Monica Tentori (Ensenada Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education)

*All Fall 2020 Design@Large talks will be hosted online. This aligns with UC San Diego policy that all events be hosted virtual during the Fall 2020 quarter.

Lessons learned organizing the Ubicomp/ISWC 2020 virtual conference

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation, the organizing committee of Ubicomp/ISWC 2020 decided to organize it as a virtual event. Unfortunately, we know very little about virtual conferences organization and their impact in the overall academic and social networking experience of their participants. In this talk, I will first summarize what was it like to attend for the first time to Ubicomp/ISWC in its virtual edition. Then I will illustrate major lessons learned highlighting positive, negative and unexpected experiences. I will give a summary of the key results from a questionnaire-based survey of participants’ experience. I will conclude with key takeaways and suggestions for future virtual conferences organization.

About the Speaker

Monica Tentori investigates the human experience of ubiquitous computing to inform the design of ubiquitous environments that effectively enhance humans interactions with their world. Her research intersecting human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing particularly focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating natural user interfaces for ubiquitous computing. Her work is being applied to healthcare and urban living to support the needs of urban citizens, hospital workers, elders, and individuals with autism and their caregivers. Tentori’s research demonstrates that effectively designed ubiquitous environments have the potential to promote healthy lifestyles and independence, and positively impact attention, behavior, and workload. She was the first Latin American woman and first Mexican who received the prestigious award Microsoft Fellowship for her research work. She is awarded with the national award of level 2 out of four levels by the National Research Committee evaluating researchers in Mexico. She is co-founder of an international consortium exploring binational challenges between Mexico and USA including academic institutions like CICESE, UABC, ITSON, UCSD, UCLA, and UC Irvine. She has advised numerous PhD and MSc students in human computer interaction and ubiquitous computing, and published extensively in the area of pervasive healthcare.

About Design@Large

Design@Large is a speaker series that is hosted by The Design Lab at UCSD, where each quarter we examine a topic in society and the relevance and implications through the lens of human centered design. This fall, hosted by Professor Edward Wang from Electrical & Computer Engineering, we will discuss the topic that has affected all of our lives, COVID-19. In a way, we are all talking about the fundamental thought of “how do we stay safe in the times of COVID-19?” But what does that mean? What are the facets of consideration that goes into this idea of “staying safe?”

We have an exciting list of speakers covering topics around remote and predictive healthcare, break throughs in computational materials towards future proofing our built environments, enabling large gatherings through virtual events, and economic impact on underrepresented communities.