Published: Oct. 10, 2023
Tags:

Congrats, Dr. Shiva Darian!

Shiva Darian successfully defended her dissertation, "The Powers and Politics of Data Rhetoric". Her committee members included Amy Voida (chair, INFO), Alison Cool (anthropology), Leysia Palen (INFO), Bryan Semaan (INFO), and Leah Sprain (COMM). Shiva is currently a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Texas, El Paso. 

 

Congrats, Dr. Janghee Cho!

Janghee Cho successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, entitled: "Design for Sustainable Life in the Work-From-Home Era: Envisioning Future Technologies that Support Reflective Practices in Everyday Life." His committee members included Stephen Voida (chair, INFO), Laura Devendorf (INFO), Bryan Semaan (INFO), Clayton Lewis (INFO courtesy faculty, emeritus) and Christena Nippert-Eng (Indiana University). Janghee also graduates with a certificate in cognitive science. Janghee and his family move to Singapore later this month, where he will begin an academic appointment in the Division on Industrial Design, National University of Singapore. 

Awards and Honors

Katy Weathington (INFO PhD student) and Jed Brubaker (INFO Faculty) received an Honorable Mention and additionally a Recognition for Contribution to Diversity and Inclusion at CSCW 2023 for their paper, Queer Identities, Normative Databases: Challenges to Capturing Queerness On Wikidata.

Casey Fiesler (INFO faculty), Joshua Paup (INFO PhD student), Corian Zacher also received an Honorable Mention at CSCW 2023 for their paper, Chilling Tales: Understanding the Impact of Copyright Takedowns on Transformative Content Creators.

 

Casey Fiesler

Invited Talks

As part of a lecture series on ethics in AI sponsored by the Office of the Provost at Northwestern University, Casey Fiesler (INFO faculty) gave a talk on October 5, titled, Ethics and Speculation in the Age of AI.        

Fiesler gave the annual Data and Computing Equity and Justice lecture at the Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems, and Computation at Lehigh University on September 28. Her talk was titled, The Internet is Good for You, The Internet is Bad for You.    

Fiesler additionally gave the opening keynote, When Data is People: Ethics and Ownership in Research and AI Uses of Public Data, for the Midwest Data Librarian Symposium at University of Cincinnati on October 9.        

ACM 2023 logo.

Conferences

ACM RecSys 2023

Amanda Aird (INFO PhD student) presented at FAccTRec: The 6th Workshop on Responsible Recommendation for the research paper: Exploring Social Choice Mechanisms for Recommendation Fairness in SCRUF, on behalf of co-authors Cassidy All (INFO CU), Farastu Paresha (CS CU), Elena Štefancová (Comenius University Bratislava), Joshua Sun (Recent CS CU grad), Nicholas Mattei (Tulane), and Robin Burke (INFO Faculty).

Aishwarya Satwani (CS PhD student) presented at the11th International Workshop on News Recommendation and Analytics in Conjunction with ACM RecSys 2023 for their research: 'It's just a robot that looks at ​numbers'​: Restoring Journalistic Voice in News Recommendation, on behalf of co-authors Nihal Alaqabawy (Journalism CU), Amy Voida (INFO Faculty), and Robin Burke (INFO Faculty).    

 

SIGCSE 2024 logo.

SIGCSE 2024

Three Information Science research articles were accepted in the proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2024). The research represented NSF-funded efforts. 

Avery Harrell and Sidney Lentz (undergraduates), Fujiko Robledo Yamamoto (PhD '23), and Amy Voida and Lecia Barker (INFO faculty) co-authored: Putting the Service into Service Learning: A Report on a Survey of CS Faculty.

Julia Dean (PhD student), and Lecia Barker and Amy Voida (INFO faculty) co-authored: Bite-Sized Experiential Education for Computer and Information Science.

Noah Q. Cowit (PhD student), Vidushi Ojha (PhD student, University of Illinois Computer Science), and Casey Fiesler (INFO faculty) co-authored: How do Computing Students Conceptualize Cybersecurity? Survey Results and Strategies for Curricular Integration.

TDWG logo.

INFO and Biodiversity

INFO graduate student Kit Lewers went to Hobart, Tasmania, to present in multiple sessions of the annual meeting of the Biodiversity Information Standards organization (TDWG). She gave an experience report on her work with TDWG to document current practices in adopting, replacing and retiring biodiversity collection standards. She was a featured panelist speaking and addressed the topic: AI Contributions to biodiversity data & data standardisation: Opportunities and challenges.         

The 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW)

Information Science students and faculty attended the 2023 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) in Minneapolis, MN from October 14-18, 2023. We had a large number of posters, papers and workshop presentations! 

 

Papers

Noah Cowit (INFO PhD student) is the lead author on a publication comparing computing students' perceptions of social presence and engagement in in-person and synchronous remote classes. The article, Measuring Computing Students' Perceptions of Social Presence and Engagement in Synchronous Remote v. In-Person Classes   (2023) appears in the proceedings of the 52nd Annual Frontiers in Education Conference. Co-authored with NCWIT's Christopher Hovey and associate professor Lecia Barker, the survey-based study found that undergraduates believe social presence is important and that it is more easily accomplished in in-person classes.

 

Lecia Barker

Grants and Awards

Lecia Barker receives NSF grant to study computer science subfield diversity         

Lecia Barker (Information Science), Lucy Sanders (National Center for Women & IT), and Daniel Larremore (Computer Science) have received a ~300K National Science Foundation Broadening Participation in Computing grant to study the mechanisms that lead to computer science (CS) subfield segregation and also quantify participation of domestic racial minorities in CS subfields. The outcome will be a knowledge base that will better support development of interventions for overcoming CS subfield segregation.