Information Science Breakfast Series Schedule

Information Science Breakfast Series

The Breakfast Series are a venue for faculty members, researchers, graduate and undergraduate students to get together and share their research experiences in Information Science.

Presentations of complete projects, practice talks, and discussions about half-baked ideas are all legitimate ways to present your work in an informal environment.

If you want to present your project, give a practice talk before going to a conference or get feedback on your research ideas at the Breakfast Series, contact Hrönn Brynjarsdóttir: hb47 [at] cs [.] cornell [.] edu

Fall 2009 Schedule: Friday 10:00-11:00 AM in large conference room, at 301 College Ave

Date	Presenter	Talk Information
11-SEP
18-SEP	Vladimir Barash	Rate Your News Feed: Impression Management in Facebook Users of Social Network Sites (SNSs) create and manage impressions of themselves through various SNS affordances such as the profile page, chat functions, and status updates. While recent research has focused impressions projected through profiles, we study impressions projected through instantaneous status updates, via the Facebook "News Feed" feature. This talk will describe the methods used to collect data about impression management in Facebook status updates, which are encapsulated in a Facebook application called "Rate Your News Feed." I will conclude by taking a first look at the data collected, which indicate that while users generally succeed at presenting a positive image of themselves, they are only partially aware of how they are coming across and tend to underestimate the strength of the impressions they foster.
25-SEP	Lucian Leahu Hrönn Brynjarsdóttir	Addressing Fluidity through Mixed Technical-Design Practices "Ubicomp systems commonly rely on sensing and recognition capabilities to understand their context. While increasingly successful in simple environments, they face significant challenges addressing the fluid nature of less constrained, human settings. My thesis examines the construction of an interactive, mobile, sensor-based recognition system designed specifically for unconstrained settings. Based on the technical experiments and design explorations required to build such a system, my research makes three key contributions to ubicomp: 1) examines the context independence of statistical inference methods in unconstrained settings, 2) identifies challenges posed by dynamic settings to sensing and recognition technologies, and 3) proposes mixed technical-design approaches to advance ubicomp beyond simple environments." Ubicomp from the Edge of the North Atlantic: lessons from Fishing Villages in Iceland and Newfoundland Typically, ‘development’ is understood as bringing technology, and along with it, progress, from the Western world into developing nations. In the small, traditional Western fishing villages of Newfoundland and Iceland where Phoebe Sengers and I have been doing participant observervations, residents have experiences with technology that complicate the assumed link between technological development and progress. In this 10 minute talk, I will discuss three lessons for the field of ubiquitous computing from our work.
02-OCT	Phoebe Sengers [Rescheduled for November 6]	Rethinking modern work, life, and technology in a Newfoundland fishing village I will describe early results from 6 months of fieldwork in Change Islands, a traditional fishing village off the coast of Newfoundland. I originally went to Change Islands to learn about mismatches between technology design practice and the needs and lifestyles of subsistence communities, as inspiration for new forms of sustainable design. When I got there, the story got more complex; as much as the village seemed 'old-fashioned' to me, my neighbours told me frequently about how radically life on the island had changed in the last 40 years, with the introduction of modern conveniences such as running water, electricity, cars, and ferry transport. Using a combined ethnographic/historical approach, I explored what it means to be 'modern' or 'old-fashioned,' the role technology plays in creating modern life, and the costs and benefits of becoming modern. I will describe how these experiences may change the lens through which we design IT, and speculate about how such in-depth ethnographic/historical studies might inform HCI practice.
16-OCT
23-OCT	Theresa Velden	Scientific communication cultures in Chemistry The advent of the World Wide Web and related information and communication technologies provide opportunities to innovate scientific communication. The openness of scientific communication is a key issues in scientific communication reform. In this regard chemistry is notably diverging from disciplinary neighbors like physics or biomedicine, where communication regimes such as web-based preprint servers, public databases, or open access publishing proliferate. Tentative explanations that allude to the privatization of information in chemistry due to its commercial value make intuitive sense, but detailed analysis and validation is lacking from the literature. Case studies (e.g. Knorr-Cetina, Traweek, Collins, Hine) have shown how material and epistemic research cultures are intertwined with communication practices. Our empirical observations of physical chemists and organic chemists in a university setting confirm earlier results from specialty studies that show that experienced scientists engage in several specialties that differ in the degree of their social and intellectual cohesion. Tightly bound communities may evolve distinct 'moral economies' (Kohler) but what about less cohesive areas? We have identified two research cultures in chemistry that affect openness in sharing information in informal communication and in publications; one relying on ‘substance creation’, and one relying on ‘instrument building’. Rather than finding evidence of an impact of commercial value of chemical information on attitudes towards openness, we find that it is related to the fear of getting scooped, a danger that depends on the investment needed to generate scientific results, and that is more predominant in the ‘substance creation’ culture. This is further underlined by an observed differential in openness within the ‘substance creation’ culture that appears dependent on differences in competitiveness, and on the ease with which results can be reproduced. This IS breakfast talk will be a yet unpolished practice talk for a presentation I am going to give at the 4S conference in Washington DC the week after. I will present and discuss first results from field studies I undertook during the last two years observing and interviewing academic research groups in chemistry and physics. The talk is not based on a finished paper, but on an analysis in progress, as I am still in the process of analyzing the data collected, and developing an interpretation. So this practice talk is different from practice talks for, say CHI, that typically present some finished, written-up piece of work. Hence my expectations in audience feedback are less focused on presentational style. Instead I would be particularly interested in links you see to other work, and suggestions for alternative views on the interpretation of the data.
30-OCT		Talk Canceled - Stay tuned for November 6!
06-NOV	Phoebe Sengers	Rethinking modern work, life, and technology in a Newfoundland fishing village I will describe early results from 6 months of fieldwork in Change Islands, a traditional fishing village off the coast of Newfoundland. I originally went to Change Islands to learn about mismatches between technology design practice and the needs and lifestyles of subsistence communities, as inspiration for new forms of sustainable design. When I got there, the story got more complex; as much as the village seemed 'old-fashioned' to me, my neighbours told me frequently about how radically life on the island had changed in the last 40 years, with the introduction of modern conveniences such as running water, electricity, cars, and ferry transport. Using a combined ethnographic/historical approach, I explored what it means to be 'modern' or 'old-fashioned,' the role technology plays in creating modern life, and the costs and benefits of becoming modern. I will describe how these experiences may change the lens through which we design IT, and speculate about how such in-depth ethnographic/historical studies might inform HCI practice.
13-NOV	Claire Cardie, Geri Gay, Jeff Hancock, JP Pollak, Stephen Purpura	w00t! There it is! Detecting emotion in Twitter posts FTW ;P We set out to determine whether finding personal expressions of emotion in new social media (Twitter and Facebook) is substantially different or more complicated than finding emotional expressions in blogs or other documents. Like blogs, Twitter and Facebook have the complications of millions of users and millions of expressions (in units of Tweets, Facebook posts), but things are complicated somewhat due to the brevity of posts, assumed insider understanding, and use of slang. This project -- joint research involving Claire Cardie, Geri Gay, Jeff Hancock, JP Pollak, Stephen Purpura, and a cast of undergraduates and Master's students -- has triggered an examination of the application of NLP methods, search system user interface design, and experimental methodology towards what could be considered a typical type of COMM research project. We will discuss our approach and the results to date.
20-NOV
04-DEC

Date

Presenter

Talk Information

11-SEP

18-SEP

Vladimir Barash

Rate Your News Feed: Impression Management in Facebook

Users of Social Network Sites (SNSs) create and manage impressions of themselves through various SNS affordances such as the profile page, chat functions, and status updates. While recent research has focused impressions projected through profiles, we study impressions projected through instantaneous status updates, via the Facebook "News Feed" feature. This talk will describe the methods used to collect data about impression management in Facebook status updates, which are encapsulated in a Facebook application called "Rate Your News Feed." I will conclude by taking a first look at the data collected, which indicate that while users generally succeed at presenting a positive image of themselves, they are only partially aware of how they are coming across and tend to underestimate the strength of the impressions they foster.

25-SEP

Lucian Leahu

Hrönn Brynjarsdóttir

Addressing Fluidity through Mixed Technical-Design Practices

"Ubicomp systems commonly rely on sensing and recognition capabilities to understand their context. While increasingly successful in simple environments, they face significant challenges addressing the fluid nature of less constrained, human settings. My thesis examines the construction of an interactive, mobile, sensor-based recognition system designed specifically for unconstrained settings. Based on the technical experiments and design explorations required to build such a system, my research makes three key contributions to ubicomp: 1) examines the context independence of statistical inference methods in unconstrained settings, 2) identifies challenges posed by dynamic settings to sensing and recognition technologies, and 3) proposes mixed technical-design approaches to advance ubicomp beyond simple environments."

Ubicomp from the Edge of the North Atlantic: lessons from Fishing Villages in Iceland and Newfoundland

Typically, ‘development’ is understood as bringing technology, and along with it, progress, from the Western world into developing nations. In the small, traditional Western fishing villages of Newfoundland and Iceland where Phoebe Sengers and I have been doing participant observervations, residents have experiences with technology that complicate the assumed link between technological development and progress. In this 10 minute talk, I will discuss three lessons for the field of ubiquitous computing from our work.

02-OCT

Phoebe Sengers
[Rescheduled for November 6]

Rethinking modern work, life, and technology in a Newfoundland fishing village

I will describe early results from 6 months of fieldwork in Change Islands, a traditional fishing village off the coast of Newfoundland. I originally went to Change Islands to learn about mismatches between technology design practice and the needs and lifestyles of subsistence communities, as inspiration for new forms of sustainable design. When I got there, the story got more complex; as much as the village seemed 'old-fashioned' to me, my neighbours told me frequently about how radically life on the island had changed in the last 40 years, with the introduction of modern conveniences such as running water, electricity, cars, and ferry transport. Using a combined ethnographic/historical approach, I explored what it means to be 'modern' or 'old-fashioned,' the role technology plays in creating modern life, and the costs and benefits of becoming modern. I will describe how these experiences may change the lens through which we design IT, and speculate about how such in-depth ethnographic/historical studies might inform HCI practice.

16-OCT

23-OCT

Theresa Velden

Scientific communication cultures in Chemistry

The advent of the World Wide Web and related information and communication technologies provide opportunities to innovate scientific communication. The openness of scientific communication is a key issues in scientific communication reform. In this regard chemistry is notably diverging from disciplinary neighbors like physics or biomedicine, where communication regimes such as web-based preprint servers, public databases, or open access publishing proliferate. Tentative explanations that allude to the privatization of information in chemistry due to its commercial value make intuitive sense, but detailed analysis and validation is lacking from the literature. Case studies (e.g. Knorr-Cetina, Traweek, Collins, Hine) have shown how material and epistemic research cultures are intertwined with communication practices. Our empirical observations of physical chemists and organic chemists in a university setting confirm earlier results from specialty studies that show that experienced scientists engage in several specialties that differ in the degree of their social and intellectual cohesion. Tightly bound communities may evolve distinct 'moral economies' (Kohler) but what about less cohesive areas? We have identified two research cultures in chemistry that affect openness in sharing information in informal communication and in publications; one relying on ‘substance creation’, and one relying on ‘instrument building’. Rather than finding evidence of an impact of commercial value of chemical information on attitudes towards openness, we find that it is related to the fear of getting scooped, a danger that depends on the investment needed to generate scientific results, and that is more predominant in the ‘substance creation’ culture. This is further underlined by an observed differential in openness within the ‘substance creation’ culture that appears dependent on differences in competitiveness, and on the ease with which results can be reproduced.

This IS breakfast talk will be a yet unpolished practice talk for a presentation I am going to give at the 4S conference in Washington DC the week after. I will present and discuss first results from field studies I undertook during the last two years observing and interviewing academic research groups in chemistry and physics. The talk is not based on a finished paper, but on an analysis in progress, as I am still in the process of analyzing the data collected, and developing an interpretation. So this practice talk is different from practice talks for, say CHI, that typically present some finished, written-up piece of work. Hence my expectations in audience feedback are less focused on presentational style. Instead I would be particularly interested in links you see to other work, and suggestions for alternative views on the interpretation of the data.

30-OCT

Talk Canceled - Stay tuned for November 6!

06-NOV

Phoebe Sengers

13-NOV

Claire Cardie, Geri Gay, Jeff Hancock, JP Pollak, Stephen Purpura

w00t! There it is! Detecting emotion in Twitter posts FTW ;P

We set out to determine whether finding personal expressions of emotion in new social media (Twitter and Facebook) is substantially different or more complicated than finding emotional expressions in blogs or other documents. Like blogs, Twitter and Facebook have the complications of millions of users and millions of expressions (in units of Tweets, Facebook posts), but things are complicated somewhat due to the brevity of posts, assumed insider understanding, and use of slang. This project -- joint research involving Claire Cardie, Geri Gay, Jeff Hancock, JP Pollak, Stephen Purpura, and a cast of undergraduates and Master's students -- has triggered an examination of the application of NLP methods, search system user interface design, and experimental methodology towards what could be considered a typical type of COMM research project. We will discuss our approach and the results to date.

20-NOV

04-DEC