Category Archives: Articles

Daily COVID-19 diaries have multiplied across social media. Sean Young, an associate professor at UCLA and UC Irvine who studies digital behavior and prediction technology, said such social media sharing is to be expected during a health crisis like this. Researchers have been mining the internet for digital journals for various research projects that are helping healthcare workers tackle the coronavirus crisis. For example, in January, researchers at the University of California Institute for Prediction Technology were tracking Baidu search engine data in China when the virus was first spreading. The researchers are now doing the same in the U.S., developing artificial-intelligence-based models that take social media data, such as these daily symptom journals, to predict hospitalization rates before hospitals become overwhelmed.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times. Subscription may be required, you can request an electronic copy of the article by sending an email to communications@uci.edu.

Informatics professor and author Melissa Mazmanian shares a few ways to stay connected while social distancing.

Watch the video below or at The List.

Dr. Constance Steinkuehler, Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Senior Policy adviser to the White House on video games and learning, has been announced as the opening keynote at this year’s inaugural Academic Esports Conference & Expo, which is scheduled for October 19-21 in Chicago.

Read the full story at University Business.

The event concluded with the closing keynote speaker Gillian Hayes, UCI vice provost for Graduate Education and former CEO of AVIAA, who shared her experience in both the academic and entrepreneurial worlds. She highlighted the need to create affordable housing in Orange County to keep talent in the area.

“If we want to keep our brilliant young minds here, we first need to do something about housing,” said Hayes. “We want all of our alumni to come back from all of the schools in this area and start creating and investing in businesses here and hiring our students and keeping these brilliant young minds here.”

Read the full story at the UCI Beall Applied Innovation News site.

Meet Kimberly Hermans. She’s a lecturer at the University of California for the School of Information and Computer Science and a computer science teacher at Woodbridge High School in Irvine, California. Discover what motivated her to pursue tech education in her extended interview.

Read the full story on the Confident Gamma Phis website.

The role of HR in supporting the transition to remote work is to establish rules, policies and suggestions about how to behave, according to experts. The most important thing remote workers can do to build trust is acknowledge a message has been received, said Judith Olson, a retired professor of information and computer science at the University of California at Irvine. Olson has researched remote working.

Read the full story at TechTarget.

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How can we create a world of user experience and HCI that is truly inclusive and that engages with people, problems, and communities in meaningful ways? I gave a talk on these issues at CHI 2019; in this article, I further expand on this line of discussion. Inclusion and engagement in HCI projects are important for multiple reasons. While we see a growing interest in new technologies from social media to AI, there is also a growing interest in questions concerning participation, engagement, and equality. Of course, HCI should be about the design and evaluation of new technologies, but even more important, it should be about making life a little bit better. So how can we go about exploring such fundamentals in HCI?

Read the full story at ACM/Interactions.

Research led by Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, found that email usage is negatively related to stress. “When an individual spends more time on email during the workday, it is significantly related to lower assessed productivity and higher stress,” the researchers wrote. “Communication is easier and faster via email than written notes and thus it creates more messages that people must spend time with, not only in responding to them, but also in organising and filing.”

Read the full story at Yahoo Style.

Customizing the features of an avatar can be an intensely personal experience. It can offer fantastical escapism, an expression of a hidden self or a pixelated reflection. Tess Tanenbaum discusses how designing digital counterparts can help break players free of oppressive social norms — and why the majority choose to remain shackled. She is an assistant professor in the department of informatics at the University of California, Irvine.

Read the full story at North Carolina Public Radio WUNC .

Popular gaming personality Pokimane has donated $50,000 to the University of California, Irvine for student scholarships in its esports program. An initial $25,000 gift this year will be combined with the remaining $25,000 in 2021 to create an endowment that will fund tuition and fees for gamers selected by UCI Esports.