present

ethnographic fieldwork :: ownership, responsibility & private community spaces

I've been conducting fieldwork in a shared community space where ownership and responsibility are ambiguous. The space, which contains a small garden, had been neglected and abandoned for several months, when, recently, an individual decided to to re-create the space.

ethnographic fieldwork :: cyberinfrastructure & collaboratories

I'm currently in the planning stages of a project to do follow-up fieldwork in a mature & successful scientific collaboratory as the funding agency is shifting the larger project goals.

recent

As a Master's student, I worked on several research projects, which are highlighted below. For information about my non-research work through June 2008, you may want to check out this portfolio.

ethnography :: cognition & learning in interdisciplinary cultures

Working with an interdisciplinary team of researchers, I spent over two years as an ethnographer in a tissue engineering research laboratory studying the daily practices of the engineer-scientists.

My work, in particular, focused on the co-evolution of technological devices and instruments alongside engineers' practices and research questions. Our deep ethnography provided insights into how some technologies can become more than simple 'tools' for the engineers. When technology lends itself to appropriation, it can become an integral part of the engineers' creative problem solving and inquiry practices. See the DIS 2008 paper for details.

I won a President's Undergraduate Research Award at Georgia Tech for my early work on this project.

Collaborators: Nancy Nersessian, Wendy Newstetter, Arvind Venkataramani

qualitative research & wizard of oz evaluation :: façade

I worked with another graduate student, Steven Dow, on this project studying augmented reality in the context of the “interactive drama,” Façade (interactivestory.net) I helped design qualitative interview questions and run a wizard-of-oz style evaluation of three different gameplay formats -- desktop with keyboard interaction, desktop with speech interaction, and augmented reality with speech interaction.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, we found that increased presence does not necessarily lead to greater engagement. See the CHI 2007 Paper for details.

Collaborators: Steven Dow

qualitative research & user-centered design :: foto fit

I worked with Brandon Brown, Andrea Grimes, and Marshini Chetty to design a diet and exercise monitoring system for college students. The system centers on using a camera phone to help students build a visual journal.

We used an iterative design process, including semi-structured interviews, think-aloud prototype testing, and a diary study.

This project won 2nd Place in the CHI 2006 Student Design Competition. See the CHI 2006 note and poster for details.

Collaborators: Marshini Chetty and Andrea Grimes.

past

Brief highlights of some of my undergraduate projects - including research with the Media Computation group, and my work as a teaching assistant.

teaching :: cs2340 - object oriented design

As an undergraduate student, I served as a teaching assistant for Computer Science 2340 for 7 semesters (5 semesters as Head TA) at Georgia Tech. As a graduate student, I had the opportunity to return to the class a couple of times to give guest lectures on User-Centered Design.

software development & education research :: media computation

When I was a freshman at Georgia Tech, all students - regardless of major - had to take the same introductory Computer Science course. While I think that teaching CS to everyone is fantastic -- it is clearly as important to understand as Calculus or Physics -- the withdraw/fail rate was nothing less than atrocious.

Luckily, there are a few people at Georgia Tech who really care about education, and I had the opportunity to develop software for a new alternative CS1 course in Media Computation, as well as assess student motivation and learning after the university began offering multiple tracks of CS1 - specialized by students' majors.

video :: work

This short film about a co-op student bored at his job was made for a Digital Video Special Effects course. My partner for this project, Ben Dines, moved on from DVFX to a job at Sony Pictures Imageworks as a "Senior Production Services Technician." He is now making much cooler movies without me, like Beowulf.

Storyboard: Page 1 & Page 2
Movie: High Res (6.2 MB) or Low Res (1.6 MB)
Making Of: Low Res (3.1 MB)