Faculty

Transformative Live-Action Role-Playing

Live-action role-playing (larp) combines face-to-face improvisation with game rules to create collaborative, playful narrative experiences for the participants. While many larps are created purely for entertainment, a growing number of larps strive to affect players. These larps include educational larps, larps for mental or physical health, larps for social change, larps that convey political points of view, and larps that ask players to explore ethical or moral quandaries.

Technology-Enabled Role-Playing in Design

College professors frequently use role-playing in class as a way to engage their students and enhance the learning experience. However, role-playing often creates an unbalanced classroom, where the majority of students are observing and only a few actors are “engaged.” This project investigates using technology to engage all students during classroom role-play. In particular, we want to explore social media platforms such as Twitter, which have been shown to enhance classroom engagement.

Supporting Opportunistic Groups

This project is focused on tools, techniques and applications that support the opportunistic grouping of devices and/or users. This includes support for coordination in real-time with prior knowledge of how to coordinate, techniques for identifying that devices or people are experiencing the same situation, and issues of privacy.

Supporting Newcomer Socialization in Online Production Communities

Online production communities are becoming increasingly important, because they are creating the software that drives the Internet, generating valuable scientific data and building history’s largest encyclopedia. In the face of inevitable turnover, every online community must incorporate successive generations of newcomers to survive. Newcomers are a source of content, labor, new ideas, and an audience.

Social Ideation Systems

This project investigates how social computing systems can optimize real-time creative collaboration, whether in teams or with crowds. We are actively developing a web-based social computing system for brainstorming that facilitates managing the interactions of brainstormers with each other so that the solution space is explored with the right combination of breadth and depth.

Social Cybersecurity

Our research into the human factors of cybersecurity focuses on people as social actors whose security behaviors are influenced by their relationships, communities and life situations.

Sensor Data Mining and Wearable UI/UX

Our research in sensors and machine learning techniques seeks to improve HCI experience by developing objective and near real-time methods for recognizing end-users’ behavioral patterns and in-situ contexts. For this, we utilize a range of sensor devices (e.g., eye trackers, ECG-enabled armband, GSR fingertip sensors, wireless EEG headset and HR monitor) to identify patterns in perceptual and cognitive activities between individuals at different levels of task-complexity.

Seniors and Quality of Life Technology

We address quality of life issues for seniors who have difficulty interacting with virtual information spaces. We lead projects to improve safe driving through Human-Vehicle Interaction (HVI) techniques. These projects are designed to help seniors maintain independence in mobility.

Scaffolding Science Achievement in a Culturally Diverse Classroom

In this project, we aim to address the systematically-reduced standardized test scores of African American students compared to their Euro-American peers by using virtual peer technology to understand the role of dialect, and more broadly, cultural congruence, on students's performance, and to help students achieve in the classroom.

PrivacyGrade

Many people are surprised to learn how much data smartphone apps are collecting about them. PrivacyGrade is a website we are creating that presents the results of our privacy analysis of several hundred thousand Android apps. We combine static analysis techniques with crowdsourcing to understand people's concerns over certain behaviors, such as using location data for advertising, or using contact lists for social networking.

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