Hi everyone,
The faculty interviews for this year will begin very shortly. You should
definitely try to attend all of them, even if they work in an area
different from yours. However, I will note that there are several
candidates who are HCI-related. In fact, the candidate next week on
Thursday & Friday is one of those--Dr. Hwajung Hong.
A) Attend her talk on Thursday (Feb 2) at 11AM. Add it to your calendar!
B) I'm writing to ask that HCI graduate students all host a roundtable
discussion with her. We will of course seek your feedback about the
candidates, so come and ask questions. Give her a chance to learn about
UofT & DCS through you. And finally, help to recruit the candidate. Even if
the person may or may not end up here, we always want them to feel welcomed.
We have the roundtable discussion scheduled for 4:45PM on Feb. 2nd. I'm
almost positive it'll start on time. It'll run all the way till 6:00PM,
when she has to go to dinner. Haijun, can I please ask you to help be the
leader in organizing and facilitating the discussion?
I've included her Bio and the abstract for her talk below. Please everyone
look over it, attend the talk, and then engage in an interesting discussion
with her.
Finally, this is a DCS faculty candidate. Which means these roundtable
discussion should be opened up to students within DCS. We typically hold
them in locations where we think the candidate aligns with the most.
Eventhough
we might be hosting it, please encourage students from other areas to
participate. When the announcement goes out for the talk, we'll let the
grad students in other areas know about the roundtable meeting as well.
It's rare that students from other areas to come, but it does happen from
time to time.
Thank you!
-khai
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*Data-Driven Design for Human-Centered Healthcare*
A plethora of digital artifacts—wearable trackers, IoT devices, social
media, online communities, and crowdsourcing platforms—have enabled new
opportunities in areas as diverse as personal health management to
collaboration in the workplace. From an interaction design perspective,
these artifacts produce a wide variety of user-generated data, ranging from
explicit micro-interactions such as clicks and touches to longer traces of
physical activities, textual input, and more implicit evidence from social
interactions. By leveraging data that provide a rich resource material for
design, I have been seeking insights to enable the improvement of current
user experiences or the creation of computational applications in the
domain of accessibility and health.
In this talk, I present examples from my personal work on exploring
human-centered healthcare technologies that could affect the lives of young
adults with autism, students suffering from stress and mental health
problems, patients seeking financial and social support from medical
crowdfunding platforms, and caregivers and volunteers who work with them.
More specifically, I describe attempts to deploy mobile, web-based, and
crowdsourcing systems that produce large scale user-generated data and
apply it to concrete design concepts. I further discuss my vision for
designing creative healthcare technologies that function through open,
ubiquitous social technical infrastructures from a maker’s fabrication tool
to collaborative virtual making platforms.
*BIO*: Hwajung Hong is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative
Design Engineering at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology
(UNIST) in Korea. Her primary research areas are at the intersection of
human-computer interaction, social/crowd computing and design, with a
special interest in health informatics and assistive technology. Her recent
research focuses on building tools which individuals with autism to
crowdsource assistance and advice on challenging situations such as public
anxiety and workplace conflicts. She has designed, developed, and evaluated
mobile and social applications for many different populations, including
young adults with autism, students suffering from mental health issues,
families and clinicians working with individuals with chronic disease. She
has also worked on interaction design and UX research to tackle real-world
problems as part of industrial internships at Palo Alto Research Center,
Microsoft Research, LG, and Motorola. She received her Ph.D. in
Human-Centered Computing in 2015, M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from
Georgia Tech, and her B.S. degree in Industrial Design from Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). She has been named a Samsung
Fellowship scholar.