Monthly Archives: April 2018

Professor Crista Lopes Recognized for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

April 27, 2018

At UCI’s 25th Annual Celebration of Teaching, held on April 26, Informatics Professor Crista Lopes was one of 13 UCI professors to be recognized as a Dean’s Honoree for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Upon learning she had received the award, Lopes, who joined the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) in 2002, says she was “honored and surprised.”

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VRcade Exposes Students to Virtual Reality Trends, Challenges and Opportunities

April 26, 2018

Students had fun stepping into virtual worlds at UCI’s first VRcade event, hosted by the Virtual Reality Development Club (VRDC) in collaboration with UCI Esports. VRDC president Edward Lok says the event, held on April 23 at the Esports Arena, was a “great success,” with approximately 50 people attending throughout the night. “Many students got the chance to try VR for the first time and were completely blown away by it.”

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Forbes: “Four Ways To Maximize Workplace Productivity By Checking Your Technology Use” (Gloria Mark research cited)

Today’s technology landscape is stippled with countless innovations designed to increase productivity, both in and outside of the workplace. … A recent UC Irvine study found that it takes 23 minutes on average to return to a task after an interruption. Though it may sound counterintuitive, email is the biggest interruption in day-to-day corporate life.

Read the full article at Forbes.

Luminaries from the Game Industry Take Over Classes as Guest Lecturers

April 25, 2018

“Thrilled to have @ThePouncer guest lecture on the trust framework he presented at GDC this year,” recently tweeted Informatics Professor Kurt Squire. “Students loved it.”

In case you’re wondering, “ThePouncer” is Aaron Cammarata, technical project lead at Google Advanced Technology and Products (ATAP). He is a game designer with more than 16 years of industry experience, including as founder of voidALPHA, a full-service game studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yet Cammarata wasn’t the only luminary to recently visit UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science (ICS).

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Students Present Blueprints for New AR/VR Theater Experiences

April 24, 2018

The end of the winter quarter represented merely the halfway point for students enrolled in Informatics 295/190: AR/VR Theater, the two-quarter course taught by Informatics Professor Theresa Jean Tanenbaum in collaboration with Broadway/film producer Tim Kashani. As noted in an earlier article, the experimental class aims to develop three augmented and virtual reality theater projects in collaboration with Apples & Oranges Arts, a nonprofit organization founded by Kashani and his wife, Broadway actress Pamela Kashani.

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Senior Spotlight: Matthew Ardeleanu Exemplifies Perseverance on Road to Success

April 23, 2018


When Matthew Ardeleanu first started at UCI, the aspiring radiologist with an interest in computer science thought he was invincible. Half-way through his college career, while working 30 hours a week, he learned that wasn’t the case. Juggling school and work proved more challenging than expected, but now, after mastering time management and overcoming academic disqualification, he is graduating this summer with a B.S. in health informatics and plans for continued success.

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Researchers from the Department of Informatics Explore Sustainable Food Systems

April 20, 2018

When you think of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), farming might not be the first thing that comes to mind. Yet research being conducted in the Department of Informatics is advancing the use of technology for sustainable agriculture.

sustainable food system “brings farmers closer to consumers by producing fruits and vegetables, or raising livestock or fish closer to the places they are sold.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “a move towards sustainable food has become an important component of public and environment health.”

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Professor Gloria Mark on Team Receiving $8 Million in IARPA Funding to Study Workplace Performance

April 17, 2018

Informatics Professor Gloria Mark is co-lead with Notre Dame Professor Aaron Striegel on a study that aims to predict workplace performance using mobile sensors. Mark and Striegel have teamed up with researchers from seven other universities to work on Project Tesserae, a 21-month study of 750 professionals working in cognitively demanding positions. The team has received $8 million in funding from Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).

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Senior Spotlight: Celine Deleon ’18 Is a Source of Inspiration for Girls Studying Technology

April 16, 2018

From serving as a resident advisor for UCI’s Middle Earth Housing and volunteering to teach high school girls how to code, to studying at the University of Manchester and acting as a study-abroad peer mentor, Celine Deleon has made the most of her college experience. The informatics senior is now ready to graduate this spring and already has a user experience job lined up at Disney. For someone who decided back in high school that she wanted to inspire women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, Deleon is off to a great start.

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The Atlantic: “The Bargain at the Heart of the Kid Internet” (Mimi Ito quoted)

April 12, 2018

“There’s huge incentives for [kids] and families to lie about age”—as in, confirming that kids are 13 or older when they’re not—“so even the data [about users that companies keep] gets corrupted,” Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Irvine, told me. Kids (and parents) want engaging, cheap, or free videos regardless of how old they are ….

Read the full story at The Atlantic.