Kickoff and Keynote Speakers
Kickoff Speaker: Srilekha Krishnamurthy
Srilekha Krishnamurthy will be presenting the kickoff talk, Wireless technological innovations over the last decade and its exciting future.Srilekha Krishnamurthy is a Director of Engineering in the Corporate Product Security Group (QPSI) at Qualcomm Technologies Inc in San Diego, CA. Within QPSI, Srilekha runs the product security business unit strategy team. She is responsible for managing the long term product security needs of all Qualcomm business units and identifying new areas of security as well as business risk. Srilekha started her career at Qualcomm as an intern and has been with the company close to 10 years. She is a working mother with 2 small children and was recently recognized as Qualcomm's working mother for the year 2013. Her career path and story have been featured by the working mother magazine.
Industry Keynote: Socially Embedded Search Engines
Question-asking on online social networks is an increasingly common method of information seeking, used as an alternative to search engines in cases where users seek subjective opinions or require trusted answers personalized to their tastes. In this talk, I will give an overview of users' motivations for choosing whether to satisfy an information need via a social networking site versus a more traditional keyword search. I then propose a new information-seeking paradigm, socially embedded search engines, which bring many of the benefits of traditional search engines into the context of online social networks. I will discuss the design and deployment of two prototype socially embedded search engines: SearchBuddies, which augments Facebook exchanges with algorithmically-generated answers, and MSR Answers, which responds to Twitter questions with crowdsourced replies.Meredith Ringel Morris
Meredith Ringel Morris is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. She is also an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering and in the Information School at the University of Washington. Dr. Morris's research area is human-computer interaction, with a particular emphasis on computer-supported cooperative work and social computing. She recently co-authored the book Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why? (Morgan & Claypool, 2010). Technology Review recognized Dr. Morris's pioneering work on collaborative information seeking by naming her one of 2008's "35 innovators under 35". Dr. Morris earned a Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from Stanford University, and an Sc.B. in computer science from Brown University. More information, including her full list of publications, can be found on her website, http://research.microsoft.com/~merrie.
Academic Keynote: Focus, stress, mood and multitasking: A consequence of living in the digital age?
We are living in a digital age where information workers and college students are online for much, if not most, of the day. How does this constant online activity affect people in terms of their focus, mood, and stress? Are people happier when doing online or offline social interactions? When are people focused and bored throughout their workday? How much does computer usage and multitasking contribute to stress among college students? We investigated detailed computer usage and its interrelationship with stress, mood, and focus. We studied the activity of 32 information workers and 48 college students using precision tracking methods of sensors, biosensors, Sensecams, and experience sampling in their in situ environments. Our results show that online and offline social interactions are associated with different moods, suggesting that they serve different purposes at work. Email use is associated with negative affect and with feeling engaged and challenged throughout the day. We find that people exhibit rhythms of being focused and bored throughout the day and week, in conjunction with their particular digital media usage. With college students, stress is positively associated with the amount of multitasking and computer usage; however social media appears to alleviate stress. I will discuss the consequences of constant online activity and how these results can inform the design of computer technologies and practices that could be used to improve people's mood, focus and stress management.Gloria Mark
Gloria Mark is a Professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from Columbia University. Prior to joining UCI, she was a research scientist at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) and at the Electronic Data Systems Center for Advanced Research. She has been a visiting research scientist at the Boeing Company, Microsoft Research, and IBM. Her research focuses on the design and evaluation of collaborative information systems. Her current projects include studying how multitasking and technology use affect mood and stress, and citizen use of social media for resilience in crises. In 2005, she received a Fulbright scholarship for study in Berlin. Dr. Mark has published over 100 peer-reviewed publications in top conferences and journals in the fields of HCI and CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work). She was the program chair for the top-ranked ACM CSCW'12 and CSCW'06 conferences and is on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction and Human-Computer Interaction. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Time magazine, Wall St. Journal, BBC News, NPR, and other popular media. More information can be found on her website, http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark.