Projects
This page contains both completed and on-going projects. If you would like to contribute to any project, please get in touch over email.
DIS Demo
Thank you for checking out the demo at DIS 2023. You can download the PDF of the demo worksheets here:
You can download the related papers here:
From Personal to Societal Informatics: Measuring Well-Being at Arbitrary Scales of Social Organization
This project explores new social measurements for guiding both individual behavior change and public policy. Traditional economic measures like per-capita income are not perfectly coupled with actual human well-being. More money is not necessarily making us more satisfied (especially beyond some baseline level of income). Human centered measured like gross national happiness (GNH) and the human development index (HDI) seek to better represent the human experience, but struggle to represent individuals (and entire societies) as single numbers.
The approach of this project is to use a network representation of an individual to capture relationships between basic human needs, and the ways in which those needs are satisfied (satisfiers). A bipartite network, with shared need nodes, enables aggregation of networks representing individuals into multi-layer networks representing groups of people at arbitrary scales.
The methodological approaches in this project are:
- Representing an individual as a network, not a number
- Sharing nodes in a bipartite network as a way of ensuring similarity across networks
- Aggregating networks in various ways using methods from multilayer networks
- Structured reflection across developed theories of need/well-being/motivation to generate a new kind of datasource - structured representations of a life
Publications and Presentations for this Project
- DIS Conference Paper reporting on results from a mixed-methods technology probe study
- Old Working paper on visualizing systems of need and satisfaction
- Lightning Talk at the vis4good workshop (Representing Systems of Need and Satisfaction)
- Talk at Networks 2021 (The Individual as Network: Multilayer Intra-individual Ego Networks)
- Poster at IC2S2 2020 (Networks for Understanding Human Need)
Co-Tracking to Direct Attention in Interpersonal Perception
Co-tracking is when you not only track your own mood, for example, but also your perception of someone else’s mood. We’ve developed a research plan to explore the use of co-tracking technology in close relationships, and will be recruiting participants within the next few months.
I learned how to make a serverless backend in AWS for this project. I learned scalable database design in DynamoDB, easy identity management with Cognito, and some basic javascript lambda functions called directly from the React App. This app could live on the AWS free tier indefinitely, and scale to many many users with a bit of money.
Personal Dream Informatics
I conducted a large scale (N=283) mixed-methods survey with a targeted audience of lucid dreamers and dream trackers, to develop a better understanding of how dreams influence ourselves, and the technology that mediates it (largely dream journals and social dreaming practices).
Out of this study came the idea for “self-information systems” as an appropriate scope of analysis for individual level behavior change. I was excited to use a system dynamics style model to summarize the findings.
Presenting at CHI 2022.
Social Interfaces for Self-Tracking in Bipolar Disorder
I interviewed 17 clinicians to get their feedback on a variety of novel social interfaces for supporting self-tracking in the context of managing bipolar disorder.
Interesting findings:
- Out of this project came the idea of designing different roles for different “parts” of the self (intra-individual roles)
- Social reactivity - when social perceptions affect data measurement (eg - if I record this fight with my brother, my mom will see it, so I’m not going to track accurately)
- Suicide risk drives reluctance to integrate mental health data with clinician practices
Published in DIS 2021 The Multiplicative Patient and the Clinical Workflow: Clinician Perspectives on Social Interfaces for Self-Tracking and Managing Bipolar Disorder
Completed Projects
The Unequal Impact of Parenthood in Academia (Science Advances)
Machine Learning for Automating Manufacturability and Supply Chain Analysis (ASME Journal of Mechanical Design)
ANA - Automated Manufacturability Analysis Software (IISE 2017)
Wind Turbine Blade Recycling Economic Decision Framework