Monthly Archives: August 2021

John Seberger and Geoffrey Bowker Win Social Informatics Best Paper Award

August 20, 2021

When John Seberger took a break from his dissertation a few years back to drive down Ocean Boulevard for a coffee, the UCI Ph.D. student had no idea he was on the road to earning the Social Informatics Best Paper Award. How did a coffee break result in Seberger and his Ph.D. adviser, Informatics Professor Geoffrey Bowker, earning a best paper award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Special Interest Group for Social Informatics (SIG SI)?

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Gizmodo: “How Has Social Media Impacted Our Mental Health” (Mimi Ito quoted)

August 16, 2021

How has social media actually impacted mental health, per the research? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts to find out. According to UCI Professor Mimi Ito:

“At the Connected Learning Lab, we’ve been doing studies of how social media can both support wellbeing for young people as well as detract from it. On the plus side, most young people will say that social media and networked games are a lifeline to supportive connections with friends and loved ones. This was critical during the pandemic when schools and sports were off limits. Social media can also be a way for young people to connect with others with shared interests and identities, which can be a lifeline for youth with marginalized or stigmatized identities such as LBGTQ+ youth or racial and religious minority youth. On the negative side, depending on the spaces they frequent, youth can encounter harassment or unhealthy body image expectations.

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CHOC to launch pilot study on speech therapy app that UCI students helped develop

August 10, 2021

The CHOC Research Institute plans to launch a pilot study on a pediatric speech therapy application that senior undergraduate students at UC Irvine’s School of Information and Computer Science (ICS) developed this past academic year.

CHOC sponsored the students’ work under the supervision of Professor Hadar Ziv, an associate professor in the Informatics Department at the Donald School of Information and Computer Science, and Dr. Brian Cohn, Ph.D., co-founder of Adventure Biofeedback and a former student of CHOC Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Terence Sanger.

Read the full story at the CHOC Provider Connection website.