Donald J. Patterson

Category: Journal Papers

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…