business School at the Universidad Católica.
Santiago, Chile
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