Donald J. Patterson

Author: Donald Patterson

I am a professor who develops people and ideas.

The Carbon Emissions of Writing and Illustrating are Lower for AI than for Humans

Person writing at a desk in an industrial wasteland

Bill Tomlinson, Rebecca Black, Andrew Torrance, and I wrote a paper that was accepted to Springer Nature Journal, Scientific Reports, in which we compare the carbon emissions between AI systems and humans. What did we find? We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of AI, including potential job displacement and legal issues, while highlighting the lower…

Turning Fake Data into Fake News: The A.I. Training Set as a Trojan Horse of Misinformation

Man reading a paper in a war zone

Bill Tomlinson, Andrew Torrance, and I wrote a paper that was accepted to the San Diego Law Review, about how academic articles can be written to influence future training of LLMs. The paper itself uses the technique to prove it’s point. (pre-print available at the bottom) What do we mean “manipulate the training process of…

Late-Binding Scholarship in the Age of AI: Navigating Legal and Normative Challenges of a New Form of Knowledge Production

screen shot of an AI producing a late-binding article for the financial industry

Bill Tomlinson, Andrew Torrance, Rebecca Black and I wrote a paper that was accepted to the UMKC law review, a top 10% academic law review journal about what the future of academic publishing might look like if LLMs like ChatGPT were embraced as an academic publishing tool. What does the future of academic publishing with…

Proof-by-Location as a Socially Responsible Financial Infrastructure

Architectural diagram of the Proof-by-Location cryptocurrency system, Xylem.

“Proof-by-Location” published in iGETblockchain Bill Tomlinson and I published a paper in 2022 IEEE 1st Global Emerging Technology Blockchain Forum: Blockchain & Beyond (iGETblockchain) This was a first of its kind forum and was presented in a very well-organized virtual conference format. We joined a number of other scholars to discuss globally focussed blockchain work, such…

Analyzing the Sustainability of 28 ‘Blockchain for Good’ Projects via Affordances and Constraints

Analyzing the sustainability of 28 ‘Blockchain for Good’ projects via affordances and constraints

  A long stretch of research and writing with a great group of colleagues, Bill Tomlinson, Jens Boberg, Jocelyn Cranefield, David Johnstone, Markus Luczak-Roesch, Shreya Kapoor and myself has finally resulted in the publication of a new article article titled “Analyzing the Sustainability of 28 ‘Blockchain for Good’ Projects via Affordances and Constraints.”  It has been…

Computing within Limits

Computing within Limits screenshot

“Computing within Limits” published in the Communications of the ACM A great group of colleagues, Bonnie Nardi, Bill Tomlinson, Jay Chen, Daniel Pargman, Barath Raghavan, Birgit Penzenstadler and I just received word that an article titled “Computing within Limits” has been published in the Communications of the ACM. This article summarizes the state of the art within…

Abstract Models for Concrete Problems Using Java

Drone Simulator Screenshot

Abstract Models for Concrete Problems Using Java For Spring semester 2018 I am teaching “Abstract Models for Concrete Problems Using Java”.  This is the second programming class in our Computer Science sequence at Westmont College.  This is the third run of this course.   We continue to enhance our drone programming simulator. I really like simulation assignments and…

Design and Implementation of Solutions to Computational Problems

Greenhouse garden sensors

  CS-010: Design and Implementation of Solutions to Computational Problems For Fall semester 2017 I am teaching an introductory course on programming at Westmont College.  This is second time that I’ve offered the course.   It remains similar to the first run which is described in more depth here.  This time I hope to bring in more in class…

Lead Where You Stand Conference

lead where you stand conference logo

  The Westmont Mosher Center for Moral and Ethical Leadership is organizing a conference on May 31-June 2 called “Lead Where You Stand“.   It’s a three day conference that “will offer key insights into an enduring challenge: How do we develop the capacity to respond in timely, principled ways to the multifaceted challenges and opportunities of effective…

Teaching Global Disruption and Information Tech

Teaching Global Disruption and Information Technology Online

“Teaching Global Disruption and Information Technology Online” accepted for publication in Interactions magazine As a part of a special issue on Sustainable HCI Education in Interactions magazine, Bill Tomlinson, Bonnie Nardi and myself, elaborated on an online course that we taught about Global Disruption and Information Technology. This article was part of an ongoing conversation with…

Design and Implementation of Solutions to Computational Problems

Cover of Python for Everyone, 2e by Cay Horstmann and Rance Necaise

  CS-010: Design and Implementation of Solutions to Computational Problems For Fall semester 2016 I am teaching an introductory course on Python Programming at Westmont College.  This is the first programming course that many students have ever encountered so it should be a great teaching opportunity and possibly a challenge for some of the students.  We have a large class…

iOS Development for Creative Entreprenuers

Mayterm iOS for Creative Entreprenuers

iOS Development For Mayterm 2016 the Westmont Computer Science Department is trying something new.  We are running an intensive iOS 9.0 programming class designed to get upper division students experience working with platform-based computing.  Another first is that we are going to be teaching it in the library’s computer lab. This 5-week course is scheduled to meet…

A Report from an Online Course on Global Disruption and Information Technology

ICS 5 Final Project Focii

“A Report from an Online Course on Global Disruption and Information Technology” accepted for publication in LIMITS 2016 Bill Tomlinson, Bonnie Nardi and I piloted an online undergraduate course with UC Irvine centered on the idea of “Global Disruption and Information Technology.”  We wanted to give students a framework to think about climate change, peak…

Computational Agroecology: Sustainable Food Ecosystem Design

A polyculture in a community garden in Urbana, IL.

“Computational Agroecology” published in alt.chi A team of people that I’m working with, led by Barath Raghavan, just had a paper accepted to alt.chi 2016! This is a portion of the CHI conference that is devoted to “controversial, risk-taking, and boundary pushing presentations at CHI”. The focus of the paper is to argue for the increased…

Object-Oriented Programming

Cover of Big Java Early Objects

Object-Oriented Teaching For Spring semester 2016 I am teaching a course on “Object-Oriented” Programming at Westmont College.  It’s been a long time since I’ve taught a lower-division Computer Science course, but I’m really looking forward to introducing students to Java and object-oriented thinking.  So far the group are really newbies to programming (except for one).  This…

Syrian Refugee Teach-In

Graphic from Westmont Syrian Refugee Teach-In

Refugee Teach-In at Westmont College Today There will be a one hour teach-in on the Syrian Refugee crisis today at noon on the Westmont College Dining Commons lawn (or Founder’s if raining). I was asked to speak to the vetting-process/security-threat angle briefly. Between handling the immigration of my oldest son, a Top Secret clearance in…

Toward Alternative Decentralized Infrastructures

Toward Alternative Decentralized Infrastructures

I’m very excited to announce that my colleagues and I had a paper accepted to ACM DEV 2015, “a premier venue to present original and innovative work on the applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computing in developing regions.”  We used the paper to put forward a vision of resilient local infrastructures that are coordinated via software…

Software Engineering

Essentials of Software Engineering cover

For Fall semester 2015 I am teaching a new course on “Software Engineering” at Westmont College.  This is my first time teaching over a semester and I’m looking forward to investigating some new tools like Pivotal Tracker! The course webpage can be found here: http://djp3.westmont.edu/classes/2015_09_CS130/structure.html

A French Affair Dot Com

Paris Subway Sign

On opinion piece I wrote at the start of the school year for the Westmont College student paper about the implications of the data breach at the dating site for married people, AshleyMadison.com In our increasingly digitized world there is very little that can be kept hidden anymore. As the Internet of things pursues the…

Haitian Resiliency: A Case Study in Intermittent Infrastructure

LIMITS 2015

This is one of two workshop papers that received a promotion to journal publications as part of this special issue of First Monday: This month: August 2015 Special issue: LIMITS 2015 — First workshop on computing within limits Today’s society is increasingly dependent upon and enmeshed with computing and technology. In parallel with advancements in computing, we have…

Cacophony: Building a Resilient Internet of Things

LIMITS 2015

This is one of two workshop papers that received a promotion to journal publications as part of this special issue of First Monday: This month: August 2015 Special issue: LIMITS 2015 — First workshop on computing within limits Today’s society is increasingly dependent upon and enmeshed with computing and technology. In parallel with advancements in computing, we have…

Haitian Resiliency: A Case Study in Intermittent Infrastructure

Haitian Resiliency: A Case Study in Intermittent Infrastructure Cover Sheet

In 2010 Haiti experienced a catastrophic earthquake that destroyed a substantial amount of infrastructure in the capital of Port-au- Prince. Limited national resources and widespread poverty have made the rebuilding slow and piecemeal. Five years later that infrastructure is still unevenly repaired and maintained. Nevertheless, the Haitian people have, by necessity, continued to adapt in…

Cacophony: Building a Resilient Internet of Things

Cacophony: Building a Resilient Internet of Things cover sheet

The proliferation of sensors in the world has created increased opportunities for context-aware applications. However, it is often cumbersome to capitalize on these opportunities due to the difficulties inherent in collecting, fusing, and reasoning with data from a heterogeneous set of distributed sensors. The fabric that connects sensors lacks resilience and fault tolerance in the…

Colonoscopy Quality Measures

A properly licensed photo of a doctor pretending to be in Minority Report

Dr. William Karnes and I are working on deploying a colonoscopy quality measure application for use in endoscopic suites.  We announced the effort today at the UCI Health 2015 Gastroenterology & Hepatology Symposium. It is a data entry tool that should be useful to endoscopists who are trying to monitor their performance at reducing colon cancer.  I am excited to be…

Fostering Non-Expert Creation of Sustainable Polycultures through Crowdsourced Data Synthesis

Fostering Non-Expert Creation of Sustainable Polycultures through Crowdsourced Data Synthesis

This $398,838 “CyberSEES: Type 1: Fostering Non-Expert Creation of Sustainable Polycultures through Crowdsourced Data Synthesis” grant was awarded by the Div. of Computing and Communications Foundations of the National Science Foundation.   The official record of the award can be found here. Food Forests This project integrates research in computing and sustainability science with the goal…

ICT4S 2029: What will be the systems supporting sustainability in 15 years

ICT4S paper cover

  Research is often inspired by visions of the future. These visions can take on various narrative forms, and can fall anywhere along the spectrum from utopian to dystopian. Even though we recognize the importance of such visions to help us shape research questions and inspire rich design spaces to be explored, the opportunity to…

Collapse Informatics and Practice: Theory, Method, and Design

Collapse Informatics and Practice: Theory, Method, and Design cover page

What happens if efforts to achieve sustainability fail? Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent…

Interchange: Bidding for green lights

Interchange: Bidding for green lights

In urban environments great effort is directed toward alleviating traffic including the design and implementation of complex software and hardware infrastructure. We introduce the idea of an auction-based mechanism for resolving vehicle intersections using a multi-way group auction mechanism. We propose a supporting infrastructure that has promise for increasing performance and responsiveness to dynamic traffic…

Efficiently Scaling up Crowdsourced Video Annotation

Efficiently Scaling up Crowdsourced Video Annotation: A Set of Best Practices for High Quality, Economical Video Labeling

We present an extensive three year study on economically annotating video with crowdsourced marketplaces. Our public framework has annotated thousands of real world videos, including massive data sets unprecedented for their size, complexity, and cost. To accomplish this, we designed a state-of-the-art video annotation user interface and demonstrate that, despite common intuition, many contemporary interfaces…

Augmenting Gesture Recognition with Erlang-Cox Models To Identify Neurological Disorders in Premature Babies

Augmenting Gesture Recognition with Erlang-Cox Models To Identify Neurological Disorders in Premature Babies

In this paper we demonstrate a Markov model based technique for recognizing gestures from accelerometers that explicitly represents duration. We do this by embedding an Erlang-Cox state transition model, which has been shown to accurately represent the first three moments of a general distribution, within a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN). The transition probabilities in the…

Assessment of Infant Movement with a Compact Wireless Accelerometer System

Assessment of Infant Movement with a Compact Wireless Accelerometer System

There is emerging data that patterns of motor activity early in neonatal life can predict impairments in neuromotor development. However, current techniques to monitor infant movement mainly rely on observer scoring, a technique limited by skill, fatigue, and inter-rater reliability. Consequently, we tested the use of a lightweight, wireless, accelerometer system that measures movement and…

Collapse Informatics: Augmenting the Sustainability & ICT4D Discourse in HCI

Collapse informatics: Augmenting the Sustainability & ICT4D Discourse in HCI cover sheet

Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent collapse is far from certain, it is prudent…

Massively Distributed Authorship of Academic Papers

Massively Distributed Authorship of Academic Papers

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that…

Audia

Whisper Analytics

Audia, formerly whisper.fm, was a start-up that I worked on with George Ruan and Sam Kaufman.  It was a very simple idea.  Instead of downloading a podcast, you could call in and listen to it over the audio channel of the phone.   It enabled you to get podcast content without a data plan.  If the…

Informing and performing: investigating how mediated sociality becomes visible

Informing and performing: investigating how mediated sociality becomes visible

In the human–computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, and ubiquitous computing literature, making people’s presence and activities visible as a design approach has been extensively explored to enhance computer-mediated interactions and collaborations. This process has developed under the rubrics of “awareness,” “social translucence,” “social activity indicators,” “social navigation,” etc. Although the name and details vary,…

Involuntary Gesture Recognition for Predicting Cerebral Palsy in High-Risk Infants

Involuntary Gesture Recognition for Predicting Cerebral Palsy in High-Risk Infants

In this paper we describe a system that leverages accelerometers to recognize a particular involuntary gesture in babies that have been born preterm. These gestures, known as cramped-synchronized general movements are highly correlated with a diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy. In order to test our system we recorded data from 10 babies admitted to the newborn…

Efficiently Scaling Up Video Annotation with Crowdsourced Marketplaces

Efficiently Scaling Up Video Annotation with Crowdsourced Marketplaces

Accurately annotating entities in video is labor intensive and expensive. As the quantity of online video grows, traditional solutions to this task are unable to scale to meet the needs of researchers with limited budgets. Current practice provides a temporary solution by paying dedicated workers to label a fraction of the total frames and otherwise…

Twitter, Sensors and UI: Robust Context Modeling for Interruption Management

Twitter, Sensors and UI: Robust Context Modeling for Interruption Management

In this paper, we present the results of a two-month field study of fifteen people using a software tool designed to model changes in a user’s availability. The software uses status update messages, as well as sensors, to detect changes in context. When changes are identified using the Kullback-Leibler Divergence metric, users are prompted to…

Supporting the transition from hospital to home for premature infants using integrated mobile computing and sensor support

Supporting the transition from hospital to home for premature infants using integrated mobile computing and sensor support

This paper reports on the requirements for, design of, and preliminary evaluation of a novel pervasive healthcare system for supporting the care of premature infants as they transition from hospital to home. In support of this system, we report the results of gesture sensing in a clinical setting and of interviews and focus groups with…

waitscout

Waitscout logo

waitscout was a start-up that I worked on with several folks, including George Ruan, Brian Silverstein and Ryan Hudson.  It was going to use predictive analytics plus relevant data from the Internet of Things to figure out what the wait time was at popular restaurants.  Then we would add that information to places like OpenTable…