HCII in the Media

John R. Anderson, the R.K. Mellon University Professor of Psychology and Computer Science, received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science April 28 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Ken Koedinger came to Carnegie Mellon University in 1986 as a PhD student—exploring how software could be harnessed as a teaching tool. Twenty-five years later, more than 500,000 students a year are learning math more easily and efficiently through the cognitive tutors he and colleagues developed.

news.com.au warns journalists about potential quality of crowd sourced journalism. The article describes the CrowdForge developed by HCII’s Niki Kittur, Bob Kraut and Boris Smus.

New Scientist says a new kind of crowdsourcing could change the way we work. CrowdForge, a structure for crowdsourcing creative work developed by Niki Kittur, Bob Kraut and Boris Smus, is highlighted in the article.

HCII Director Justine Cassell joins in the discussion over the relative lack of female contributors to Wikipedia, why the disparity exists and why it matters, in the New York Times’ “Room for Debate” Opinion Page feature.

Professor Robert Kraut was quoted in a USA Today article about the impact of pervasive communication technology on how people interact with each other:

HCII PhD student Matthew Lee and faculty-advisor Anind Dey’s work on devices to help memory-impaired patients, such as those with Alzheimer’s, has been highlighted in the September 27th issue of AARP’s Bulletin.

An article in the Communications of the ACM describes work by HCII PhD student Anuj Kumar and others, which they presented in a CHI 2010 paper, “An Exploratory Study of Unsupervised Mobile Learning in Rural India”.

Bryan Pendleton, a PhD student in HCII, is known on Twitter as @BP. But since the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, some Twitter users have mistaken that Twitter handle for that of another BP, the oil giant. Some of the tweets Bryan has received since then have been … well, listen to how Bryan told the story to John Hockenberry on his radio show, The Takeaway.

Moira Burke, HCII PhD student, was the featured “Newsmaker” in the Sunday, May 9 edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Moira was recognized for winning two major awards: a Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship and the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges award.