In two weeks you are hosting 1,800 scientists, engineers, designers, and other experts at a five day conference but then the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suddenly encourages Americans to practice “social distancing” measures to prevent the further spread of COVID-19. What do you do?  You move it online.  That is what the IEEE VR conference chairs decided to do last month, led by Blair MacIntyre, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and IEEE VR conference co-chair, and Kyle Johnsen, an associate professor in the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering, when they transitioned the IEEE VR 2020 Conference to an all-virtual event. Working non-stop […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Council members Katie Siek (Indiana University) and Shwetak Patel (University of Washington).  Many people around the country are in week three of their resolutions to monitoring their health with their fitness trackers. These mobile health devices are becoming more common. The iphone track your steps, maybe without you even realizing it, as does this necklace and this ring. Researchers have been talking about mobile health devices for years. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) held 2016 workshop on Discovery and Innovation in Smart and Pervasive Health and then at AAAS 2017 CCC had a session on “Health in Your Pocket: Diagnosing and Treating […]

Shwetak Patel, the 2018 ACM Prize in Computing winner and Professor in Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, was a participating laureate at this year’s Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF). During his presentation at HLF, Dr. Patel discussed some of the innovate health applications he and his team have developed including an app that can monitor jaundice in babies called Bilicam. Typically, it can be hard to discern if a baby has severe jaundice since many babies skin has a yellowish hue naturally. Bilicam filters certain kinds of light out of the spectrum which allows that user to track the kinds of chemicals found in the babies skin. From there you can decide whether there […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Research Opportunities in Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction workshop report. The CCC’s 1.5 day Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction workshop took place in April 2018 in New Orleans, co-located with the Society for Behavioral Medicine’s 39th Annual Meeting. This cross-disciplinary workshop, brought together leading researchers in computing, health informatics, and behavioral medicine to develop an integrative research agenda regarding sociotechnical interventions to reduce health disparities and improve the health of socio-economically disadvantaged populations. “Health disparities are differences in disease prevalence, incidence, morbidity and/or mortality in one group as compared to the general population. In Western countries, groups which experience disparities in health outcomes […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently held a visioning workshop in Atlanta, GA to discuss and articulate research visions for authoring rich graphical content for new workforce training. The workshop’s goal was to articulate research challenges and needs and to summarize the current state of the practice in this area. This workshop is in response to growing needs in the field and new research programs such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier: Advancing Cognitive and Physical Capabilities (FW-HTF). In this episode of the Catalyzing Computing podcast, Khari Douglas sits down with workshop organizers Holly Rushmeier (Yale) and Beth Mynatt (Georgia Tech) to discuss […]

This blog post contains contributions from an upcoming special issue of Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association In April 2018, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) held a visioning workshop on Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction. The workshop brought together leading researchers from computing, health informatics, behavioral medicine, and health disparities to develop an integrative research agenda that will advance sociotechnical interventions capable of reducing health disparities and improving the health outcomes of socio-economically disadvantaged populations. Four main themes were addressed during the course of the workshop: Theory to Design and Implementation: “How do researchers appropriately identify and map theory to design, implementation, and evaluation?” Sociotechnical System Blackboxes: “How […]