ATLAS | Technical Reports

Ph.D. students

Heather Underwood presented her PartoPen project as part of a panel of at the mHealth Summit conference from Dec. 5-7 in Washington, D.C. The conference brings together government and industry officials, academia, health providers and non-profit organizations to advance wireless technologies that can improve health care throughout the world. Underwood’s PartoPen is a digital pen application that helps identify potential problems during labor and birth. The pen interacts with a standard health monitoring paper form called a Partograph, which tracks and monitors various stages of labor and birth. Using preprogrammed audio prompts, the pen interacts with the paper form to provide real-time decision support, timely reminders for ongoing and consistent monitoring, dynamic data validation to ensure quality control, and access to the complete World Health Organization user manual instructions just by pressing the tip of the pen to the paper form. The goal of the PartoPen project is to improve labor outcomes in in the developing world and, ultimately, reduce the number of preventable maternal deaths.

Leslie Dodson, Revi Sterling and John Bennett co-wrote a paper called “Considering Failure: Eight Years of ICTD Research,” which will be featured as one of the top papers at the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2012) in March in Atlanta. Sterling, who is director of the ATLAS master’s degree in Information and Communication Technology for Development, also will moderate a workshop on teaching ICTD. ATLAS Ph.D. student Heather Underwood will demonstrate the PartoPen, which is a digital pen intended to help improve labor outcomes in the developing world. Underwood also will participate in a workshop related to Ph.D. work in ICTD.

Sarah Viewig will do a poster presentation at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference in February in Seattle. The poster describes her research into how to analyze and computationally represent Twitter messages in times of mass emergencies.

Master’s students

McCleese Stephens worked on an assessment project for Engineers Without Borders from Dec. 27-Jan. 13 in Peru. Stephens also was a Graduate Scholar at the Technology, Knowledge and Society international conference, held Jan. 16-18 in Los Angeles. The conference brought together educators, students and experts for plenary sessions, workshops and paper presentation around the topics of technology, knowledge and society. Information about the conference is at http://techandsoc.com/conference-2012/.

September 2011

Ph.D. students

Calvin Pohawpatchoko gave a presentation about his “Native Science @ DMNS (Denver Museum of Nature and Science)” project, which involved Native American high school students developing interactive Denver museum displays, at the Cosmic Serpent Conference in May in Taos, N.M. Cosmic Serpent is a collaborative project led by the Indigenous Education Institute and UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory through National Science Foundation grants. Pohawpatchoko completed the second year of the museum pilot project this summer. Students were involved with creating programming for a mobile device to go directly to a Web site so a Denver Museum of Nature and Science visitor could learn more about a museum diorama.

Sarah Viewig authored a paper entitled “Natural Language Processing to the Rescue? Extracting Situational Awareness Tweets During Mass Emergency,” which was presented and published at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 2011. She also attended the 2011 Human Computer Interaction Conference.

Kara Behnke recently co-authored a paper with ATLAS Ph.D. student Leslie Dodson and ATLAS Institute Director John Bennett entitled “Games for Development: A Framework for Assessing Serious Games and ICTD.” The paper has been submitted to the ICTD Conference in Atlanta. She also is working on two proposals to conduct research in the game World of Warcraft. One study explores a women’s community within the game. The second examines cultural differences and play experience between the Chinese and American versions of World of Warcraft. Behnke also is working with Bennett in the development of a new game development course, and on building a virtual island on ATLAS servers running the open source version of Second Life virtual world software.

Edwige Simon will present a paper entitled “The Impact of Online Learning on Higher Education Faculty Professional Identity” on Nov. 9 at the International Conference on Online Learning in Buena Vista, Florida.

Master’s students

Lakshmi Haridas contributed a chapter to the International Telecommunications Union report on “Accessibility in Mobile Phones and Services for Persons With Disabilities: A Global Study.”

Alexandra Morgan served for nine weeks as the ICT4E intern with the Haiti Connected Schools Project, a pilot initiative and Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) commitment of Microsoft, HP, Inveneo and World Vision that aims to install 40 school-based computer laboratories in rural Haiti. In November, Morgan will head to Kingston, Jamaica, for the 23rd annual Haitian Studies Association Conference where she will present her recently-accepted paper entitled, “Designing Technology-Enhanced Learning Environments in Haiti: A Working Paper.” In June, Morgan attended the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Haiti Ministry of Education (MENFP) ICT in Education two-day envisioning workshop and three-day summit held in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Alex Viggio has been working on the CU implementation of the open source software VIVO (see http://vivo.colorado.edu), which allows faculty to post information about themselves and research, allowing people from various disciplines to discover common research interests. Viggio also was on a panel discussing the VIVO open source community during the VIVO Conference in August in Washington, D.C.

ATLAS staff

ATLAS Institute Director John Bennett and Revi Sterling, director of graduate studies in Information and Communication Technologies for Development, will present a paper at the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC) Oct. 30-Nov. 1. The paper is entitled “Crossing the Real Chasm in Humanitarian Technology” and it builds on Sterling’s work on practical fieldwork methods and informed consent when working with underdeveloped communities. The paper is a dialog between a computer scientist and a social scientist, and challenges the attendees to consider the conventional models for engaging with communities.

Sarah Hug of the ATLAS Assessment and Research Center presented her work at the American Society for Engineering Education this June. Her presentations included evaluation results of innovative introductory computing courses utilizing cell phone app development and a qualitative study analyzing the professional identity development of women in the computing fields. In July, she participated in the Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed conference, co-leading a session about the role of creativity and creative collaboration in science and scientific research. Her latest project measures the impact of professional development training on K-12 academic counselors’ promotion of IT careers with diverse students, particularly those underrepresented in computing.

ATLAS Research Roundup

January 2012

September 2011