November 2019 - Thirdspace - dgp mailing lists

Talk by Narges Mahyar (UMass Amherst) Tuesday Nov 26, 11am, DGP Seminar room
by Nicole Sultanum 26 Nov '19

26 Nov '19

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

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[Tux] HCI Poster Showcase Tomorrow
by Tovi Grossman 25 Nov '19

25 Nov '19

Dear TUX Community, Tomorrow there will be another HCI poster showcase (a similar event was held last year) which I'd like to invite you to. This will be a presentation of posters that the students in the Human-Computer Interaction course I am teaching at U of T have prepared. The course is cross-listed as a fourth-year undergraduate / graduate course. For their final term project, they have been conducting a literature review and proposing new ideas on an HCI topic of choice. Tomorrow they will be presenting their findings in the format of a poster. This year the poster showcase will be held in the ground floor atrium of the Bahen building (40 St George St). You are welcome to come by and see the posters and meet the undergraduate and graduate students that have been studying HCI at U of T this semester. Date: Tuesday, November 26 Time: 3:15pm-5:00pm Location: Bahen Ground Floor Atrium (40 St George St.) Hope to see you there! Thanks, Tovi Tovi Grossman, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 40 St. George St, Toronto Toronto, Ontario M5S 2E4 Canada www.cs.toronto.edu <http://www.cs.toronto.edu>

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Fwd: [Grad-announcements] All PhD checkpoints require advance notice to the Grad Office!
by Ishtiaque Ahmed 24 Nov '19

24 Nov '19

Grad students, Please read this carefully and let me know if you there is something we should do. Best Regards, Ishtiaque Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science University of Toronto, ON, CA Ph: +1 647 220 3482 Skype: syed.ishtiaque.ahmed web: https://www.ishtiaque.net/ My Availability: Google Calendar Link <https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ishtiaque.uoft%40gmail.com&c…> ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Graeme Hirst — Grad Chair <gradchair(a)cs.toronto.edu> Date: Sun, Nov 24, 2019 at 3:49 PM Subject: [Grad-announcements] All PhD checkpoints require advance notice to the Grad Office! To: <phd-students(a)cs.toronto.edu> Cc: <supervisors(a)cs.toronto.edu> *Reminder:* All PhD checkpoints require advance notice to the Grad Office by filling in the appropriate form from this page: https://web.cs.toronto.edu/graduate/forms-and-handbooks (scroll down to near the bottom). And prior to your first checkpoint (the qualifying oral examination), you must first request approval of your supervisory committee, also using a form from that page. *Here’s why: * (1) We need to make sure that your committee meets SGS regulations. This is not a rubber stamp, and several students have recently proposed ill-formed committees. Moreover, a purported checkpoint that was held with an ill-formed committee (as happened recently) doesn’t count for SGS, and could have to be repeated with a corrected committee. (2) In any case, if the Grad Office doesn’t know about your checkpoint meeting in advance, it can’t send the appropriate paperwork to the chair of the meeting, nor ensure that it is returned. If your checkpoint is not recorded, you will in due course fall out of good standing with the department and with SGS. (3) This is especially so for your final oral exam at SGS. In one recent case, a failure to complete the necessary paperwork for the exam led to the exam being rescheduled, with a consequent high cost to the student for changing their travel arrangements. *Conclusions and future work: *All this stuff is explained in the DCS PhD Handbook, which is available from the webpage mentioned above and which is also attached to this email for your convenience. All PhD students in the department are expected to have read it and to be familiar with its contents. *Appendix:* Early next year, we will be transitioning to a new online system that will provide reminders for scheduling checkpoints and which will allow online submission of progress reports and committee reports. -- :::: Graeme Hirst • Professor and Associate Chair, Graduate Studies :::: University of Toronto • Department of Computer Science

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Our group Twitter
by Ishtiaque Ahmed 23 Nov '19

23 Nov '19

Hi Folks - I have set up a twitter account for our group: https://twitter.com/SpaceUoft The handle is @SpaceUofT emai: thirdspace.uoft(a)gmail.com pass: thirdspace12345 (same as our google password) I have done preliminary setting up thing, but please feel free to change them. We will basically use this twitter account to broadcast good news of our group. I remember, we selected Maryam as our 'web publicity manager'. It will be great if she gets the responsibility fo this Twitter account of our group, too. :) Best Regards, Ishtiaque Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science University of Toronto, ON, CA Ph: +1 647 220 3482 Skype: syed.ishtiaque.ahmed web: https://www.ishtiaque.net/ My Availability: Google Calendar Link <https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ishtiaque.uoft%40gmail.com&c…>

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Rise of the Rocket Girls - Nathalia Holt
by Yasaman Rohanifar 22 Nov '19

22 Nov '19

I read the abstract of this book and it seems an amazing work in addressing the role of women in computing in the space programs. All the best, Yasaman

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Demos for Narges Mahyar - Visiting Professor @ UMass
by Nicole Sultanum 20 Nov '19

20 Nov '19

Hello folks, Prof. Narges Mahyar <https://www.cics.umass.edu/people/mahyar-narges> from University of Massachussets Amherst will be visiting DGP next week on Tuesday, November 26 for a talk and demos. She has done really cool work intersecting Data Vis, collaborative systems, interactive surfaces, urban design/planning, and civic engagement, which should be of interest to many of you. She's also a great person to chat about research, so I'd recommend you to sign up for a slot even if your ideas are still in early stages and you don't have much to show. Please send me a message if you would like to sign up for a demo/chat slot with Narges, with your availability; I should be able to accommodate slots in the morning (10-12) and in the afternoon (2-4). Thanks, Nicole

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[Tux] Reminder: Prof. Michel Beaudouin-Lafon today @ Autodesk!
by Shaza'a Fayyaz 19 Nov '19

19 Nov '19

Hello TUX! A reminder that today we have a Sanders Series Lecture by Prof. Michel Beaudouin at Autodesk. We look forward to seeing you there! Ali, Fraser, Daniel and Tovi Sanders Series Invited Lecture - Prof. Michel Beaudouin-Lafon: Towards Unified Principles of Interaction November 19, 2019. Autodesk-Research @ 661 University Avenue #200, Toronto, ON. Lunch reception begins at 12:30 pm. Presentation begins at 1:00 pm. Abstract Even though today’s computers are used for many different types of tasks, they still rely on user interfaces designed for office workers in the 1980s. HCI researchers have produced a slew of innovative interaction styles, from gestural interaction to mixed reality and tangible interfaces, but they have not replaced traditional GUIs. I argue that we must devise fundamental principles of interaction that unify, rather than separate, these interaction styles in order to support the diversity of uses and users. I describe ongoing work on my ERC advanced grant, ONE, which explores how the concepts of information substrates and interaction instruments can help us create digital environments that users can appropriate and (re)combine at will. Bio Michel Beaudouin-Lafon is Professor of Computer Science, Classe Exceptionnelle, at Université Paris-Sud and a senior fellow of Institut Universitaire de France. He has worked in human-computer interaction for over 30 years and is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy. His research interests include fundamental aspects of interaction, novel interaction techniques, computer-supported cooperative work and engineering of interactive systems. He has published over 180 papers and is an ACM Distinguished Speaker. He heads the 22M€ Digiscope project and is the laureate of an ERC Advanced Grant. Michel was director of LRI, the laboratory for computer science joint between Université Paris-Sud and CNRS and now heads the Human-Centered Computing lab at LRI. He is also chair of the department of Computer Science at Université Paris-Saclay (2400 faculty, staff and Ph.D. students). He founded AFIHM, the Francophone association for human-computer interaction and has been active in ACM and SIGCHI for over 20 years, including sitting on the editorial boards of ACM Books and ACM TOCHI, on the ACM Council and ACM Publications Board, as founder of ACM Europe and EUACM, and as vice-chair of the newly created ACM Technology Policy Council. He served as Technical Program Co-chair for CHI 2013 in Paris (3500 participants) and received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2015. OUR SPONSORS: TUX is made possible by the support of our sponsors, Steven Sanders, Autodesk, University of Toronto Department of Computer Science, and Chatham Labs.

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CHI reviews are coming today at 3 pm EST!
by Ishtiaque Ahmed 18 Nov '19

18 Nov '19

Folks, CHI reviews will be out today at 3 pm EST! Many of you who have written CHi paper this year, will receive the reviews, and we need some preparations for rebuttals. But before going there, first let me tell you that CHI, being the topmost HCI publication venue and being attended by thousands of people from all around the world, is a very uncertain place to hear back from. So, it is not unlikely that your good work may not get appreciated in the right way, and that never tells anything about the quality of your paper. So, do not get upset with the reviews - take them only as feedback. Now, after reading the reviews, we have the option to write a rebuttal to respond to the reviewers' concerns. We only do so if we believe there is a chance to get our paper accepted. In general, if the AC score is 3.0 or above, we write rebuttals, but in a few selected cases, it is not unlikely to write rebuttals for 2.5. We usually do not write rebuttals if the score is lower than that. Now, what is a rebuttal and what we write in it? Please read these two articles to know more about it: - https://sites.umiacs.umd.edu/elm/2016/11/19/writing-rebuttals/ - https://cs.stanford.edu/~merrie/merrie_rebuttal_tips.pdf From my own experience with CHI, in rebuttal, the authors basically provide answers/clarifications to any questions that the reviewers ask, and provide the concrete plan of how they will update the paper according to address the comments of the reviewers. For example, if a reviewer says, "the authors have not provided a concrete design guideline based on their analysis", we have to respond, "We will add two concrete design guidelines (X and Y) in the second paragraph of Discussion section, and to make space for it, we will remove Table Z." I have also accumulated some past sample rebuttals that were submitted and were successful. Please feel free to read and use them, but please do not share them beyond our circle: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IAGV8wBih7_3-8cPA18UzDgXxSRpCRIp Now, how will you prepare your rebuttal? Here are the steps: 1. Forward the review email to all the co-authors, and start a discussion thread. This thread will decide whether we will go for a rebuttal or not. 2. Open a Google document inside this folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Gde45MYD0R_65O8DKeiji_re2QUiGct2?us… Mention the link of this document in your email to your co-authors. 3. Copy-paste the reviews with the score in the document. 4. Make a table in which you list which reviewer asked for what, and how you are going to accommodate that. 5. Please note that the length of rebuttal cannot go beyond 5000 characters. So, you need to use very tight English to write a rebuttal. Check this document - a rebuttal document written by Sharifa for last CHI to see how she did that: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lxmca1W8eAQkBdDrmTBJmw6X8ySfqNKDVrM8wEH… Finally, I wish you all the best with your CHI reviews and I look forward to working with you with your rebuttals. Best Regards, Ishtiaque Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science University of Toronto, ON, CA Ph: +1 647 220 3482 Skype: syed.ishtiaque.ahmed web: https://www.ishtiaque.net/ My Availability: Google Calendar Link <https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ishtiaque.uoft%40gmail.com&c…>

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Microsoft Teams
by Ishtiaque Ahmed 18 Nov '19

18 Nov '19

Hi Folks, After some research, I have decided to pick Microsoft Teams as your group's online hub. All of you, by now, should have got an invitation from me to join there. I will appreciate if you can join there and post a message so that I know you are successfully added. Please let me know if you cannot join. You have to join using your uoft id if you are affiliated with UofT. For our members from outside, I have sent a separate invitation. Here are some reasons why I chose MT (Microsoft Teams): - I am overburdened with emails and want to cut a portion of it. - I want an easy way to share articles, links, etc. Sending an email for every article I find interesting is not so cool. - I could use Slack, but there are 100 other slack groups that added me, and I am ignoring them. I want to have a peaceful place just for us - Slack charges money for its full service. Thanks to UofT, MT is free for us. Also, there is technical support standby to help us. - I checked Facebook workspace, Google workplace, and some other options, but MT looks more professional, organized, and more importantly, free! Now, how are we going to use MT? We will use MT more casually for sharing anything to everything - serious to fun, foods to vacation, and sports to movies. Also, there will be dedicated channels for each project where the project members will talk and all the documents and information can be easily found there. Additionally, if you need to ping me in person (or I do), we will use the chatting option there. This will significantly reduce the burden over our email and we will have more fun. We will still keep using this email list - for any announcement, and for sharing attachments. I think, in the coming days, we will get a clearer picture of how we are using which platforms. MT has a mobile app for android and iPhone, which is a very nice way to keep track of everything. Best Regards, Ishtiaque Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science University of Toronto, ON, CA Ph: +1 647 220 3482 Skype: syed.ishtiaque.ahmed web: https://www.ishtiaque.net/ My Availability: Google Calendar Link <https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ishtiaque.uoft%40gmail.com&c…>

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[Tux] TUX: Prof. Michel Beaudouin-Lafon tomorrow @ Autodesk!
by Shaza'a Fayyaz 18 Nov '19

18 Nov '19

Hello TUX! A reminder that tomorrow we have a Sanders Series Lecture by Prof. Michel Beaudouin at Autodesk. We look forward to seeing you there! Ali, Fraser, Daniel and Tovi Sanders Series Invited Lecture - Prof. Michel Beaudouin-Lafon: Towards Unified Principles of Interaction November 19, 2019. Autodesk-Research @ 661 University Avenue #200, Toronto, ON. Lunch reception begins at 12:30 pm. Presentation begins at 1:00 pm. Abstract Even though today’s computers are used for many different types of tasks, they still rely on user interfaces designed for office workers in the 1980s. HCI researchers have produced a slew of innovative interaction styles, from gestural interaction to mixed reality and tangible interfaces, but they have not replaced traditional GUIs. I argue that we must devise fundamental principles of interaction that unify, rather than separate, these interaction styles in order to support the diversity of uses and users. I describe ongoing work on my ERC advanced grant, ONE, which explores how the concepts of information substrates and interaction instruments can help us create digital environments that users can appropriate and (re)combine at will. Bio Michel Beaudouin-Lafon is Professor of Computer Science, Classe Exceptionnelle, at Université Paris-Sud and a senior fellow of Institut Universitaire de France. He has worked in human-computer interaction for over 30 years and is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy. His research interests include fundamental aspects of interaction, novel interaction techniques, computer-supported cooperative work and engineering of interactive systems. He has published over 180 papers and is an ACM Distinguished Speaker. He heads the 22M€ Digiscope project and is the laureate of an ERC Advanced Grant. Michel was director of LRI, the laboratory for computer science joint between Université Paris-Sud and CNRS and now heads the Human-Centered Computing lab at LRI. He is also chair of the department of Computer Science at Université Paris-Saclay (2400 faculty, staff and Ph.D. students). He founded AFIHM, the Francophone association for human-computer interaction and has been active in ACM and SIGCHI for over 20 years, including sitting on the editorial boards of ACM Books and ACM TOCHI, on the ACM Council and ACM Publications Board, as founder of ACM Europe and EUACM, and as vice-chair of the newly created ACM Technology Policy Council. He served as Technical Program Co-chair for CHI 2013 in Paris (3500 participants) and received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2015. OUR SPONSORS: TUX is made possible by the support of our sponsors, Steven Sanders, Autodesk, University of Toronto Department of Computer Science, and Chatham Labs.

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Thirdspace November 2019