IU School of Informatics Upcoming Events

Wed, November 11: A Mobile Health Application for a Chronically ill, low-literacy Population

Time: 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Place: Lindley Hall, Room 101

by Kay Connelly
School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University

Abstract: In this presentation, we describe the design of the Dietary Intake Monitoring Application (DIMA[1]), a mobile, electronic food diary for low-literacy patients with stage 5 Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). CKD patients do not have functioning kidneys, requiring them to undergo hemodialysis three times a week. Because excess fluids and toxins normally removed continuously by the kidneys are only removed every other day with dialysis, CKD patients have an extremely restricted prescribed diet. For example, a typical patient must limit their fluid to 1 liter a day, and their nutrients to 2 g of sodium. Failure to adhere to the diet can lead to a host of complications, including exacerbated hypertension, pulmonary edema, and even death. However, this population often lacks the computational and memory skills necessary to track their fluid and nutrient intake on their own, with as many as 80% of patients not restricting their fluid and 67% not limiting their nutrients. Further, this patient group is particularly difficult to design for as they have varying literacy skills, prohibiting text-based input and output. In this presentation, we describe our approach to designing for a chronically ill patient population that is not tech-savy and has educational barriers for using technology.

[1] Funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NBIB): Award #1 R21 EB007083-01A1, titled Self-Monitoring of Dietary and Fluid Intake Using a PDA.

Biography: Dr. Kay Connelly is an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics at Indiana University. Her research interests are in the intersection of mobile and pervasive computing and healthcare. In particular, she is interested in issues that influence user acceptance of health technologies, such as privacy, integration into one’s lifestyle, convenience, and utility. Dr. Connelly works with a variety of patient groups, including very sick populations who need help in managing their disease, healthy populations interested in preventative care, and senior citizens looking to remain in their homes for as long as possible. Dr. Connelly is the Senior Associate Director for the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, and has recently taken the challenge to start a new Health Informatics program at Indiana University. Dr. Connelly received a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from Indiana University (1995), and an MS (1999) and Ph.D. (2003) in Computer Science from the University of Illinois.

Provided By:

The Center for Data and Search Informatics, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University

Fri, November 13: The intersection of User Experience Design and Brand Strategy

Time: 1:30 p.m.

Place: Informatics East, Room 130

Kristian Andersen (http://twitter.com/kristianindy) is the founder and president of KA+A (http://kaplusa.com) a boutique branding and experience design firm that helps companies define, articulate and execute brand strategies and user experiences that drive long-term success.

Kristian’s clients range from venture-funded start-ups to established members of the Fortune 500. During the course of Kristian’s professional career he has consulted in the advertising, entertainment, technology, healthcare, professional services, and communication industries. Kristian routinely serves as an advisor to businesses and not-for-profits looking to strengthen their position in the marketplace through intelligent branding and experience design strategies.

In addition to directing the operations of KA+A, Kristian also serves as a managing partner at Gravity Ventures, an Indianapolis-based, venture fund that makes investments in seed and early-stage companies. Additionally, he has co-founded or invested in several innovative start-ups, in which he serves in various leadership capacities.

Kristian received his B.A. in design from Anderson University and has completed additional study in digital and industrial design at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2005 Kristian was one of forty design executives in the nation who were selected to attend the Harvard Business School Design Leadership Program.

Colloquia: Fri, November 13: The cloud, its architecture and what this implies for scholarly research

by Dennis Gannon
Microsoft and School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University

Time: 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Place: Lindley Hall, Rm. 102

Abstract: We are currently in the middle of major sea change in science research from an era dominated by large scale simulation to one dominated by data. This change is due to two factors. First, because of the proliferation of on-line instruments and other devices we have now access to much more digital information than ever before. Second, our tools to analyze, explore and understand these data are far more powerful now thanks to advances that have come about because of technologies like large scale data centers, advanced search and data mining algorithms and our ubiquitous on-line access to the Internet. Together these technologies are evolving into a seamless fabric of client-to-cloud computing that will keep us constantly connected to our social networks, monitor our health and empower us with knowledge derived from vast oceans of data. This talk will focus on the some of the design issues for large scale data centers and the problem of designing applications and software that can run in these massive clouds and also connect to our personal information clients. We will survey the various approaches to cloud programming and try to outline some challenges that lie ahead as we envision the applications of the future.

Biography: Dennis Gannon is the Director of Applications for the Cloud Computing Futures Group. Prior to coming to Microsoft, he was a professor of Computer Science at Indiana University and the Science Director for the Indiana Pervasive Technology Labs and, for seven years, Chair of the Department of Computer Science. His research interests include large-scale cyberinfrastructure, programming systems and tools, distributed computing, computer networks, parallel programming, computational science, problem solving environments and performance analysis of Grid and MPP systems. He led the DARPA HPC++ project and he was one of the architects of the Department of Energy SciDAC Common Software Component Architecture (CCA). He was a partner in the NSF Computational Cosmology Grand Challenge project, the NSF Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery and the NCSA Alliance. He served on the steering committee of the GGF, now the Open Grid Forum and the Executive Steering Committee of the NSF Teragrid where he managed the TeraGrid Science Advisory Board. He was the Program Chair for the IEEE 2002 High Performance Distributed Computing Conference, the General Chair of the 1998 International Symposium on Scientific Object Oriented Programming Environments and the 2000 ACM Java Grande Conference, and Program Chair for the 1997 ACM International Conference on Supercomputing as well as the 1995 IEEE Frontiers of Massively Parallel Processing. He was the Program Chair for the International Grid Conference, Barcelona, 2006 and co-chair of the 2008 IEEE e-Science Conference. While he was Chair of the Computer Science Department at Indiana University, he led the team that designed the University’s new School of Informatics. For that effort he was given the School’s Hermes Award in 2006. He has published over 100 refereed articles and co-edited 3 books. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1980 after receiving a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Davis.

A printable version of the flyer may be printed.

Sat, November 14: iPhone Conference

Time: 9:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Place: Indiana Memorial Union

Indiana University is excited to host the iPhone Conference at the Indiana Memorial Union (IMU) on Saturday, November 14th from 9am-3pm. Join us to learn how to get started with the latest innovations in Apple’s developer tools for Mac and iPhone. Get an overview of the technologies available for iPhone web applications and network with other iPhone developers to make your iPhone application visually compelling and simple to use.

Who Should Attend?

Those interested in iPhone application and web development. All are welcome, so be sure to register before November 6th as space is limited. IU students, faculty, and staff can attend the conference for FREE. Registration fee for non-IU attendees is $20.

The conference is sponsored by University Information Technology Services (UITS), the School of Informatics and Computing, and Apple.

Colloquia: Fri, November 20: SeerSuite: Enterprise Search and Cyberinfrastructure for Science and Academia

by Lee Giles
College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University

Time: 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Place: Lindley Hall, Rm. 102

Abstract: Cyberinfrastructure or e-science has become crucial in many areas of science as data access often defines scientific progress. Open source systems have greatly facilitated design and implementation and supporting cyberinfrastructure. However, there exists no open source integrated system for building an integrated search engine and digital library that focuses on all phases of information and knowledge extraction, such as citation extraction, automated indexing and ranking, chemical formulae search, table indexing, etc. We propose the open source SeerSuite architecture which is a modular, extensible system built on successful OS projects such as Lucene/Solr and discuss its uses in building enterprise search and cyberinfrastructure for the sciences and academia. We highlight application domains with examples from computer science, CiteSeerX, chemistry, ChemXSeer, and archaeology, ArchSeer.

CiteSeerX, the successor to CiteSeer, currently offers or intends to offer some unique aspects of search not yet present in other scientific search services or engines, such as table, figure, algorithm and author search. In addition, CiteSeerX continuously crawls the web and author submissions and now has nearly 1.5 million documents, close to 30 million citations, a million authors and comparable database tables. It has nearly 1 million unique users with several million hits a day.

In chemistry, the growth of data has been explosive and timely, and effective information and data access is critical. The ChemXSeer (funded by NSF Chemistry) system is a portal and search engine for academic researchers in environmental chemistry, which integrates the scientific literature with experimental, analytical and simulation datasets. ChemXSeer consists of information crawled from the web, manual submission of scientific documents and user submitted datasets, as well as scientific documents and metadata provided by major publishers. Information gathered from the web is publicly accessible whereas access to restricted resources such as user submitted data will be determined by those users. Thus, instead of being a fully open search engine and repository, ChemXSeer will be a hybrid one, limiting access to some resources.

Because such enterprise systems require unique information extraction approaches, several different machine learning methods, such as conditional random fields, support vector machines, mutual information based feature selection, sequence mining, etc. are critical for performance. We draw lessons for other e-science and cyberinfrastructure systems in terms of design, implementation and research and discuss future directions and systems.

References:
[ChemXSeer] http://chemxseer.ist.psu.edu
[CiteSeerX] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
[SeerSuite] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeerSuite
[Solr] http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Biography: Dr. C. Lee Giles is the David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. He has appointments in the departments of Computer Science and Engineering and Supply Chain and Information Systems. His research interests are in intelligent cyberinfrastructure, web tools, search engines and information retrieval, digital libraries, web services, knowledge and information extraction, data mining and social networks. He has published over 300 papers in these areas. He was a cocreator of the popular search tools, SeerSuite, CiteSeer (now CiteSeerX), for computer science, and ChemXSeer, for chemistry. He is fellow of the ACM, IEEE and INNS. His work has been funded by NSF, DARPA, Microsoft, Ford, IBM, Internet Archive, Lockheed-Martin, Alcatel/Lucent, NEC, Raytheon, Smithsonian, US Department of Treasury, and Yahoo.

A printable version of the colloquium printer is available for printing.

Thu, December 3: Life Sciences Day

Time: 11:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Place: Godfrey Graduate and Executive Education Center, Room 1040

Contact: lifesc@indiana.edu

Join the Center for the Business of Life Sciences at the Kelley School of Business for Life Sciences Day events beginning at 11:30 a.m. A reception will follow the event from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Colloquia: Fri, December 4: A Retrospective on Grey, A System for Ubiquitous, Smartphone-Based Authority Management

by Michael Reiter
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Time: 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Place: Lindley Hall, Rm. 102

School of Informatics and Computing Distinguished Colloquium

Abstract: For years, research groups and companies have explored a vision of the smartphone as a universal access-control device, replacing physical keys, access tokens, and even payment cards. The Grey system is our flavor of this vision, which we have developed over the last half-decade and deployed in buildings at two university campuses. A key design decision in Grey is that each request should be accompanied by a formal, machine-checkable proof that demonstrates why the request satisfies access-control policy. In this talk, we will describe how this led to more flexible policy management and authority delegation than had been available previously, ultimately resulting in quantifiably more usable access-control than conventional approaches. We will survey several interesting questions we faced in the design, deployment and use of this system, and we will describe how, by drawing on research areas as diverse as formal methods, cryptography, machine learning, and human-computer interaction, we attempted to tackle them.

Biography: Michael Reiter is the Lawrence M. Slifkin Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He received the B.S. degree in mathematical sciences from UNC in 1989, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1991 and 1993, respectively. He joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1993 and became a founding member of AT&T Labs Ã¢â‚¬â€œ Research when NCR and Lucent Technologies (including Bell Labs) were split away from AT&T in 1996. He then returned to Bell Labs in 1998 as Director of Secure Systems Research. In 2001, he joined Carnegie Mellon University as a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science, where he was also the founding Technical Director of CyLab. He joined the faculty at UNC in 2007.

Dr. Reiter's research interests include all areas of computer and communications security and distributed computing. He regularly publishes and serves on conference organizing committees in these fields, and has served as program chair for the flagship computer security conferences of the IEEE, the ACM, and the Internet Society. He presently serves on the editorial board of Communications of the ACM, and he has previously served as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security and on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, and the International Journal of Information Security. He presently serves on the Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee for the United States Department of Commerce.

Dr. Reiter was named an ACM Fellow in 2008.

A printable version of the colloquium flyer is available for printing.

Colloquia: Fri, December 11: A Multidisciplinary Approach Towards Computational Thinking

by Susanne Hambrusch
Department of Computer Science, Purdue University

Time: 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Place: Informatics East, Rm. 130

Abstract: This talk describes two on-going projects on integrating computational thinking into courses for non-CS majors. Project SECANT is a multi-disciplinary effort developing a course on computational thinking for science majors. At Purdue, all science undergraduates must fulfill a computing requirement, generally by taking a CS course. A new course was developed by CS faculty in collaboration with faculty in Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Statistics. It uses a problem-driven approach focusing on scientific discovery through computational methods grounded in computer science principles. The main objective is to give science majors a firm foundation of basic programming concepts and to establish an understanding of the algorithmic thought process. Python was chosen as the language as it quickly allows the writing of meaningful programs and is used in serious ways by many scientific communities. Project CS4EDU aims to create new pathways for undergraduate education majors to become computationally educated secondary teachers. This joint effort between CS and Education plans to create a Computer Science Endorsement program based on the Educational Computing Standards set by the International Society for Technology in Education. The pathways to the endorsement program include creating modules on computational thinking for education courses to highlight the pervasiveness of computational metaphors in topics like reasoning, knowledge construction, critical thinking and problem solving.

Biography: Susanne Hambrusch is a professor of computer science at Purdue University. She served as the Department Head from 2002 to 2007. Her research interests are in query and data management in mobile environments, parallel and distributed computation, and analysis of algorithms. She leads two interdisciplinary NSF funded projects, “Science Education in Computational Thinking” and “Computer Science for Education.” She is a member of the editorial boards of Parallel Computing and Information Processing Letters, and she is a co-chair for CACM's Viewpoints section. She also serves on the board of directors of the CRA and the CRA-W.

A printable version of the colloquium flyer is available for printing.