Donald J. Patterson

Category: Writing

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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;…

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…