Hello folks,
As many of you know, prof. Narges Mahyar will be visiting the lab this
coming Tuesday, *Nov 26*. Thank you for those who signed up for demos. Her
talk will be at *11am* in the seminar room (BA 5187), see details below:
*****
*Title:* Social Computing and Visualization to Democratize Public
Participation
*Abstract*
Public participation is a pillar of a functioning democracy. Much of the
recent work in utilizing technology for facilitating public participation
has been focused on broadening access and data collection from the public.
However, these technologies still face several challenges in democratizing
public participation, such as including marginalized populations and
integrating data analysis into civic decision-making processes. In this
talk, I present examples of my recent work using social computing and
visualization technologies for further democratizing public participation.
These examples demonstrate applications of 1) collaborative technologies
and interactive visualization to increase public engagement, 2) online
platforms and crowdsourcing techniques to scale public participation, and
empower the public to contribute meaningfully in a short amount of time, 3)
low barrier technology to engage reticent participants to provide feedback
during town hall meetings, and 4) visualization tools to enable civic
leaders to make sense of a large amount of public input better. I describe
a vision for expanding my research on building novel tools towards advanced
stages of the decision-making process, such as collaborative sensemaking of
complex civic data and consensus-building.
*Bio *
*Narges Mahyar is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information and
Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds a
Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Victoria, an MS in
Information Technology from the University of Malaya, and a BS in
Electrical Engineering from Tehran Azad University. Her Ph.D. was funded by
SAP Business Objects for four years, where she worked closely with SAP
experts and research teams to develop novel technologies for collaborative
visual analytics tasks. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of
Computer Science at the University of British Columbia from 2014-2016.
Prior to joining UMass she completed a second postdoctoral fellowship in
the Design Lab at the University of California San Diego from 2016-2018.
Her research papers have received awards at the premier venues in
Visualization, Social computing and Landscape Architecture, including the
outstanding paper award from the Council of Educators in Landscape
Architecture 2017, the honorable mention award from Interactive Surfaces
and Spaces conference in 2016 and the best paper award from IEEE VAST 2014.*
Cheers,
Nicole