Upcoming job talk this Thursday, 11am; graduate students roundtable at 4pm. This candidate has HCI-relevant research, so we’d love to see most of you there.

- fanny

Begin forwarded message:

From: Steve Easterbrook sme@cs.toronto.edu Subject: Talk on Thurs 11am: The Social Life of Environmental Data Date: 3 February 2019 at 20:01:15 GMT-5 To: dcs-all@cs.toronto.edu

Folks,

I'm delighted to announce a talk entitled "The Social Life of Environmental Data: Lessons from Crisis Informatics" on Thursday at 11am by Robert Soden of the University of Colorado Boulder (see talk abstract and details below). Robert is interviewing for a faculty position joint between the School of Environment and the Department of Computer Science. The talk is open to anyone, but please don't share the fact that this is an interview talk with anyone outside of U of T.

We'd like to encourage as many graduate students to attend the talk as possible, and we'll be hosting a round table meeting at 4pm on Thursday for interested graduate students to meet with Robert and talk with him about life at U of T, common research interests, etc. Once you've been to the talk and/or the round table meeting, we would very much like to hear your feedback on his suitability for a faculty position.

Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks! Steve

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The Social Life of Environmental Data: Lessons from Crisis Informatics

Robert Soden, University of Colorado Boulder http://robertsoden.io

Talk: 11am, Thursday February 7th (room BA1210)

Advances in algorithms, sensors, databases, and computing power in recent decades have led to the development of fundamentally new approaches in science and policy for supporting safe, healthy, and sustainable communities in the around the world. These new technologies promise to improve our ability to monitor the natural and built environments and more effectively respond to crisis and disaster, but they can also limit public participation in planning, focus attention only on what can be measured with current tools, and reinforce existing social inequalities. To realize the promise of emerging technologies, we need to develop a better understanding of how they intervene in the governance of complex technological and environmental challenges. In this talk, I will discuss my research in this area drawing from studies on flood hazard mapping Colorado, post-earthquake damage assessment in Nepal, and sea-level rise modeling the San Francisco Bay Area. I show that an expanded agenda for crisis informatics research that draws on insights from science and technology studies, design research, and the humanities can improve the development of technologies used for responding to environmental challenges.

Robert Soden is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder working on crisis informatics, human-centered computing (HCC), and science and technology studies (STS). His research examines the implications of changing technologies on efforts to address environmental challenges including disasters and climate change. He holds a Master's Degree in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development from American University and Bachelor’s degrees in History and Political Science from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Prior to starting his PhD, Robert was a professional software developer and a consultant to the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), where he launched the Open Data for Resilience Initiative, a worldwide effort to harness open data, open source software, and civic technology to improve disaster and climate risk management. His research has been awarded multiple best paper awards and honorable mentions at ACM’s CHI and CSCW, as well as other computing venues.