The weather cleared in time to reveal a beautiful blue sky on the evening of May 5, when nearly 200 UC Irvine engineering and information and computer sciences (ICS) alumni, faculty and friends gathered at the Inn at Mission San Juan Capistrano to celebrate six alumni for the 2023 Hall of Fame.
Continue readingThe Power of Health Informatics
May 10, 2023
As the daughter of immigrants, Letsy Cahue-Flores would often act as a translator for her parents, helping them communicate with store clerks or read through various documents. “My most memorable experiences, however, have been interpreting in health facilities, places with an ongoing problem of inadequately informing non-English speakers about their or their children’s health status and options when translation services are unavailable,” says Cahue-Flores. “This accessibility barrier was the catalyst that encouraged me to research fields that would combine my interests in healthcare and computer science.” Her research led her to health informatics, a multidisciplinary field focused on leveraging technology for improved healthcare outcomes.
Continue readingSenior Spotlight: GDIM Major Matthew Knight Presses Start on His Game Development Career
May 5, 2023
From playing video games as a kid to developing his own games in high school, Matthew Knight has always been passionate about gaming. Now, as a graduating senior in the game design and interactive media (GDIM) program, Knight is ready to enter the game development world and craft immersive gaming experiences with what he’s learned at UCI.
Continue readingData@UCI Embarks on Data Science Adventures in Inaugural Datathon
May 4, 2023
Data@UCI hosted its first-ever datathon in UCI’s Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Building on April 15-16. With a theme of “Embark,” the datathon aimed to inspire “new adventures and continued growth” in the field of data science for both Data@UCI and the wider community of data enthusiasts at UCI.
Continue readingDelving into The Privilege of Play
April 25, 2023
Aaron Trammell, in his new book The Privilege of Play, digs up the early roots of exclusion in gaming, exploring how the history of white masculinity in hobby gaming created systemic barriers to inclusivity.
Continue readingMohammad Moshirpour Receives 2023 APEGA Summit Award for Excellence in Education
April 20, 2023
Mohammad Moshirpour, who joined UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) in January as an associate professor of teaching in the Department of Informatics, was recently recognized for exemplary contributions to teaching and learning. Moshirpour, previously an associate professor of electrical and software engineering at the University of Calgary, received a Summit Award for Excellence in Education from the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA).
Continue readingAlumni Spotlight: Game Play Sparks Software Engineering Career for Jun-Wei Lin
April 10, 2023
As a young teenager in Taiwan, Jun-Wei Lin enjoyed playing King of Kings, a MUD [multi-user dungeon] text-based online game. But the game was more than just a pastime. It sparked a fascination with computing that put Lin on the path to becoming a software engineer.
Continue readingThe Race for AI: Time to Raise Awareness
April 3, 2023
In November 2022, ChatGPT quietly slipped into global conversations with its human-like responses to text queries. By January 2023, more than 100 million users were interacting with the novel chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI). In February, an AI-powered Microsoft chatbot told a tech journalist to leave his wife: “You’re married, but you love me.”
Now, four months after OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT to the public, AI scholars and tech experts have published an open letter, calling for a pause in AI experiments: “recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control.” The letter’s signees, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, called on “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
Continue readingUSA Today: “Opinion: Will TikTok be banned? Maybe it should be for kids, at least.” (Gloria Mark interviewed/quoted)
“We have a part of the brain called the executive function that’s responsible for self-regulation. For kids, it’s not fully mature, and yet they’re exposed to (social media) before their executive function mind (can help them manage it),” Gloria Mark, [Chancellor’s] professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine and author of “Attention Span,” tells me over the phone. “A lot of adults have trouble with that as well,” she adds. … “One of the biggest things parents can do is limit screen time and be better role models themselves,” Mark said. “Get off screens and pay attention to your child so that they don’t learn that it’s normal to have a phone between you and another person.”
Read the full article on USA Today.
Salon: “Like a frog in boiling water”: How Big Tech stole our ability to focus
March 29, 2023
Informatics Professor Gloria Mark explains why letting your mind wander is good for your brain, and how to regain your lost attention span.
Salon talked recently to Mark about why we keep throwing ourselves into “attention traps,” the myths of sustained focus and learning how to find the “empty time” in our distracted days while still living in our real and infinitely diverting world.
Read the full interview on Salon.