in ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice Bill Tomlinson and I published a paper in the ACM journal Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice (DLT) “a peer-reviewed journal that seeks to publish high-quality, interdisciplinary research on the research and development, real-world deployment, and evaluation of distributed ledger technologies, such as blockchain, cryptocurrency, and smart contract.”…
Bill Tomlinson, Rebecca Black, Andrew Torrance, and I wrote a paper that was accepted to Springer Nature Journal, Scientific Reports, in which we compare the carbon emissions between AI systems and humans. What did we find? We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of AI, including potential job displacement and legal issues, while highlighting the lower…
Bill Tomlinson, Andrew Torrance, and I wrote a paper that was accepted to the San Diego Law Review, about how academic articles can be written to influence future training of LLMs. The paper itself uses the technique to prove it’s point. (pre-print available at the bottom) What do we mean “manipulate the training process of…
Bill Tomlinson, Andrew Torrance, Rebecca Black and I wrote a paper that was accepted to the UMKC law review, a top 10% academic law review journal about what the future of academic publishing might look like if LLMs like ChatGPT were embraced as an academic publishing tool. What does the future of academic publishing with…
“Proof-by-Location” published in iGETblockchain Bill Tomlinson and I published a paper in 2022 IEEE 1st Global Emerging Technology Blockchain Forum: Blockchain & Beyond (iGETblockchain) This was a first of its kind forum and was presented in a very well-organized virtual conference format. We joined a number of other scholars to discuss globally focussed blockchain work, such…
A long stretch of research and writing with a great group of colleagues, Bill Tomlinson, Jens Boberg, Jocelyn Cranefield, David Johnstone, Markus Luczak-Roesch, Shreya Kapoor and myself has finally resulted in the publication of a new article article titled “Analyzing the Sustainability of 28 ‘Blockchain for Good’ Projects via Affordances and Constraints.” It has been…
Last night I had the opportunity to join several local entrepreneurs and non-profit leaders to talk about how AI is impacting non-profit fundraising. I don’t know very much about fundraising myself, but Westmont is developing a pretty robust machine learning infrastructure to help guide the campus fundraising efforts. I had something to say about machine…
In my job as a professor I am often in conversations with people about the value of a college education and how different institutions articulate that value. Over time I’ve come up with a response to the question “What is college selling?” and I decided to write it up into a Medium post. It’s kind…
“Computing within Limits” published in the Communications of the ACM A great group of colleagues, Bonnie Nardi, Bill Tomlinson, Jay Chen, Daniel Pargman, Barath Raghavan, Birgit Penzenstadler and I just received word that an article titled “Computing within Limits” has been published in the Communications of the ACM. This article summarizes the state of the art within…
I recently collaborated on an article with Chris Kornelis of the Wall Street Journal about cryptojacking. This is the (generally) illegal practice of taking over someone’s computer to mine cryptocurrency. Anatomy of a Cryptojacking:(WSJ,local copy)
I wrote a Medium article in which I obsessively collected instances of 3-word taglines in the wild. It is some kind of a thing that I’m not sure that people realize is going on. Once you see my collection you will spot them EVERYWHERE. I’m not sure what is in the marketing water that has…
Professor Patterson and colleagues have received a grant from the NIH to develop machine learning techniques that can detect Cerebral Palsy in premature newborns.
The national conversation about transgender individuals that peaked for a time toward the end of Obama’s presidency caused a number of institutions to change their bathroom signage. I found this interesting since this was the dominant exposure and focal point that most people had with the issues. Human-computer interaction spends a lot of time thinking…
The Computer Science Academy The Santa Barbara High School has a Computer Science Academy within it. This is a program that is currently run by Richard Johnston and enables students to be in a multi-year course sequence to develop computing skills. One of my kids participates in it and I was invited to come down…
The third ACM LIMITS workshop wrapped up recently. It was held June 22, 23 and 24th at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA and followed on from two previous events held at UC Irvine (see 2016, and 2015, 2015) It featured local researchers from Westmont College and University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) as well as international guests…
The Westmont Mosher Center for Moral and Ethical Leadership is organizing a conference on May 31-June 2 called “Lead Where You Stand“. It’s a three day conference that “will offer key insights into an enduring challenge: How do we develop the capacity to respond in timely, principled ways to the multifaceted challenges and opportunities of effective…
Conversation about Big Data and Surveillance at the University Club of Santa Barbara I’m honored to be invited to speak at the University Club of Santa Barbara on April 13th, 2017 at 5:30pm to give a talk about “Big Data”. The talk is sponsored by Westmont College and is part of their “Westmont Downtown: Conversations about…
The Westmont Inspired Computing Lab just got a “seed” grant to launch a greenhouse powered by Artificial Intelligence! Our plan is to see if a machine learning algorithm with access to sensor data can beat a human at growing food in drought conditions. This work is inspired by a paper that I coauthored with colleagues about…
“Teaching Global Disruption and Information Technology Online” accepted for publication in Interactions magazine As a part of a special issue on Sustainable HCI Education in Interactions magazine, Bill Tomlinson, Bonnie Nardi and myself, elaborated on an online course that we taught about Global Disruption and Information Technology. This article was part of an ongoing conversation with…
Special Issue on Sustainable HCI Education published in IX (interactions) magazine Recently Bonnie Nardi, Bill Tomlinson and I were invited to curate a special issue of Interactions magazine that focussed on teaching sustainable HCI. Interactions will often have a series of articles on a topical theme within a given publication and this month we put…
“A Report from an Online Course on Global Disruption and Information Technology” accepted for publication in LIMITS 2016 Bill Tomlinson, Bonnie Nardi and I piloted an online undergraduate course with UC Irvine centered on the idea of “Global Disruption and Information Technology.” We wanted to give students a framework to think about climate change, peak…
“Computational Agroecology” published in alt.chi A team of people that I’m working with, led by Barath Raghavan, just had a paper accepted to alt.chi 2016! This is a portion of the CHI conference that is devoted to “controversial, risk-taking, and boundary pushing presentations at CHI”. The focus of the paper is to argue for the increased…
video link Patent Published! It’s been a long time coming, but we finally had our patent formally published by the USPTO. Google has it listed under two numbers for some reason, US 9232912 B2 and US 20140066780 A1. The basic idea that we demonstrated was that if one appropriately monitors preterm babies then one can identify those that…
Tonight’s Event on Limits This evening I’ll be participating in a public discussion at the Newkirk Center for Science and Society on “Computing with Limits”. The title of my talk is “Haiti’s Grid Isn’t Smart, It’s Futuristic”. My main point is that the 2010 earthquake in Haiti created conditions in Haiti that are illuminating for…
I’m very excited to announce that my colleagues and I had a paper accepted to ACM DEV 2015, “a premier venue to present original and innovative work on the applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computing in developing regions.” We used the paper to put forward a vision of resilient local infrastructures that are coordinated via software…
On opinion piece I wrote at the start of the school year for the Westmont College student paper about the implications of the data breach at the dating site for married people, AshleyMadison.com In our increasingly digitized world there is very little that can be kept hidden anymore. As the Internet of things pursues the…
This is one of two workshop papers that received a promotion to journal publications as part of this special issue of First Monday: This month: August 2015 Special issue: LIMITS 2015 — First workshop on computing within limits Today’s society is increasingly dependent upon and enmeshed with computing and technology. In parallel with advancements in computing, we have…
This is one of two workshop papers that received a promotion to journal publications as part of this special issue of First Monday: This month: August 2015 Special issue: LIMITS 2015 — First workshop on computing within limits Today’s society is increasingly dependent upon and enmeshed with computing and technology. In parallel with advancements in computing, we have…
Prof. Bill Maurer and I are teaching a second version of the online class called “From Barter to Bitcoin: Society, Tech and Future Money” during UC Irvine’s Summer Session 2015. We’ve got some great new interviews lined up for this time around and are updating the class with lots of new information on Silk Road and…
In 2010 Haiti experienced a catastrophic earthquake that destroyed a substantial amount of infrastructure in the capital of Port-au- Prince. Limited national resources and widespread poverty have made the rebuilding slow and piecemeal. Five years later that infrastructure is still unevenly repaired and maintained. Nevertheless, the Haitian people have, by necessity, continued to adapt in…
The proliferation of sensors in the world has created increased opportunities for context-aware applications. However, it is often cumbersome to capitalize on these opportunities due to the difficulties inherent in collecting, fusing, and reasoning with data from a heterogeneous set of distributed sensors. The fabric that connects sensors lacks resilience and fault tolerance in the…
Dr. William Karnes and I are working on deploying a colonoscopy quality measure application for use in endoscopic suites. We announced the effort today at the UCI Health 2015 Gastroenterology & Hepatology Symposium. It is a data entry tool that should be useful to endoscopists who are trying to monitor their performance at reducing colon cancer. I am excited to be…
First Patent Published! This is the first patent that I successfully saw through the entire patent pipeline process. It is for: A system and method for measuring movements, utilizing one or more wireless accelerometers attached to one or more limbs of a human subject for the purpose of determining certain temporal and spatial gestures of the…
I just got back from a trip to Haiti that I took with a diverse group of people from my church. While there I was working with Haitian kids, schools and churches and studying intermittent infrastructures. I produced a series of videos that describe the infrastructure hacks that I saw while I was there. I’m…
This $398,838 “CyberSEES: Type 1: Fostering Non-Expert Creation of Sustainable Polycultures through Crowdsourced Data Synthesis” grant was awarded by the Div. of Computing and Communications Foundations of the National Science Foundation. The official record of the award can be found here. Food Forests This project integrates research in computing and sustainability science with the goal…
Prof. Bill Tomlinson, Prof. Bonnie Nardi and I, along with TA support from Marcel Pufal and Aubrey Slaughter are teaching a class on Global Disruption and Information Technology. We are thinking through issues of peak energy and considering how we might use technology to ease us into the long descent. It’s an online course and…
Keeping up with our family’s use of digital technology is a lot like a trip to the beach. On most days, the ocean doesn’t pose too much of a danger to our four kids. They stay together, they have survived a few seasons of swim team and they already have a healthy fear of the…
Research is often inspired by visions of the future. These visions can take on various narrative forms, and can fall anywhere along the spectrum from utopian to dystopian. Even though we recognize the importance of such visions to help us shape research questions and inspire rich design spaces to be explored, the opportunity to…
I was recently asked to describe my philosophy of a Christian liberal arts education. Education is important to my family and I, and it was a good exercise for me to explicitly link education to my faith. Therefore, a liberal arts education is the imbuing of knowledge, the development of skills for the synthesis and…
Here is a short essay on my view about how my faith impacts the study of computer science. This is something that I think is important, but is also something that is in flux in my life. “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I…
Prof. Bill Maurer and I taught a class called “From Barter to Bitcoin: Society, Tech and Future Money” during UC Irvine’s Summer Session 2014. It was really a blast to do and I enjoyed getting to dig into the bitcoin state of the art. It’s an online course and we have a batch of videos that…
This paper presents a curated collection of fictional abstracts for papers that could appear in the proceedings of the 2039 CHI Conference. It provides an opportunity to consider the various visions guiding work in HCI, the futures toward which we (believe we) are working, and how research in the field might relate with broader social,…
Steve Voida, Shwetak Patel and I collaborated to write this chapter in Ways of Knowing in HCI by Judy Olson and Wendy Kellog. It talks about how to use sensor streams to do HCI research. (local copy). C.V.: BCN-2
Gas sensors have the potential to assist cooking by providing feedback on the cooking process and by further automating cooking. In this work, we explored the potential use of gas sensors to monitor food during the cooking process. Focusing on dry cooking, we collected gas emissions using 13 sensors during trials in which food was…
What happens if efforts to achieve sustainability fail? Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent…
In urban environments great effort is directed toward alleviating traffic including the design and implementation of complex software and hardware infrastructure. We introduce the idea of an auction-based mechanism for resolving vehicle intersections using a multi-way group auction mechanism. We propose a supporting infrastructure that has promise for increasing performance and responsiveness to dynamic traffic…
This article in Interactions was intended to be an introduction to the idea of Collapse Informatics that was elaborated in other publications in more depth. In a recent NSF-funded National Academies symposium on Science, Innovation, and Partnerships for Sustainability Solutions, there was a great deal of discussion about global change. To offer a few concrete…
We present an extensive three year study on economically annotating video with crowdsourced marketplaces. Our public framework has annotated thousands of real world videos, including massive data sets unprecedented for their size, complexity, and cost. To accomplish this, we designed a state-of-the-art video annotation user interface and demonstrate that, despite common intuition, many contemporary interfaces…
In this paper we demonstrate a Markov model based technique for recognizing gestures from accelerometers that explicitly represents duration. We do this by embedding an Erlang-Cox state transition model, which has been shown to accurately represent the first three moments of a general distribution, within a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN). The transition probabilities in the…
There is emerging data that patterns of motor activity early in neonatal life can predict impairments in neuromotor development. However, current techniques to monitor infant movement mainly rely on observer scoring, a technique limited by skill, fatigue, and inter-rater reliability. Consequently, we tested the use of a lightweight, wireless, accelerometer system that measures movement and…
Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent collapse is far from certain, it is prudent…
Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that…
I had the pleasure of chairing the technical program for Ubicomp. Here is a link to the proceedings:http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2030112 C.V.: CPR-2
In the human–computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, and ubiquitous computing literature, making people’s presence and activities visible as a design approach has been extensively explored to enhance computer-mediated interactions and collaborations. This process has developed under the rubrics of “awareness,” “social translucence,” “social activity indicators,” “social navigation,” etc. Although the name and details vary,…
In this paper we describe a system that leverages accelerometers to recognize a particular involuntary gesture in babies that have been born preterm. These gestures, known as cramped-synchronized general movements are highly correlated with a diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy. In order to test our system we recorded data from 10 babies admitted to the newborn…
Accurately annotating entities in video is labor intensive and expensive. As the quantity of online video grows, traditional solutions to this task are unable to scale to meet the needs of researchers with limited budgets. Current practice provides a temporary solution by paying dedicated workers to label a fraction of the total frames and otherwise…
In this paper, we present the results of a two-month field study of fifteen people using a software tool designed to model changes in a user’s availability. The software uses status update messages, as well as sensors, to detect changes in context. When changes are identified using the Kullback-Leibler Divergence metric, users are prompted to…
This paper reports on the requirements for, design of, and preliminary evaluation of a novel pervasive healthcare system for supporting the care of premature infants as they transition from hospital to home. In support of this system, we report the results of gesture sensing in a clinical setting and of interviews and focus groups with…
In this paper we describe the use of collaborative filtering to make predictions about place using data from custom instant messaging status. Previous research has shown accurate predictions can be made from an individual’s personal data. The work in this paper demonstrates that community data can be used to make predictions in locations that are…
To better coordinate information displays with moving people and the environment, software must know the locations and three dimensional alignments of the display hardware. In this paper we describe a technique for creating such an enhanced topological map of networked public displays using a mobile phone. The result supports a richer user experience, without the…
The Nomatic prototype system and communications ecosystem automatically infers users’ place, activity, and availability from sensors on their handheld devices or laptop computers and then reports this information to their instant-messaging contacts. ( local copy ) Published in IEEE Pervasive Computing C.V.: JR-05
The use of personal status messages is becoming a part of popular culture through wide-spread instant messaging (IM) adoption, the growth of social networking websites and the increased connectivity provided by mobile phones. However, the implications of status broadcasting and people’s behavior in the milieu of social life is still poorly understood. In this paper,…
This was a short editorial for the online tech news blogs ZDNet: There is no way that managers and their subordinates see eye to eye on social networking in the workplace. Why should they? To employers and employees alike, most social networking sites are about entertainment. Tweeting about Gail’s birthday party decorations is only in…
This paper describes an approach for creating detailed full coverage labelings of human activity. Our goal is to create global maps of physical positions labelled with a distribution over the most likely place name and most likely activity. We ground our ontology of labels as: the term that a person would want to display to…
The process of designing technological systems for the developing world is a challenging task. In a project that we undertook in the summer of 2007 using an iterative design process, we attempted to develop delay-tolerant networking technology on mobile phones to support workers at AIDS orphanages in Zambia and South Africa. Despite extensive preparations and…
< In this paper we report on the results of a large scale user survey investigating the status setting and interruption management behavior of mobile instant messaging (IM) users with existing systems. The motivation for this study was to inform the design of interface tools that support users by setting contextually appropriate awareness messages. Our…
Interventions to support children with cognitive and social developmental disabilities often include visual elements. Use of visual artifacts has been shown to increase the communication and understanding levels of children with disabilities. We describe a research agenda for expanding these capabilities using interactive, collaborative and intelligent systems. ( permanent, local copy ) Published in Interactive Design for…
I had the pleasure of chairing the technical program for Pervasive. Here is a link to the proceedings:http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1532200&picked=prox C.V.: CPR-1
Computer Science, as a single discipline, can no longer speak to the broad relevance of digital technologies in society. The Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, serves as the institutional home for research on relationships between technological, organizational, and social aspects of…
We describe the design of the NomaticBubbles, a visualization that provides cues of communal whereabouts. Unlike most location displays showing whereabouts on a geographical map, the NomaticBubbles depicts historical and aggregate traces of participants’ whereabouts in an abstract and ambiguous manner. We describe the design of the NomaticBubbles, and discuss some early experiences and feedback…
This $449,765 “HCC: Computing Place Context” grant was awarded by the Div. of Information and Intelligent Systems of the National Science Foundation. The official record of the award can be found here. A New Approach to Discovering Interruptibility This is a project to develop a new approach to interruptibility and related issues in instant messaging…
quub was a start-up that I worked on with several folks, including George Ruan and Nathan Esquenazi. quub was a commercialization of Nomatic*IM. Basically it was supposed to be automatic status updates that your computer would generate for you based on what it could detect about you from sensors. The ideal case would be to…
Intelligent assistants that support human communication need to respect the difficulty of understanding the context surrounding the interchange. Rather than attempting to directly communicate for a user, intelligent assistants should support decision making on the part of the involved parties so that complex social negotiations are preserved. We describe an intelligent assistant that does this…
In this article we discuss an assisted cognition information technology system that can learn personal maps customized for each user and infer his daily activities and movements from raw GPS data. The system uses discriminative and generative models for different parts of this task. A discriminative relational Markov network is used to extract significant places…
This paper introduces a hierarchical Markov model that can learn and infer a user’s daily movements through an urban community. The model uses multiple levels of abstraction in order to bridge the gap between raw GPS sensor measurements and high level information such as a user’s destination and mode of transportation. To achieve efficient inference,…
Henry Kautz, Dieter Fox, Lin Liao and I collaborated to write this chapter in Pervasive Computing in Healthcare by Alex Mihailidis, Jakob E. Bardram. It talks about how we used artificial intelligence to see when people made transportation errors associated with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease (local copy). C.V.: BCN-1
In this paper we present a social and technical architecture which will enable the study of localization from the perspective of crowds. Our research agenda is to leverage new computing opportunities that arise when many people are simultaneously localizing themselves. By aggregating this and other types of context information we intend to develop a statistically…
In this paper we present results related to achieving fine grained activity recognition for context-aware computing applications. We examine the advantages and challenges of reasoning with globally unique object instances detected by an RFID glove. We present a sequence of increasingly powerful probabilistic graphical models for activity recognition. We show the advantages of adding additional…
We present an automated transportation routing system, called “Opportunity Knocks,” whose goal is to improve the efficiency, safety and independence of individuals with mild cognitive disabilities. Our system is implemented on a combination of a Bluetooth sensor beacon that broadcasts GPS data, a GPRS-enabled cell-phone, and remote activity inference software. The system uses a novel…
In this paper we discuss a system that can learn personal maps customized for each user and infer his daily activities and movements from raw GPS data. The system uses discriminative and generative models for different parts of this task. A discriminative relational Markov network is used to extract significant places and label them; a…
This is my thesis, the focus of which was on “Assisted Cognition”. It was the result of close work with my advisors Henry Kautz and Dieter Fox at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department (now a school). I am also very grateful to support from Gaetano Borriello and Ed Lazowska in getting me…
Many recent studies have underscored the applicability to healthcare of a system able to observe and understand day-to-day human activities. The Guide project is aimed at building just such a system. The project combines novel sensing technology, expressive but scalable learners and unsupervised mining of activity models from the web to address the problem. An…
One the best qualitative and quantitative tools that elder–care specialists have to monitor the health of elderly individuals is Activity of Daily Living (ADL) tracking [1,2]. By watching the frequency and competency with which an individual can cook, clean the house, engage in socializing, etc, short– and long– term changes in health can be identified.…
Elevated serum phosphate levels have been linked with vascular calcification and mortality among dialysis patients. The relationship between phosphate and mortality has not been explored among patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). A retrospective cohort study was conducted from eight Veterans Affairs’ Medical Centers located in the Pacific Northwest. CKD was defined by two continuously…
Recognizing and recording activities of daily living is a significant problem in elder care. A new paradigm for ADL inferencing leverages radio-frequency-identification technology, data mining, and a probabilistic inference engine to recognize ADLs, based on the objects people use. ( local copy ) Published in IEEE Pervasive Computing C.V.: JR-01
The ability to determine what day-to-day activity (such as cooking pasta, taking a pill, or watching a video) a person is performing is of interest in many application domains. A system that can do this requires models of the activities of interest, but model construction does not scale well: humans must specify low-level details, such…
The modern knowledge worker has become very adept at working with desktop computers through familiar user interface devices such as keyboards, mice and screens. This interaction has relied on human adaptation for people to enter into the digital world by learning to type, double-click, etc. This paradigm has been sufficient to assist people in an…
We present a method of learning a Bayesian model of a traveler moving through an urban environment. This technique is novel in that it simultaneously learns a unified model of the traveler’s current mode of transportation as well as his most likely route, in an unsupervised manner. The model is implemented using particle filters and…
This paper presents an overview of the research on learning statistical models from relational data being carried out at the University of Washington. Our work falls into five main directions: learning models of social networks; learning models of sequential relational processes; scaling up statistical relational learning to massive data sources; learning for knowledge integration;…
Assisted Cognition systems provide active cognitive aids for people with reduced memory and problem-solving abilities due to Alzheimer’s Disease or other disorders. Two concrete examples of the Assisted Cognition systems we are developing are an ACTIVITY COMPASS that helps reduce spatial disorientation both inside and outside the home, and an ADL PROMPTER that helps patients…
In this paper, we introduce the Activity Compass, a cognitive aid for early-stage Alzheimer’s patients. This device has a simple user interface based on the metaphor of a traditional navigation compass. By following an arrow and an icon, users who are disoriented or forgetful are assisted in reaching their destination. A server-based AI engine learns…
Accurate splice site prediction is a critical component of any computational approach to gene prediction in higher organisms. Existing approaches generally use sequence-based models that capture local dependencies among nucleotides in a small window around the splice site. We present evidence that computationally predicted secondary structure of moderate length pre-mRNA subsequences contains information that can…
Stochastic search algorithms have proven to be very fast at solving many satisfiability problems [2,3,8]. The nature of their search requires careful parameter tuning to maximize performance, but depending on the problem and the details of the stochastic algorithm, the correct tuning may be difficult to ascertain [9]. In this paper we introduce Auto-Walksat, a…