Workers by Self-Design: Digital Literacies and Women’s Changing Roles in Unstable Environments — first workshop and public event

This GCRF-funded network will soon have its first workshop, in Glasgow, and within it is a public event. 

As the public event’s EventBrite invitation page says, “The first public event of the network is scheduled for March 12th, 2019 where we invite participants to attend a series of short presentations on the topic, as well as to share their knowledge, experiences and challenges. If you are interested in women’s roles and experiences with non-traditional work pathways, digital literacies and innovative entrepreneurial solutions, join us!”

Workers by Self-Design: Digital Literacies and Women’s Changing Roles in Unstable Environments

In a welcome turn of events, some additional Global Challenges Research Fund budget was made available… and this allowed the above-named project proposal to be funded. It’s a £29K network style grant: 

The proposed meetings aim to strengthen and develop new partnerships among academic and non-academic partners who will work to understand, explore and create an impact-oriented research agenda on women’s engagement with digital literacies and their changing roles as they transition into the workplace in unstable environments in UK, the Philippines and Iran. 

The leader is Lavinia Hirsu, in the School of Education at U. Glasgow, along with Dr.Katarzyna Borkowska, in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies. Academic Partners are Dr. Zenaida Reyes, Professor and Director of Linkages and International Office, Philippine Normal University, and Lamiah Hashemi, Senior Administrative Officer, University of Kurdistan Technology Incubator, Iran.

I will try to help with tech-centred issues, as I can. I rather hope that there might be a way to connect it to the issues and people in the HDI network, which has a theme on skills and education…

ACM ToCHI

I’m very glad to now be an associate editor for the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. I was just in the door, and I already have a paper to organise reviewers for… and, yes, I’m struggling already to get people signed up for the expected date. Conforming to an old norm?

First Human Data Interaction workshop: AI Intelligibility and Public Trust

Good news for the HDI Network — our first theme is getting going, on AI intelligibility and public trust. The initial workshop for it will be in Cambridge, at MSR, on Dec 4. More information is here.

Now that my teaching is getting a little less intense, I’ll have to get going with another theme: beyond smart cities…

 

 

 

Improving the t-SNE data visualisation algorithm via stochastic sampling

Another project started very recently, with the above title. It’s great to be working with Alistair Morrison again, as we look at ways to apply the ideas we developed (many years ago!) for fast spring models (a.k.a. force-directed placement) with tSNE algorithms. Somewhat bizarrely, this is funded by the US Navy. We are grateful but also somewhat surprised.

Ethical Design of Apps for Assessing Mental Health

This is a EPSRC Impact Acceleration Award project getting off the ground now, on phone apps that collect personal data that can be used to predict social anxiety.

I am enjoying working with Angus Ferguson and Marek Bell on this short (4 month) project. It is based on an undergraduate project by Dimitris Eleftheriou, that basically reproduced an experiment by Boukhcheba et al. reported at the 2017 Ubicomp workshop on mental health.  We will extend Dimitris’ work that let the app operate in a way that allows most/all of the personal data (collected via Denzil Ferreira’s AWARE framework) to be kept on the phone, by adding and evaluating features that allow participants to maintain feedback and control over what happens to the data sent from their phone to us.

Even as I write this, it reminds me of old Ubicomp work from the 1990s, by Victoria Bellotti and Abi Sellen, on feedback and control… We’ll see whether/how that might weave into this work…

EPSRC NetworkPlus on Human Data Interaction starting

This network plus grant is starting up, and the investigators (Hamed Haddadi, Ewa Luger, Elvira Perez-Vallejo, Atau Tanaka and me) met up for the first time within the grant, to make plans such as prioritising our themed workshops, setting up a web site and mailing list (connecting to the existing site/list at hdiresearch.org).

One point that came up was that the ~45 grants we will give out will be especially suitable for PhDs and early career researchers, and so we should connect to the CDTs in relevant areas. We can’t guarantee funds to particular CDTs, but can certainly help them as part of our matchmaking and workshop processes. More generally, if you are interested, let us know…

Shifting…

It’s easier to edit and save stuff on this WordPress site, instead of the one inside the university.

Here’s a link to the old DCS server, for reference… and a picture from a fine day out in the Cairngorms. Extra points if you can spot the climber near the top of the Milky Way route…