Professor Tanenbaum brought together 130 people who collectively created 20 wave-themed games in 48 hours.
This year’s Global Game Jam (GGJ) was a huge success for UC Irvine and GGJ site organizer Theresa Jean Tanenbaum, assistant professor of informatics at UCI. For 48 hours of game development mayhem from Jan. 20-22, 130 people joined the fun, compared to the roughly 50 participants GGJ had last year. This was the third year Tanenbaum has hosted the event at UC Irvine.
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Seeing video games as the next frontier in college athletics, UCI launches player scholarships and a first-of-its-kind arena
Read the full story at UCI Magazine.
On Thursday, in the shadows of a freshly constructed gaming center on the campus of University of California Irvine, a panel called “Women in Gaming” will set out to reshape these perceptions. Much like the physical space UCI has recently created to allow the world of esports and video game development to infiltrate the academic landscape, five female panelists will explore ways to increase the visibility and representation of women in competitive gaming.
Read the full story at ESPN.
Stop multi-tasking, seriously stop. Of all the bad habits, multitasking is among the worst and most common. Multi-tasking does not necessarily make you more productive as you may think. You can actually achieve more in less time when you single task and focus on getting one thing done well.
It takes about 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully return to a task after interruption, according to Gloria Mark, Professor at UC Irvine, in Fast Company. So you may be wasting a lot more time than you think.
Read the full story at Medium.
Informatics Professor Cristina Lopes was honored as a main speaker at the 2016 OpenSimulator Community Conference (OSCC16) in December. The conference is an annual event dedicated to OpenSimulator software, which is an open-source multi-platform, multi-user 3-D application server that can be used to create virtual environments. The conference focused on the continued development of the software and user-community building. OSCC16 is organized as a joint production by core developers of OpenSimulator, such as Lopes herself and AvaCon Inc., which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the growth, enhancement and development of the metaverse, virtual worlds, augmented reality, and 3-D immersive and virtual spaces.
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Even if it means allowing emails to pile up momentarily, don’t spend too much time in your inbox. According to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at University of California, Irvine, a lot of people striving for Inbox Zero typically do so as part of a weird game. She says that when people compulsively and continuously check their emails, they lose out big on productivity—the whole reason for Inbox Zero, to begin with. In fact, it’s so bad, she says, that when people are taken off task, it can take a whole 25 minutes for them to get back on track. So, if you want to be more organized without losing out on productivity, try not to compulsively check your inbox.
Read the full story at Cool Material.
Robert A. and Barbara L. Kleist Professor in Informatics Gillian Hayes has been selected as a finalist for the 2017 Community Engaged Scholar Award by the Western Region of Campus Compact for her “enduring commitment to connecting campus and community through teaching and research.”
Founded in 1985, Campus Compact is now a national coalition of nearly 1,100 colleges and universities committed to the public purposes of higher education. As the only national higher education association dedicated solely to campus-based civic engagement, Campus Compact supports faculty and staff as they pursue community-based teaching and scholarship in the service of positive change, while enabling campuses to develop students’ citizenship skills and forge effective community partnerships.
Join Informatics for an EOT Archiving Hackathon on Jan. 11 to help save environmental data from deletion.
There is a new old adage that parents tell their children: whatever you post on the Internet, stays on the Internet. Digital permanence has become an inconvenient, sometimes destructive, truth to social media hotheads who post before thinking, but what about information on U.S. Government websites? Is climate change data as equally eternal as a celebrity tweet? The answer is less simple.
That’s why archivists and concerned citizens have begun to take notice that federal government websites (eg., .gov, .mil, etc.) in the legislative, executive and judicial branches were at risk of being changed, consolidated, buried or altogether disappearing from public access during presidential transitions. Since 2008, the End of Term (EOT) Web Archive has preserved websites from both Republican and Democratic administration changes in 2008 and 2012, and is now preparing for the arrival of a Donald Trump presidency.
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Informatics Ph.D. students Clara Marques Caldeira and Anita Marie Tsaasan recently received Internal Fellowships from the UCI Graduate Division. Caldeira received the Miguel Velez Scholarship, which provides financial support to talented graduate students who are citizens of a Latin American country. Tsaasan received the Brython Davis Fellowship, which provides financial support to promising graduate students who are the child of a veteran of the U.S. Navy or Marine Corps. Both awards provide resident fees and a $6,000 stipend for the Spring 2017 quarter.
UC Irvine Social Media Professor Gloria Mark says it’s a perfect example of why so many who are victimized once shut down their social media sites so they don’t get triggered by trolls.
“It’s easy to post this kind of hate on the Internet without seeing the effects it has on another person,” Mark said.
Watch the video on CBS Los Angeles.