

Tutorials / Workshops - May 25-26, 2011
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T1: Crowdsourcing with Amazon Mechanical Turk (May 25, 1:30-5pm) Mechanical Turk is an online marketplace for small tasks. Requesters post the jobs they need done and specify the price they are willing to pay. Workers, who may be anywhere in the world, log onto the site and do the tasks in their spare time. Applications include labeling images, filtering inappropriate content, finding information on the internet, data manipulation, checking or translating sentences, or anything that can be done easily by humans but cannot be done to satisfaction by computers alone. Typically, work is broken into small tasks (i.e., a few images or sentences at a time) and may pay as little as a few cents each. Tasks can be posted—and answers received—either programmatically or using an web interface. We will cover both.
A laptop and some programming experience will be helpful, but not required. Hands-on practice will use the Mechanical Turk web interface and our own Python-based programming toolkit, which is designed especially for simplicity and ease-of-use. No prior knowledge of Python is assumed. The primary focus will be concepts and best practices for making the best use of Mechanical Turk to get work done. |
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T2: New Methods for Designing for and with the iChild (May 25, 1:30-5pm)
Mona Leigh Guha, Allison Druin, Jerry Fails, Tamara Clegg, Greg Walsh, Elizabeth Foss Today’s young people are information active, socially aware, and highly mobile. Designing new technologies for today’s independent, interactive, and information active iChild necessitates new design strategies. In this tutorial, we will introduce new co-design methods that have been specifically adapted for mobility, distributed sociability, and ubiquitous information. Participants will leave the tutorial having been introduced to or updated on co-design techniques that can lead to the development of new, innovative technologies for children. This tutorial will begin with a historical overview of co-designing with children. Participants will then experience hands-on experience using new methods in designing for children’s mobile, social, and Internet technologies, and will learn about examples of technologies that have been developed with children using co-design methods. This tutorial will use hands-on design activities, small and whole-group discussion, and short presentations with slides and video. The audience for this course requires no special background. We view design as most effective when it is interdisciplinary; therefore, we welcome and encourage attendance by industry professionals, academics, and students from a wide variety of communities (e.g., design, computer science, information studies, and psychology). |
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T3: Introduction to Usability Testing (May 26, 10:30am-5pm) This is an introductory tutorial on the topic of usability testing. This tutorial is intended for usability practitioners looking to expand their skills, other practitioners (designers, developers, testers, etc.) who may have usability testing interests or responsibilities, and management staff that may be considering incorporating usability into their organization. In the tutorial we will cover both management issues and practical issues of usability testing and discuss what usability testing is (and isn't). |
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T4: Introduction to iPhone Development (May 26, 10:30am-5pm)
Contact: Ben Bederson for more information This is a programming course will teach how to develop applications (with a focus on user interface) for Apple iPhone. It will include some general mobile design principles, and will also briefly compare iPhone to mobile web development and Android development. However, this is primarily a programming course. It will jump start your understanding of Objective C, iPhone user interface libraries, Interface Builder, memory management and performance issues with the goal of making it easier for existing programmers to start developing for iPhone. Students should already have basic familiarity with C or a C-like language such as Java or C#, and an understanding of basic object-oriented programming. If you have a Mac laptop, bring it with the free XCode development environment (downloadable from http://developer.apple.com/iphone/) installed in advance so you can try some simple exercises during the tutorial. |
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T5: Entrepreneurship (May 26, 1-3pm) Raising capital to fund your start-up can be a challenging and frustrating experience, especially in today's economic environment. In this session, entrepreneurs will learn about different types of money, the difference between angel investors and VCs and how to find both, at what stage and under what circumstances should entrepreneurs consider angel investors, and what they can expect from angels. Participants of this interactive 2-hour tutorial will learn about 'must-have' ingredients for a compelling investor pitch, and other tips about pitching investors. This tutorial will be led by two guest entrepreneurs, Ed Barientos and Steven Roth. Ed Barrientos, Dingman Center Angel in Residence Ed Barrientos is CEO and Chairman of the Board of Brazen Careerist, a career focused social networking site targeting Gen Y. He is also Managing Partner of Zeitgeist Holdings, L.L.C., an angel investment firm focused on investing in early stage technology companies. From 1996 to 2005, he was President and CEO of Arc Second Inc., a high growth market leader in the field of laser based, high-precision GPS. Barrientos led Arc Second to a successful exit (acquired by Metris NV of Belgium) at the end of 2005. He sat on the Board of Directors of Metris NV, and worked as an active Board member through the Company’s IPO (2006) and its acquisition by Nikon (Japan) in 2009. From 1993 to 1996, Barrientos served as Managing Director of Max Schlatterer GmbH & Co KG, a leading German manufacturer of products for the food, drug and machine tool industry with headquarters outside of Munich, Germany. From 1991 to 1993, he was an international marketing consultant for Management Partner GmbH, a boutique management consulting firm based in Stuttgart, Germany. He started his professional career with IBM in 1986, serving in a number of technical and marketing related positions. Barrientos holds a B.S. in Management from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MBA from the George Washington University. Steven Roth, Dingman Center Entrepreneur in Residence Roth is a partner with CM Equity Partners which specializes in investing in government contract service businesses. We have purchased multiple platform companies that primarily serve the U.S. federal government. We have built these into significant enterprises through a combination of fostering internal growth and completing multiple add-on acquisitions. Prior to CM Equity, Roth held several key senior management positions in the high technology and government services industry. Roth was COO and cofounder of Onyx Government Services, Inc. He was President of WFI Government Services, Inc. (WGS) and Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing for both Plateau Systems and Riverbed Technologies (now Aether Systems). He was also Vice President & General Manager of 3Com Corporation (now part of Extreme Networks) and Vice President of Federal Systems for Octel Communications Corporation (now part of Lucent Technologies). Roth spent considerable time in the computer workstation market where he launched Silicon Graphics Inc. He also served as a member of the original management team of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Earlier in his career, Roth also helped form a strong base for systems engineering, technical consulting and information technology services in the sales and marketing area to key customers during his tenure at M/A-COM and DATATEL. Roth is a graduate of the University of Maryland. He is a member of the Northern Virginia Technology Council and AFCEA Board of Directors and is an Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Maryland's Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship. Roth currently holds a Top Secret Clearance. | |
W1: Consumer Health Informatics: Aging, Culture and Technology (May 25, 1:30-5pm) Permission is not required to register for this workshop. Click here to read more about participating in this workshop. The Consumer Health Informatics Workshop will examine the use of information and communication technologies in healthcare from the perspective of health consumers. Potential topics to be investigated may include (but are not limited to):
The May 25, 2011 portion of this workshop, sponsored by the Association for Anthropology and Gerontology (AAGE) (http://aage.clubexpress.com/), will be devoted to consumer health informatics issues related to aging and culture. Potential topics to be investigated may include (but are not limited to):
Click here to read more about participating in this workshop. |
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W2: Social Media Networks and Communities (May 25, 1:30-5pm) The goal of this workshop is to introduce and explore network analysis concepts and tools as they apply to social media and online community interactions. Social media have created a wealth of social data in the form of Facebook friends, Twitter Followers, hyperlinks, and shared tags. We will discuss techniques and tools that help to harvest and make sense of this relational data. The workshop will be a mixture of instruction and discussion, tailored to meet the needs of the participants. The free Excel plugin, NodeXL (nodexl.codeplex.com), will be introduced and demoed. Methods for understanding and visualizing relationship types and strengths will also be presented. To Participate: This workshop is open to all (space permitting). Participants who want to show off any tools or analyses that they have performed should contact the organizers and briefly describe what they would like to present. |
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W3: Consumer Health Informatics (May 26, 10:30am-5pm) Permission is not required to register for this workshop. Click here to read more about participating in this workshop. The Consumer Health Informatics Workshop will examine the use of information and communication technologies in healthcare from the perspective of health consumers. Potential topics to be investigated may include (but are not limited to):
Click here to read more about participating in this workshop. |
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W4: Electronic Health Record Informatics (May 26, 10:30am-5pm) Abstract: Well-designed Electronic Health Record systems are crucial for adoption by clinical practitioners and for improving the quality of medical care. A challenge for medical informatics interface designers is to enable users to benefit from the increasing abundance of information in a way that supports creative and effective decision making. Novel strategies in interface design and information visualization are needed. Format: While attendees will be able to learn about the work conducted at the Human-Interaction Lab during other sessions of the symposium (talks on Wednesday and demos Thursday morning), this Thursday workshop will include in-depth discussions and presentations from our collaborators and external researchers working on interfaces for Electronic Health Records. We will invite speakers and post the topics of the presentations as they are confirmed. To Participate: The workshop is open to all (space permitting, so register early). If you are interested in presenting you are welcome to submit a short abstract (~ 300 words max) to Sureyya Tarkan by May 1st. Please summarize what you would like to present on the topic of Electronic Health Record Systems design or evaluation and provide pointers to papers and screen shots as needed. If we receive too many requests, we may ask you to bring copies of papers or a poster for presentation during the breaks. |