Another fall is quickly slipping by, which means that another student recruiting season is underway! I'm looking for new PhD students, undergraduate research assistants, and independent study scholars to join my research group both in the upcoming academic semester and during the 2018–2019 academic year. I've updated some of my research project pages to reflect some of the exciting new directions that my research in personal informatics and personal information management is headed here at the University of Colorado Boulder…

Please take a look and contact me if you are interested in jumping in or considering submitting a PhD application to one of our human-centered computing–affiliated PhD programs here on campus: Information Science, Computer Science, or Technology, Media, and Society (via the ATLAS Institute).

As of 1 August, I'm pleased to announce that I've started a permanent academic position in the IU School of Informatics and Computing at Indianapolis (IUPUI). In fall 2013, I'll be teaching a throughly refreshed version of the course I480, Experience Design and Evaluation of Ubiquitous Computing, which will be based on a design-focused ubicomp course that I offered previously at UC Irvine.

After (regrettably) having missed several personal informatics workshops held at CHI and CSCW, I'm pleased to have been invited to attend this year's workshop at CHI 2013 as a co-author of two accepted position papers. One of the main motivations for me to participate is to share some of my recent thinking about how physiological sensing (such as stress detection) might dovetail with other kinds of information management approaches as one way to combat information overload. I've also been working with other postdocs and students at Cornell to think about how critical design can be used to reveal the seams and assumptions inherent in personal health informatics systems.

I'm also excited that this year's workshop will be more than just participant presentations and brainstorming. Ian, Jon, and company have put together a fun mix of hands-on prototyping exercises for one of the two days. This seems like a great way to play with some new ideas and get to know the other participants in a way that you typically wouldn't in the course of a conference workshop!

I'm pleased to announce that I've accepted an appointment as a postdoctoral associate in the Cornell University Department of Information Science, where I'll be working with Tanzeem Choudhury and Geri Gay on various projects in the domain of mobile health informatics. Although this will be a new research area for me, some of the initial research that we'll be doing will build off of the kind of stress detection that I used for the Multitasking & Email Study at UC Irvine.

I'll be moving to Ithaca to start the new position in August 2012. Since my appointment at UC Irvine will be closing out later in the year, please update any web bookmarks to point to this new, permanent site (http://stephen.voida.com) and note my updated email addresses: svoida@acm.org for research-oriented correspondence and svoida@cornell.edu for University-oriented correspondence. My various UCI login credentials will go away sometime in November or December.

Photo: UCI Communications 

UC Irvine recently featured our research on multitasking and email on the university home page, and, as a result, a number of news outlets have been picking up the story over the last 24 hours or so.

So far, some of the major outlets that have run stories about our forthcoming CHI paper include the New York Times' Bits Blog, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic (which wins the prize for best accompanying visual with a large image of Munch's The Scream), and American Public Media's Marketplace Tech Report.

The interaction-design.org Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction recently released a new chapter on Activity Theory by Victor Kaptelinin, one of the foremost experts on Activity Theory in the field of HCI, and I was asked to provide a response, which was published alongside the chapter. Victor's article does a terrific job of summarizing the framework's historical roots and its trajectory of adoption by the HCI domain, and he was also kind enough to highlight Giornata as one of his illustrations of how Activity Theory has been used to guide the design of information systems.

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The first paper summarizing the results of my two-year collaboration with Gloria Mark and Armand Cardello to empirically measure the impact of e-mail on multitasking in information work has been accepted for publication at the upcoming CHI 2012 conference, to be held in Austin, Texas in May 2012.

UPDATE: I have just learned that our paper has been awarded a CHI 2012 Best Paper Honorable Mention, indicating that it was among the top 5% of all submissions to the conference!

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I'm in Vancouver, BC this week, attending the CHI 2011 conference. I'm serving as the session chair for the 3D Interaction paper session on Tuesday afternoon, May 10, starting at 14:00. If you're attending the conference, be sure to look for our brand-new 2011 LUCI postcards, one of which features the multitasking research that I've been working on with Gloria Mark at UC Irvine.