Research
Research Statement
Strong democracies necessarily rely on an educated and engaged citizenry for civic oversight. Education, in this context, includes not only general education, provided with the assistance of free public schools and libraries, but also remaining well informed on current events and the actions of their representatives in order to make the best possible voting decisions.
My research focuses on the development of information technology systems designed to enable novel methods of civic participation and oversight. Every day, hundreds of government agencies release vast quantities of publicly available data. These data are often prohibitively large and complex for ordinary citizens to gain meaningful insights and understanding. Currently, the public relies on experts to interpret these data into information. These interpretations are then filtered and passed on to us through commercial and government media. My research aims to turn these data into information, allowing citizens to derive their own interpretations and reducing reliance on third-parties.
Initially, I began this work by looking at Congressional voting data. These data are very large, confusing, and complex. For example, during the 110th Congress (2007-2008), over 6,800 amendments were introduced, each amending one of more than 14,000 bills, which had one or more of over 48,000 titles. Over 2,500 votes took place, each with its own requirements for passage and vote tally. For a citizen to examine, synthesize, and interpret all of that data into a coherent opinion based on fact without some assistance is extraordinarily labor intensive. Careful to avoid stepping into interpretation, I designed and developed an information visualization system that leverages domain knowledge and expertise regarding human perception, with the goal of assisting with the examination and synthesis of these data into information. A formative evaluation of the system (Connect2Congress) provided evidence that it can substantially reduce the cost of exploratory and task-driven investigations of representatives.
Congressional voting records are an interesting starting point, but certainly not an end point. I am interested in determining whether collaborative or crowd-sourced annotation and text editing systems can assist users in understanding bills and laws. Future work may include research on effective, interactive techniques for presenting economic and budgetary data.
Realizing the potential of information technology systems in this context requires engineering and evaluating systems that conform to the abilities and needs of the target audience. Therefore, my continuing research in this domain is likely to employ participatory design of systems.
Connect 2 Congress
I am the lead researcher on a project aimed at bringing interactive visualizations to the world of Congressional voting records. I submitted a Poster and a Position paper to the InfoVis 2009 Conference related to this work. Both were accepted! The poster was based on a class project, but I am continuing work in this area and have submitted a paper to CHI 2010.
Designing to Support Sustainable Living
With Tae-Jung Yun, I iterated on earlier work, improving a minimal in-home Energy Consumption Display (ECD). We are currently conducting user-evaluations of our interface, expecting a publication in CHI 2010.
Communities in AP Computer Science
Working as a Graduate Research Assistant with Mike Hewner, we matched AP Computer Science students with Computing interest groups and work with a Georgia Tech student mentor. We’re hoping by providing a community that students feel a connection to, we can encourage them to think of themselves as Computer Scientists. We anticipate a publication in ICER 2010.
InfoVis & Visual Analytics: Timelines
Dr. John Stasko and I are working on an interactive information visualization system that will enable new means of interaction with temporal data sets. We would like to find out if, given our system, new understanding can be garnered with relation to specific kinds of temporal data sets. That is: given, say, four different individuals’ perspectives on a single event (not necessarily discreet), can investigators more rapidly make sense of the actual event by subtly manipulating the data as relayed by those individuals? I submitted a poster to InfoVis 2009 on this topic. The poster was accepted.
Uses of Technology in Church Worship: An Exploratory Study
I am participating in an independent study research project with Dr. Beki Grinter and Susan Wyche. We are investigating religious uses of technology. Specifically, we are deploying a website that we built. We are seeking participation from area churches with members who are interested in sharing their photographs with their fellow church-goers. The photos could be displayed before or after church service on a projector. The goal of the project is to study both how participants select appropriate images for this venue and the reactions to the technological intervention.
Using Qualitative Methods to Understand Usable Security
Studying under Dr. Beki Grinter, I participated in a research project on usable computer security by conducting interviews and ethnographic observations. I then performed an analysis of all compiled data from other participants and presented the results to the class.
Ubiquitous Computing
Studying under Gillian Hayes, I first developed a research topic within HCI (assisting users in the location of specific items in very large stores), then gathered and analyzed relevant data, rapidly developed a prototype, and conducted further evaluation of the interface using surveys, cognitive walkthroughs, and interviews.
Intron Evolution: Automated Phylogenetic Analysis System
As a research assistant in Bioinformatics at Furman University’s Biology Department, I worked under Dr. Nicholas Schisler. I handled all technological aspects of project including: Perl coding and shell Scripting for automation.