Category Archives: Articles

State Superintendent Tom Torlakson has announced his appointments to the Computer Science Strategic Implementation Plan Panel (CSSIPP), which aims to expand and improve computer science education statewide in grades K–12. The panel has its first meeting on March 1, 2018. Torlakson appointed five members of the 23-member panel. “I’m excited that this panel is beginning the work of strengthening computer science education in California,” he said. ‘We are preparing students for today’s and tomorrow’s career and college opportunities—and for the jobs of the future that haven’t yet been invented. Jobs and skills we must have in a fiercely competitive global economy.”

Read the full news release at the CDE website.

High-level guidelines for the treatment of crowdworkers.

Read the article on the Communications of the ACM website.

Is excess gaming a mental disorder? UCI fights back, saying it’s unfair to gaming world

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times.

In her lab, Professor Hayes is working on tangible interfaces for blind
people that focus on interactions based on an augmented sense of
touch. Instead of using a screen reader to describe a visual interface,
which makes technological interaction difficult for the blind, one of
her projects in this area focuses on the development of a motorised
virtual scroll bar. Among other things, this scroll bar gives different
levels of resistance depending on the size of a document. “So, if it is a
short document, [you feel] light resistance, and you can pull quickly
down,” she explains. “Longer documents have more resistance so it
feels like the scroll bar is bigger than it is.”

Read the full story in this PDF. (Article starts on page 44.)

Much of the internet runs on volunteer labor performed by people who are often unnoticed, such as online community moderators. When these people are recognized, it’s usually because they’ve become a target of harassment, are involved in a flamewar, or are accused of abusing their power.
Moderators make message boards, Reddit, Facebook groups, email listservs, and many other online communities function, and yet not a whole lot of time has been spent by mainstream academics understanding good internet moderation, or the psyche of a moderator. Kat Lo, a PhD student at the University of California Irvine, is bridging that gap by researching online communities at a time when most major platforms are trying reckon with widespread harassment.

Read the full story at Motherboard.

“When I come to teach these kids, they surprise me,” said mentor Jerry Granillo, a software engineer major at UC Irvine. “The ideas are all theirs. The programming is all theirs. I teach them the fundamentals and they take it from there. I’m pretty astonished by all of it.”

Read the full story at OC Register.

Chicago Public Library partnered with the MacArthur Foundation to launch YOUmedia in 2009 as a way to engage teenagers at the library. The space is equipped with a music studio, digital cameras, 3-D printers, loads of computers and, of course, books. It’s all self-driven, but there’s a staff of mentors and librarians ready to help.

The loose atmosphere is based on University of California, Irvine professor Mizuko (Mimi) Ito’s study that found teens engage with digital media by “hanging out,” “messing around” and “geeking out,” as she puts it. Teens can “hang out” at the center by playing games or relaxing, but mentors are there to help them “mess around” or learn how to use new tech and gadgets, and “geek out” or dive deeper into passionate projects, like music production, designing a float or writing poetry.

Read the full story at SDPB Radio.

Tess Tanenbaum always envisioned creating a mixed-reality game that incorporated elements of theater, costumes and dance. The UC Irvine assistant professor of informatics got her chance last fall when she collaborated with then-student Natalie Nygaard to start developing an interactive storyline for a physical game called Magia Transformo — The Dance of Transformation.

Read the full story at Los Angeles Times.

An international team of eight researchers didn’t set out to measure GitHub duplication. Their original aim was to try and define the “granularity” of copying – that is, how much files changed between different clones – but along the way, they turned up a “staggering rate of file-level duplication” that made them change direction.

Presented at this year’s OOPSLA (part of the late-October Association of Computing Machinery) SPLASH conference in Vancouver, the University of California at Irvine-led research found that out of 428 million files on GitHub, only 85 million are unique.

Read the full story at The Register.

According to the study, No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work, by Gloria Mark, Victor Gonzalez and Justin Harris of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, people were interrupted and moved from one project to another about every 11 minutes; each time, it took some 25 minutes to return to full focus on the original project.

Read the full story at The National.