Author: alyxanderbur

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CoSpaces

CoSpaces

Led by: Narges Mahyar & Ali Sarvghad
CoSpaces: Workspaces to Support Co-located Collaborative Visual Analytics
Observations of Record-Keeping in Co-located Collaborative Analysis
Project Video

CoSpaces is a prototype that is designed for collaborative data analysis on a large interactive tabletop display. It enables multiple users to simultaneously work together and create statistical charts. Some main features include the ability to record and keep track of the work by automatically saving charts, and also an embedded note-taking mechanism. Tabs are used as channels for providing awareness of collaborators’ work status. Each tab provides a portal for viewing work in progress in another workspace without any interruption. Using tabs, an analyst can view a collaborator’s current work, review work history, and study findings.

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CLIP

CLIP (Collaborative Intelligence Pad)

Led by: Narges Mahyar
Supporting Communication and Coordination in Collaborative Sensemaking
Project Video

CLIP is a prototype tool designed and implemented to facilitate collaborative sense-making. The focus of this project is to assist intelligence analysts to record, schematize, and share their findings and hypotheses. Utilizing peer-to-peer communication, all working instances of CLIP broadcast the latest work of an analyst to the rest of the group. Different privacy levels provide controlled sharing. CLIP supports providing awareness of common work by visually indicating common entities.

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UD Co-Spaces

UD Co-Spaces

Led by: Narges Mahyar
UD Co-Spaces: A Table-Centred Multi-Display Environment for Public Engagement in Urban Design Charrettes
Collaboration Tools To Support Informed Public Engagement
Project Video

UD Co-Spaces (Urban Design Collaborative Spaces) is an integrated multi-display tabletop centered urban design application that was developed and iteratively improved over five years to engage diverse stakeholders such as planners, designers, and the public in the task of generating and testing urban planning and design options. I Investigated the use of novel visualization and collaborative technologies to make data more accessible, understandable, and useful to enhance public engagement in community design and empower them to make well-informed data-driven and evidence-based decisions. Results of an observational study comparing UD Co-Spaces with the traditional paper-based approach indicated that groups using our system had more equity in terms of collaborative contributions and co-creation of plans, more parallel activities through the use of iPad applications, and more fine-grained discussions about features of the design such as look and alignment of buildings because of the 3D view and the real-time metrics.

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ConsensUs

ConsensUs

Led by: Narges Mahyar
ConsensUs: Visualizing Points of Disagreement for Multi-Criteria Collaborative Decision Making

Groups often face difficulty reaching consensus. For complex decisions with multiple latent criteria, discourse alone may impede groups from pinpointing fundamental disagreements. (How) can technology help groups reach better decisions together? To explore this, ConsensUs project explores a visulization approach for multi-criteria group decision making that highlights salient agreements and disagreements between group members.

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CitizenSourcing

CitizenSourcing

Led by: Narges Mahyar
Enabling Crowdsourced Visualizations to Support Large-Scale Civic Engagement

The internet has enabled decision makers in government to collect ideas, suggestions and opinions on civic-related issues. While such strategies typically succeed at collecting opinions from citizens, they often lack follow through in which citizens identify conflicts, empathize with other viewpoints, and collectively generate and act on negotiated solutions. To address these challenges, Citizensourcing project focuses on supporting large-scale civic engagement and extending current civic systems where citizens become “sensors” for reporting and collecting civic-related issues, but also participate in problem-solving processes.

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Design for San Diego (D4SD)

Design for San Diego (D4SD)

Led by: Narges Mahyar
Website

We partnered with leading local organizations to drive collaboration, innovation and impact. In collaboration with City of San Diego, SCALE SD, the Design Forward Alliance, and the National Science Foundation, we launched Design for San Diego (D4SD), an online platform to engage the public in solving San Diego’s mobility challenges. The challenge is open to anyone from students and senior citizens to entrepreneurs and designers. D4SD creates unique opportunities for the public, government, academia, and industry to collaboratively design innovative civic solutions through a mixed engagement approach. Our project goal was to provide an equal voice for everyone to collaborate with other city innovators to solve the most pressing mobility-related issues in San Diego. In addition, during Fall 2010 Narges Mahyar co-taught a course called Civic Design at UCSD, where she taught the human-centered design principles and provided students with guidance and feedback on their D4SD projects.

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Prof. Mahyar was selected as a 2020–2021 UMass ADVANCE Faculty Fellow!

Prof. Mahyar was selected as a 2020–2021 UMass ADVANCE Faculty Fellow!

The UMass ADVANCE program is funded by the NSF ADVANCE Program and “aims to bring about institutional transformation.” Fellows are provided with “the resources, recognition and relationship building necessary to help faculty collaborate successfully and feel valued and included.”

Congratulations to Professor Mahyar on this honor!

You can read more about the UMass ADVANCE Faculty Fellowship here: https://www.umass.edu/advance/faculty-fellows

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Our lab had 5 papers accepted this summer, including to CSCW and BELIV.

Our lab had 5 full papers accepted this summer, including to CSCW and BELIV.

Below are the 5 papers which were accepted. Congratulations to all of the authors for their successful submissions!

  • Rehabilitation Games in Real-World Clinical Settings: Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities by Hee-Tae Jung, Taiwoo Park, Narges Mahyar, Sungji Park, Taekyeong Rye, Yangsoo Kim, Sunghoon Ivan Lee (ACM TOCHI, will be presented at ACM CHI 2021)
  • Designing Technology for Sociotechnical Problems: Challenges & Considerations by Narges Mahyar, Mahmood Jasim, and Ali Sarvghad (CG&A)
  • Looking to the Past to Visualize the Present: Revisiting W.E.B. Du Bois’ Abolitionist Visualizations by Andrew Cunningham, Alyxander Burns, and Narges Mahyar (IEEE VIS Poster)
  • CommunityClick:  Capturing  and  Reporting  Community  Feedback  from  Town Halls to Improve Inclusivity by Mahmood  Jasim,  Pooya  Khaloo,  Somin  Wadhwa, Amy  X.  Zhang,  Ali Sarvghad,  and  Narges  Mahyar (CSCW)
  • How to evaluate data visualizations across different levels of understanding by Alyxander Burns, Cindy Xiong, Steven Franconeri, Alberto Cairo, Narges Mahyar (BELIV workshop, held in conjunction with IEEE VIS)