Human-Centered Data Science Lab

SCC Lab members and HCDE undergraduates John Robinson and Megan Torkildson recently won the College of Engineering’s Capstone Design Award. Their group is conducting a series of interviews and contextual inquiries with emergency responders to better understand their processes and information needs. The goal of the project is to prototype a tool to utilize social media to provide situational awareness. They plan on implementing a prototype tool or visualization that fulfills emergency responders’ needs and would integrate well into their current workflow.

The Engineering Capstone Design Award was created to support student teams across the College of Engineering working on capstone design projects. Teams are awarded $3,000 for materials or training relevant to their Capstone project. Further information about the award can be found on the HCDE blog.

Call for papers, Deadline 4/1/2014 for the International Conference on Cooperative Design, Visualization and Engineering

The international conference CDVE 2014 will be held in Seattle, WA in September after ten previous conferences in Europe and Asia. The focus this year is on cooperative applications and approaches to design, visualization, and engineering. Accepted papers will be published by Springer in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and selected papers may be published in special issues of the Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work or the Journal of Concurrent Engineering. HCDE is a technical sponsor of the CDVE 2014 conference, and students from the department will receive a registration discount.

PhD student and SCC Lab member Nan-Chen Chen received the Microsoft Research Graduate Women Scholarship for 2014.  The highly selective scholarship was established to encourage first year female PhD students in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Math. It is awarded to only ten recipients a year in recognition of their undergraduate work and future research goals. Nan-Chen is interested in building visual analytics tools to help people better understand data. She is passionate about developing technologies that support collaboration and bridging the gaps between disciplines so that people from different fields can more easily work together to solve problems. Further information about the scholarship can be found here.

PhD student Daniel Perry looks on as students play the game MAX5 at the Computing Open House.

SCC Lab members Megan Torkildson (undergraduate student) and Daniel Perry (PhD student) represented the HCDE Department at UW’s Computing Open House this past Saturday, an event that drew over 1,000 middle and high school students and their families to explore and learn about computing activities on campus.  Torkildson and  Perry were among the HCDE volunteers at a table that featured an interactive iPad activity as well as the bioinformatics game, MAX5, developed by Perry and members of  the Games for Good Research Group.  “Many of the students we spoke with were pretty excited to find out about our department, especially the ones interested in computing as well as film production, art, or game animation. They didn’t know a department like ours existed where they could easily combine these interests” remarked Perry.  The annual event was sponsored by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and featured dozens of projects in computing related fields.