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Research Updates

Updates from Human Centered Design & Engineering faculty, PhD students, and research scientists.

Autumn 2024

November 1, 2024

Michael Beach, Christina Graves, and Tyler Fox had a pictorial, “Speculative F/Actors: Climate Futures - Crafting a Workshop for Collaborative Worldbuilding in Cataclysmic Climates,” published in the Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium.
 
Kate Starbird and Stephen Prochaska (UW Information School) had an article “Misinformation is more than just bad facts: How and why people spread rumors is key to understanding how false information travels and takes root.” published in The Conversation. The article has also been re-printed with permission by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
 
Kate Starbird was featured in the Science article, “The rumor clinic: At the Center for an Informed Public, Kate Starbird tracks falsehoods and counters them in real time.” Danielle Lee Tomson (UW Center for an Informed Public), Jevin West and Emma Spiro (UW Information School), and Ryan Calo (UW School of Law & Information School) are quoted.
 
Kate Starbird and Danielle Lee Tomson (UW Center for an Informed Public) were featured in the New York Times article, “Disinformation Watchdogs Are Under Pressure. This Group Refuses to Stop.
 
Kate Starbird was quoted in the NPR article, “Crowdsourced voting fraud claims could become grist for Republican lawsuits.”
 
Kate Starbird, Joey Schafer, and Danielle Lee Tomson (UW Center for an Informed Public) were quoted in the InvestigateWest article, “The UW is trying to weather a storm of setbacks for misinformation researchers.” Mert Bayar (UW Center for an Informed Public) was mentioned.
 


October 25, 2024

Gary Hsieh received a $100K Google Academic Research Award for “Combating Health Misinformation with LLM-Powered Living Summaries.” Funded under the Trust & Safety focus area, this project addresses the decline in public confidence in health science due to the spread of health misinformation. The project will use AI to help synthesize existing health research and to design trustworthy interfaces to communicate the current state of science. Feedback from patients and navigators will help assess trust and explore the use of these summaries for improving health communication.
 
Emma McDonnell and Leah Findlater had a paper, “Envisioning Collective Communication Access: A Theoretically-Grounded Review of Captioning Literature from 2013-2023,” published in The 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’24).
 
Adrian Rodriguez, Nisha Devasia, Michelle Pei, and Julie A. Kientz had a paper, “Towards Construction-Oriented Play for Vision-Diverse People,” published in The 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’24).
 
Cecilia Aragon, Bernease Herman (UW eScience Institute), and Nisha Devasia, with co-authors Sun Yoon, Sarah Evans, and Tianna Miles (University of North Texas), had a paper, “Responsibility and Care in AI/ML Education: A Collaborative Approach to Ethical Awareness,” published in the Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
 
Brett Halperin and Rebecca Michelson, with co-author Ian Gonsher (Brown University), published a paper, “Prototyping Jewish Ritual Objects: Wearable Affordances for Intention and Connection,” in the Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium.
 
Kate Starbird published an opinion piece, “I’ve been studying misinformation for a decade — here are the rumours to watch out for on US election day,” in Nature. This article has also been re-printed with permission in Scientific American.
 
Kate Starbird was also quoted in the CNBC article, “How trolls, lawsuits caused 'trust and safety winter' before election.”


October 18, 2024

Hannah Twigg-Smith and Nadya Peek with co-authors Yuecheng Peng (UW HCI Master’s program) and Emily Whiting (Boston University) had a paper, “What’s in a cable? Abstracting Knitting Design Elements with Blended Raster/Vector Primitives,” published in the Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.
 
David Ribes and Janet Vertesi (Princeton University) contributed a chapter to the Elgar Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Studies titled “Digital methods in STS: continuities, discontinuities, and reconfigurations.”
 
Kate Starbird was interviewed on The Lawfare Institute podcast “Lies and Rumors After Hurricanes Helene and Milton.”


October 11, 2024

Sean Munson and co-authors Shaan Chopra (UW CSE), Lisa Orii (UW CSE), Katherine Juarez (UW CSE), Nussara Tieanklin (UW CSE), and James Fogarty (UW CSE), had a paper, “Menopause Legacies: Designing to Record and Share Experiences of Menopause Across Generations,” accepted to the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
 
Brett Halperin with co-authors Robert B. Markum (University of Michigan), Franzisca Maas and Sara Wolf (Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg), Caroline Claisse (Newcastle University), and Elizabeth Buie (Independent researcher), had a paper “Navigating Intersections of Religion/Spirituality and Human-Computer Interaction” published in NordiCHI '24 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.
 
Laura Jo Swartley, with undergraduate researchers Najmo Abdi (UW Education major) and Monica Hniang Dawt Chin and Dylon Ongwiseth (UW Environmental Studies majors), presented on their long-term research about lived experiences in environmental learning, at the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences annual conference: Cultivating Courage for our Collective Future. Their presentation in the Education for Sustainability track was entitled “I’m still thinking about land as...witnessing"- Relational reflection and constructive hope-building among environmental learners.”
 
Kate Starbird is quoted in the Reuters article, “US officials struggle to quash Hurricane Helene conspiracy theories” and is mentioned in “A new director takes up the fight at UW Center for an Informed Public” by the Seattle Times.
 
Shana Hirsch is quoted in the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound (EoPS) article “How eDNA is changing the way scientists track species in Puget Sound.”
 


October 4, 2024

Nisha Devasia and Jin Ha Lee (UW Information School) published “The role of narrative in misinformation games” in the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review.
 
Melinda McClure Haughey with co-authors Rachel Moran-Prestridge (UW CIP) and Emma S. Spiro (UW Information School) published a blog post, “Recommendations for journalists covering election rumors in 2024.”
 
Kate Starbird, Joseph S. Schafer, and Adiza Awwal with co-authors Ashlyn B. Aske (UW Law), Danielle Lee Tomson (UW CIP), Stephen Prochaska (UW Information School), Rachel Moran-Prestridge (UW CIP) and Michael Grass (UW CIP) published a blog post, “What to expect when we’re electing: An object-oriented framework for pre-election rumors.”
 
Daniela Rosner will join Erin McElroy (UW Geography) and Manissa Maharawal (American University) at Town Hall on Saturday, October 5, 2024 for a discussion of McElroy’s book, “How Silicon Valley's Tactics Spread to Postsocialist Romania.”
 
Cecilia Aragon presented "From Fear to Freedom: How a Tech Visionary Overcame Fear to Soar" on October 3, 2024, hosted by the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), Aerospace Career Enhancement (ACE), a non-profit that supports the development of the aerospace workforce in Washington state.


September 27, 2024

Danli Luo has been named to MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 list. Danli was recognized in the Climate and Energy sector for her work building a biodegradable robot that makes aerial seeding more effective. Details of the project, conducted by Danli and her collaborators, are included in “Autonomous self-burying seed carriers for aerial seeding,” published by Nature in 2023.
 
Shana Hirsch and Ryan Kelly (UW School of Marine and Environmental Affairs), with co-authors Neha Acharya-Patel, Phyllis Akua Amamoo, Giomar H. Borrero-Pérez, Ni Kadek Dita Cahyani, Joape G. M. Ginigini, Kaleonani K. C. Hurley, Manuel Lopes-Lima, Mark Louie Lopez, Ntanganedzeni Mapholi, Koffi Nouho Ouattara, Diana A. Pazmiño, Yoshimi Rii, Fabiano Thompson, Sophie von der Heyden, Mrinalini Watsa, Vanessa Yepes-Narvaez, and Elizabeth Andruszkiewicz Allan, published “Centering accessibility, increasing capacity, and fostering innovation in the development of international eDNA standards” in Metabarcoding and Metagenomics.
 
Mark Haselkorn and David Ribes, with co-authors Tam K. Dao, Kenneth M. Evans, Michael D. Shannon, Christopher Bronk, Claudia Neuhauser, Evan Roberts, and Tommy Shih, released a workshop report “Responsible Collaboration Through Appropriate Research Security: A Workshop To Discuss and Study the Emergent Discipline of Research on Research Security” which offers a summary of the workshop of the same name held at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy in May 2024.
 
Megan Moldestad and Christian Helfrich (UW School of Public Health), with co-authors Ekaterina Anderson, Julian Brunner, Sherry Ball, Jay Orlander, Seppo Rinne, and George Sayre, published “User Experiences of Transitioning From a Homegrown Electronic Health Record to a Vendor-Based Product in the Department of Veterans Affairs: Qualitative Findings From a Mixed Methods Evaluation” in JMIR Formative Research.
 
Os Keyes published “Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution, Alison Li” in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.
 
Kate Starbird was a panelist for “Addressing Researcher Harassment: A Fireside Chat and Panel Discussion to Launch New Researcher Support Tools” held September 20, 2024, hosted by the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics (IDDP) at George Washington University. The event consisted of two panels and featured “testimony from researchers who have lived through being the target of… harassment and expert discussion on combating the alarming trend.” The first panel included Renée DiResta (author) and Kate Starbird; the second panel included Alex Abdo (Columbia University), Will Creeley (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)), and Mary Anne Franks (George Washington University). Both panels were moderated by Brandy Zadrozny, senior reporter at NBC News.
 
Shana Hirsch was a panelist for “Environmental DNA for Oceans: White House Strategies, International Standards, and Critical Perspectives” held September 25, 2024, hosted by Ocean Nexus and sponsored by The Nippon Foundation. This panel explored “the Biden-Harris administration’s ocean science and justice policies and how they relate to eDNA.” The expert panel also included Yoshitaka Ota (Ocean Nexus & University of Rhode Island), Amelia Moore (University of Rhode Island), and Elaine Shen (NOAA & NSF).
 
Niharthi Muddada, a fellow in the UW Population Health Initiative’s 2024 Social Entrepreneurship Fellows Program, presented project findings in a campus-wide event at the end of the summer.
 
Sourojit Ghosh was quoted in “Here's How Generative AI Depicts Queer People” in Wired on April 2, 2024.
 
Kate Starbird was mentioned in “How Disinformation Research Came Under Fire: Academic and industry support has retreated amid a GOP assault” in the November-December 2024 issue of Mother Jones.


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