GVU Foley Scholars Present Computing Research in Education, Healthcare and Social Media Applications

Speakers: Barbara Ericson, Jessica Pater and Tanushree Mitra, Georgia Institute of Technology 

Title:
Computer Science for All: Steps towards realizing that vision
 
Abstract:
President Obama wants all American kindergarten through high school students to be empowered with the computer science skills they will need to thrive in a digital economy.  What are some of the barriers to that effort? What can we do to help achieve that vision? Barbara Ericson has been working on increasing both the quantity and diversity of computer science high school students in Georgia since 2004. Her research investigates how to make learning more effective and efficient for both secondary teachers and students through interactive electronic books.  She is also exploring ways to increase the diversity of the students who succeed in high school computer science courses.  
 
Bio:
Barbara Ericson is the Director of Computing Outreach for the College of Computing and a 4th year HCC PhD student. Her PhD advisor is Jim Foley. She has worked since 2004 to increase the quantity and quality of secondary computer science teachers and the quantity and diversity of secondary computer science students. She and her husband, Dr. Mark Guzdial, were the winners of the 2010 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Computing Educator Award for their work on Media Computation. She was also the winner of the 2012 A. Richard Newton Educator Award for her work to increase the percentage of women in computing.
 
Title:
Online expressions of self-harm: connecting online pro-eating disorder behavior trends to clinical analysis
 
Abstract:
The growth of self-harm related content online continues to be an issue. The pro-eating disorder community regularly uses popular platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram to share content and find support from other members in the community that share similar ideals as it relates to desiring and maintaining unhealthy diets and lifestyles and other indicators associated with eating disorders like Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, and Binge Eating. Currently, all assessment tools and screeners used to identify the initial scope and depth of these disorders do not take into account a patient’s online activities. With modifications, can the current suite of tools used for initial assessment capture online activities associated with an individual’s disease? How can clinician’s meaningfully utilize this data within treatment? In this talk we will discuss how the research addresses the characterization of these behaviors online and how collaborators are working to translate diagnostic instruments to collect information that reflects disease presentation in both a patient’s online and offline identity.
 
Bio:
Jessica Pater is a Researcher at the Georgia Tech Research Institute and a 4th year HCC PhD student.  Her PhD advisor is Beth Mynatt. She has worked since 2008 to understand how adolescents and teens use technology and social media platforms. Working with Georgia school systems, she has worked to educate students, schools, and communities on patterns of adoption and the opportunities and risks associated with behaviors associated with this technology useOnline expressions of self-harm: connecting online pro-eating disorder behavior trends to clinical analysis
  
Title:
Understanding Social Media Credibility: A Deep Dive into CREDBANK
 
Abstract:
Social media has quickly risen to prominence as a news source, yet lingering doubts remain about its ability to spread rumor and misinformation. Systematically studying this phenomenon, however, has been difficult due to the need to collect large-scale, unbiased data along with in-situ judgments of its accuracy. This talk describes CREDBANK, a corpus designed to bridge this gap by systematically combining machine and human computation. In this talk, I will discuss how CREDBANK was constructed, the motivation behind constructing this dataset and present a few possible future research directions which CREDBANK enables.
  
Bio:
Tanushree Mitra is a PhD candidate in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech under the supervision of Prof. Eric Gilbert. Her general research interests include social computing and understanding computer mediated social behavior. She is currently working on understanding social media credibility, rumors and misinformation.