[Colloq] Hiring Visit: Julie Kientz 5/8

[Patricia Freeman]

Julie Kientz will be joining us for a Hiring Visit Thursday, 5/8.
Her Talk will take place in 366WVH at 11:45am.


CCIS Colloquium/Hiring Talk


Decision Support through Embedded Capture for Everyday Health and Wellness

                             Julie Kientz
          School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing
                   Georgia Institute of Technology

                         Thursday, May 8, 2008
                     11:45 a.m., 366 Vest Village H

People are faced with many decisions regarding their personal and family
health and wellness, such as personal nutrition and exercise or ensuring a
child is on track developmentally.  Many times such decisions are made
without high confidence due to insufficient evidence or lack of input from
all people affected by the outcome.  Decision support systems have a long
history within computing and information sciences and have been crucial to
helping workplaces process large amounts of data to come to a conclusion.  
However, there has been little application of these techniques to less
structured, informal decision-making, mainly due to their complexity,
higher learning curve, and time required to gather input.

Computing technology designed to embed seamlessly into existing practices
can improve confidence in everyday decisions by enabling the capture of
more data, providing opportunities to access and reflect on data, and
encouraging collaboration.  In this talk, I will present two examples of
technologies I have designed, developed, and evaluated through long-term
deployments that were used to help in decision-making for caregivers of
children.  These examples include supporting therapy for children with
autism and helping parents and pediatricians track developmental progress in
young children.  I will discuss results that show these technologies can
improve collaboration and increase reliance on evidence in decision-making
and then reflect on how lessons learned from these examples can be applied
more broadly.

Julie A. Kientz is a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science in the School of
Interactive Computing and GVU Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
She is advised by Dr. Gregory D. Abowd and is a member of the Ubiquitous
Computing Research Group. Her research interests center primarily in the
area of Human-Computer Interaction, especially Ubiquitous Computing and
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. In particular, she is interested in
determining how novel computing applications can address important social
issues, such as autism and children's health, and evaluating those
applications through long-term, real world deployment studies.