UMBC Information Systems Department

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    Open to Interpretation
    (UMBC Magazine, 2023-06-08) O'Grady, Jenny
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    New U.S. News rankings honor UMBC strengths in teaching, innovation, and inclusion
    (UMBC News, 2020-09-14) McCaffrey, Kait; Winnick, Dinah
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    Surfing The Net With Project Waves
    (WYPR, 2020-09-09) Kast, Sheilah; Harvie, Maureen; Hamidi, Foad; Bennet, Jay; Bouhmad, Adam
    Internet access allows us to work and learn at home. For some, it’s a luxury out of their reach. To dent that digital divide, Adam Bouhmad founded Project Waves, a nonprofit that provides free Internet access to families across Baltimore. UMBC assistant professor Foad Hamidi describes how lack of internet makes disparities even worse for low-income families. And Jay Bennet tells how getting connected to the web has made life easier.
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    Wearable sensors and infrared cameras: Introducing UMBC’s User Studies Lab
    (UMBC News, 2020-02-05) Mastrola, Megan Hanks
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    Do-It-Yourself Assistive Technologies
    (Diario da saude, 2020-04-02)
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    Using Retrospective Surveys to Assess the Impact of Participating in an Afterschool Maker Learning Program on Youth
    (ASEE, 2020-06-22) Hamidi, Foad; Moulton, Adena; Grimes, Shawn; Grimes, Stephanie; Coy, Andrew
    As the number of afterschool technology-rich maker learning programs for youth increases, it is important to investigate effective assessment tools that can be used to assess program impact at scale. We studied results from a series of surveys using two deployment modes with 94 youth who participated in programs at an afterschool maker learning center. We found that retrospective surveys that ask youth to reflect on shifts in their attitudes after completing a program are more effective than the same surveys deployed twice, pre- and post- a program. These results confirm input from youth interviews in which they expressed dislike of repeating the same surveys before and after a program and difficulty with answering self-assessment questions without a point of reference.
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    Facilitating Privacy Conversations with Vulnerable Populations
    (ACM, 2020-04) Hamidi, Foad; Massey, Aaron; Easley III, William; Mentis, Helena; Hurst, Amy
    In recent years, designers, engineers, policy makers, and regulators have taken considerable interest in the design of emerging systems to incorporate privacy perspectives of diverse populations, including vulnerable populations. The development and deployment of accessible and easy-to-use tools to facilitate conversations about privacy and data expectations for diverse end-users is an important step in including such perspectives. In this position paper, we reflect on the role of a tool we developed and used in two recent projects to inquire into the data expectations of two vulnerable populations: people with disabilities and youth in the workplace.
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    Scaling Informal Technology Education through Maker Spaces
    (ASEE, 2020-06-22) Hamidi, Foad; Grimes, Shawn; Grimes, Stephanie; Moulton, Adena; Coy, Andrew
    Maker education models provide multiple points of entry for youth to gain exposure, interest, and skill-building in high-growth technology skills. Research has shown that maker-based programs can engage underrepresented audiences, including minorities and females, in technology career pathways. While maker education principles and approaches have transformative potential across both formal and informal learning environments, the agility and flexibility of informal learning environments like afterschool programs, make them especially amenable to the iterative, experimental, ethos of making and provide the needed flexibility to experiment with systemic changes to youth-centered learning approaches. Resources and guides on how to establish and run a makerspace are increasingly becoming available; however, research is needed to understand what are effective ways to create these resources and how to best support educators who want to create and run maker learning programs for the first time. In this NSF-funded project (Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings division), we are studying how to expand maker-based educational programs across three different sites. We used three professional development models, comprising of (1) online training, (2) face-to-face training at the site, and (3) face-to-face remote training. During the trainings, we worked with educators who had not delivered a maker-based program to design their space, familiarize them with maker concepts and technologies, and train them in an established maker curriculum. Results to date show that a hybrid online and face-to-face training offers the most promising approach and that building in flexibility and customizability in the curriculum may increase educator and youth engagement.
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    Rapid Transitions: Experiences with Accessibility and Special Education during the COVID-19 Crisis
    (Frontiers, 2021-02-17) Long, Emily; Vijaykumar, Sruti; Gyi, Serena; Hamidi, Foad
    The ongoing outbreak of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the ensuing preventative lock-down and shelter-in-place policies enacted around the world have caused unanticipated disruptions in the delivery of educational content and accessibility services to children, youth and adults with disabilities. The rapid move to online and remote learning, socialization, and therapeutic activities have surfaced some of the inadequacies of existing systems and infrastructures as well as opportunities for creating novel and accessible solutions. We conducted semi-structured remote interviews with nine special education teachers, therapists, community advocates, and individuals with disabilities to capture their perspectives on delivering services and supporting children and adults with disabilities and their families during the pandemic. Participants shared reflections on their experience and those who they serve during the initial phases of the COVID-19 crisis and the challenges and insights that this experience surfaced. Findings include a need to better support families in facilitating remote learning experiences for their children, developing tactile modes of engagement to complement online interactions, and the impact of a lack of contingency plans specifically to support people with disabilities and their families during crizes. The participants also described the lack of clarity about the future as one of the most difficult aspects of the pandemic. We conclude with a discussion of these findings and directions for future research.
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    Raaz: A Transdisciplinary Exploration at the Intersection of Bioart, HCI, and Community Engagement
    (Frontiers, 2022-03-17) Stamato, Lydia; Higgins, Erin; Prottoy, Hasan Mahmud; Asgarali-Hoffman, S. Nisa; Scheifele, Lisa; Dusman, Linda; deCarvalho, Tagide; Ascencao, Teresa; Hamidi, Foad
    Living organisms and their biological properties, including the capacity for transformation and representation of information, offer exciting and inspiring opportunities for transdisciplinary art and design explorations. While an emerging body of work is increasingly investigating the possibilities at the intersection of interactive computing, biology, and art, more work is needed to investigate the potential of these approaches for supporting community and public engagement and participation in art, science, and technology. In this project, we describe a multimedia transdisciplinary bioart installation and hands-on agar art activity that we presented to members of the public in a community biology lab setting. Using short interviews, observations, and questionaries, we investigated attendees' reactions and impressions of the experience and found that the event generated transdisciplinary reflections, invited participants to bring their previous knowledge and experience to bear in engaging with different aspects of the work, and that the audience benefited from contextualization by artists.
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    “Critical questions are missing”: Perspectives of environmental justice activists of Bangladesh on justice and technology
    (Computing within Limits, 2023-06-14) Prottoy, Hasan Mahmud; Stamato, Lydia; Hamidi, Foad
    Recent years have seen increasing interest in aligning interactive technology design and research with social justice values and practices, including those pertaining to environmental justice. These efforts can result in both innovative sociotechnical approaches to amplify environmental justice movements and resist injustices that may come about with the deployment of emerging technologies. Given the global nature of environmental injustice and the interconnectedness of their root causes and efforts to address them, it is important to understand the experiences and perspectives of activists from climate change-vulnerable Low and Middle-income Countries (LMICs). In this paper, we present findings from an interview study with five environmental justice activists in Bangladesh who share their motivations for activism, their views on the roots of injustice, the power dynamics in environmental justice activism, and their use of digital technologies for organizing, raising awareness, and coalition building. Our findings show the importance of genuine motivation and power analysis in this complex ecosystem and the potential of interactive technologies to support EJ activism.
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    Community Biology Labs in Practice: A Pasteur’s Quadrant Perspective
    (IOS Press, 2022) Aldulijan, Ibrahim; Asgarali-Hoffman, S. Nisa; Hamidi, Foad; Stamato, Lydia; Walker, Justice; Mansouri, Mo; Scheifele, Lisa
    Donald Stokes developed a paradigm that categorizes research into three quadrants based on two dimensions: the pursuit of basic understanding and consideration of utility. His ultimate goal was to create synergy between science and technology for economic advancement. Academics working on basic research fall into the Bohr quadrant; engineers fall into Edison’s quadrant of applied research. Pasteur’s quadrant, use-inspired basic research, is largely occupied by government agencies and societal input into setting their research priorities is indirect. Community labs are organizations that enable community members to perform research. Yet their utility as scientific organizations is unclear; understanding where they fall within the quadrant paradigm may enable their role to be better defined and may help their contributions to the scientific endeavor to be more fully realized. We use interviews with participants, review of literature, and review of lab and project websites to understand the nature of community lab projects and participants’ motivations. We show that the role of community labs falls most frequently into Pasteur’s quadrant. Community labs’ ability to integrate diverse expertise, pivot between basic and applied work quickly, support collaboration, and focus on local priorities makes them valuable additions to this quadrant and to the scientific research community.
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    Note: “Fear is Grounded in Reality”: The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Refugees’ Access to Health and Accessibility Resources in the United States
    (ACM, 2022-06-29) Hamidi, Foad; Karachiwalla, Zulekha
    The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a significant impact on people's lives worldwide. Research has shown that these impacts are distinct for different populations and often exasperate existing inequities and challenges. Within this landscape, the experiences of refugees with disabilities and mental health challenges are understudied. There is a need to better understand the challenges that refugees with disabilities and their families face in host countries during the pandemic and investigate strategies used to overcome them to inform future inclusive pandemic preparedness efforts. In this paper, we report findings from interviews conducted during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic with four experts who serve refugees in the US. Participants described the impact of the pandemic on refugees, explained challenges that the prevailing political conditions of the time added to refugees’ experiences, and identified several strategies for resilience they experienced in the communities they serve.
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    Using a Participatory Toolkit to Elicit Youth’s Workplace Privacy Perspectives
    (ACM, 2021-12-11) Easley III, William; Asgarali-Hoffman, Nisa; Hurst, Amy; Mentis, Helena; Hamidi, Foad
    The rapid evolution of technology has enabled us to perform complex, interdependent, and geographically distributed work. As a result, the effective use of communication and coordination technologies is increasingly crucial to success in the workplace, raising at the same time concerns about workplace privacy. In this paper, we present a case study showing how we adapted and used a participatory toolkit to elicit the privacy perspectives of a 3D print shop’s youth employees. Participants expected their managers and co-workers, rather than other third-parties, to see their data, and yet prioritized keeping their co-workers informed rather than being overly concerned about third-parties accessing their data. We found this approach effective at creating an expressive space for the youth to reflect on and share their expectations and preferences on workplace data privacy, a practice that can enhance both their workplace participation and professional communication training. We conclude with thoughts on how using open-ended participatory mechanisms can support employees’ ongoing reflection on the privacy of communication and coordination technologies, leading to increased fluency and participation in workplace decision-making.
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    Responding to COVID-19 with Community Internet
    (Computing Research Association, 2020-08-14) Bouhmad, Adam; Coy, Andrew; Hamidi, Foad
    In this video, we present an overview of our NSF-funded project that investigates an efficient and effective community-based approach for setting up free Internet access to low-income families in Baltimore City, MD, during and following the COVID-19 crisis. Using a sociotechnical approach, we are combining the technical work of setting up distributed mesh-networks in the urban context with the development of localized, trusted and open-access online education, career, communication, and information sharing resources.