Monthly Archives: November 2019

Professor James Jones Receives ASE 2019’s Most Influential Paper Award

November 25, 2019

Associate Professor of Informatics James Jones recently received the Most Influential Paper award at the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2019). The award recognizes the most influential ASE paper for the past 15 years, and this year’s committee selected “Empirical Evaluation of the Tarantula Automatic Fault-Localization Technique,” by Jones and the late Mary Jean Harrold. Written in 2005, it is the most cited paper of all time for the ASE conference, and according to Google Scholar, it has more than 1,000 citations.

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How Do You Like It So Far?: “Digital Diversity with Craig Watkins, Mimi Ito and Katie Salen”

November 21, 2019

We’ve got a treat in store for you this week, How Do You Like it So Far? fans! We begin a two-part series from the 2019 Connected Learning Summit which took place at the University of California, Irvine from October 3-5. This first installment is a panel with Henry, S.Craig Watkins, a Professor at the University of Texas, Austin, Mizuko Ito, the Director of the Connected Learning Lab, and Katie Salen, a Professor at the University of California, Irvine, for a discussion about digital youth in the talk, “Digital Diversity: How Social, Cultural and Real Life Circumstances Shape Youth Digital Media Practices.” Listen in as Watkins, Ito and Salen discuss topics concerning digital youth and how the digital learning space has evolved for the new generation.

Listen to the episode at the How Do You Like It So Far? podcast.

Developing a Data Analytics Course for Low-Income High Schools

November 20, 2019

A new class offering at select high schools in San Jose, Philadelphia and Cleveland is exposing low-income students to data analytics, preparing them to leverage future career opportunities stemming from advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The new curriculum was made possible with a grant from Deloitte Foundation, which supports education through a variety of initiatives that help develop the talent of the future and promote excellence in teaching, research and curriculum innovation, and Base 11, a nonprofit focused on engaging students from low-resource communities with STEM education, and was developed in consultation with UC Irvine. The award was made to UCI to develop a high school data analytics course targeting the needs of low-income students and involved a partnership between UCI’s Office of Access and Inclusion (OAI) for the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) and the Samueli School of Engineering

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Ph.D. Candidate Reyhaneh Jabbarvand Selected as “Rising Star”

November 15, 2019

Informatics Ph.D. candidate Reyhaneh Jabbarvand recently attended the 2019 Rising Stars in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Workshop at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Since the workshop was first launched at MIT in 2012, women graduate students and postdocs interested in pursuing academic careers in computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering have been invited to attend the intensive workshop, held at various institutions annually. This year, Jabbarvand was one of 90 women invited to the event, making her part of the largest class of participants to date.

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Fast Company: “People are building technology that could survive the apocalypse” (Bill Tomlinson quoted)

November 8, 2019

If computing resources become more scarce and networks fracture, even deciding what information to store could become an important question, potentially leading to scenarios such as communities dividing up pieces of resources like Wikipedia to try to preserve it across computers, says Bill Tomlinson, a professor and vice chair of the Department of Informatics at the University of California at Irvine.

Read the full story at Fast Company.

Healthline: “People Are Getting Their STDs Diagnosed on Reddit” (Sean Young quoted)

November 7, 2019

There’s also a lot of information missing from the Reddit posts that could help health officials understand what’s going on. “Like many social media studies, this study didn’t provide info on the location of the people posting about sexually transmitted infections (STIs) on Reddit, whether they were being honest or if it was a hoax, how their actual STI risk compares to those not using Reddit, etc.,” said Sean Young, PhD, executive director of the UC Institute for Prediction Technology and a professor in the departments of informatics and emergency medicine at UC Irvine.

Read the full story at Healthline.

Student Spotlight: Veteran Chauncy Sapien Hopes to Create Software to Support the U.S. Military

November 4, 2019

Chauncy Sapien is a software engineering major in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). He is gaining experience during his senior year by working part time as a software engineer at Raytheon. However, before Chauncy took the job at Raytheon, he was a peer advisor and webmaster for UCI’s Veteran Services Center (VSC), which provides veterans with the “world-class benefits and services they have earned.” Chauncy himself earned those benefits while serving in the United States Marine Corps (USMC). He is one of 23 veterans in the School of ICS and 167 veterans (including both active duty and reservists) at UCI, and he is president of the Anteater Veteran Association (AVA). Here, the devoted veteran, student, software engineer and father to five-year-old son, Ryan, talks about his service in the Marines and future career plans.

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Family Circle: “Mind Control: How to Focus and Pay Attention” (Gloria Mark quoted)

I wonder whether I have to give up multitasking too; it seems crucial, in light of what I need to get done in a mere 24 hours. Plus, I consider myself a maven at accomplishing a million things all at once. As it turns out, I’m kidding myself. According to a study conducted by Gloria Mark, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, every time we switch from one project to another and back again, we lose a hefty amount of mental efficiency, as well as create a certain level of stress. “If we are interrupted from a task, it takes us a full 23 minutes to circle back to our original degree of concentration for the job at hand,” says Mark.

Read the full story at Family Circle.

Informatics Alumna Lilly Irani Receives Diana Forsythe Prize for Chasing Innovation

November 1, 2019

The 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize has been awarded to informatics alumna Lilly Irani (Ph.D. ’13) for her bookChasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India. The prize celebrates work in the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science or technology, and the book captures that spirit in its examination of how long-standing power hierarchies continue to influence opportunities. In particular, the book documents the rise of “entrepreneurial citizenship” in India, demonstrating how “a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world’s fastest-growing nations.”

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