Hello all,
Prof. Narges Mahyar's talk will take place today in 1h, in the seminar room. Please see details below.
Nicole
---------- Forwarded message --------- De: Nicole Sultanum nicolebs@dgp.toronto.edu Date: sex., 22 de nov. de 2019 às 13:20 Subject: Talk by Narges Mahyar (UMass Amherst) Tuesday Nov 26, 11am, DGP Seminar room To: hci@dgp.toronto.edu
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:
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*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