Xerox, American Express, Dell and about two dozen other Fortune 500 companies have made entire divisions remote. But it’s not as simple as just giving employees a laptop and sending them home, said Judith Olson, a professor of informatics and computer science at UC Irvine. Moving people out of the office can make simple collaborative tasks much less efficient.
Read the full story at Marketplace.
This article features Craig G. Anderson, a doctoral candidate at the Esports Lab. His research topics focus on the cognitive influences of games, including the roles of failure and persistence in gaming. More information, including contact information, can be found at https://www.uciesportslab.org/.
Read the full story at UCI Esports.
A study led by UC Irvine researchers and published in January in the Journal of Literacy Research found that those with autism—along with family members, teachers and advocates—use “Harry Potter” fanfiction to cast autistic characters in their stories that can help challenge stereotypes.
“We expected to find that fanfiction authors with autism, or friends, family members and close advocates of autistic individuals, would write about autism in ways that challenged pervasive stereotypes about neurological difference that are often found in popular media,” said Rebecca W. Black, UCI associate professor of informatics and lead author of “Representations of Autism in Online ‘Harry Potter’ Fanfiction.” “While we found that this was often the case—and that fanfiction authors did use their stories to present nuanced representations of autistic characters—we also found that they also drew on stereotypes and included negative reactions to autism as a rhetorical device.”
Read the full story at Parenting OC.
“Just because [kids] may meet an unsavory person in the park, we don’t ban them from outdoor spaces,” said Mimi Ito, director of the Connected Learning Lab at University of California-Irvine, at the 10th annual Women in the World Summit on Thursday. After years of research, the mother of two college-age children said she thinks parents need to understand how important digital spaces are to children and adjust accordingly.
Read the full story at Women In the World.
This episode of The UCI Podcast discusses the history of video games through the lens of LGBTQ theory with Bonnie “Bo” Ruberg, assistant professor of informatics, whose new book, “Video Games Have Always Been Queer,” is on shelves now.
Listen here or at The UCI Podcast on SoundCloud.
Participants of the recent “Datafication and Community Activism” workshop, hosted by Roderic Crooks, propose that the consequences of datafication demand new approaches to research and collective action.
Read the full story at Medium.
Gillian Hayes experienced a migratory life growing up, as her parents would move the family from state to state pursuing careers in academia at universities. After landing in Athens, Georgia, she discovered her talent for the Science-Technology-Engineering-Math (STEM) field. And, as her own academic career began to unfold, Hayes eventually found herself with a fateful internship at the National Institutes of Health’s AIDS laboratory that helped define her future when her cultures grew mold and didn’t yield the results they needed.
Read the full story on the UCI News Applied Innovation website.
Despite the field’s rapid growth in the past few years, academic research on the subject of esports is rare. The UCI Esports Lab’s aim, according to their website, is to “understand and enrich esports” through their student research. The faculty and graduate students there focus their study on methods to optimize esports teams, and they apply their findings to educational spaces like the North America Scholastic Esports Federation (NASEF). Such research often involves how players function in teams, particularly when they need to communicate and work together.
This article focuses on Maria J. Anderson-Coto, a first-year doctorate student at the Esports Lab. Her research topics include player performance, retirement in esports, and gender inclusion. More information, including contacts, can be found at https://www.uciesportslab.org/
Read the full story at the UCI Esports website.
“At the federal level there is a lot of interest in the power of games. You have, for example, the Department of Education that funds game research and how to use games in educational ways. Past administrations have actually had a video game guild, where they talk about games. Obviously there was Constance Steinkuehler, who’s a professor at UC-Irvine now. She spent time at the White House promoting the value of games in learning. There is a lot of interest in the power of games.”
Read the full story at VentureBeat.
AVIAA, an international group purchasing organization for business aviation and UCI startup company, has reached an agreement to merge operations with Convolus, Europe’s smart purchasing business. The acquisition will increase AVIAA’s European presence by establishing an office in Munich, Germany, in addition to their U.S. and U.K. locations.
“We are delighted to have formalized this agreement with Convolus,” said Gillian Hayes, AVIAA CEO, in a press release. “It marks a significant strategic step for AVIAA, which will enable us to deliver larger scale global purchasing for our collective members and suppliers.”
Read the full story at UCI Applied Innovation.