ATLAS Research Roundup
March 2013
ATLAS Ph.D. student Heather Underwood received the best student paper award during the International Conference on Health Informatics held March 3-6 in Angers, France. She was the lead author for a paper entitled "The PartoPen in Training and Clinical Use -- Two Preliminary Studies in Kenya." ATLAS director John Bennett and ATLAS ICTD program director Revi Sterling were co-authors. The conference brings together researchers and practitioners interested in the application of information and communication technologies (ICT) to healthcare and medicine.
Kate Starbird, an ATLAS Ph.D. graduate who is now Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) professor at the University of Washington, and CU professor Leysia Palen have received a best paper award at the 2013 Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) conference from Feb. 23-27 in San Antonio, Texas. Their paper, "Working and Sustaining the Virtual 'Disaster Desk'," follows the trajectory of Humanity Road, a volunteer organization working within the domain of disaster response, from an emergent group to a formal nonprofit.
Starbird also recently authored an article in the IEEE magazine Computer, which focused the March issue on gender diversity in computing. Her article, entitled "Returning to My Inner Nerd: Following the 'Social' Disruption of Computing," traces her experiences as a Stanford computer science undergraduate, a basketball star both in college and professionally, and as an ATLAS Ph.D. student.
ATLAS ICTD student Rachel Strobel is a finalist in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Challenge Slavery Tech Contest, which is designed to highlight ideas to combat human trafficking. Her entry was entitled "A Mobile Phone Technology Solution for Countering Human Trafficking in Mexico."
ATLAS Ph.D. student Joanne White is working with project EPIC to design, test and deploy the Emergency Pet Matcher tool. It is both a mobile and web-based app and site that allows people all around the world to match pets displaced from their owners in disaster events. She is writing a paper about reuniting pets with their owners following Hurricane Sandy.
Ph.D. student Leslie Dodson recently presented her work on "The Mobile Utility Gap and Literacy Challenges in Oral-Language Communities: SMS use by Berber Women" at UNESCO's Mobile Learning Week event in Paris.
January 2013
Meg Leta Ambrose, an ATLAS Ph.D. student who is spending the 2012-13 academic year at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, gave a presentation entitled “Right to be Forgotten: Ethical Considerations” at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, and also gave presentations about her research at the Indiana University Center for Apply Cybersecurity Research and Telecommunications Research Policy Conference. She has a paper entitled “It’s About Time: Privacy, Information Lifecycles, and the Right to be Forgotten” to be published in the Stanford Technology Law Review. Ambrose will become an assistant professor in Georgetown’s Communication, Culture and Technology program, focusing on international technology policy, starting in August.
Ph.D. student Heather Underwood presented a paper at the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference in Seattle in October, at the ACM Dev conference in Bangalore, India, in January, and attended the mHealth Conference in Washington, D.C., in December. Her invited presentations on her PartoPen work include the SVC Wireless conference in Palo Alto in December; the UW Change Group in October; and the CU Med Scholars in November, which included a presentation on best practices for health research in developing countries.
Kevin Moloney presented his Ph.D. research on transmedia storytelling in journalism first at the Aurora Multimedia Workshop at ATLAS in May, then to members of the National Press Photographers’ Association as part of their “Business Blitz Road Show” in Boston, Austin and Chicago on dates from July through October, and most recently to the staff of Rich Clarkson and Associates – a multimedia visual storytelling firm in Denver – in December. He also co-presented with Marijke Unger of the National Center for Atmospheric Research at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco in December. The segment was titled “Transmedia Storytelling and Science Communication.” The presentation will be recreated as a potential book chapter for an edited volume tentatively titled, “New Ideas in Geoscience and Environmental Communications.”
Ph.D. student Leslie Dodson continues her fieldwork in southwestern Morocco, where she is researching the use of mobile phones in rural Berber communities. Her research is sponsored by a grant from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS). While in Morocco, she attended the 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Amazigh. The biannual event on applied and computational linguistics was held at the Royal Institute of the Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) in Rabat. In February, she will present her work on “The Mobile Utility Gap and Literacy Challenges in Oral-Language Communities: SMS Use by Berber Women in Morocco” at UNESCO’s Mobile Learning Week in Paris. In March, she will co-present “An Experiment in Fog: Collection and Equity among Berber Communities in Morocco” at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Denver.
Ph.D. student Jiffer Harriman is working with ATLAS Center for Media, Arts and Performance director Michael Theodore on an interactive sound art installation set to be unveiled in the spring at the David B. Smith Gallery in downtown Denver. Harriman also plans to attend the Tangible Embedded Interaction (TEI) conference to present his research in tangible interfaces and the overlap between art and technology.
Ph.D. student Calvin Pohawpatchoko is continuing his work with Native Students at a Denver public school. He also gave a talk to students in a new American Indian History class at Denver Center of International Studies High School. He will give a talk entitled “Communities Old and New: Indigenous Knowledge meets New Approaches in Education” for the CU Presidents Leader Class on April 16. Pohawpatchoko also has received a CU Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Education for his work improving STEM education for indigenous students.
Kara Behnke, an ATLAS Ph.D. student whose research focuses on how digital games and game design elements can enhance strategies for teaching computer science, has been accepted to participate in the ACM SIGCSE Student Research Competition, which will be held in Denver in March. Behnke also participated in a panel entitled “Epic Win: Opening Doors for Women in Games Research and Development” at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in October.
About 20 women in ATLAS graduate and undergraduate programs attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference from Oct. 3-6 in Baltimore. The ATLAS Institute once again was a Gold academic sponsor of the annual event, which is presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and is billed as the world’s largest gathering of women in computing.
Abigale Stangl of the ATLAS ICTD master’s program was among four CU graduate students selected to participate in the Project-Oriented Learning Environment (POLE) project, led by the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. Each year POLE focuses on a single problem, with this year’s project challenging students to develop innovative, new ticket vending ideas for the Swiss railway and transportation company A-Welle, based in Aargau, Switzerland.
Alexandra Morgan, who graduated from the ATLAS ICTD master’s program, has been working in ICT and Education for World Vision Haiti (WVH) in Haiti’s central plateau since her practicum with WVH last January. Her practicum became a full-time position. She finished her coursework from abroad and completed her work for the December graduation.
Revi Sterling, who is director of the ATLAS ICTD master’s program, is leading the research working group of UNWomen’s “Women, ICT, and Development” task force, which first convened in September and is hosting a forum in Washington, D.C., this month for international policy makers, including U.S. ambassadors to developing countries, as well as top State Department, World Bank and USAID officials. The research working group is responsible for driving an academic research agenda into 10 ICTD and gender sectors, including health, access, policy, education, funding and capacity building, which UNWomen will champion throughout the UN system.
Revi Sterling and Ruscha Cohen, who is the ICTD master’s program adviser, are enrolled in a graduate certificate, Global Mental Health and Trauma, through Harvard Medical School in order to create curriculum and research that integrates approaches to working with highly-traumatized populations, as well as creating technical systems to sustain and scale mental health efforts in rural or conflict-zone areas as a precondition to development programs. The program kicked off with an intensive two-week training in Porano, Italy, and continues as an online course through June.
Rachel Strobel, a student in the ATLAS master’s program in Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICTD), is one of two scholarship winners for attending the Trust Women Conference held in December in London. Strobel submitted an essay to the contest at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in October. She wrote about her plans to use technology to counter human trafficking and cited her ongoing work in Mexico and her future plans in the region. Strobel will work with Workforce Boulder during the spring semester. She will be working for its youth initiative and will be implementing a technology to connect youth in the Boulder County area to Workforce’s resources for jobs and college prep.
September 2012
ATLAS Ph.D. student Heather Underwood was featured in a recent Kenyan television report about her work related to improving birth outcomes.
The report said the maternal mortality rates in Kenya are 480 deaths per 100,000 births and that the deaths are higher in rural areas. Underwood is working with Kenyatta National Hospital, which is employing her PartoPen and Partograph techniques that help monitor the progress of a delivery.
The article said the hospital "has embraced the use of the paper-based system for monitoring maternal labor that has been able to reduce life-threatening complications in pregnancy in low-resource environments."
To read the report, click here.
An iPad application developed by a group of CU students, including ATLAS master’s student Joellen Raderstorf, recently won an honorable mention award and $2,000 in prize money in a global Apps for Climate competition in the World Bank’s Climate Challenge.
The app, called Eco Explorer, is a virtual global field trip designed to positively engage 8-14 year olds in the climate change challenges.
The application uses an interactive virtual globe to travel around the planet and combines videos, games and World Bank data in relationship to the location on the planet visited. Students who also worked on the app were Scott Raderstorf, Devon Tivona, Vickie Everts, Greg O’Brien and Peter Klipfel. They were assisted by ATLAS instructor Aileen Pierce. The app is available for free through the Apple iTunes Store.
July 2012
Ph.D. Students
Meg Leta Ambrose will explore the legal, social and technical issues surrounding the proposed digital right to be forgotten as a fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University for the 2012-2013 academic year.
The Berkman Center is a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study and help pioneer its development.
Ambrose has a law degree from the University of Illinois, where she focused on digital copyright issues. Her Ph.D. research explores issues of privacy, data-governance, data-lifecycles and cybersociology. Her dissertation analyzes U.S. issues related to the European right to be forgotten, an issue related to information on the Internet about individuals.
Founded in 1997, the Berkman program aims to encourage and support fellows in an inviting and rigorous intellectual environment, with community activities designed to foster inquiry and collaboration.
Fellows participate in exchanges through a weekly fellows hour, various online media, fellows-run working groups and a wide range of events and interactions. With Berkman faculty, students, staff and other affiliates, fellows help develop and advance Berkman Center projects, and learn and teach through courses, curricula and diverse gatherings.
Joanne White has been invited to the Summer Social WebShop at the University of Maryland in August, where she will work with invited faculty and other Ph.D. students from multiple disciplines for four days.
Kevin Moloney will be presenting his Ph.D. research on Transmedia Journalism at the National Press Photographers' Association's Business Blitz Road Show in Boston, Austin, Chicago and San Clemente, Calif., on four dates between July and November. Click here for more information.
Calvin Pohawpatchoko Jr. continued to work with students through the Indigenous Alliance Computer Build, which is now in its third year and provides Native American middle and high school students in Colorado an opportunity to learn about science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In June, Pohawpatchoko teamed with the Southern Ute Indian Tribe's Education Department and worked with six students over two days as they assembled their own computers from components including motherboards, processors and power supplies. At the end of the program, the students took home their own machines. For an article about the project, published in the Southern Ute Drum, click here.
Kate Starbird is headed to the University of Washington where she will be assistant professor in the Human Centered Design and Engineering department in the fall.
Kara Behnke presented the poster "Ladies of Warcraft: Changing Perceptions of Women and Technology Through Productive Play" at the ACM Foundations of Digital Games Conference in Raleigh, NC in June; co-authored, with Ph.D. student Meg Ambrose, a presentation for the National Association for Attorney Generals (NAAG) in June, which discussed the complexities of protecting child privacy in online browser-based gaming; and she recently was awarded a two-year National Science Foundation GK-12 Fellowship through the Engaging Computer Science in Traditional Education (eCSite) Project (click here for more information.)
May 2012
Ph.D. Students
Heather Underwood received a first-place ranking in the student research competition for her paper “PartoPen: Enhancing the Partograph with Digital Pen Technology” at the CHI 2012 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems held May 5-10 in Austin, Texas.
Underwood also has received an 18-month Bill and Melinda Gates Grand Challenge Award of $100,000. The award will support two pilot studies using the PartoPen in the summer of 2012, and will facilitate expanding the project to more health clinics in Kenya during 2013.
Underwood is developing the PartoPen, which is an interactive digital pen-based system that reinforces birth-attendant training, records labor progress, validates form data, and overall aims to improve maternal outcomes in developing countries. The pen interacts with a standard health monitoring paper form called a Partograph, which tracks and monitors various stages of labor and birth.
The CHI research paper was based on PartoPen research Underwood conducted over spring break in Kenya.
There were 30 entries in the CHI research competition.
CU had a number of students participating in the CHI conference competitions. Several projects grew out of CU Computer Science professor Leysia Paylen’s design studio class. ATLAS Ph.D. student Joanne White and computer science students Mario Barrenechea and Joshua Barron placed fourth out of 55 teams in the Student Design Competition for No Place Like Home, a socially networked Web and mobile platform that facilitates reunification of pets with family members following disaster events.
Kate Starbird has been appointed an assistant professor in the Human Centered Design and Engineering department at the University of Washington and will join the faculty this fall. As an ATLAS Ph.D. student, she studied interaction and collaboration as enabled, supported and structured by social media and other online tools and is advised by CU Computer Science professor Leysia Palen.
Meg Ambrose and ATLAS Associate Director Jill Van Matre were on the “Right to be Forgotten: Forgiveness or Censorship?” panel at the South By Southwest interactive conference in March in Austin, Texas. A Huffington Post article about the panel is at http://huff.to/x49Vcy.
Ambrose also will speak at the National Association of State Attorneys General summer meeting June 18-22 in Anchorage, Alaska.
Ambrose, Nicole Friess and Van Matre also recently co-authored “Seeking Digital Redemption: The Future of Forgiveness in the Internet Age.” Ambrose also is a speaker at the Information Ethics Roundtable in May in New York, the Privacy Law Scholars Conference on June 7, and is writing a paper for a special issue of the International Review of Information Ethics, The Ethics of Secrecy.
“Green Up Colorado,” a PBS television program that takes a look at Colorado’s local food movement, alternative energy projects, and a range of recycling and green jobs that aired April 21 and was hosted by ATLAS Ph.D. student Leslie Dodson, has won a CINE Golden Eagle Award in the Environment and Natural Science Category. The CINE Golden Eagle Award has been recognized as a mark of excellence throughout the film and television industry for over 50 years.
Leslie Dodson will be spending the summer studying Argan oil production in the Ait Baamrane region of Morocco. Her research focuses on technology-based opportunities for women involved in natural resource management and small enterprise in relatively remote areas. Expansion in demand for Argan oil coincides with efforts by members of the Amazigh community to preserve their traditional practices and ensure environmental sustainability of the natural resource.
Kara Behnke will do a poster presentation at the Foundations of Digital Games Conference May 29-June 1 in Raleigh, N.C. She also plans to attend the Games for Change Festival June 18-20 in New York.
Calvin Pohawpatchoko and students who participated in the CU Native Alliance Computer Build project demonstrated some of their work to elected officials on April 25 in Washington, D.C. The main purpose for the demonstration was to show how students are taught to build computers and how the program creates interest for attending universities. The second purpose was to seek support for continuation of the program.
March 2012
Ph.D. Students
Meg Ambrose and ATLAS Associate Director Jill Van Matre were on the "Right to be Forgotten: Forgiveness or Censorship?" panel at the South By Southwest interactive conference this month in Austin, Texas. A Huffington Post article about the panel is here.
Ambrose, Nicole Friess and Van Matre also recently co-authored "Seeking Digital Redemption: The Future of Forgiveness in the Internet Age." Ambrose also is presenting at the Information Ethics Roundable April 28, the Privacy Law Scholars Conference on June 7, and is writing a paper for a special issue of the International Review of Information Ethics, The Ethics of Secrecy.
Calvin C. Pohawpatchoko Jr. was interviewed by IndianCountryTodayMediaNetwork.com about proposed jobs with call centers. To read the interview, click here.
Heather Underwood's PartoPen research project will be presented at the 2012 ICTD conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in March, and at the 2012 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Austin, Texas, in May. The 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. Underwood also will be leading a workshop at the ICTD conference in Atlanta that focuses on improving the presentation and public speaking skills of junior researchers in the field. During spring break, she will return to Kenya to conduct a small-scale pilot study of the fully implemented PartoPen project with nurses and nursing students.
Kara Behnke will make a poster presentation at the Foundations of Digital Games Conference May 29-June 1 in Raleigh, N.C. She also plans to attend the Games for Change Festival June 18-20 in New York. Students in her advanced game development ATLAS course are submitting to the CU New Venture Challenge, which will be held March 19.
Master's Students
Lise St. Denis co-wrote a paper with Amanda Hughes and Leysia Palen entitled "Trial by Fire: The Deployment of Trusted Digital Volunteers in the 2011 Shadow Lake Fire." She will present the paper at ISCRAM 2012 conference April 21-25 in Vancouver, Canada.
Matt Hulse attended the Engineers Without Borders International Conference March 22-25 in Las Vegas.
January 2012
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.
Legal & Trademarks | © 2013 Regents of the University of Colorado
home | contact us
| reservations | staff | webmaster