Donald J. Patterson

Author: Donald Patterson

I am a professor who develops people and ideas.

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…

Getting Places: Collaborative Predictions from Status

Getting Places: Collaborative Predictions from Status

In this paper we describe the use of collaborative filtering to make predictions about place using data from custom instant messaging status. Previous research has shown accurate predictions can be made from an individual’s personal data. The work in this paper demonstrates that community data can be used to make predictions in locations that are…

Constructing Topological Maps of Displays with 3-D Positioning Information

Constructing Topological Maps of Displays with 3-D Positioning Information

To better coordinate information displays with moving people and the environment, software must know the locations and three dimensional alignments of the display hardware. In this paper we describe a technique for creating such an enhanced topological map of networked public displays using a mobile phone. The result supports a richer user experience, without the…

Status on Display: a Field Trial of Nomatic*Viz

Status on Display: a Field Trial of Nomatic*Viz

The use of personal status messages is becoming a part of popular culture through wide-spread instant messaging (IM) adoption, the growth of social networking websites and the increased connectivity provided by mobile phones. However, the implications of status broadcasting and people’s behavior in the milieu of social life is still poorly understood. In this paper,…

swayr

Swayr Mock Up

swayr was a start-up that I worked on with several folks, including George Ruan and Paul Limon.  The idea was to use gamification to encourage sharing of media. So we would have links to media that we could track the use of. Then we would build game mechanics that encouraged people to share links. Companies…

Overcoming Blind Spots in Interaction Design: A Case Study in Designing for African AIDS Orphan Care Communities

Overcoming Blind Spots in Interaction Design: A Case Study in Designing for African AIDS Orphan Care Communities

The process of designing technological systems for the developing world is a challenging task. In a project that we undertook in the summer of 2007 using an iterative design process, we attempted to develop delay-tolerant networking technology on mobile phones to support workers at AIDS orphanages in Zambia and South Africa. Despite extensive preparations and…

Online Everywhere: Evolving Mobile Instant Messaging Practices

Online Everywhere: Evolving Mobile Instant Messaging Practices

< In this paper we report on the results of a large scale user survey investigating the status setting and interruption management behavior of mobile instant messaging (IM) users with existing systems. The motivation for this study was to inform the design of interface tools that support users by setting contextually appropriate awareness messages. Our…

Interactive and Intelligent Visual Communication Systems

Interactive and Intelligent Visual Communication Systems

Interventions to support children with cognitive and social developmental disabilities often include visual elements. Use of visual artifacts has been shown to increase the communication and understanding levels of children with disabilities. We describe a research agenda for expanding these capabilities using interactive, collaborative and intelligent systems. ( permanent, local copy ) Published in Interactive Design for…

Informatics at UC Irvine

Informatics at UC Irvine

Computer Science, as a single discipline, can no longer speak to the broad relevance of digital technologies in society. The Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, serves as the institutional home for research on relationships between technological, organizational, and social aspects of…

NomaticBubbles: Visualizing Communal Whereabouts

NomaticBubbles: Visualizing Communal Whereabouts

We describe the design of the NomaticBubbles, a visualization that provides cues of communal whereabouts. Unlike most location displays showing whereabouts on a geographical map, the NomaticBubbles depicts historical and aggregate traces of participants’ whereabouts in an abstract and ambiguous manner. We describe the design of the NomaticBubbles, and discuss some early experiences and feedback…

Computing Place Context

Computing Place Context

This $449,765 “HCC: Computing Place Context” grant was awarded by the Div. of Information and Intelligent Systems of the National Science Foundation.   The official record of the award can be found here. A New Approach to Discovering Interruptibility This is a project to develop a new approach to interruptibility and related issues in instant messaging…

quub

quub logo white

quub was a start-up that I worked on with several folks, including George Ruan and Nathan Esquenazi.  quub was a commercialization of Nomatic*IM.  Basically it was supposed to be automatic status updates that your computer would generate for you based on what it could detect about you from sensors.  The ideal case would be to…

Involving Intelligent Assistants in Active Human Communication

Involving Intelligent Assistants in Active Human Communication

Intelligent assistants that support human communication need to respect the difficulty of understanding the context surrounding the interchange. Rather than attempting to directly communicate for a user, intelligent assistants should support decision making on the part of the involved parties so that complex social negotiations are preserved. We describe an intelligent assistant that does this…

Fine-Grained Activity Recognition by Aggregating Abstract Object Usage

Fine-Grained Activity Recognition by Aggregating Abstract Object Usage

In this paper we present results related to achieving fine grained activity recognition for context-aware computing applications. We examine the advantages and challenges of reasoning with globally unique object instances detected by an RFID glove. We present a sequence of increasingly powerful probabilistic graphical models for activity recognition. We show the advantages of adding additional…

Opportunity Knocks: a System to Provide Cognitive Assistance with Transportation Services

Opportunity Knocks: a System to Provide Cognitive Assistance with Transportation Services

We present an automated transportation routing system, called “Opportunity Knocks,” whose goal is to improve the efficiency, safety and independence of individuals with mild cognitive disabilities. Our system is implemented on a combination of a Bluetooth sensor beacon that broadcasts GPS data, a GPRS-enabled cell-phone, and remote activity inference software. The system uses a novel…

Guide: Towards Understanding Daily Life via Auto-Identification and Statistical Analysis

Guide: Towards Understanding Daily Life via Auto-Identification and Statistical Analysis

Many recent studies have underscored the applicability to healthcare of a system able to observe and understand day-to-day human activities. The Guide project is aimed at building just such a system. The project combines novel sensing technology, expressive but scalable learners and unsupervised mining of activity models from the web to address the problem. An…

Expressive, Tractable and Scalable Techniques for Modeling Activities of Daily Living

Expressive, Tractable and Scalable Techniques for Modeling Activities of Daily Living

One the best qualitative and quantitative tools that elder–care specialists have to monitor the health of elderly individuals is Activity of Daily Living (ADL) tracking [1,2]. By watching the frequency and competency with which an individual can cook, clean the house, engage in socializing, etc, short– and long– term changes in health can be identified.…

Serum Phosphate Levels and Mortality Risk among People with Chronic Kidney Disease

Serum Phosphate Levels and Mortality Risk among People with Chronic Kidney Disease

Elevated serum phosphate levels have been linked with vascular calcification and mortality among dialysis patients. The relationship between phosphate and mortality has not been explored among patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). A retrospective cohort study was conducted from eight Veterans Affairs’ Medical Centers located in the Pacific Northwest. CKD was defined by two continuously…

Research on Statistical Relational Learning at the University of Washington

Research on Statistical Relational Learning at the University of Washington Screenshot

  This paper presents an overview of the research on learning statistical models from relational data being carried out at the University of Washington. Our work falls into five main directions: learning models of social networks; learning models of sequential relational processes; scaling up statistical relational learning to massive data sources; learning for knowledge integration;…

Intel Research Seattle

Intel Research Labs Seattle logo

I did two summer internships at Intel Research Seattle while in graduate school at UW.  That organization ceased to exist around 2012-2013, but it was a moment in time that was very cool.  The dawn of ubiquitous computing and lots of great researchers working on it. I designed and implemented a modeling language and statistical…

Intelligent Ubiquitous Computing to Support Alzheimer’s Patients

Intelligent Ubiquitous Computing to Support Alzheimer's Patients: Enabling the Cognitively Disabled Screenshot

Assisted Cognition systems provide active cognitive aids for people with reduced memory and problem-solving abilities due to Alzheimer’s Disease or other disorders. Two concrete examples of the Assisted Cognition systems we are developing are an ACTIVITY COMPASS that helps reduce spatial disorientation both inside and outside the home, and an ADL PROMPTER that helps patients…

The Activity Compass

The Activity Compass Screenshot

In this paper, we introduce the Activity Compass, a cognitive aid for early-stage Alzheimer’s patients. This device has a simple user interface based on the metaphor of a traditional navigation compass. By following an arrow and an icon, users who are disoriented or forgetful are assisted in reaching their destination. A server-based AI engine learns…

Pre-mRNA Secondary Structure Prediction Aids Splice Site Prediction

Pre-mRNA Secondary Structure Prediction Aids Splice Site Prediction

Accurate splice site prediction is a critical component of any computational approach to gene prediction in higher organisms. Existing approaches generally use sequence-based models that capture local dependencies among nucleotides in a small window around the splice site. We present evidence that computationally predicted secondary structure of moderate length pre-mRNA subsequences contains information that can…

Auto-Walksat: A Self-Tuning Implementation of Walksat

Auto-Walksat: A Self-Tuning Implementation of Walksat Screenshot

Stochastic search algorithms have proven to be very fast at solving many satisfiability problems [2,3,8]. The nature of their search requires careful parameter tuning to maximize performance, but depending on the problem and the details of the stochastic algorithm, the correct tuning may be difficult to ascertain [9]. In this paper we introduce Auto-Walksat, a…

Eagle Scout

Eagle Scout Award

I am an Eagle Scout. I earned my award in 1989 with an Eagle Scout project that entailed using a very early database system to catalog tombstones in the Fairfax County area.  Most of the tombstones were under threat from development and contained genealogy information that is otherwise unavailable.