Outreach | Human Computer Interaction | West Virginia University

Transforming Everyone, Everywhere Into Creators!

One of the goals of the HCI@WVU Laboratory is to empower everyone, everywhere to innovate and create novel artifacts that can improve our daily lives. To accomplish this goal, the group makes novel technology to crowdsource outreach events and enable a larger population to be part of the digital revolution.

ICTD '16: Innovations Across Countries Workshop

We organized a workshop at the International Conference on Information & Communication Technologies and Development. ICTD'16 is a research conference that explores the role of information and communication technologies in global development. Our workshop showcased innovation that was occurring by people in developing countries, especially, research from groups we might not conventionally hear about. Our lab also presented research on crowdsourcing volunteering.

Ouishare Fest: Hack and Dance!

We organized a workshop at the Ouishare Fest, which gathers creative leaders, entrepreneurs, movement builders, purpose-driven organizations and communities from across the globe to explore and discuss the sharing economy. Our workshop, “Hack and Dance,” hoped to include everyone to create technology for the sharing economy, especially for the developing world. The workshop had two parts: (1) micro-hackathon and a (2) dance fest. The micro-hackathon pushed all participants to be creators and to think how we can innovate from the first world garbage that we dump into third world countries. The dance fest aimed to push participants to celebrate the instruments they had just built. Our hope was that the music, dance and micro-hackathon would inspire participants to produce useful technology that involves more people in the collaborative economy. We were happy to see that by creating a hackathon that aimed to include more people into the design of technology, we were able to have a majority of minorities participate, notably women and people of color.

Google I/O: Leader Anita Borg Community

Google named me director of the North America Anita Borg Community for my research in crowdsourcing outreach events. I was one of the most active community members, organizing the largest number of outreach events in the region. Congratulations to our awesome team and reach that made this possible!

Dataland: Empowering Women to Talk About Data Science

“Dataland” took place at National Autonomous University of Mexico. Two hundred undergraduate and graduate students heard a series of talks focused on data with a number of female speakers. It was great to give ladies who are doing really cool things with data a chance to shine and show off their work. Some of them had never had a chance to present to such a large audience and people really liked their research.

FixIT Hackathon: Large Scale Latina Hackathon

The HCI@WVU Lab has organized one of the largest Latina Hackathons: FixIT. We strongly support undergraduate and cross-disciplinary research. We are always happy to work with students with a variety of backgrounds, and enjoy exposing students to our field of research. We are actively mentoring and working with several undergraduate and graduate students. We are currently working with Major League Hacking and Google to organize hackathons that motivate girls to study computer science.

We have also helped organize and been a speaker to show computer science research done by the Four Eyes Lab to junior high and high school students.

Some lab members have given talks to motivate teens to study computer science at middle schools in Goleta, California.