Monthly Archives: March 2022

Mayara Costa Figueiredo Wins iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award

March 14, 2022

Mayara Costa Figueiredo has brown eyes and shoulder-length brown hair. She is smiling, wearing a blue-jean blouse and silver necklace. Trees are in the background.

On Feb. 28, 2022, iSchools, a group of information schools dedicated to advancing the information field, announced the winner of its Doctoral Dissertation Award. The recipient is Mayara Costa Figueiredo, who earned her Ph.D. in informatics from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). The award committee was impressed with Figueiredo’s thesis, “Data Work and Data Tracking Technologies in Fertility Care: A Holistic Approach.”

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Faculty Spotlight: Crista Lopes Creates Startup to Reimagine Virtual Conferences

March 10, 2022

Crista Lopes sits at a desk with four screens (including one with an avatar) in the backdrop. She has brown eyes and straight brown hair that falls below her shoulder. She smiles as she looks up toward the camera.

In 2020, the knowledge and expertise of Crista Lopes converged to meet the moment. The professor of software engineering in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) had just co-authored the Communications of the ACM article, “Conferences in an Era of Expensive Carbon,” so she was already exploring the future of conferences when the global pandemic hit. She quickly pivoted to help draft “Virtual Conferences: A Guide to Best Practices” and worked to move the 42nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) online. Drawing from her wealth of experience as an early developer of OpenSimulator — and her involvement with the OpenSimulator Community Conference (OSCC), which has occurred virtually since 2013 — she worked with Professor Jon Bell of Northeastern University and Professor Benjamin Pierce from the University of Pennsylvania to code a new platform called Clowdr. Their innovative open source project for climate friendly, accessible virtual and hybrid conferences now serves as the basis for a startup company that operates the platform as a service called Midspace. Here, Lopes talks about her experience in developing this new project and bridging the academic-industry divide.

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Hack at UCI Hosts Hybrid HackUCI 2022

March 4, 2022

Hack at UCI hosted its annual HackUCI hackathon, the largest collegiate hackathon in Orange County, in a hybrid format on Feb. 25-27. With more than 300 students in attendance from over 10 different schools, HackUCI 2022 proved to be a hit once again and generated projects ranging from artificial intelligence models to fitness applications.

Hacks were judged based on the technology used to build the project, the quality of the project and the purpose of the project. Here are the winning hacks from HackUCI 2022: 

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Women’s History Month: Resources for Empowering Women in Tech

March 2, 2022

In honor of Women’s History Month, the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) has pulled together a list of resources for empowering women in technology, including on-campus groups, nationwide organizations and books that focus on women in STEM. We also highlight current leaders in tech and introduce you to some faculty members leading the way in expanding ICS education.

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