Monthly Archives: May 2021

UCI News: #IamUCI profile of Mayara Costa Figueiredo, Informatics Ph.D. ’21

May 28, 2021

If you’ve ever used a health app to track your menstrual cycle or count steps, you’ll want to follow Mayara Costa Figueiredo’s research. According to a recent Gallup survey, 20 percent of U.S. adults employ health apps, with high-income households, women and young adults among the most enthusiastic users. An interest in the intersection of health informatics and human-computer interaction led Figueiredo from her native Brazil to UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences, where she works under the supervision of Associate Professor Yunan Chen and Professor Kai Zheng in the Health and Informatics Lab.

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Professor Anne Marie Piper Receives Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence Award

May 27, 2021

The Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence Awards program recognizes scholarship that advances inclusive excellence, providing $50,000 to awardees to support efforts to increase diversity, equity and inclusion. This pilot program at UCI, funded through an Advancing Faculty Diversity grant from the UC Office of the President, provides a two-year appointment for newly hired faculty, including Anne Marie Piper, an associate professor who joined the Department of Informatics in July 2020. Piper was named a recipient of the award for her research into human-computer interaction and accessible computing and efforts to create more equitable and inclusive digital experiences.

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11 ICS Professors Included on Guide2Research’s 2021 Ranking of Top Scientists in Computer Science

May 20, 2021

Guide2Research, a leading portal for computer science research and data on scientific contributions, recently released its 7th edition of Top Scientists Ranking for Computer Science & Electronics that featured more than 30 scholars from UCI, with Computer Science Professors Pierre BaldiRamesh Jain and Gene Tsudik at the top of the list. Here are the 11 computer science and informatics professors who made it onto Guide2Research’s 2021 rankings:

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UCI’s Informatics B.S. Ranked 4th by BDC

May 18, 2021

Bachelor’s Degree Center (BDC), which has been providing independent and unbiased resources and rankings on the best traditional and online bachelor’s degree programs since 2014, recently released its list of the 15 Best Bachelor’s in Informatics for 2021 in which UCI’s informatics program was ranked No. 4. To rank the best informatics bachelor degree programs, BDC editors researched on-campus and online programs from accredited institutions. Its rankings were based on factors such as cost, reputation and student outcomes, using data from Niche and IPEDS. 

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UCI Celebration of Teaching: Professors Rebecca Black and Katie Salen Tekinbaş Named Dean’s Honorees

May 14, 2021

For more than 25 years, UCI’s Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI) has been recognizing faculty, instructors and teaching assistants at its annual Celebration of Teaching event, honoring those who have demonstrated excellence in undergraduate teaching. The pandemic forced the cancellation of the event the last two years, so DTEI created a series of videos to recognize the Celebration of Teaching award winners for 2020 and 2021.

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Professor Daniel Epstein Receives ICTS Pilot Studies Award

May 13, 2021

On May 5, 2021, the UCI Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (ICTS) announced the eight recipients of its Pilot Studies Award, which was “designed to support exceptionally innovative and/or unconventional research projects that have the potential to create or overturn fundamental paradigms.” Among the 2021 ICTS Pilot Awardees is Assistant Professor of Informatics Daniel Epstein for his research into a set of apps to support patients in tapering off of psychiatric drugs.

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Professor Crista Lopes Immerses Students in a Virtual World for ICS 10: How Computers Work

May 6, 2021

The 150 UCI students enrolled in “ICS 10: How Computers Work,” a general education course on the basics of computing, had an entirely new learning experience this past winter, and it wasn’t just owing to remote learning during a pandemic. For the first time, Crista Lopes, an informatics professor in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), held the course in OpenSimulator, an open source virtual world.

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