Monthly Archives: April 2015

Informatics Ph.D. student receives Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship

April 28, 2015

photo: Katherine LoInformatics Ph.D. student Katherine Lo has received the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship supports women in technology with a $10,000 financial award for the academic year as well as an invitation to the annual Google Scholars’ Retreat, which offers unique professional development and community outreach opportunities, at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. In addition to her Ph.D. studies, Lo is an adviser to the student organization Women in Information and Computer Sciences (WICS) at UC Irvine. She has previously received an honorable mention from the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).

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NMSU Roundup: “Video game labor yields economic value” (Nardi quoted)

April 24, 2015

A visiting professor of anthropology to New Mexico State University gave a presentation on April 17 about the economic benefits that video game developers get from the free labor of their players.

Bonnie Nardi is an anthropologist in the School of Information and Computer Science at University of California – Irvine. Nardi started studying “World of Warcraft” almost 10 years ago when some of the undergraduates she was teaching started talking about such games as “WoW” and “EverQuest.”

Read the full story on NSMU’s The Roundup website.

Professor Olson Recognized by Google Co-founder

April 21, 2015

photo: Judith OlsonInformatics Professor Judith Olson has won many accolades and been widely published over the years, but it’s not often that you are recognized by the likes of Google Co-founder and CEO Larry Page. In a book recently released titled The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, Page acknowledges the impact Olson had on him as a student: “The college course that made the greatest impression on me was one on human-computer interaction taught by Judith Olson. The goal was to understand how to design interfaces that were easy and intuitive.”

BBC: “A generation of cyberslackers” (Mark quoted)

April 9, 2015

Some experts question whether millennials are truly committed to changing their ways.

When Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, in the US, told her students to track their use of technology for a couple of weeks, most were startled to see how much time they spent on the Internet. They reported that they’d like to improve their attention spans, but ironically, they wanted to use technology to help them limit their technology use.

“They aren’t willing to change intrinsically, but instead want an extrinsic means to do it,” such as an app that temporarily blocks access to email or social media sites, Mark said.

Read the full story on the BBC website.

ICS graduate students receive prestigious NSF fellowship

April 6, 2015

Three graduate students from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) have just received the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP). Informatics students Oliver Haimson and Van Erick Custodio and statistics student Maricela Cruz join 2,000 students nationwide to be awarded the fellowship in 2015. Informatics student Katherine Lo also received an honorable mention in the highly competitive program. Haimson, Custodio and Cruz contribute to UC Irvine’s 35 total awardees in 2015, while Lo joins an additional 37 honorable mentions across campus.

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