Doctoral Students

Huijuan (Jocelyn) Wu is from China and has been working with me since Fall 2006. She completed her Master’s degree in computer science in 2005. She was a visiting researcher at NCR Financial Solutions Group Ltd. Her research interests are in Human-Computer Interaction, Usability, User-Centered design, User Experience as well as HCI related health informatics, e-commerce, mobile-commerce, online communities and cross-cultural interface design. Currently, she is working on her second year in the Ph.D. program. Her research topic is on building a model on the types of user interfaces and features of such interfaces in the health care area (specifically from an HCI perspective). Her PhD thesis deals with the application of Technology Acceptance, Distributed Cognition and Task Technology Fit Models in the health care area, specifically from the perspectives of nurses and other health care specialists in Intensive Care Units. Her research methodology includes observations, interviews, surveys, prototyping and more.

Ryan Getek has been working with me on his PhD since Fall 2006. He successfully defended his proposal on Monday, May 4th, 2009. He is currently working on adaptive interfaces and focusing on usability and privacy issues. The user aspect deals with usability (whether adaptation enables users to find stuff faster, get more benefit or comprehension from the data, and similar issues), profiling users based upon a broad understanding of how users interact with specific interface configurations, and how diabled users interact with the interface. Disabled doesn't necessarily just include visually impaired for this context- it also could include the learning impaired or other conditions that would affect the user's ability to find data. It can even extend to cultural issues. Adaptation is often mingled with personalization, and based upon current interpretations in academia, these terms are not necessarily synonomous. Adaptation often deals with the interface characteristics, whereas personalization can deal with content and extend to concepts such as recommender systems, user agents, and data mining to determine patterns. My research does not necessarily focus on any of those. I am looking at how the interface (and related presentation) attributes can be modified based upon screen resolution, bandwidth (therefore image size/resulution), layout, text size, and similar attributes. This is the content vs. presentation issue- I focus on presentation. The applicability alludes to my focus on e-commerce, news and media sites, and other large and frequently visited site types. How data is acquired could include Javascript, Java, or other application, or could involve an architecture such as the new proposed device independence initiative at W3C. Where adaptation occurs could be the client, an intermediary, or at the server. Such architectures have potentially significant implications for privacy and security, performance, and interoperability as well as the feasibility for wide deployment. The technology or language used most likely would be HTML/XHTML with CSS or XML and XSL. The device type could include mobile devices such as PDA's, standard PC's, and widescreen PC's. I do not intend to focus on the mobile area because significant work is currently being done by other researchers right now, but instead, I will focus on standard PC's and the rapid emergence of widescreen monitors with high resolutions, smaller computers with limited bandwidth such as those that are part of the $100 laptop initiative, and such relevant broad ranges of types of PC's.