GVU Seed Grant Talks

"Interfacing Crowds with Entertainers"
Dan Hou, Mark Godfrey, Jason Freeman, Music Department, College of Architecture
Frank Dellaert, Tucker Balch, College of Computing

"Visualized Decision Making: Information Visualization Techniques to Improve Decision Quality of Nursing Home Choice"
John Stasko, Julie Jacko, School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, College of Computing

"Threads for Development: Computer Education Revolutions for Sub-Saharan Africa"
Marshini Chetty, Celeste Buckhalter-Pittman, Rebecca Grinter, Michael Best, Mark Guzdial, College of Computing

12:00 Noon on Thursday, March 8, 2007
TSRB 132

One of the relatively unexplored frontiers in human-computer interaction is how computers can understand crowds and interact with them or, alternatively, mediate interaction. Our project centers on investigating how technology can mediate between crowds and entertainers in real-time, physically bringing audiences out of their seats and into a more direct relationship with the music, the musicians, and each other. In particular, we are developing a novel application of computer vision methods to enable Flock, a ninety-minute interactive multimedia performance work for saxophone quartet, video, and audience participation. Leveraging existing work in the BORG lab, we are developing a real-time, multi-camera video analysis system for the cheap, robust, and precise tracking of up to a hundred people in a large space.

Selection of a nursing home for a close family member is a crucial medical decision. In order to help consumers with this decision, several initiatives have resulted in public Web sites designed to share nursing home quality indicators (e.g., % of residents with pressure sores). However, it has been noted that the majority of consumers fail to fully utilize this information for various reasons (e.g., complexity of and uncertainty about the information). Information visualization (InfoVis) techniques have recently emerged that have been demonstratedto alleviate some of these problems. Accordingly, we apply InfoVis techniques to the nursing home selection decision domain as follows: First, a framework of InfoVis and decision theories will be developed specifically contextualized for use in the nursing home selection decision domain. Second, appropriate InfoVis techniques will be designed and evaluated. The results of this study will not only aid individuals who are faced with selecting a nursing home, but also establish the groundwork for the utility and application of InfoVis tools in various medical and healthcare decision making domains.

Most all major African universities offer degree programs in computing. All of these programs, however, face considerable challenges including lack of adequately trained faculty; lack of equipment, and antiquated curriculum lacking in local relevance. These constraints often fail to adequately train students that can respond to the local need for computer professionals and participate effectively in the global IT market. We set out to examine how the Threads approach to computing education, pioneered at Georgia Tech, might be adapted to Africa, where the need to contextualize computing for local needs is high. Our broad aims were to deepen our understanding of the problem domain before identifying partner institutions in Africa. Our intention is to collaboratively define curricula with these partner institutes based on insights from a Threads approach. In this talk, we will discuss the challenges and preliminary results of conducting a survey to broadly examine higher education training in computing across Sub-Saharan Africa. We compare and contrast computing education in Africa versus the US. Finally, we will outline our next steps for learning more about Threads in a radically new environment.