2011 Foley Scholars
Zhicheng Liu
Sense-making and Exploratory Data Analysis with
Interactive Visualization Interfaces
Zhicheng is a 6th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Human-Centered Computing program. His research focuses on developing techniques and software tools to help people perform sense-making and exploratory data analysis, with an emphasis on interactive visualization interfaces. Taking a human-computer interaction perspective, his work integrates theories and techniques from the areas of databases, information visualization, data mining and cognitive science. Systems he has designed and implemented have been in trial use by companies and organizations. He is also interested in using visualizations as a window to explore the nature of human cognition.
Kurt Luther
Supporting and Transforming Leadership in Online Collaboration
Kurt is a 6th-year Ph.D. candidate in Human-Centered Computing. His research explores new forms of online creative collaboration, focusing on issues such as leadership, creativity, and authorship. For his dissertation work, he led the development of Pipeline, a software platform for organizing large-scale creative projects over the Internet. Kurt has interned with the User Experience team at YouTube and the Social Computing groups at Microsoft Research and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
2011 Foley Scholars Finalists
Jenay Beer
Home-based Robots Designed to Assist Older Adults
Jenay Beer is a 5th-year Ph.D. student in Engineering Psychology at Georgia Tech. She is a member of the Human Factors and Aging Laboratory, co-directed by Wendy A. Rogers and Arthur D. Fisk. Her research intersects the fields of Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and Psychology. Specifically, she studies home-based robots designed to assist older adults to maintain their independence and age in place. She has studied a variety of robotic systems and topics such as emotion expression of agents, user acceptance of robots, and the role of autonomy in HRI. Jenay received a BA degree in Psychology from the University of Dayton, Ohio and an MS in Engineering Psychology from Georgia Tech.
Jill Dimond
Technology to Support Participation in Social Movements
Jill Dimond is a 5th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Human-Centered Computing program advised by Dr. Amy Bruckman. Her research interests combine the areas of social computing, feminism, and design. For her dissertation work, Jill designs, builds, and evaluates technology to support a social justice organization called Hollaback, a transnational group that uses technology in order to end street harassment (ihollaback.org). In this work, she examines how the design of technology can impact participation in social movements. Prior to graduate school, Jill worked as an interaction designer and holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.
Matthias Grundmann:
Understanding Video's Underlying Content with Synthesis and Interaction
Matthias Grundmann is a Ph.D. student at the Georgia Institute of Technology advised by Prof. Irfan Essa. He is recipient of the 2011 Google US / Canada Fellowship in Computer Vision. Matthias works in the areas of Computer Vision and Computational Photography & Video. Specifically, he is interested in developing a thorough understanding of a video's underlying content, with applications to video synthesis and video interaction. Matthias has published five papers at CVPR and is holder of one U.S. patent with 4 further pending. He earned his M.S. in 2008 at Georgia Tech and his bachelor’s degree in 2005 at the Technical University of Munich (www.mgrundmann.com).
Eugene Medynskiy
Technology to Support Realization of Health and Wellness Goals
Eugene Medynskiy is a Ph.D. candidate in the Human-Centered Computing program, advised by Professor Elizabeth Mynatt. His research focuses on designing interactive systems that can support individuals in realizing personal health and wellness goals. He has developed and evaluated Salud!, a website and suite of applications for health self-monitoring and goal management. He is also involved with the commercialization of the SmartMenu, a restaurant self-service terminal that can provide diners with personalized nutritional advice. Eugene holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University.
Brian O'Neill
A Computational Model of Affective Responses to Stories
for Augmenting Narrative Generation
Brian O'Neill is a 5th-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science, advised by Dr. Mark Riedl. His research focuses on developing computational models of affective responses to stories, such as suspense and surprise, and applying these models to intelligent story generation. Currently, Artificial Intelligence- generated stories are boring and lack human emotion. By modeling suspense and surprise, Brian hopes to use AI to generate stories that are more suspenseful or surprising, and therefore more pleasing to human readers. Brian received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 2007 from Saint Joseph's University, and a master's degree from Georgia Tech in 2010.
Lana Yarosh
Synchronous Remote Communication to Develop Closer Relationships
Lana is a 6th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Human-Centered Computing program. Her research focuses on supporting synchronous remote communication between parents and young children in situations such as divorce and military deployment. She hopes to create a system that will support more natural interaction and play across distance. She is also interested in contributing to the ongoing discussion of how such technologies may be understood and evaluated. Lana holds two B.S. degrees, in Computer Science and Psychology, from University of Maryland.
