Agile Research Studios

Agile Research Studios

Undergraduate research experiences enhance learning and professional development, but providing effective and scalable research training is often limited by practical implementation and orchestration challenges. Agile Research Studios (ARS) is a new socio-technical model for expanding research training opportunities that supports research communities of practice without increasing faculty mentoring resources. ARS integrates and advances professional best practices and organizational designs, principles for forming effective learning communities, and design of social technologies to overcome the orchestration challenge of one faculty researcher mentoring 20 or more students. The DTR program uses the ARS model to improve the quality of learning, produce research outcomes, and lower the barrier to participation while increasing the number of students who receive authentic research training.

Agile Research Studio (Model)

Agile Research Studios is a new socio-technical model for research training consisting of processes, tools, and social structures for orchestrating...

Self-Directed Help Seeking and Skill Growth

Current work: Networked learning communities (NLCโ€™s) are spaces designed for their members to collaborate on work and benefit from each otherโ€™s...

Independent Development Plan

Independent Development Plan explores the effectiveness of metacognitive reflection in supporting students in building their self-direction skills by...

Nithya

As research groups expand in size, it becomes increasingly difficult for community members to identify the expertise within the community and the...

Pair Research

Pair Research is a platform that helps research studios pair students to help one another on their respective projects based on their reported task...

Polaris

It is increasingly important to train novice innovators in the skills they need to lead the design and research of solutions to todayโ€™s most pressing...

Metacognitive Reflection

This project specifically examines how to support student-researchers in improving their metacognitive processes as they work on independently-lead...

Compass

Undergraduate research experiences provide numerous personal, professional, and societal benefits, including enhancing student learning and...

Team

Faculty

  • Haoqi Zhang
  • Matt Easterday
  • Liz Gerber

Ph.D. Students

  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Leesha Maliakal Shah

Masters and Undergraduate Students

  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Neha Sharma
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Aimee van den Berg
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Ariella Silver
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Bomani McClendon
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Isaac Miller
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Kevin Chen
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Maggie Lou
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Molly Pribble
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Natalie Ghidali
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Nneoma Oradiegwu
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Olivia Gallager
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Sameer Srivastava
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Sehmon Burnam
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Shankar Salwan
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Victoria Cabales
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Zev Stravitz

Context-Aware Metacognitive Practices

Context-Aware Metacognitive Practices

Learning how to program is hard, and many students in introductory computer science courses struggle to overcome programming challenges on their own. These students are unsatisfied with their performance on assignments, but donโ€™t know how to identify ineffective actions in their process, reflect on the root causes for these actions (ex: impostor syndrome, low self-efficacy, low sense of belonging), or recognize potential obstacles. Without adopting solutions that address ineffective actions, their root causes, and obstacles, they will continue to struggle in CS.ย 

Supporting Help-Seeking in CS1 Office Hours

Learning how to program is hard, and many students in introductory computer science courses (CS1) struggle to overcome programming challenges on...

Cardinal

Students studying computer science tend be ineffective planners who don't know the best practices for completing coding assignments and projects in...

PATH: Process Adjustment by Tackling Hang-ups

Learning how to program is hard, and many students in introductory computer science courses struggle to overcome programming challenges on their own....

Q&A Buddy

Q&A Buddy explores the metacognitive skill of help-seeking, and how we can best support it during CS1 office hours. We are designing and creating a...

Team

Faculty

  • Haoqi Zhang
  • Eleanor "Nell" O'Rourke

Ph.D. Students

  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Harrison Kwik

Masters and Undergraduate Students

  • Ella Cutler
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Amy Guo
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Dani Zhang
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Iphigenie Bera
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Izzy Chun
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Justin Shi
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Lauren Bichelmeir
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Li Kang Tan

Human-AI Tools

Human-AI Tools

How can we imbue machines with a deeper understanding of human situations and contexts, and the interactions they afford? Despite significant advances in machine sensing and machine learning technologiesโ€”and the availability of rich APIs for creating AI-powered applicationsโ€”it remains difficult for designers to express their concept of a human situation (e.g., places to hold a private conversation; good places to take a bike ride with young children) to machines so that applications can be aware and responsive to the situation across a variety of distributed contexts. Failing to do so could result in costly errors, violate safety and privacy, or lead to inequitable access to AI supported experiences. To fill this gap, this SIG's projects advance new human-AI expression tools that support designers using their understanding of human situations to construct machine representations using available context features.ย 

Human-AI tools for concept development and expression

Getting machines to support human experiences, desires, and goals requires imbuing them with representations of human situations that are beyond what...

Human-AI tools for accounting for differences across contexts

Our project introduces an innovative AI system designed to adeptly translate different human experiences and cultural contexts into...

Team

Faculty

  • Haoqi Zhang

Ph.D. Students

  • None

Masters and Undergraduate Students

  • Jiayi Zheng
  • Yiran Mo
  • Mame Coumba Ka
  • Nuremir Babanov
  • Suhuai Chen
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Alex Feng

Networked Orchestration Technologies

Networked Orchestration Technologies

Todayโ€™s work and learning communities have become increasingly networked through the inclusion of a variety of social support structures, agile working processes, and productivity tools that facilitate their members in solving complex, ill-structured problems. While these advances are necessary for supporting complex work, learning how to connect oneโ€™s working process with the support opportunities throughout the ecosystem can be challenging for novices since it requires them to continually monitor for their needs, plan strategies to resolve them, and replan as progress on their needs is made. Towards addressing these challenges, this SIG develops technologies that help people develop orchestration strategies for working and learning across the support opportunities present in these complex organizations.

Technologies for Networked Orchestration

Training undergraduates in conducting authentic, independent research provides many benefits to the student, including learning the regulation skills...

Regulation Devices

We are interested in exploring technologies that can help mentors and mentees more effectively regulate their behaviors in-the-moment to maximize the...

Interactive SOAP Notes

Networked learning communities in research settings provide students with many venues in which to help-seek or make research progress, but it is...

Orchestration Scripting Environments

Working well in networked communities requires that its members learn to access the support opportunities available for their needs, but this can be...

Understanding Networked Orchestration

Work and learning communities have become increasingly networked to support their members in developing the skills to solve complex, real-world...

Orchestration Scripting Platform

Mentors must be able to provide coaching to students when they are using ineffective network access strategies, but this remains difficult without...

Orchestrating Planning and Reflection

Todayโ€™s problems across domains like research, engineering, and public policy are challenging, complex, and often ill-defined. In lieu of these...

Situated Reflection Systems

In the fast-paced realm of education, mentors and mentees grapple with identifying and addressing issues to improve work practices. Our project,...

Team

Faculty

  • Haoqi Zhang

Ph.D. Students

  • Kapil Garg

Masters and Undergraduate Students

  • Ella Jones
  • Grace Wang
  • Jonah Jodlowski
  • Linh Ly
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Alex Feng
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Ariella Silver
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Caryl Henry
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Charlotte Jones
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Chase Duvall
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Hang Yin
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Jason Friedman
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Josh Klein
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Kieran Bondy
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Mason Lin
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Rawan Mohamed
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Richard Huang
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Sydney Smith
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Tommy McHugh
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Vishal Giridhar

Opportunistic Collective Experiences

Opportunistic Collective Experiences

Designing Opportunistic Interactions to Connect People at Distance

Affordance Aware Computing

We are exploring interactions, algorithms and architectures that will allow us to interact programmatically with objects in our physical environments...

Collective Experience API

Collective Experiences is a novel platform that coordinates people in real spaces in real time to participate in experiences. For example, if we...

OCE Design Guidelines

Opportunistic Collective Experiences (OCEs) are social experiences powered by computer programs that create shared, interactional spaces from...

Cast

The process of creating stories with others is highly engaging but labor-intensive, especially because satisfying narratives often require a central...

OCEs for Relationship Development

Screenshots of the Cerebro app that highlight the process in which users participate in shared activities while in a shared affordance.

Dedicating...

Intelligent Execution Engine

While opportunistic interactions are a promising way of promoting shared activities across space and time that fits into the routines of peopleโ€™s...

Collective Narrative

With the emergence of social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, etc, sharing stories has become an essential part of peopleโ€™s everyday...

Team

Faculty

  • Haoqi Zhang

Ph.D. Students

  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Ryan Louie
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Vsevolod (Seva) Suschevskiy

Masters and Undergraduate Students

  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Kevin Cheng
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Pablo Gupta
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Allison Sun
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Amy Yang
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Cindy Hu
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย David Lee
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Eunice Lee
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Gabriel Caniglia
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Gino Wang
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Grace Wainaina
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Jennie Werner
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Jenny Chang
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Kevin Chen
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Mary Truong
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Mason Lin
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Matthew Wang
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Navin Gopaul
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Nina Cong
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Parveen Dhanoa
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Richard Lam
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Ryan Jeon
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Ryan Madden
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Sanfeng Wang
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Shannon Nachreiner
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Suzy Lee
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Victoria Tran
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Yvan Chu
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Zachary Cmiel

Readily Available Learning Experiences

Readily Available Learning Experiences

After completing programming courses, students encounter barriers when trying to contribute to open source and professional projects. Students may have the knowledge to develop an application, but knowledge gaps such as knowing which tool is the right tool to use can keep a student from applying their skills where a need exists. We propose research to bridge gaps in knowledge and overcome lack-of-experience barriers with a two-prong approach: Programming with a Purpose (PWAP) and Readily Available Learning Experiences (RALE). PWAP provides students with an opportunity to learn production-quality development practices while fulfilling the coding needs of actual clients. RALEs help students and professionals to overcome knowledge gaps that prevent them from developing high quality software products. Through participation in PWAP and RALEs, we hypothesize that students can gain tangible project experience and eliminate barriers to production-quality development.

Telescope

Professional websites contain rich interactive features that developers can learn from, yet understanding their implementation remains a challenge...

Scaffolded Exercises

Though options exist for learning web development skills independently, it is still difficult for intermediate web developers to learn to author...

GuideRALE

Online tutorial platforms with rich curation like Codecademy's โ€œmake airbnbโ€ help learners acquire new programming techniques by offering them rich...

Knowledge Maps

Knowledge Maps encourages novice web developers to construct conceptual models by way of analyzing the code of professional web features. The...

TagStyle

Aspiring programmers have written millions of lines of code using online tutorial platforms such as Codeacademy, but none of this code will ever be...

Unravel

Professional websites with complex UI features provide real world examples for developers to learn from. Yet despite the availability of source code,...

Ply

Despite the ease of inspecting HTML and CSS, web developers struggle to identify the code most responsible for particular stylistic effects, due to...

rale-rnd

Novices struggle to understand professional web architectures ๐Ÿ–ฅ๏ธ. Professional sites can be good learning resources because they are inspectable ๐Ÿง,...

RALE Modules

RQ1: Can highlighting and annotating design patterns help intermediate developers see how and why they are used in professional codebases?

RQ2: Can...

Team

Faculty

  • Haoqi Zhang
  • Eleanor "Nell" O'Rourke

Ph.D. Students

  • Gobi Dasu
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Josh Hibschman

Masters and Undergraduate Students

  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Alexandra Andreiu
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Aaron Leon
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Alex Hollenbeck
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Ava Robinson
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Ben Rothman
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Daniel Zhu
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย David Latimore
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Fardeem Munir
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Greg Kim
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Jonathan Liu
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Katie George
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Lev Rosenberg
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Maxine Whitely
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Mieraf Mulat
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Natalie Brewster
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Philip House
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Roxy Wilcox
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Salome Kariuki
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Sarah Lim
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Suzy Lee
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Yabi Ayele

Breaking Boundaries

Breaking Boundaries

Breaking Boundaries focuses on exploring novel interactions and connecting people in unusual and unexpected ways. The goal of this SIG is to redefine the boundaries of what is possible in our everyday interactions and ways of doing. Example projects aim to empower interactions that (a) share real-world collective experiences as readily as we would share information via social media today; (b) provide personalized action plans for novice web developers as they embark on their first personal project; (c) allow developers to prototype mobile apps in low fidelity, but still test them outside of the lab in realistic scenarios; (d) blur the lines between physical and virtual reality; and (e) connects strangers through sharing of secret information about their community.

Big Talk

Developing an online question answering platform that promotes deeper, more meaningful interactions between people โ€“ essentially skipping the small...

McGonagall

In this project we explore the use of mixed-fidelity (paper and digital) prototype design as a method for prototyping and testing mobile applications...

Rift Together

Rift Together explores interactions between two people โ€” one omniscient "brain" wearing the Oculus Rift and directing the other, who is in real life...

Secrets

Information sharing a core focus of many online systems, and within these systems information is shared either through established social ties and...

Action Plans for Personal Projects

Beginning and novice web developers often have trouble working through personal projects without the help of more experienced peers and mentors....

Remote Paper Prototype Testing

RPPT enables designers to wizard paper prototypes from afar while a user tests the prototype in realistic scenarios, out of the lab. The user tester...

Lake

Lake is an iOS app that allows designers to prototype mobile applications with complex functionality at low cost. By allowing designers to manipulate...

Yo Star

Yo* is a collective experience game based around forming shapes in real spaces. Players work collaboratively to form shapes on a map with their...

Team

Faculty

  • Haoqi Zhang

Ph.D. Students

  • None

Masters and Undergraduate Students

  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Alex Kaldjian
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Alex Wang
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Andrew Finke
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Corey Grief
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Greg Kim
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Kalina Silverman
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Katie George
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Kevin Chen
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Meg Grasse
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Nikhil Pai
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Ryan Madden

On-the-Go Crowdsourcing

On-the-Go Crowdsourcing

The On-the-Go Crowdsourcing SIG focuses on designing interactions, algorithms and architectures that conveniently leverage people's existing mobility and routines for crowdsourcing and self-sourcing. Projects center around three core areas: (1) enabling large-scale, high-fidelity communitysensing through lightweight interactions (see TapShare, Gaze, and Low-Effort Sensing); (2) empowering community-supported physical tasking through people's existing routines (see CrowdFound and Libero); (3) using location-aware reminders to promote completing tasks at home for oneself (see Micro-reminders). Our research aims to enable physical crowdsourcing systems to tap into the rich daily physical routines of over 100 million on-the-go Americans to better transport goods, map the world in exquisite new detail, and accomplish a broad range of tasks at scale. Our work will lead to a general framework and set of techniques that aim to achieve this by (1) scaffolding individual contributions toward a communal goal, (2) developing computational models and mechanisms that flexibly guide people to appropriate tasks and intelligently manage community participation.

MicroReminders

How can we use smart reminder systems to help people accomplish long-term personal goals, such as building habits? This project uses the idea of...

BiteNow

Current approaches to physical crowdsourcing focuses on one person contributing full reports for participatory sensing. These approaches focus on...

Opportunistic Hit-or-Wait

Figure: Illustration of the search distribution coverage across task delivery mechanisms for on-the-go crowds. Tall black bars denote wasted effort;...

Rahisi

Initial quarterly wrap-up video. Features the landmark opportunistic coffee delivery application, Caffeine Rush, which was created to explore what...

Understanding Task Notification Policies

Recent years have seen the growth of physical crowdsourcing systems (e.g., Uber; TaskRabbit) that motivate large numbers of people to provide new and...

Libero

Libero utilizes peopleโ€™s existing routine for package delivery by incorporating just-in-time notifications in hopes of reducing task distance to an...

4X: Scaffolding Data Collection

Participatory sensing systems in which people actively participate in the data collection process must account for both the needs of data...

Social Tasking

On-the-go tasking systems, such as peer-to-peer food delivery or package delivery systems, help volunteers complete tasks for other users along their...

CrowdFound

CrowdFound, a mobile crowdsourcing system to find lost items. CrowdFound allows users to input lost item descriptions on a map and then sends...

Mercury

On-the-go physical crowdsourcing systems aim to take advantage of users' everyday routines to complete tasks for other community members. For...

TapShare

The pervasiveness of sensor-rich mobile devices enables citizens to contribute to sensing and data collection efforts by participating in citizen...

Gaze

Recent developments in citizen science, community sensing, and crowdsourcing suggest the possibilities of massive data collection about the natural...

Dynamic Habitsourcing

Building a habit is often a challenging task for many individuals. Our project, Dynamic Habit sourcing, investigates how dynamic habit sourcing...

Patterns

Natural Patterns uses an experience of recognizing, detecting, and reasoning about patterns in nature to promote a new form of citizen science -- one...

Team

Faculty

  • Haoqi Zhang

Ph.D. Students

  • Kapil Garg
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Emily Harburg
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Julian Vicens
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Yongsung Kim

Masters and Undergraduate Students

  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Aaron Loh
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Abizar Bagasrawala
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Cooper Barth
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Eli Cohen
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Nicole Zhu
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Olivia Barnett
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Priya Shah
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Sam Naser
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Sasha Weiss
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Shana Azria
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Stephen Chan
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Zak Allen

Playful Learning

Playful Learning

The Playful Learning SIG focuses on designing, building, and evaluating playful learning environments that encourage people to interact with educational content in new and exciting ways. Projects center around three themes: (1) incorporating playful elements into learning activities to encourage exploration and deep understanding; (2) studying how peers can learn from each other through collaborative and competitive learning activities; and (3) understanding how learning transfers between playful learning activities and more traditional tasks. Our research will build a deeper understanding of how play can encourage and motivate learning, with the goal of producing general principals to guide the design of playful learning environments across multiple learning domains.

Bridges for Learning Transfer

While students may master a concept in one learning context, research shows that they often have trouble transferring that knowledge into a new...

Pyrus

Existing computer science programs do not emphasize the teaching of programming problem solving skills to novice programmers. However, programming...

Learning with Phones

Can you learn chemistry from your phone? Can it be fun? What are the components that allow learning or allow people to be

Assessments for Reflection

AFR aims to create a peer reviewing platform that allows students to receive actionable, timely, succinct and useful feedback in order to improve on...

Brain Points

Research has shown that rewarding or promoting a growth mindset in math has increased user engagement time, usersโ€™ quality and quantity of problem...

Metacognitive Behavior Tracking

Research has shown that metacognition, or the process of thinking about thinking, helps people learn better. Metacognitive Behavior Tracking seeks to...

Team

Faculty

  • Haoqi Zhang
  • Eleanor "Nell" O'Rourke

Ph.D. Students

  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Garrett Hedman

Masters and Undergraduate Students

  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Allison Lu
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Ankita Chowdhry
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Armaan Shah
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Grace Alexander
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Josh Shi
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Lily Zhang
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Megan Conlon
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Morgan Walker

Situational Crowdsourcing

Situational Crowdsourcing

The Situational Crowdsourcing SIG focuses on designing, building, and testing technologies to use crowdsourcing and crowdsourced data to improve specific situations and routines through new forms of interaction. Projects center around three concepts: (1) habitsourcing, which is the idea of helping people develop personal habits through immersive experiences while leveraging habits as data collection opportunities; (2) physical games with a purpose, which creates new forms of affordance-aware physical gameplay that is powered by crowdsourced data and that collects additional data as a side-effect of physical interactions with objects in an environment; (3) spectator-sourcing, which engages live spectators at sporting events to provide tailored motivational support to athletes when they need it the most, and to help coaches understand trends in their players and during live games.

Zen Walk

The practice of meditation can benefit a personโ€™s well-being through the development of a state of mindfulness and acceptance. ZenWalk is a guided...

ZombieRun Interactive

ZombieRun Interactive is a habitsourcing iPhone application that aims to leverage a userโ€™s running habit to collect information about the world,...

Continual Support Systems

People in groups and communities are often willing, available, and able to support othersโ€™ needs. For example, a graduate student in a research...

RinkTalk

Hockey coaches like to show their players game film in order to teach them important lessons about their play. The more players watch film of...

Habitsourcing

Millions of people around the world regularly develop and practice personal habits such as running and meditation. These practices reduce sedentary...

Physical Games with a Purpose

Humans have the innate ability to easily explore their surroundings. With sensor-rich mobile devices, everyday people can become data contributors by...

Team

Faculty

  • Haoqi Zhang

Ph.D. Students

  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Leesha Maliakal Shah
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Scott Cambo
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Yongsung Kim

Masters and Undergraduate Students

  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Alaina Kafkes
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Christina Kim
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Frank Avino
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Henry Spindell
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Hyung-Soon Kim
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Jennie Werner
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Katherine Lin
  • ๐ŸŽ“ย Shawn Caeiro