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CITS is dedicated to research and education about the cultural transitions and social innovations associated with technology. The Center ...Video Episodes:
6 Views
15:08:22 07/04/09
Zoomorph - Enabeling Interspecies Collaboration Lisa Jevbratt
[LESS INFO] 6 VIEWS | ADDED 19:08:22 07/04/09
Jevbratt will present and contextualize her current project "ZooMorph" which consists of plug-in filters for widely used image and video-editing software such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, and platforms such as the iPhone and other smart phones. The plug-ins simulate how a large selection of non-human animals see, creating pictures that help us experience the world through the eyes of another species. Constructed with the assistance of both scientists in the field of animal vision and non-scientific experts on animal vision such as shamans and animal communicators, the filters embody highly diverse modes of knowledge production. ZooMorph intends to inspire humans to work on aesthetic projects together with other species - interspecies collaborations, and to make us aware of, and if possible facilitate, an intellectual, emotional and spiritual partnership with the species around us in the quest for a sustainable environment for all of us to thrive within.
BIO:
Jevbratt is a Swedish born new media artist, currently an associate professor in the Art Department and the Media Art Technology program at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work, ranging from Internet visualization software to biofeedback and interspecies collaboration, is concerned with collectives and systems, the languages and conditions that generate them, and the exchanges within them. The projects explores alternative, distributed and unintentional collaborations and the expressions of the collectives they create. Her work has been exhibited extensively in venues such as The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), The New Museum (New York), The Swedish National Public Art Council (Stockholm, Sweden), and the Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); and it is discussed in numerous books, for example in "Internet Art" by Rachel Greene and "Digital Art" by Christiane Paul (Thames and Hudson). Jevbratt also publishes texts on topics related to her projects and research, for example in the anthology "Network Art - Practices and Positions" ed. Tom Corby (Routledge).
8 Views
15:54:44 06/04/09
Changemakers: Tools and Strategies for Digital Advocacy
[LESS INFO] 8 VIEWS | ADDED 19:54:44 06/04/09
63 Views
14:22:04 02/16/09
CITS Distinguished Lecture Series 2008: Judy Estrin, Closing the Innovation Gap
[LESS INFO] 63 VIEWS | ADDED 19:22:04 02/16/09
Judy Estrin, long-time technology leader and former CTO of Cisco, will be speaking as part of the CITS Distinguished Speaker Series on October 27, 2008 at UCSB.
Biography:
Judy Estrin has been named three times to Fortune Magazine's list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in American business, and was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame.
She started her career as a 21-year old researcher in the lab that created the underlying technology for the Internet, co-founded several successful companies, pioneered the computer networking industry, and served as chief technology officer of networking giant Cisco.
She is currently a board member of The Walt Disney Company and FedEx Corporation. She also serves on the advisory boards of Stanford’s School of Engineering, and a member of the University Of California President’s Science and Innovation Advisory Board.
More on the topic of her talk:
CLOSING THE INNOVATION GAP
Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy
By Judy Estrin
The high cost of losing innovation in America – and solutions to revive national prosperity in the global economy
In the last half of the 20th Century, the United States benefited from a rich environment of scientific and technological innovation that led to such major discoveries and initiatives as DNA, the microprocessor, and the Internet. But now, short-term thinking and fear of risk are jeopardizing our future says Judy Estrin, who has built a 30-year career at the forefront of technology and business.
CLOSING THE INNOVATION GAP (McGraw-Hill; Hardcover, September, 2008) explains how recent dramatic shifts in our society – particularly an emphasis on boosting current profit margins at the cost of long-term exploration and sustainability – have undermined the cultural foundation that nurtured America’s success, creating dangerous blind spots in business and science as we try to compete in the global economy.
Those blind spots go beyond a shift away from long-term R%D. The collapse of innovation is now being felt in science, academia, federal policy, health care, and corporate boardrooms. While countries like China aggressively position themselves for economic and technological growth in the future, the United States is focusing almost exclusively on short-term investments. The country is suffering from what Estrin terms "Root Rot," like a tree whose leaves appear to flourish, while the source of its nourishment withers and dies. As our support for innovation declines, our nation faces serious challenges – and thus, major opportunities – in energy use and climate change, health care, and national security. Estrin believes that as the Space Race did in the 1950s, each of these challenges could inspire its own "moon shot," rallying the nation to come together and revive the spirit of innovation.
Estrin explains in clear and simple terms how the three communities that drive innovation – in research, development, and application – must exist in balance to flourish, like a natural ecosystem. The Innovation Ecosystem requires collaboration between these communities, and must be nurtured by wise leadership, sustainable funding, smart policy, solid education and a culture that respects science. Using anecdotes and examples from more than 100 leaders at companies like Disney, Pixar, FedEx, Proctor & Gamble, and Google, as well as academic and scientific institutions, Estrin shows how applying five core values of questioning, patience, trust, openness and risk can reignite innovation in individuals, companies, institutions, and countries.
CLOSING THE INNOVATION GAP rolls out an action plan for reviving national innovation by:
* Creating cultures and organizational structures for innovation through "green thumb leadership";
* Evaluating the innovation portfolios of businesses, industries, and countries;
* Understanding the impact of policy decisions and investments on long-term innovation independent of partisan beliefs and religious ideologies;
* Encouraging critical thinking and problem solving by changing the fundamentals of how and what we teach, rather than obsession with the outcomes of standardized tests.
"Innovation is not optional. Sustainable innovation is integral to our economic growth. It is not too late to reignite the spark of creativity and take decisive actions to save our future."
-Judy Estrin
35 Views
16:50:40 11/13/08
Are Your Votes Really Counted? Giovanni Vigna
[LESS INFO] 35 VIEWS | ADDED 21:50:40 11/13/08
Center for Information Technology and Society
University of California, Santa Barbara
Are Your Votes Really Counted? Evaluating the Security of Real-world Electronic Voting Systems Oct 23, 2008 Engineering Sciences Building 1001, Santa Barbara, CA
Electronic voting systems play a critical role in today?s democratic societies, as they are responsible for recording and counting the citizens? votes. Unfortunately, there is an alarming number of reports describing the malfunctioning of these systems, suggesting that their quality is not up to the task. Recently, there has been a focus on the security evaluation of voting systems to determine if they can be compromised in order to control the results of an election. We have participated in two large-scale projects, sponsored by the Secretaries of State of California and Ohio, whose respective goals were to perform the security testing of the electronic voting systems used in those two states. The testing process identified major flaws in all the systems analyzed, and resulted in substantial changes in the voting procedures of both states. In this talk we describe how voting systems work, what their vulnerabilities are, and what can be done to achieve a more secure voting process.
Giovanni Vigna is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California in Santa Barbara. His current research interests include web security, malware analysis, and vulnerability assessment. He has led a team of evaluators in California's Top-To-Bottom-Review of voting systems and in Ohio's EVEREST project. Finally, he is known for organizing and running an inter-university Capture The Flag hacking context that every year involves dozens of institutions around the world.
27 Views
14:25:58 06/11/08
Facebook and Network Interactivity (CITS, 2008)
[LESS INFO] 27 VIEWS | ADDED 18:25:58 06/11/08
In this talk Rob presents work on a study that examined the communication behaviors of student users of the popular online social networking site (SNS) Facebook. Specifically the research analyzed the relationships between three categories of antecedent user characteristics: academic achievement, background demographics, and new media use behaviors against the forms of networked interactivity present in Facebook user profile communication: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many and aggregated networked interactivity. Data analysis conducted on student Facebook profiles (N=348) suggests significant relationships between the constitutive forms of networked interactivity and independent variables of academic achievement, gender, user socio-economic background and specific media use behaviors such as instant-messaging and online game playing. Under analysis the most frequent relationships found are those between the antecedent variables and one-to-one interactivity. These results suggest that while SNS environments offer users multiple forms of communication to engage one another, direct one-to-one interactivity remains the dominant form of networked interactivity. Originally recorded on June 5, 2008 at UC Santa Barbara.
8 Views
00:35:35 10/23/07
Designing Interactive Games to Promote Health Behavior Change (CITS, 2007)
[LESS INFO] 8 VIEWS | ADDED 04:35:35 10/23/07
Debra Lieberman is a lecturer in the Department of Communication and a researcher in the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research (ISBER) at UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Lieberman presents theory and research on the features of interactive health games that -- when well designed -- may influence players' health-related attitudes, learning, and behavior. The features include, for example, challenging game goals, a dramatic story line, and nurturing of game characters who need care. How do these and other game features enhance or detract from players' processing of health messages, and in turn what is their potential impact on health behavior change? Originally recorded October 18, 2007 at the University of California Santa Barbara.
2 Views
10:57:36 06/19/07
Transformed Social Interaction: Using Virtual Reality To Break Social Reality (CITS, 2003)
[LESS INFO] 2 VIEWS | ADDED 14:57:36 06/19/07
Originally recorded October 3, 2003. Andy Beall is a professional researcher in the UC Santa Barbara Department of Psychology and The Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior. For further information see: www.recveb.ucsb.edu
Dr. Beall's talk focuses on computer-mediated communication systems known as Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) which allow geographically separated individuals to interact verbally and nonverbally in a shared virtual space in real-time. He discusses an ongoing CVE-based research project that transforms (i.e., filters and modifies) nonverbal behaviors during social interaction in strategic ways. Doing so can change the way we think of "face-to-face" interaction, at least during mediated circumstances.
1 Views
15:46:18 05/23/07
Argumentative Architecture: Building a Database for Educational Reform (CITS, 2005)
[LESS INFO] 1 VIEWS | ADDED 19:46:18 05/23/07
Originally recorded May 6, 2005. Karen Lunsford is a Professor in the Education and Writing Program departments at UC Santa Barbara.
In recent years, scholars (e.g., Bolter, 2001; White, 2000) have fore-grounded hypertext genres as the primary challenge to traditional argumentation that digital media offer. For example, hypertexts may replace the hierarchical, linear logic of traditional argumentative texts with more rhizomatic, associative, yet equally persuasive argument structures. However, this focus on hypertext genres has overshadowed the often
invisible, black-boxed technologies that also should be seen as argumentative agents: databases.
To be sure, information specialists (e.g., Lakoff, 1987; Bowker & Star, 1999) have pointed out that creating categories, such as database fieldnames, is an argumentative act. In addition, business and technical writing scholars (e.g., Salvo, 2004; Spinuzzi, 2003) have commented on how information architectures affect employees and other database users, and they have discussed the responsibilities that rhetoricians have in contributing to effective information design. Yet what are needed are more accounts of the discussions that groups engage in as they decide what values should be reflected by their information architectures--particularly when these groups are composed of information specialists alongside "content area" specialists. What strategies do they employ to embed their decisions into elements such as database fieldnames, and, more important, how do they also actively persuade the intended database users to align with values they have chosen?
In this presentation, Professor Lunsford reports on a case study of a consortium that was funded to develop a database of resources for fostering diversity in educational settings. She draws on semi-structured and text-based interviews with six key consortium members, along with rhetorical analyses of several of the project's central documents. She examines how the consortium took on the challenge of not only developing the database but also subtly acclimating teachers to the values that the database embodied--thus building the distributed common ground needed for the consortium's more traditional written arguments and the database to succeed.
1 Views
18:00:26 04/11/07
E-Movements and the Structure of Collective Action (CITS, 2003)
[LESS INFO] 1 VIEWS | ADDED 22:00:26 04/11/07
Originally recorded Novermber 7, 2003. Professor Jennifer Earl, from the UC Santa Barbara Department of Sociology, presents a lecture on the topic of E-Movements and the Structure of Collective Action: Examining Strategic Voting In the 2000 Presidential Election.
Most research on social movements and the Internet has focused on pre-existing movements, which have recently adopted online tactics. This body of research has applied classic social movement theories to such movements, focusing on the faster communication, broader reach, and the expanded mobilization capacity facilitated by the Internet for pre-existing movements. Using the online strategic voting movement during the 2000 US Presidential Election as a case study, Professor Earl and her colleagues argue that the application of prior theory often overlooks the ways in which movements that emerge and thrive online function differently from conventional movements. Specifically, they argue that movement entrepreneurs, instead of social movement organizations, were largely responsible for organizing the strategic voting movement. This more entrepreneurial movement infrastructure brought with it changes in decision-making processes and concerns. Decision making became more discretionary, the importance of leadership declined, decisions about organizational form became less problematic, and ideological and Internet-related concerns informed decision making in lieu of organizational or more standard social movement concerns. However, Earl argues that e-movements, and the strategic voting movement in particular, are not so exotic that they constitute fundamentally new forms of action; instead, such movements are still usefully thought of as social movements.