http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/ News about general from School of Informatics en-us Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:28:07 -0500 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4346/IU-Informatics-Faculty-Present-at-2009-Midwest-HIMSS-Technology-Conference http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4346/IU-Informatics-Faculty-Present-at-2009-Midwest-HIMSS-Technology-Conference Josette Jones and Sara Anne Hook, faculty at Indiana University’s School of Informatics in Indianapolis, recently gave a presentation at the 2009 Midwest Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Technology Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their competitively-selected lecture, titled “The Impact of the 2009 Stimulus Provision on the Privacy, Security and Accessibility of the Personal Health Record (PHR),” compared the Electronic Health Record with the Personal Health Record in the wake of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Jones and Hook discussed pressing issues facing Personal Health Records, including security, ownership, control, privacy and accessibility. They emphasized the critical work remaining for Personal Health Records to become an integral part of the American healthcare system. They also reviewed federal, state and international laws related to the protection of personal data, with a special focus on privacy rights. Session presentations from the 2009 Midwest HIMSS Technology Conference are available for download here. Josette Jones’ and Sara Anne Hook’s joint presentation can be found here. Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4300/IU-School-of-Informatics-at-IUPUI-launches-new-interactive-Web-site http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4300/IU-School-of-Informatics-at-IUPUI-launches-new-interactive-Web-site The Indiana University School of Informatics at IUPUI has launched a new interactive Web site developed to better serve students, faculty, staff and others, and to foster a clearer definition of informatics and its implications for the future. The Web site prominently features the School’s undergraduate and graduate programs, including the nation’s first PhD program in Informatics. Academic programs include Informatics, Bioinformatics, Health Informatics, Health Information Administration, Human-Computer Interaction, and Media Arts & Science. “We know that Web site visitors expect easy navigation and compelling content,” explained Anthony Faiola, executive associate dean. “We have added dynamic video content and other new design elements which will help site visitors better understand the wide scope of informatics as an academic discipline, and the associated career opportunities available to our graduates.” A featured element of the new Web site is an animation that answers the question, "What is Informatics?" Mathew Powers, lecturer, and Stephanie Shattuck, an undergraduate student, developed the Flash movie using a "digital river" metaphor that highlights each of the School's academic programs including examples of informatics at work in the classroom and workplace. The School is home to a dynamic Media Arts & Science (MAS) program, where students learn the latest theory and applications necessary for effective digital communications. School leaders say that understanding and implementing these best practices was crucial to developing a site that is both functional and visually appealing. “As the leading academic program in Indiana teaching Web design and usability, it was especially important that the School have a cutting-edge Web presence,” Faiola said. “I’m proud to say we have a site that reflects the high quality of teaching enjoyed by our students.” A team of IU Informatics alumni - Nate Garrett, Webmaster; Steve Hodges, interface design; and Stuart Ough, usability – was responsible for site development including usability testing with various focus groups, the writing of new programming code and databases, and designing and testing of the site's new interface. Barbara Hayes, associate dean, Vicki Daugherty, projects coordinator, Kim Melluck, technology director, Neal Moore, director of community relations, Geoffrey Coryell, videographer, and Robert “Skip” Comer, photographer, played roles in developing and managing site content including collecting hundreds of images and videos to use as visual elements. “New and prospective students will find information about the School’s admissions and registration procedures that is intuitive and easily understood,” Hayes said. Other key elements of the site include improved navigation, a strong use of video featuring informatics faculty, students and staff, and a stunning design employing related but distinct color palettes to differentiate the academic programs. Additional information about the IU School of Informatics is available here. Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4293/IUPUI-HumanComputer-Interaction-Program-sponsors-World-Usability-Day-conference http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4293/IUPUI-HumanComputer-Interaction-Program-sponsors-World-Usability-Day-conference As part of World Usability Day, the Indiana Chapter of the Usability Professionals' Association is hosting an event to promote the exchange of ideas on sustainability as it relates to usability and product development.  The IU School of Informatics, Human-Computer Interaction Program is co-sponsoring the event.  Everyone with an interest in usability is invited!  The conference will be held Thursday, November 12, 9:00AM-4:00PM at the IUPUI Campus Center.  Additional sponsors include The Center for Information and Communication Sciences at Ball State University, Pearson Publishing, and Creative Street Media Group. Posters are welcome. Please indicate that you will be bringing a poster when you register.  The registration fee for professionals is $35. This special package includes the conference fee (lunch, handouts and prizes) and a one year membership to the Indiana Usability Professionals’ Association.  Normally, the Indy UPA membership is $20. If you prefer not include the Indy UPA membership, the registration fee is $30. Students pay $10 to attend the conference. Registration information is available here.  Additional conference information including the agenda is available here.     Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4289/IU-Informatics-professor-and-alums-featured-speakers-at-leading-pharma-conference http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4289/IU-Informatics-professor-and-alums-featured-speakers-at-leading-pharma-conference Two graduates of IU's Laboratory Informatics Program, and an IU Health Informatics professor will be featured speakers at LI '09: The 5th Forum on Lab Informatics.  This year's conference - "Advancing Laboratory Informatics to speed up the analytical process and Time to Market" - will be held Oct. 26-28 in San Francisco.  Mahesh Merchant, lecturer, Health Informatics, will give a talk entitled, "Discussing the Arising Challenges and Opportunities of Electronic Records Management."  The conference will focus on how pharma and biotech laboratories today are constantly challenged with improving business performance, reducing cost and increasing ROI of lab informatics systems, and will address the fundamental challenges that are shared by both lab directors and informatic professionals. Joining Dr. Merchant will be Mihai Stancu, systems architect, AIT Laboratories; and  Barry Harnick, associate quality consultant, Eli Lilly and Company.  Stancu will share "Case Study: Leveraging Semantic Technology for Scientific Data Integration and Knowledge Management".  Harnick's talk is entitled "A Practical Approach for Data Quality Assurance."  Stnacu and Harnick both are graduates of IU's Laboratory Informatics Program.   Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4278/Too-scary-to-be-real-research-looks-to-quantify-eeriness-in-virtual-characters http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4278/Too-scary-to-be-real-research-looks-to-quantify-eeriness-in-virtual-characters Indiana University's Karl MacDorman has been to the valley -- the uncanny valley of virtual humans so lifelike they give us real humans the creeps. What he's found is that things don't look so bad after all. That's because MacDorman's research into human photorealism in robots, androids and computer-generated characters is calling into question a longstanding premise put forth by the pioneering Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori that people become unsettled by any slight nonhuman imperfection in very human-looking forms. MacDorman is an IU School of Informatics associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction program and the director of the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Android Science Center. Nearly 40 years ago Mori identified the uncanny valley as that place where zombies, corpses and dancing mannequins reside. Developing impeccably humanlike computer-generated characters that will not fall into the uncanny valley is the Holy Grail for animators in the multi-billion dollar animation and video game industries. And what MacDorman has found is that it is no longer your parents' art school. "What is surprising is that some of the rules you learn in art school do not apply to computer graphics characters," he said. "For example, artists will typically enlarge the eyes of someone they paint to make the person look more attractive. In fact, artists tend to make their own eyes larger in self-portraits. But our results indicate that eye enlargement can have a decidedly negative effect when photorealistic textures are applied to a human model." The same holds true when distorting other facial proportions such as eye separation and face height, as the changes have a more negative impact on very realistic human character models. So caricaturing can be effective for abstract faces, like the ones seen in Pixar's movie The Incredibles, but fails for human-looking faces like those seen the same year in another film, The Polar Express, that also relied on computer generated imagery. "The Disney animation of Cinderella's stepmother can be horrid without being eerie, and Tom Hanks can be warm in Polar Express but still eerie," MacDorman said. "So our group is devising new scales that can deal with these nuances." MacDorman has developed the first "eeriness index" to help quantify how virtual characters influence human decision making. "The index has been developed based on a pilot study, but we want to refine it further in a larger study on animated characters and robots," he said. Developing design principles for human-looking characters, MacDorman believes, would not only have a huge economic impact on computer graphic animation and video games, but could also play an integral role in developing long-term beneficial relationships between robots and humans. "Interventions could range from the treatment of autism to rehabilitation coaching to companionship for the elderly," he said. "One goal is to create robots and computer generated characters that are capable of interacting with people in humanlike ways to sustain long-term relationships that improve people's physical, cognitive and social well-being." Research results to date reflect subjective measures used with human participants who viewed the characters, but MacDorman and his team plan to use results from objective sources like heart rate, galvanic skin response, electroencephalograms and functional magnetic imaging of the brain to gauge how far designers can go before characters creep out viewers. His latest published research, "Too real for comfort? Uncanny responses to computer generated faces," (appearing in Computers in Human Behavior, and co-written with Robert D. Green, Chin-Chang Ho and Clinton T. Koch, all of the IU School of Informatics), called into question Mori's predictions that a computer generated face looks the eeriest when it looks nearly human. "Even abstract faces can look eerie if they contain facets that seem unintended or arbitrary," MacDorman said. To view a visualization of two different, side-by-side computer graphic characters as they undergo slight changes in skin and eye realism, visit the Uncanny Valley. MacDorman's upcoming research with his colleague, Matthias Scheutz, turns in the direction of virtual versus physical representation influencing ethical decision making made via online and face-to-face interactions. Matthias Scheutz is an associate professor of Cognitive Science, Computer Science, and Informatics and the director of the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory at Indiana University Bloomington. "The purpose of one of these upcoming proposals is to determine whether the physical embodiment or virtual representation of a robot can influence human decision-making of ethical consequence," MacDorman explained. And a research paper now in review, "Gender Differences in the Impact of Presentational Factors in Human Character Animation on Ethical Decisions about Medical Dilemmas," indicates that under certain similar conditions men and women make different decisions. MacDorman, Chin-Chang Ho, Joseph Coram and Himalaya Patel found that using a computer-generated character instead of a human character, or using jerky movements instead of fluid movements, to present participants with an ethical dilemma produced no significant effect on female participants. Male participants, however, were much more likely to rule against the computer-generated character with jerky movements. "From the standpoint of studying human interaction, it is important to get into and out of the uncanny valley. If you build a robot or computer-generated character that looks human, but you do not animate it well -- if its motion looks jerky or the timing of its responses are off -- it will look uncanny, no matter how realistic and attractive it looks when still," MacDorman said. "But this is useful because it indicates when the cognitive model I am testing in an android, or the artificial intelligence used to control a character in a computer game, is not working. The fact that we are so sensitive to flaws in the behavior of human-looking characters means that we know when our models of human interaction are wrong, so we can correct them. This is the beauty of human photorealism. Because if a cartoon character or a less human-looking robot does something that isn't human, we might not even notice it." MacDorman, who is also an adjunct professor with the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, received a BA in computer science from University of California, Berkeley, in 1988, and a PhD from Cambridge University, United Kingdom, in machine learning and robotics in 1996. rior to coming to the School of Informatics he was an associate professor at Osaka University, Japan. He has published more than 80 papers in human-computer interaction, robotics, machine learning and cognitive science. [source: Indiana University Bloomington news release] Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/images/60_sq_macdorman.jpg http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/images/200_macdorman.jpg http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4263/In-tribute-to-Myles-Brand http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4263/In-tribute-to-Myles-Brand The School of Informatics mourns the passing and pays tribute to the life of former IU President (1994-2002) Myles Brand, who passed away on Sept.16 from pancreatic cancer. “Myles Brand laid the foundation for the School of Informatics as well as the broader vision of excellence in information technology at Indiana University” said School of Informatics dean Bobby Schnabel. “His vision for excellence in IT in hiring Michael McRobbie as vice president in 1997, and the leadership of President Brand as well as founding dean Mike Dunn and then vice president McRobbie, led to the path-breaking formation of the School in 2000 including securing substantial funding from the State of Indiana.” When President Brand moved on to become president of the NCAA in 2003, he remained a loyal and helpful supporter of IU and the School of Informatics, including serving as a member of the School of Informatics Dean’s Advisory Council. “Myles’ most significant accomplishments while he was President of Indiana University were the creation of the School of Informatics and the significant improvement in information technology infrastructure at IU,” said founding dean Mike Dunn. “I continue to be grateful for his faith and support in making me the founding dean of the School of Informatics. Myles was an old friend, and I miss him deeply. His wife Peg and his son Joshua, who are very much in my thoughts, can take great pride in Myles’ accomplishments as a ‘change agent,’ not just at IU, not just in the NCAA, but across academe quite generally.” All of us at the School of Informatics are grateful to Myles Brand for his vision in creating our School, a vision that will touch many lives for decades to come. Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4237/Joseph-Maley-Scholarship-created-to-support-IUPUI-Media-Arts-and-Science-Program http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4237/Joseph-Maley-Scholarship-created-to-support-IUPUI-Media-Arts-and-Science-Program (INDIANAPOLIS) – The IU School of Informatics has announced the creation of a scholarship honoring the late Joseph Maley. The annual scholarship will be given to a deserving student in the Media Arts and Science Program at IUPUI, based on the student’s merit and academic achievement. The first award will be given in spring 2010 and will continue until 2012. The scholarship is named for Joseph Maley, who passed away in August 2008 after a long battle with AML, an aggressive form of leukemia. It was created thanks to the generosity of Conrad Piccirrilo, president, Innovative, Inc., who serves as a member of the IU School of Informatics Media Arts and Science Advisory Board. “Joseph Maley had a profound impact on my life,” said Piccirrilo. “Even though a flood of physical disabilities challenged him, he mastered communication. With a smile, a simple gesture, or the touch of a hand, Joseph moved those around him to help him thrive.” “My father taught me that my ability to write and communicate would be the most important treasure in my life. Joseph was a living example and inspiration, ” added Piccirrilo. ”We are grateful to Conrad Piccirrilo and Innovative for their generosity with this scholarship in support of the School of Informatics, “ said Anthony Faiola, executive associate dean. “The Joseph Maley Scholarship honors the field of new media, and will provide a young student the opportunity to make a difference in the world.” For more information about Joseph Maley’s life, visit www.josephmaley.org. Information about Innovative is available at www.innovativei.com. Information about the IU School of Informatics at IUPUI is available at http://informatics.iupui.edu. Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4226/MediaSauce-Scholarship-created-to-support-IUPUI-Media-Arts-and-Science-Program http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4226/MediaSauce-Scholarship-created-to-support-IUPUI-Media-Arts-and-Science-Program The Indiana University School of Informatics has announced the creation of a scholarship supported by MediaSauce to be given to students who are studying in the Media Arts and Science Program at IUPUI. The inaugural scholarship will be granted in spring 2010 to a deserving student, based on their merit and achievement within the program. “Attracting and keeping the best and brightest students in-state is important to Central Indiana businesses,” said Bryan Gray, CEO of Carmel, Ind.-based MediaSauce, and chairperson of the IU School of Informatics Media Arts and Sciences Advisory Board. “Offering scholarships for deserving students helps IUPUI attract top talent, which will provide our businesses with the emerging employees we'll need to thrive. As more organizations see how impactful supporting a scholarship is, I believe it will become a cost effective part of many companies’ HR and recruitment strategy,” Gray added. MediaSauce is a national leader in Internet strategy, Web development and interactive solutions, helping companies and non-profits build lasting connections to drive their revenues in this Interconnected Age. MediaSauce’s Digital Blueprint strategic consulting service provides clients a plan outlining strategies, tactics, timelines and metrics to accelerate their business using digital and social media. Their award-winning creative work and rapid growth recently earned MediaSauce recognition as a 2009 Indiana Company To Watch by the Indiana Economic Development Corporation’s Small Business Development Centers. For more information about MediaSauce, please visit www.mediasauce.com. For information about the IU School of Informatics at IUPUI visit http://informatics.iupui.edu.   Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4222/MAS-class-project-blossoms-into-bicycle-safety-Web-site-for-Riley-Hospital http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4222/MAS-class-project-blossoms-into-bicycle-safety-Web-site-for-Riley-Hospital When Dr. Karen Stroup, IU School of Medicine, and Janet Everly, IU School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences visited Edgar Huang's Media Arts and Science class last year, they arrived with an idea for a Web site.  The duo left having planted a seed that eventually blossomed into a high profile offering by Riley Hospital for Children. Stroup and Everly were interested in creating a Web site that would teach teens and college students how to develop a bicycle safety course in their communities.  Julie Andrews, a student in Huang's class took on the assignment.  Working with four graduate students in the IU Department of Occupational Therapy, and others, the team created a prototype for the Racing for Safety Web site.  After some additional refinements, the Racing for Safety Web site was officially launched this month.  It is a featured item on Riley Hospital's Web home page. "This partnership united student talent and resources of the IU School of Informatics, the IU School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, and Riley Hospital, a part of the IU School of Medicine," explained Dr. Stroup.  "Graduate students from the IU Department of Occupational Therapy and an undergraduate student from the IU School of Informatics worked together as part of respective course requirements to develop the prototype." The Racing for Safety Web site was produced as a Web-based tool for teens and college age students engaged in community service and service learning to help prevent and reduce bike-related injuries and fatalities to children and to demonstrate that safety is for kids who use all kinds of wheels. Huang, associate professor, IU School of Informatics at IUPUI, has long encouraged students to become engaged in community service projects. "Service learning is a central focus of IUPUI's mission," explained Huang, who serves as a faculty representative for the campus' service learning initiatives. "I am very proud of my student Julie Andrews and all others who assisted in development of the Racing for Safety Web site." The Web site provides the tools and resources needed for teens and college age students to plan and present a bike safety course for all children of all abilities using all kinds of wheeled vehicles, including bikes, adapted bikes, wheelchairs, scooters, skateboards, and rollerblades. Adult advocates for child safety and injury prevention interested in presenting a bike safe course in their community also would find the Web site to be a helpful resource and reference. "Dr. Huang and Riley Hospital Community Education and Child Advocacy have worked together for several years in a creative partnership that nurtures frequent exchanges of ideas and possibilities," said Stroup. Such collaborations are prime examples of why service learning is a powerful tool for higher education, said Huang.  Other partners in the collaboration include the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Productions, and the Think First National Injury Prevention Foundation.   Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/images/60_sq_racingforsafety3.jpg http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/images/200_racingforsafety3.jpg http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4217/IU-workshop-to-increase-awareness-about-advantages-of-databases-in-research http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/4217/IU-workshop-to-increase-awareness-about-advantages-of-databases-in-research Rapid technological advances now offer new research opportunities through the unprecedented explosion of digital data. As a result, researchers are finding that manual processes for data and traditional tools such as Excel are no longer adequate and they need assistance with data-related issues. To improve research productivity and enable new possibilities in research, the Research Technologies Division and the Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University are sponsoring Data Services Day, a free event open to all academic and scientific researchers, students, faculty and staff interested in database and data management for use in research. The event will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 15, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., at University Place Conference Center at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. The keynote speaker for the event is Beth Plale, director of the Pervasive Technologies Institute Data to Insight Center and the Center for Data and Search Informatics. Plale is also an associate professor of computer science in the IU School of Informatics and Computing. "Data Services Day is designed to help researchers understand the opportunities and advantages of using databases and data management in their research," said Nancy Long, principal database consultant for IU's high performance systems group, and co-organizer of the event. "We want to help IU researchers make the best use of all the data services at their disposal." The event will offer presentations on various database and data management features of interest to researchers from a wide range of scientific and academic disciplines. Oracle representatives will discuss functionality related to data analysis and access, while IU Research Technologies staff will present a general overview of databases as applied to research and will describe the resources and data services IU offers the research community. Workshop attendees will also hear from IU researchers who are currently using some of these tools and services to support research in their labs. Data Services Day speakers and topics include: Heikki Tuuri, vice president of development at Oracle, will discuss InnoDB, a "storage engine" that can be used by MySQL databases to create, retrieve, update and delete data by, for example, providing referential integrity support and automatic data recovery. Charlie Berger, senior director of product management-Data Mining Technologies Data Mining & Health Sciences, will provide an overview on data mining, in-database SQL statistical functions and text-mining. Brian Macdonald, Oracle master principal BI/DW consultant, will discuss online analytical processing (OLAP). Job Miller, Oracle enterprise architect, will provide insight on Oracle Locator, database security and encryption, and other Oracle features and products IU provides to its research community. Jeanette McClintick, researcher for the Center for Medical Genomics (CMG), will discuss the CMG Oracle database application. Anna Radue, database and geographic information systems (GIS) specialist at IU, will present on the GIS and Indiana Spatial Data Service. Jake Chen, director, Indiana Center for Systems Biology and Personalized Medicine and Assistant Professor of Informatics and Computer Science, will share his experience with research databases and work being done by the Discover Informatics and Computing Laboratory. Andy Arenson, manager of IU's Biomedical Applications team, will discuss his experience using databases to support national and international research. Stephanie Burks, principal database administrator for High Performance Systems at IU, will discuss the current state of the Research Database Complex (RDC) and will describe database-related services available to researchers. Nancy Long, principal database consultant for IU's High Performance Systems group, will provide a basic overview and demonstration of Application Express, a tool provided by Oracle that allows researchers to develop web applications that can access data stored by users in an Oracle database using only a web browser and requiring only limited programming experience. Breakfast and lunch will be provided. In addition, talks presented during the Data Services Day general sessions will be webcast from the workshop web pages. The event is free but registration is required. For more information or to register for the event, please visit: http://pervasive.iu.edu/dataservicesday. Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/images/60_sq_chen-headshot.jpg http://newsroom.informatics.iupui.edu/images/200_chen-headshot.jpg