We’re excited to bring you the first HCIL BBL talk of the semester this Thursday. Our speakers for this week are Professors Tamara Clegg and Joel Chan from the iSchool.

Details:

Time: 9/13 (Thursday) from 12:30pm – 1:30pm
Place: HCIL, Room 2105, Hornbake Building, South Wing
Lunch: Free pizza!

Professor Tamara Clegg’s research interests lie in developing technology to support life-relevant learning environments and participatory design with children and will present on the following topic.

Title:

Understanding Opportunities for STEM learning and Data Analytics in College Football Programs (Tamara Clegg and Dan Greene)

Abstract:

Issues of equity and diversity have prevailed on college campuses related to athlete’s academic patterns and retention. This work has shown that athletes tend to be severely underrepresented in STEM majors. Furthermore, athletes are often objects of science through measurement of biometrics as well as sports play statistics. We see an opportunity to leverage such measurements to help athletes to become agents of STEM engagement – designing new studies, collecting and their own data, and applying that day in life-relevant ways (e.g., to connect to their sports play and health). Our approach recognizes the expertise that athletes bring to bear on their sports play and the data, tools, and opportunities that exist. We aim to leverage these resources to design innovative learning experiences that help athletes connect their sports play to STEM learning in authentic, meaningful ways.

Professor Joel Chan’s research interests lie in integrating cognitive science and human-computer interaction to explore how we can better understand and support human creativity and will present on the following topic.

Title:

Making Literature Reviewing Less Painful and More Commonplace: Exploring Sociotechnical Solutions

Abstract:

Having a solid grasp of the literature is very often a critical precursor to finding/defining and ultimately solving impactful research problems. But effective literature reviewing is currently painful and often (too) rare. It is very common to hear researchers (both beginning and experienced) struggle with the literature review process, complain about the lack of effective tools for supporting the process, or (if they’ve written a literature review before) express reluctance to do it again. This hampers research progress. My group is exploring sociotechnical solutions to this problem: how do we design configurations of technical systems (e.g., better interfaces, AI) and people (e.g., norms, practices) that can make effective literature reviewing less painful and more commonplace? This is still ongoing work, but I’d love to get feedback on some ways we are framing the problem, and some preliminary data and prototypes we have on hand so far.