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.