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April 2007
Two Department of Computer Science PhD students --
Sebastian De La Chica and
Melissa Dawe --
have been accepted to the
CHI Student Research Competition
to be held in San Jose, California, during the
CHI 2007 conference.
Sebastian and Melissa have both received a $500 travel award from CHI as part
of their selection to this competition.
The CHI Student Research Competition provides a forum for only 10 graduate
students selected from all applicants to share their research results, exchange
ideas and improve their communication skills, while competing for prizes.
Sponsored by Microsoft Research, the CHI competition is a branch of the ACM
Student Research Competition which hosts similar competitions at other ACM
conferences in different areas of computer science. The top three winners at
CHI will receive cash prizes and go on to compete in the finals with winners
from other ACM conferences.
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Sebastian's research explores the design and evaluation of
educational scaffolds to support students writing scientific explanations for
natural disasters, focusing on human information interaction design and natural
language processing. His work investigates how to generate educational
summaries from collections of digital library resources, and how to use these
summaries to design scaffolds to support sense-making activities. The
educational summaries are generated by extending existing multi-document
summarization techniques to capture educationally-relevant concepts and
relationships between those concepts from online resources.
Sebastian is advised by Professor Tamara Sumner.
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de la Chica
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Melissa's research examined patterns of use and the adoption
processes of assistive technologies for individuals with cognitive disabilities
and their families. Melissa combined participatory design techniques with a
technology probe study to design a PDA-based mobile phone that matched the
specific abilities and needs of two young adults with cognitive disabilities.
This research revealed the importance of designing for emotional and social
support when creating assistive technologies.
Melissa is advised by Professor Gerhard Fischer.
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Dawe
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Both Sebastian's and Melissa's work will be highlighted and evaluated during a
poster session throughout the duration of the CHI conference. If selected for
the final round of the competition, they will present their research during a
special presentation and question/answer period at CHI 2007. We wish Sebastian
and Melissa good luck at CHI!
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