Informatics Seminar Series
Fall Quarter 2019

Abstract:
Graduate students from the Department of Informatics at UCI are at the leading edge of research in fields like HCI, software engineering, medical informatics, critical technology studies, and more. This showcase features three Informatics doctoral students presenting an overview of their dissertation research, along with a reflection about themes that cross their areas of inquiries. It serves as an opportunity for faculty and students alike to learn more about the innovative research taking place in the department and celebrates the work of Informatics grad students as they move our scholarly community into the future.



Speakers (in Alphabetical order by last name):

Craig G. Anderson
Title: Congratulations! You Failed! How Players React to Failure in Video Games
Bio: Craig G. Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Informatics department at UCI studying the cognitive influences of video game playing. His work focuses on how players conceptualize and react to failure in games and is currently working within notoriously challenging game, Cuphead, developed by Studio MDHR. His work aims to inform game developers and researchers alike on how players experience failure and how games encourage them to persist in challenging environments.

Phoebe Chua
Title: Examining the Hiring Practices of Big Tech Companies
Bio: Phoebe K. Chua is a Ph.D. candidate in Informatics at UC Irvine. Her dissertation research examines the hiring practices of large tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. Her work seeks to inform how organizations might enact inclusive hiring practices and how applicants can potentially navigate the hiring process. Phoebe is the recipient of the 2018 Fred Tonge Endowed Graduate Award in ICS, and her dissertation research is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Noopur Raval
Title: Infusing Care in the Gig Economy
Bio: Noopur Raval is a PhD candidate in Informatics at UC Irvine. She works with Professor Paul Dourish and studies the intersection of non white collar work and platform technologies with a special interest in impure involvements, new forms of collectivization and notions of responsibility within platform capitalist worlds. Her work has been published at venues such as CSCW, CHI, HICSS and the CASTAC blog Platypus.