Björn Hartmann Joins BiD Faculty

The Berkeley Institute of Design is excited to announce that Björn Hartmann has been appointed as an Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Björn received his PhD degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2009. His research in Human-Computer Interaction focuses on on the creation and evaluation of user interface design tools, end-user programming environments, and ubiquitous computing toolkits. He will be teaching CS160 with Professor Maneesh Agrawala in Spring 2010.

Maneesh Agrawala has been named a MacArthur fellow

Maneesh Agrawala has been named a MacArthur fellow, one of 24 recipients chosen nationwide for the annual award. This award comes with a $500,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago. Fellows can use the money any way they want over the next five years. Prof. Agrawala develops visual methods to help people to more easily sort through information. As a graduate student, he created an automated program that creates easy-to-decipher route maps that make it clear where to turn and which road to take. Later, he developed a system that creates simple assembly instructions - with three-dimensional views - for such things as furniture and toys. He said he may use the grant to explore how radio journalists use words and sound to produce rich, descriptive and compelling stories.

BiD Design Clinics

The Berkeley Institute of Design will be hosting Design Clinics for Spring Semester 2009. The Design Clinics are a series of hands-on workshops where we invite people to lead sessions on skills that are important to have as a practicing designer.

The design clinics are mostly on Thursdays from 4-6 at the Berkeley Institute of Design. Some clinics are on Wednesdays due to scheduling conflicts with the presenters. Please see the schedule for more information.

January 29 - Brainstorming
February 4 - Typography & Graphic Design
February 12 – No Clinic, Open House
Febrary 19 – Sketching User Interfaces (w/ Bill Buxton)
February 26 – Leadership & Teamwork (w/ Ulrich Nettesheim, Passages Consulting)
*March 4 – Knitting and Crochet
*March 11 – Developing Scenarios
March 19 – Advanced Laser Cutter (w/ Mitch Heinrich & Mike Lin, Squid Labs)
March 26 – No Clinic, Spring Break
April 2 – Musical Instrument Design and Fabrication with Fabric (w/ Adrian Freed, Berkeley CNMAT)
*April 8 – Improv for Design
April 16 – Papercraft (Origami & Pop-up)
April 23 – Flex Programming
April 30 – TBA
May 7 – TBA

* Schedule Shift: Wednesday Clinics

Best Paper Award at Persuasive 2008

Divya Ramachandran and John Canny brought home the Nokia Best Paper Award from the Persuasive 2008 conference held in Oulu, Finland for their paper "The Persuasive Power of Human-Machine Dialogue."

BiD projects win 'innovations in learning' grants

Professor Greg Niemeyer's "Black Cloud" was awarded a $238,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation competition for innovations in learning using digital media.

Matthew Kam and Professor John Canny's work with MILLEE was also among the largest of the 17 grants from the Digital Media and Learning Competition.

Read the full Berkeley press release or the story in the Daily Californian.

BiD teams compete at the Google Games (cont'd)

David Nguyen quoted in New York Times about BiD's participation in Google Games.

BiD heads to India

Matthew Kam and David Nguyen will be heading to Mysore, India to do field research for the MILLEE project. They have started a blog to keep everyone updated with their experiences at http://bidtierindia.blogspot.com/.

MultiView study wins CHI 2007 Best Paper Award

David Nguyen and John Canny's paper: MultiView: Improving Trust in Group Video Conferencing through Spatial Faithfulness was awarded a Best Paper Award at this year's CHI 2007 Human Factors in Computing Systems conference!

BiD teams compete at the Google Games

Two teams composed of BiD members competed at the Google Games held April 28th in Mountain View. The event pitted teams from Berkeley and Stanford against each other in heated competition in Logic Puzzles, Nintendo Wii Olympics, and Lego Bridge-Building.

Team I'm an XL, consisting of Cap'n Wes Willett, Ryan "the world is a feisty oyster" Aipperspach, Jeff "scheme-ing polyglot" Heer, "Shoeless" Dave Nguyen, and Lora "hold 'em and fold 'em" Oehlberg, won first place in the Logic Puzzles, and took fourth place overall. Meanwhile, team BiD Razrs, consisting of Andy Carle, Jono Hey, Omar Khan, Ana Ramirez Chang, and David Sun, valiantly attempted to put Stanford in its place. Sadly, Stanford won overall, though the second place team "Fiat Ursi" proudly displayed their Cal pride. Unfortunately, this set of Cal grads had all migrated to Stanford for graduate school, so their points were tallied against their alma mater.

Lora was later quoted about our experiences in the San Jose Mercury News.

David Nguyen and John Canny bring CHI '07 Best Paper Award to BiD

David Nguyen and John Canny bring a CHI '07 Best Paper Award to BiD in their paper titled "MultiView: Improving Trust in Group Video Conferencing through Spatial Faithfulness." Press Release.

BiD visualization research catches Tufte's eye

Visualization research on optimizing the presentation of data graphics, conducted by BiD members Jeffrey Heer and Maneesh Agrawala, recently caught the eye of famed visualization guru Edward Tufte, as posted on his blog. Scroll down for the April 27, 2007 entry.

BiD's Vizster system used on CBS TV show "Numb3rs"

The Vizster system for visualizing online social networks, developed at BiD by Jeffrey Heer and danah boyd, was featured on the CBS crime drama Numb3rs. The show is about an FBI agent and his brother, a professor that uses various mathematical and algorithmic techniques to solve crimes. In the March 3, 2006 episode "Protest", social network analysis is used to "catch the bad guy". The Vizster visualization was used to illustrate the concept of social networks.

You can also download the clip (WMV, 4.7M).