Batya Friedman was once a lone voice asking hard questions of the tech industry
Design class teaches students to make people the priority, rather than technology
I recently sent my eldest son, Kavi, off to college in Southern California, and these past few months have been an eye-opening experience. I have a newfound appreciation for parents navigating the process of sending their kids off to college. I’ve seen students make decisions at age 17 or 18 that will affect their entire lives. And as a dean, it’s given me a new perspective on the trust that families put in us and on what our school is doing to support a growing number of direct-to-major admits into Informatics.
Kavi’s experience made me realize how much has changed since I applied to college. Now, at the UW and other institutions, students are increasingly asked to apply directly to their major of choice. In Informatics and other STEM majors that are in high demand, students benefit from securing their place in their major when they arrive at the UW, and fewer are disappointed later by being denied admission to the major they want. An advantage for the iSchool is that we can use first-year admissions
to bring diversity to the school by giving opportunities to students who have different backgrounds and experiences. The downside is that teenagers are under a lot of pressure to make crucial, life-shaping decisions.
With more direct admits, we have to look at Informatics as a four-year program instead of two. When they start at the UW or any institute of higher learning, younger students need more than academic support. So, we are expanding our efforts to help them get off on the right foot. We are adding advisors to help students acclimate and learn how to navigate the labyrinth of higher education. We are hiring current Informatics students to serve as peer advisors and help our newest students form a community. And each year, we offer a 1-credit orientation course to help new Informatics students succeed. Nearly 100 percent of students admitted into the major graduate with an iSchool degree, and we want to keep it that way.
In the past few years, we’ve also expanded access to Informatics. In 2014, we admitted 168 students into the major; this year, we will accept more than 300, with plans to admit 600 students per year by 2025. We’re giving more opportunities to first-year students, while at the same time providing greater access for transfer students and those who are already at the UW to apply through the traditional process after a couple years of higher education. It’s crucial that we continue to provide a path for students who have discovered Informatics during their first two years at the University.
One of the great benefits of higher education, especially at a large institution such as the UW, is the opportunity to explore different subjects and imagine different career paths. With so much pressure on students to get into their desired major, I hope we don’t lose track of that.
I hope that first-year students in any program use their electives and general requirements to learn about themselves and get a well-rounded education. That’s what I want for my son, and that’s what I want for our students at the iSchool.
— Anind K. Dey Dean and Professor Fall 2022
Can escape room games teach people how to recognize misinformation? 7
With machine learning, project creates searchable transcripts of meetings
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Program highlights 4 Research 8 The Download 12 Alumni Updates 34 Achievements 37 Faculty 38 Bookshelf 42
Informatics: Amy J Ko (on sabbatical); Joel Ross, interim chair
MLIS: Michelle H Martin
MSIM: Hala Annabi (on sabbatical); Andrew Reifers, interim chair; Heather Whiteman, deputy interim chair
Ph.D.: Alexis Hiniker
Writing, editing and photography: Doug Parry, Maggie Foote, Samantha Herndon, Shanzay Shabi, Jim Davis, Mary Lynn Lyke, Jessi Loerch, Sarah McQuate
Design: Katie Mayer
Cover photo: Sunny Consolvo at the Google campus in Mountain View, California
Photo by Doug Parry
Copyright 2022 University of Washington Information School
MANDI HARRIS (CHEROKEE NATION)
Children’s librarian, UW MLIS ‘19, and 2nd-year iSchool Ph.D. student
Libraries connect communities. They provide early literacy education, assist with job searches, and bridge the digital divide by providing access to technology. Caregivers meet and support each other through story times. Libraries work with community partners to provide free health checks, free music concerts, free tutoring, and more resources than I could ever begin to list. However, the key to libraries sustainably supporting community health and hap piness is by investing in the health and happiness of those who make connections happen: library workers. Library workers are part of the communities they serve.
In a time of increasing threats to libraries, those in fund ing and leadership roles can ensure intellectual freedom by supporting the physical and mental health of those who do collection development, create displays, lead programs, and work in circulation. Provide health insurance, paid time off, a living wage, safety protocols, and mental health support for all staff regardless of job title. Investing in library workers is an investment in community health and happiness.
TEMI ODUMOSU Assistant Professor, Information School
When I think of health and happiness in col lections, The Black Archives in Amsterdam immediately comes to mind. For me, this archive is soul food, in the sense that it is nourishment for a difficult and changing world. Here in this cozy space filled with floor-to-ceiling Pan-Africanist energy — where Angela Davis has visited, where artist Emory Douglas has breathed — you can see original copies of books from the global lexicon of Black radical thought alongside local organizing pamphlets, policy reports, and racist imagery from Holland’s ongoing “Zwarte Piet” blackface tradition. The pain of Dutch colonialism and its afterlives is integrated with Black joy and dreaming.
But it is not just that this collection comes from the heart and soul of the Afro-Dutch community; it is also that the ar chive’s hosts are young, dynamic, welcoming, and want to foster a meaningful intergenerational dialogue. They are super fresh, funky fly people who also really know their history. Listening to co-founders Jessica de Abreu, Mitchell Esajas, Miguel Heilbron and Thiemo Heilbron speak about their work, you can feel their love, and that they want to ensure the archives are within reach — not hidden in folios in temperature-controlled basements, but “right here” for you to touch and feel and remember.
CHRIS JOWAISAS Senior Research Scientist, Technology & Social Change GroupAmong the 17,000+ public libraries in the U.S., you’ll see libraries adapting their pro grams and services in response to their community’s needs. When it comes to the health and happiness of their communi ties, I think some of the most interesting areas where libraries have adapted are in expanding their services in response to the ongoing pandemic and the broader questions about inequities that exist in their communities.
I have seen libraries work to expand their services beyond their physical footprint — whether this was installing an outdoor “story walk” exhibit so families could get physical exercise while experiencing a story or changing their wireless setup to reach farther and outside operating hours to expand internet access. They also shifted their budgets to license additional e-books and undertook a wide range of online programming to continue to provide entertainment and edu cational opportunities to their communities. We’ve also seen more libraries initiate partnerships to address public health challenges in their communities through establishing commu nity gardens and seed libraries or serving as food access hubs, either by themselves or in partnership with other organiza tions focused on food security and access.
DANIELLE MILLER, DIRECTOR TRACI TIMMONS, MANAGINGWashington Talking Book & Braille Library
Libraries are part of the social infrastructure that enriches our lives by building commu nities of connections, sharing resources, and reducing social isolation. The Washington Talking Book & Braille Library (WTBBL) serves audiences aged 0 to 100+ that often lack access to materials that others take for granted — those with blindness, deafblindness, or physical and/or reading disabilities that make reading standard print difficult.
Many of our readers have lost their sight later in life and the thought of no longer being able to read is devastating. Having access to easy, customizable, accessible audiobook and braille services is life-changing. The opportunity to read (or read again) fosters renewed pleasure and stimulates health and well-being. WTBBL’s vision, “That all may read,” drives accessible library services that bring joy to often marginalized readers and helps promote their well-being.
Informatics students know how to work hard and earn high grades. One student, Marie O’Connell, found another way to ensure that she earned an A: by hacking her professor.
Andrew Reifers, an associate teaching pro fessor at the iSchool, offers students a unique opportunity in his INFO 415: Emerging Topics in Information Assurance and Cybersecurity course.
“If one of you can hack me successfully, you get an A in my class,” he tells students on the first day.
An Informatics and French double major, O’Connell decided to take Reifers up on the challenge during spring quarter. Reifers has a reputation as an engaging lecturer and a cybersecurity expert, yet even the experts can sometimes be hacked.
It was the first successful hacking attempt in his three years of teaching the course.
With inspiration from lectures and from listening to almost every episode of the “Darknet Diaries” podcast, O’Connell decid ed to try her hand at a spear-phishing attack.
Unlike broad phishing attempts, which target many potential victims at once, spear-phishing attempts depend on familiarity. They often use a pretext, a scenario that a hacker can use to engage their target.
In O’Connell’s case, a casual conversation with Reifers about her involvement in the UW Blockchain Society led to his request for more information — a perfect pretext.
“We were having a conversation about blockchain technol ogies,” said Reifers. “She invited me to check out the student organization she’s part of and then followed up with an email. It seemed very natural. I was fully expecting the email. In no way was there any indication that this was going to be a spear-phishing attempt.”
O’Connell’s previous study of web design was pivotal. She crafted a page that mimicked the University’s sign-on page. But a masked link directed to a page that harvested Reifers’ credentials.
“She got me,” Reifers said. “I was impressed with how seam less (the hack) was. It transitioned from a social engineering attack to a digital attack in a very professional manner.”
The hack was considered an ethical one, without repercus sions besides a slight boost in grade. O’Connell did not access or save any protected data, and Reifers’ two-factor authentication prevented her from seeing his password or files.
After taking Reifers’ class, O’Connell sees more connections in what she has learned in Informatics.
“I’m really happy that I went out of my comfort zone and took a class that I knew nothing about,” O’Connell said. “I would like to get into cybersecurity, and I see this as a foot in the door.”
Reifers expressed pride in his student. “I hope that she con tinues investigating cybersecurity as a potential career. I think she’d be an excellent engineer.”
“The
Humanly io, the company I founded in 2019, helped us win GeekWire’s
building a product that allows our customers to measure how
towards candidates and if affinity bias exists, we have made candidate
conversations and interviews more equitable and inclusive My Informatics degree has
foundation for DEI and has been a huge competitive advantage in my career ”
inclusive design practices of
2022 UX Design of the Year award By
empathetic employees are
screening
provided a greatAlumni spotlight: Prem Kumar, 2006
Members of the University of Washington community lack a tool to declare their pronouns in directory listings, but soon they will have one. Master of Library and Information Science alum Lauren Manes is helping make it happen through her work on a new pronoun tool.
Manes is a user experience designer at the UW and the primary designer on the pronoun tool project. The pronoun tool, a project started by Identity and Access Management, will be a designated space within the centralized UW system where anyone with a UW NetID can declare any and all or no pro nouns. This information will then be consumed by various other systems around the university, such as class rosters. The tool is expected to be rolled out this academic year.
“This tool is necessary to support the UW community in representing their whole selves and to communicate to other members of the community how they want to be addressed,” said Manes, MLIS ’05.
Discussions about the need for a pronoun tool began about six years ago when Manes increasingly became involved with di versity, equity and inclusion work within UW-IT. While working with Identity and Access Management on a widget to allow UW students to set a preferred name that’s distinct from their legal name, Manes and others realized there was a need for a similar tool specific to pronouns.
Helen B. Garrett, university registrar and chief officer of En rollment Information Services at the UW, is one of the leading advocates for identity expression across UW systems. Having worked closely alongside Manes on the pronoun tool, she said she admires Manes’ commitment to the idea that identity be longs solely to its holder.
“Lauren has been an amazing partner to have throughout this project,” Garrett said. “Lauren and I work so well together because as a UX designer she emphasizes that behind each tech nological process and interaction is an individual person.”
It has taken years to compile research and design a tool that is both inclusive and accessible. In addition to designing the interface, Manes has led competitive analyses looking at the design of other interfaces where users set pronouns. She also did research on potential user populations for the pronoun tool and assessed their needs, then set out to create a tool that would accommodate those needs.
“To connect people with information, you have to understand the information deeply and you also have to understand what the people’s goals and motivations are for using that informa tion,” said Manes.
“Along with furthering my education and starting my Ph D program at the University of Maryland, I am one of the seven ALA Spectrum Doctoral Fellows In addition, I published three book chapters this year drawing from my experience and expertise in Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) efforts Further continu ation in leading and supporting EDI efforts in the profession through consultations, mentorship, research and service is an ongoing focus of my work as a facilitator, speaker, EDI consultant and author ”
Locksley, Lynzley and McKaulay Kolakowski don’t have to go far when they need a study partner. The siblings, who live together in the Seattle area, are all working on degrees through the iSchool’s Master of Science in Information Management online mode. And, because they’re all pursuing the same spe cialization — Program/Product Management and Consulting — they’re also in all the same classes.
McKaulay, who is the eldest sibling, was the first to join the iSchool when he was accepted to the Informatics program. Lyn zley and Locksley, who are twins, followed him a few years later. They all got jobs after graduating with Informatics degrees.
McKaulay worked for a couple years before returning for his MSIM. Locksley and Lynzley jumped right into the graduate program. The siblings started the program in 2021.
They agree it’s been a positive for them to all be working through the same program — even if it’s sometimes been a bit surprising for their fellow students.
“Sometimes people seem a little intimidated when they realize we all have the same last name,” Lynzley said. “It’s been a good experience. We get to work together, but we also get to meet other people. We get to discuss our different experienc es, and it’s really easy to stay connected between our different classes. We’re a little team working together even if we’re not always on the same group project.”
Locksley said all three have been impressed by their instruc tors. “The professors have been the coolest, most interesting and accomplished professors we’ve ever had,” she said.
“Plus one to the teachers and the people,” Lynzley said. “I met a person who used to be a surgeon and now she’s doing this. We meet all these different people from different walks of life and we get to work with them and discuss with them and it’s been great.”
The siblings, who will finish up their studies in December, are
already applying what they’ve learned to their work.
Lynzley said she’s been sharing what she learned in the iSchool with her coworkers at Avanade. She suspects that the skills she’s gained from studying at the iSchool helped her to get promoted sooner than she’d been expecting.
Locksley, who had been working at Accenture until recent ly, hadn’t been planning to look for a new position until she graduated, but a perfect role opened up, and she was excited to get hired. She started in late August with Major League Hacking. She’s a program manager, working with academic developers and helping them discover the variety of technologies that are out there to help them do their work.
“The interview team was really impressed with the MSIM,” she said. “What I learned at Accenture and through the MSIM is what prepared me for this role.”
McKaulay, who works for Amazon Web Services, says he is putting what he’s learned to use. While he’s not looking to change positions anytime soon, he’s been able to show his man agers the skills he’s developing in project management, and he’s keeping the doors open.
He’s also grateful for how the setup and flexibility of the pro gram allowed all of them to study together.
“We all appreciate how unique this situation was — that we were all able to take this at the same time,” he said. “We recognize it’s a rare opportunity for siblings to all go down the same path.”
“I support NASA’s human exploration programs with expertise in exploration mission planning, systems development and integration, as well as program cost, schedule and risk assessments I am a proud contributor to the Artemis generation with its first mission launching this fall! In addition, I have advanced the work of the Johnson Space Center by developing data visualizations, creating Gateway schedule performance metrics and assisting the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility mission
Misinformation is everywhere, and it gets more sophisticated all the time: doctored photos, made-up news stories, fake vid eos. What people believe drives how they act, and this misinfor mation has real-world, sometimes dangerous, effects.
iSchool students are helping tackle this problem while gain ing experience in running and interpreting research projects.
Yeonhee (Johnny) Cho and Lidia Morris, who are both earning doctorates in Information Science, are working on misinforma tion escape rooms — games in which players work together to solve a series of puzzles. The escape rooms are a project from the Center for an Informed Public, in partnership with the Technology & Social Change Group, GAMER Research Group and Puzzle Break.
Misinformation is extremely hard to combat, and the re searchers are attempting to understand whether game-based learning can help people recognize misinformation tactics.
“I believe that games have power as a medium to teach and guide people in a different way,” Cho said. “It’s not just a fun way to teach people. It engages people and participation increases people’s motivation.”
Cho helped with a participatory design process to create the game. In “The Euphorigen Investigation,” the first escape room game created for the project, players imagine themselves as journalists and collaborate to figure out whether a company is selling a dangerous product.
The game can be played online or in person. The goal is to get people talking and thinking about misinformation and help them spot it in the future.
He explains that people often think that only other people get tricked — that they themselves are somehow immune. But the game shows anyone can be susceptible.
Morris joined the project after “The Euphorigen Investiga
tion” had already been built. She and Cho both worked with directed research groups (DRG), which gave students a chance to participate in the research. Cho and Morris helped lead the DRG, which analyzed results from test players and looked for ways to adapt or improve the game.
“Misinformation is not a topic, it’s a tactic,” Morris said. “It is way of spreading false information in a way that makes it seem true. … Misinformation is scary. It can harm everybody and any body. We need to inform people of it and we need to give them these tools to combat it.”
Morris also worked with Jin Ha Lee, an iSchool associate pro fessor who is the director of the UW Game Research (GAMER) Group, on a variation of the game for ARMY, the BTS fandom.
Chris Coward, a senior principal research scientist at the iSchool and a co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public, said the earlier work has built a foundation for new projects, including combating cancer-nutrition misinformation, as well as misinformation directed at the Black community.
Coward said Ph.D. students are a vital part of work like this. It’s good for the students and it’s good for the research.
“It gives students a lot of hands-on experience working with more senior researchers,” he said. “It exposes students to differ ent questions, approaches and methods so that they are better equipped to embark on their own research careers.”
“I recently became a member of the Scholars Council for Data & Society Founded in 2022, the Schol ars Council supports D&S Fellows and researchers working across issues of social change, equity, and digital life Alongside my own work on rural and tribal digital divides, I mentor doctoral students inves tigating how social change relates to topics such as internet, roads and energy deployments in Indian Country; Indigenous social media engagement; and digital Black femme and queer self-expressions
The idea grew out of a disagreement. Eva Maxfield Brown was an undergraduate student six years ago at the Information School. She was paying close attention to a controversial issue before the Seattle City Council to allow a new NBA arena to be built in the SoDo District. So was one of her professors, Nic Weber.
When the vote occurred, they read about it the follow ing day. They disagreed on why a council member voted a certain way and even whether that member’s vote was de cisive. So they sought out the council meeting recording.
“It took us a surprising amount of time to find the re cording of that meeting,” said Weber, who is an assistant professor at the iSchool. “Once we found the recording, it was a matter of searching through it. We both had some what different takes (on what the council member said). What we shared in common was a sense that this can and should be easier.”
Together, they knew that the machine learning and ar tificial intelligence tools taught at the iSchool could help.
“We decided, ‘Let’s make city council meetings easier to follow,’” Brown said.
So they developed the Council Data Project, a website that creates searchable transcripts of city council and committee meetings as well as establishing a way to track legislation and voting records of elected officials. Now in its third iteration, the Council Data Project compiles transcripts from 17 cities across the U.S. with more soon to come.
At first, Weber and Brown expected that this would be a tool used by the public. While that happens, Weber, Brown and other volunteers have found four groups that repeatedly use the tool: journalists, researchers, activists and city staff.
Led by its co-director, Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock, the CREATE research center conducted the first large-scale longitu dinal analysis of missing label failures in Android applications The team analyzed 312 popular applications and found that 55 6 percent of unique image-based el ements were inaccessible CREATE is the Center for Research and Education on
One of those using the Council Data Project is Arica Schuett, a Ph.D. student at Emory University in Georgia. In her work, she’s looking at social movements such as Black Lives Matter. She is working on a theory that activists who are more specific in what they want to accomplish can more easily get those demands enacted into policy than those who are imprecise.
A colleague who studied at the UW introduced her to the Council Data Project. Schuett said, “It almost sounded too good to be true.” She’s beginning to use the meeting transcripts in her research.
“So what it’s meant for me is that I can test this theory at scale and with a variety of different cities in ways that I couldn’t previously have done,” Schuett said.
Another person who uses the Council Data Project is Philip James, who advocates for housing in the Bay Area city of Alameda where he grew up and owns a home. James found the Council Data Project on the internet.
“I knew that having a tool like this would actually be invaluable because most civic governments are making progress in terms of making the recordings and the data of their meetings available, but not very accessible,” James said.
He reached out to the Council Data Project, which set up a location in his community. He’s volunteered to assist with the project.
James, who is a chief technology officer for a startup, sees a housing crisis in the East Bay Area, where most people of his generation are unable to afford a home. He said the Council Data Project has kept people clued into the civic conversation.
“It’s been extraordinarily useful for getting quick summaries of what has happened at recent meetings,” James said. “And I have seen people on Alameda politics Twitter starting to link to meetings in the Council Data Project instance.”
Wobbrock was also the co-senior author on a paper describing VoxLens, an opensource JavaScript plug-in that improves the accessibility of online data visualiza tions using a single line of code VoxLens enables screen-reader users to obtain a summary of the information in a visualiza tion and interact with the data Task-
based experiments with screen-reader users showed VoxLens improved the accuracy of information extraction and interaction time by 122 percent and 36 percent, respectively
Ph D candidate Shruti Phadke was the lead author and Assistant Professor Tanu Mitra the senior author on the ICWSM
Peggy Watt is an associate professor in journalism at Western Washington University. She’s also a longtime board member of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, a nonprofit that advocates for the people’s right to access government information.
She said that forward-thinking cities are being innovative in increasing transparency. Bellingham, for instance, is posting videos of city council meetings with links to navigate agenda topics. She said she was a fan of the Council Data Project, espe cially the ability to search transcripts. She noted that “not every body can go down there and sit at the city council meetings.”
“It was interesting to see that the information was so easily
accessible through this,” Watt said. “As a resident, as a journal ist and as a journalism professor, I’m in favor of anything that makes public information more accessible to people.”
In Montana, volunteers set up a location that has created tran scripts for the City of Missoula. They’ve also used the tool to pro vide transcripts of congressional debates and are working to use it to create transcripts of meetings of the Montana Legislature.
DemocracyLab Executive Director Mark Frischmuth was the one who brought the Council Data Project to Montana, working
CITY DATA, continued on Page 36
2022 Best Paper Award recipient, Path ways through Conspiracy: The Evolution of Conspiracy Radicalization through En gagement in Online Conspiracy Discus sions Conference organizers noted the paper “shines a light on an important yet under-attended aspect of the radicaliza tion problem ” ICWSM is the International Conference on Web and Social Media
issue of Information and Learning Sciences: “Beyond Digital Youth: Un derstanding, Supporting, and Designing for Young People’s Digital Experiences ”
Among the issue’s 10 published works is an introductory essay by Davis and Sub ramaniam and a paper by a team led by Associate Professor Jason Yip, titled “Youth Invisible Work: The Sociocultural and Collaborative Processes of Online Search and Brokering Between Ado lescents and English-language Learning Families
Social media platforms have the ability to slow the spread of misinformation by using certain interventions, according to research from the UW Center for an Informed Public
A combination of actions such as fact-checking, slowing people’s ability to repost content, and banning misinfor mation super-spreaders can significantly reduce viral misinformation, the research ers found in a paper published in Nature Human Behaviour.
The spread of a fact-checked piece of misinformation can be reduced by 55 per cent to 93 percent, the researchers found A misinforming post had 15 percent less engagement and was shared 5 percent less when people were urged to repost carefully Banning verified accounts known to spread misinformation reduced engage ment with false posts by nearly 13 percent
The CIP research team included Joe Bak-Coleman, Ian Kennedy, Morgan Wack, Andrew Beers, Joseph S Schafer, Emma S Spiro, Kate Starbird and Jevin D West Their paper provides a framework to evaluate interventions aimed at reduc ing viral misinformation online
The researchers found that commonly proposed interventions are unlikely to be effective in isolation However, their framework demonstrates that a combined approach can achieve a reduction in the prevalence of misinformation
Assistant Professor Mike Teodorescu was the lead author on both the Best Paper recipient and the Best Paper Runner-Up at the Academy of Management’s Technol ogy Innovation Management Confer ence The winning paper analyzed inter ventions meant to improve low-resource inventors’ ability to secure patents from the U S Patent and Trademark Office
We use Google’s image search to help us understand the world around us. For example, a search about “truck driver” should yield images that show us a representative smattering of people who drive trucks for a living.
But in 2015, University of Washington researchers found that when searching for a variety of occupations — including “CEO” — women were significantly underrepresented in the image results, and that these results can change searchers’ worldviews. Since then, Google has claimed to have fixed this issue.
A different UW team led by iSchool Professor Chirag Shah recently investigated the company’s veracity. The researchers showed that for four major search engines from around the world, including Google, this bias is only partially fixed, according to a paper presented at the 2022 AAAI Conference of Artificial Intelligence. A search for an occupation, such as “CEO,” yielded results with a ratio of cis-male and cis-female presenting people that match the current statistics. But when the team added another search term — for example, “CEO + United States” — the image search returned fewer photos of cis-female presenting people.
“My lab has been working on the issue of bias in search results for a while, and we wondered if this CEO image search bias had only been fixed on the surface,” said Shah, the senior author and co-director of the iSchool-based RAISE research center. RAISE stands for Responsibility in AI Systems & Experiences. “We wanted to be able to show that this is a problem that can be systematically fixed for all search terms, instead of something that has to be fixed with this kind of ‘whack-a-mole’ approach, one problem at a time.”
The team investigated image search results for Google as well as for China’s search engine Baidu, South Korea’s Naver and Russia’s Yandex.
“This is a common approach to studying machine learning systems,” said lead author Yunhe Feng, a postdoctoral fellow in the iSchool. “Similar to how people do crash tests on cars to make sure they are safe, privacy and security researchers try to challenge computer systems to see how well they hold up. Here, we just changed the search term slightly. We didn’t expect to see such different outputs.”
Professor Ari Pollack,
Professor Wanda Pratt and Associate Professor Jaime Snyder received a $672,000 grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases for “Kids CoLab — Supporting Collaborative
Ari Pollack
Decision Making with Youth Impacted by Chronic Kidney Disease The project will be a 5-year collaboration between Seattle Children’s Hospital, the UW and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to explore how technology can empower and engage youth with chronic kidney disease to improve outcomes as they transition to independence
Guatemala is one of the few countries in Latin America that have recently gained strong exposure to the use of information systems and people data processes. Information School Assistant Teaching Professor Heather Whiteman recently received a Fulbright Scholar Award for an idea intended to increase the exposure and understanding of those concepts.
Whiteman, who teaches courses in people analytics and information management at the iSchool, is cre ating the first master’s-level people analytics program in Latin America at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín
(UFM) in Guatemala. People analytics is a data-driven approach to study ing people processes and improving people-related decisions.
“It’s wonderful to have a dream and then have an organization like Fulbright tell you that your dream is worth an investment,” said Whiteman.
Whiteman’s project was inspired by a professor she met from UFM at a conference. The professor shared with Whiteman her desire to bring more data and analytics to HR in Guatemala, and Whiteman shared
FULBRIGHT, continued on Page 43
The Institute of Museum and Library Ser vices (IMLS) recently awarded more than $1 3 million in funding for research proj ects led by iSchool faculty They include: Valuing Library and Archives Labor: Assessing Internship and Fellowship Im plications for the Library and Archives Community, awarded $318,989, will in vestigate the impact on librarianship from fellowships and internships focused on diversity, equity and inclusion The project is led by Assistant Professor Marika Cifor
Empowering Neurodivergent Librar ians to Lead Inclusion in Libraries, awarded $491,500, will research libraries’ capacity to support the careers of neurodivergent librarians The project is led by Associate Professor Hala Annabi and Professor Michelle H Martin
Open-Source Hardware Assembly, Repair, and Sustainability, awarded $317,332, will investigate the role of documentation in open-source hardware projects The project is led by Assistant Professor Nicholas Weber Supporting the Development of Digital Playful Exploratory Resources to Com bat Mis/disinformation through Online Intergenerational Co-design, awarded $249,917, will design games in libraries to combat misinformation The project is led by Associate Professors Jason Yip and Jin Ha Lee and Senior Principal Research Scientist Chris Coward
People enter into a state of dissociation while using social media, according to a research team led by Assistant Professor Alexis
Hiniker In a paper present ed at CHI 2022, the researchers described the total cognitive absorption, diminished self-awareness and reduced sense of
agency experienced by users They pro posed interventions that could help people avoid slipping into passive dissociation and wasting time The lead author on the paper was Amanda Baughan, a doctoral student in the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering Co-authors included Hiniker and iSchool Ph D students Anastasia Schaadhardt and Mingrui “Ray” Zhang
Assistant Professor Tanu Mitra is among the inaugural 17 members of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council Formed after controversy over podcaster Joe Rogan’s use of his show to spread misinformation about COVID-19, the committee will help the streaming plat form set policies over potentially harmful content
In March, Kalyan Chakraborty and Marquisha Hicks became the first graduates of the iSchool’s MSIM program through its online delivery mode Both completed their Mid-Career MSIM degrees in less than a year They were part of an inaugural 23-person class in the online modality, most of whom graduated in June “I just feel so much more confident,” Hicks said “I feel like a different person than what I was before I started the program ”
Dowell Eugenio, the iSchool’s assistant director of advising, lays a flower on a bench in memory of the late professor Allyson Carlyle in September As the academic year began, iSchoolers and friends gathered to honor Carlyle with a bench dedication ceremony outside Mary Gates Hall Dean Emeritus Harry Bruce and Professor David Levy were among those who shared remem brances of Carlyle, who passed away in 2020
Nine iSchool students were among the 2022 Husky 100, which honors those who make an impact and demonstrate leadership inside and outside the classroom They are: (top row, from left) Lisi Case, Informatics; Daniel Chen, Informatics; Wintana Eyob, Informatics; (center row, from left) Lyneea Kmail, MLIS; Ethan Kuhn, Informatics; Sam Jemuelle Quiambao, Informatics; (bottom row, from left) Alannah Oleson, Ph D ; Hayley Park, MLIS; Lindsay Tebeck, MLIS
Kalyan Chakraborty Marquisha HicksDozens of children were among a nationwide audience on Zoom at the inaugural Native American Led by Michelle H Martin, the iSchool’s Beverly Cleary Professor for Children and Youth Services, the read-aloud event invited all to appreciate and learn more about Indigenous culture and talent The event was jointly hosted by the Information School and the nonprofit Read-a-Rama . Among the presenters was Michaela Goade, a Caldecott Medalist and #1 New York Times best-selling illustrator of “We Are Water Protectors . ”
A 2022 Capstone project, Longview StoryWalks, will become a permanent feature at Longview’s Archie Anderson Park Created by 2022 MLIS alumni Jakob Collins and Joanne Dallas, the walk features a series of 20 signs displaying pages of a picture book and encouraging children to read along as they walk The first book that will go on display is Nicola Killen’s “The Little Kitten,” a story about a little girl and her pet cat trying to help a stray kitten
Inspired by MisinfoDay, Ballard High School hosted MisinfoNight in June At MisinfoNight, high school students and teachers got a chance to not only learn more about navigating today’s information environment but also share knowledge with parents and others in their community The event featured posters and slideshows created by the students Many of the presentations featured a fact-checking method called SIFT: Stop; Investigate; Find better coverage; Trace claims, quotes, and media to their original context Presented by the Center for an Informed Public, MisinfoDay is an annual event at the UW that started in 2019 and invites high school students to come to a college campus to learn from faculty, students and librarians about how to identify and combat misinformation
Tracie D Hall, MLIS ’00, was honored with a lifetime achieve ment award from the Nation al Book Foundation Hall, the executive director of the American Library Association, received the 2022 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community Over the past t wo decades, Hall has held positions at the Seattle Public Library, the New Haven Free Public Library, Queens Public Library, and Hartford Public Library Hall was appointed to her current role at the ALA in 2020 “Tracie D Hall is a courageous champion for readers and libraries,” said Ruth Dickey, National Book Foundation executive director, announcing the award
Michelle H. Martin
It’s shortly before 8:30 on a Wednesday morning in June outside Room 139 at the University of Washington’s Condon Hall. Small groups of students huddle over laptops, feverishly typing revisions or rehearsing lines soon to be delivered.
Today is presentation day for Information Management and Technology 565, a course called Designing Information Experiences.
Half of the class will unveil their final projects for this upper-division course at the Information School. The rest will deliver theirs next week. All the projects take on the feel of business proposals in front of a group of angel investors.
First up is a team that presents an idea called Shift, a service to help work-from-home employees transition — or shift — from the workday to home life. Central to their concept is a set of virtual reality goggles that feature a video with relaxing scenes and music.
Other groups today include Super Hairos, which fosters communication between hair salon clients and their stylists; Gym Buddy, which teaches gym members how to use various exercise equipment; Partopia, which aims to improve morale and camaraderie between work-at-home and in-theoffice employees; and Let’s Go, which links people who want to share and explore urban walks.
Course teaches students how to put human wants and needs at the heart of everything they design
Logos by students in Information Management and Technology 565, Designing Information Experiences, for their final projects.
From top: Partopia, an app to improve camaraderie between work-at-home and inoffice employees; Loom, an online tailoring service; Shift, a service to help people working from home transition at the end of their day; and Packed, a service to allow travelers to rent clothes to be delivered to their destinations.
After the Super Hairos presentation, Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock notes the hair salon business is multibillion-dollar-a-year industry with clients who spend up to hundreds of dollars a session. National and regional chains would be interested in the data generated both on consumers and stylists by the Super Hairos app.
“This has business potential, I think,” Wobbrock says. “If none of you have plans after you graduate, you might want to get together and keep going.”
Technology features prominently in many of the presentations. After all, the iSchool studies the interaction between information, technology and people. This class, however, intentionally places experience first and considers how that experience is delivered as secondary, whether it’s via an app, a website, a service or even a piece of paper.
“We don’t want to merely educate students to create technologies but not think about why they’re creating the technologies in the first place,” Wobbrock said. “This course was born out of a desire to center human experience as the driving force behind the creation of new technologies and services.”
Most of the students who take the class are in the iSchool’s Master of Science in Information Management (MSIM) program or the Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design (MHCI+D) program, which is a cross-disciplinary program jointly offered by four departments, including the iSchool.
One of the students who presented on the first day was Jinyu Wu, part of the Partopia team. Wu, who is in the MSIM program, said the class was highly recommended by other classmates.
Her group realized that virtual work-from-home offices were taking a toll on workplace morale. They envisioned a scenario where a small tech firm was trying to engage workers in both Seattle and San Francisco.
They designed an app that features games for employees to play, including an activity where some workers find clues to help others guess a movie. (In this presentation, the workers find a broom, a robe and a hat that evoke a Harry Potter movie.)
Wu said the class requires a lot of reading with a heavy workload and tight deadlines. She’s happy with the class and how their project came together. “I’ve learned a lot from my peers, whether it’s about project management, user experience design in general, and just communication and collaboration,” Wu said.
Wobbrock started the class in spring quarter 2016 with about 15 students. Each year, Designing Information Experiences has grown more popular. Last spring, the iSchool turned away students for the first time after more than 50 signed up.
The first part of the class focuses on philosophical and psychological readings that ask students to consider what an experience is, such as psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s work on the “experiencing self” as distinct from the “remembering self.” Kahneman shows that people’s emotional state during an experience may be different from their memory of that experience.
Take hiking, for instance. The actual experience can be miserable between bug bites, body aches and hot weather. But afterward, the hiker will remember what made the day enjoyable, the summit, the lunch and the walk back down the trail. It’s an important concept for designers to understand, Wobbrock said. Designers need to consider not just the experience, but how the experience is remembered and retold. In fact, much of the class focuses on giving people stories, which are ways of packaging experiences that have beginnings, peaks and endings.
The class also considers the customer journey. Students map out what
customers — broadly defined as the consumers of experiences — are thinking, what they’re feeling, and what their uncertainties are.
One of the reasons that students take the course is to develop a portfolio piece to show potential employers, Wobbrock said. But he hopes they walk away with more. “This class is going to change how you think, if I’m successful,” Wobbrock said. “Learning design tools is important, but you can go off and learn tools on your own. They change every couple of years anyway. But why are you using the tools that you’re using, and what is it you’re creating and why are you creating that thing?
“Breakthrough products or services tend to meet a fundamental need and do so in a way that the experience is satisfying and successful.”
Groups in the second session are Scent Explorer, which creates a digital kiosk to assist perfume shoppers; Break the Ice, an app that connects people for friendship; Loom, an online tailoring service for heirloom clothing; Memento, an app that allows people to hang out online together and create tangible keepsakes such as personalized postcards; and Packed, a service that allows travelers to rent clothes to be delivered to their destinations, easing the travel experience.
Scent Explorer considers how some retail experiences, such as perfume shopping, are better in person than online.
“We thought that the problem of finding a fragrance was really interesting …” said Makeda Adisu, part of the Scent Explorer team. “The physical in-store experience is essential, because it’s a very sensory thing. We thought there was a gap in how the digital and physical experiences were tied together.”
An app wasn’t useful in testing, because people needed to keep picking up and putting down their phone while trying fragrances, said Adisu, who is part of the MHCI+D program. So, they developed the concept of a kiosk to help customers sort through what they were looking for and print paper scent strips with notes.
Like Wu, Adisu took Designing Information Experiences in part based on recommendations of past students. She appreciated the structure of the class and what she learned. “The class forces you to think deeply about the philosophy behind experience design and not just how do you apply this as a skill, but what defines an experience,” Adisu said. “It forces you to do a lot of hard thinking. Definitely a lot of work and definitely very challenging, but also rewarding.”
As for Wobbrock, he plans to keep offering his course each year, a course he regards as delivering a service experience to his students. “Experiences will always be central to people and to organizations, and the technologies and services that support experiences will keep evolving — just like my class.”
Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock, instructor of Information Management and Technology 565, Designing Information Experiences
“We don’t want to merely educate students to create technologies but not think about why they’re creating the technologies in the first place. This course was born out of a desire to center human experience as the driving force behind the creation of new technologies and services.”
As a researcher at Google, Sunny Consolvo works relentlessly on a formidable problem: how to protect the people most at risk online
Bullying, trolling and other forms of hate and harassment are intensifying online. Attackers hunt down home addresses, hijack accounts, disrupt chatrooms, sexually harass people, post racial slurs, issue harmful threats, and extract and publish revealing private information. iSchool alum Sunny Consolvo, Ph.D. ’08, studies how best to safeguard against such everevolving assaults in her role as a Google researcher focused on security, privacy, safety and anti-abuse topics.
“It’s a very, very complicated space. It’s not always clear how to do things the right way,” says Consolvo, this year’s iSchool Distinguished Alumni Award recipient.
STORY BY MARY LYNN LYKE PHOTOS BY DOUG PARRYWhat seems right can be wrong, says the user-experience researcher. “When I first started this work, I’d bring an idea for a solution to a security engineer and they would say, ‘This is going to have an unintended consequence, something you weren’t thinking about.’
“So sometimes the obvious solution may not work the way we intend,” she says. “We have to really understand what is happening.”
Consolvo concentrates on at-risk users in her work, people often not considered in the design or development of
technologies. That includes survivors of intimate partner abuse, people experiencing financial insecurity, women from South Asia, political campaign workers, and other populations that face disproportionate risk of harm from a digital attack.
“We need to consider all these populations in design,” says Consolvo, whose team’s research helps guide that process. “Understanding their experiences enables the design of more inclusive security, privacy and abuse protections.”
Adds the researcher: “When you solve for these problems, you often end up creating something that is better for everyone online.”
Consolvo’s pioneering work has had a profound impact on the field, says her supervisor Elie Bursztein, leader of Google’s anti-abuse research team. “Sunny has reshaped how the world goes about protecting internet users through award-winning research and relentless advocacy that has shifted the industry mindset from solely focusing on universal protection for the mythical ‘average’ user to the need to build specific protections for groups that are particularly vulnerable or disproportionately harmed.”
That’s a formidable task. Different people have very different security needs, Consolvo points out. Even within an at-risk population, those needs can differ and shift in time.
Consolvo and colleagues looked at intimate partner abuse through a technological lens and found that survivors’ digital needs varied in different stages of a toxic relationship. While two-factor authentication might be advisable once survivors escape their abusers, if they are still cohabitating, it could lead to escalated abuse from controlling partners who too often take over email accounts, monitor phones or install spyware on them. “If the abuser discovers the two-factor, they may think the survivor is trying to hide something,” says Consolvo.
The team found technology could help survivors in court. Evidence of threats or other digital abuse is often used to argue for a restraining order or custody of children.
Researchers identified political campaign workers as another at-risk population, exposed to attacks by wellfunded, sophisticated attackers, including nation-states. Some workers ignored advanced security measures such as password managers and two-factor authentication, saying their time was better spent recruiting voters than
enacting security protocols.
“The secure behavior that many of us in tech practice in our day-to-day work is not part of the campaign culture. It’s becoming part, but it’s not there yet,” says Consolvo.
Also vulnerable were content creators on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, who were sometimes attacked by coordinated online mobs that bomb sites with a barrage of negative reviews. Of the 135 creators the research team surveyed — including storytellers, artists, gamers, entrepreneurs and influencers — more than a third said attacks were a regular occurrence.
Content creators reacted differently to cyberattacks. Some shrugged them off. “If you are on the internet, no matter the platform, get a thick skin,” responded one survey participant.
For others, the attacks took an emotional toll. “For some, these attacks are quite devastating,” says Consolvo.
The team’s survey of content creators revealed an especially troubling trend: more than 40 percent reported leaving a platform, at least temporarily, because of the online hate and harassment. Those who stayed sometimes resorted to self-censoring what they posted to minimize attacks. One group of creators who had received hundreds of anti-Semitic comments blocked the words “Jew,” “Jewish” and “Judaism” from their platform presence.
Consolvo came to her career from an unusual field — interior design, her undergraduate major.
“Many of the design principles from interior design apply to humancomputer interaction; you try to understand people’s needs and how to develop or change something to accommodate them,” she says.
The researchers describe this loss of voices as a serious threat to the richness of the online community — a valuable asset in a democratic society. “A lot of good can come out of technology,” says Consolvo. “It can be amazing for these populations.”
Consolvo came to her career from an unusual field — interior design, her undergraduate major. The country was in recession when she graduated, jobs were scarce, pay was underwhelming, and she found herself intrigued by a friend’s work in computer science. While attending a computer science re-entry program at the University of California, Berkeley, she heard a lecture by human-computer interaction (HCI) professor James Landay. “It was like the clouds parted over my head,” she says. “This was my field.”
Her studies in interior design boosted her HCI work, she says. “Many of the design principles from interior design apply to human-computer interaction; you try to understand people’s needs and how to develop or change something to accommodate them.”
Online safety was always on her mind. At the iSchool, she worked with professor Batya Friedman on public records data. Did people who contributed to political campaigns understand what information about them would be made publicly available online? “Attackers could look up who a person contributed to and how much, their occupation, address and other information,” says Consolvo. “It was all in the record.”
Before coming to Google, Consolvo worked as a research scientist at Intel Labs Seattle, where she investigated ways to use mobile technologies to encourage health and wellness online, helping develop technologies that encouraged increased physical activity and improved sleep habits. She also worked on support for older adults who were aging in place, developing a coordinated care network for those who looked after them.
In her 20-plus years in human-computer interaction research, Consolvo has co-authored more than 60 articles and papers in peer-reviewed venues. That “co” is critical. She is a team player. “I love collaborating with people. When you work with people who are very good and if you have people representing different perspectives who are open to giving you honest feedback on your work, it improves your work and hopefully you can improve theirs.”
Her list of awards and honors is long, including multiple 10-year impact awards, induction into the SIGCHI Academy and a people’s champion award at the 2017 O’Reilly Defender Awards for her work on improving security warnings in the Chrome browser.
Being named an iSchool Distinguished Alumni was especially rewarding, she says. “It was so meaningful to me to hear that my academic community recognized and appreciated the work I do.”
In announcing the iSchool award, which honors graduates who make exceptional contributions to the information field, iSchool Dean Anind Dey commented on Consolvo’s commitment “to tackling extraordinarily difficult socio-technical issues and convincing the technology world it can and should do better.”
Most Americans agree on the need for that improvement. In a Pew Research Center report, almost 80 percent of participants said social media companies were doing only a fair or poor job addressing online harassment and bullying on their platforms.
Yet many users still do not take advantage of available privacy, security and anti-abuse protections. Understanding why is another complex challenge for Consolvo and her team.
“Users often don’t follow expert advice for staying safe and secure online, but maybe it’s the advice itself that’s part of the problem. Maybe we need to focus more on usability or some other aspect of the protections. That’s part of what we’re trying to figure out,” she says.
“We’re still learning.”
Gennie Gebhart’s job is far from simple. But she sums it up simply.
“I mostly yell at tech companies,” she said. “When I really want to boil down my job description, I say, ‘I make my living yelling at any tech company that is not standing by its users in any number of ways.’”
Gebhart is this year’s recipient of the Graduate of the Last Decade (GOLD) Alumni Impact Award, which celebrates recent graduates for their contributions to the information field. Geb hart is the activism director at the Electronic Frontier Founda tion (EFF), a nonprofit that defends civil liberties in the digital world. She graduated from the iSchool’s Master of Library and Information Science program in 2016.
Gebhart’s interest in the iSchool began while she was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, where she majored in international studies and economics. She worked in
various libraries, which she loved, and it got her excited about librarianship.
At that time, she learned about the idea of open access — the free and open availability of scholarly work — and wanted to see the UW create an open-access policy. She and a friend began working toward that goal and saw some big wins before they graduated. Others carried on the work, and the university now has an open-access policy.
Gebhart earned a graduate fellowship to work in libraries in Laos and Thailand. She was living in Thailand in May 2014 during a military coup. It made her think about digital informa tion differently.
“I went from a naïve access professional to learning about the perils of information and the internet,” she said. “I was see ing censorship and surveillance firsthand in a way I never had, including censorship of my friends.”
The experience gave her a new perspective as she pursued her MLIS.
“I applied to the iSchool intending to be a librarian in a library, and then all the experiences I had made me want to be a librarian outside of a library. I wanted to work on security and privacy and censorship,” she said.
She appreciates how the iSchool has prepared her for her career, and that she was able to pursue her studies from the San Francisco Bay Area, where she’s able to enjoy some of her favorite activities, including long-distance swimming, biking and volunteering for the San Francisco SPCA.
Gebhart joined EFF a few months after she earned her de gree. EFF’s work with digital rights in Thailand originally drew her to the organization. Once she learned more, she realized EFF was a place where her mishmash of skills — open access, privacy and security work, with a bit of net neutrality — made sense.
Yoshi Kohno, a computer science and engineering professor at the UW, nominated Gebhart for the GOLD award. Her wide range of skills, he said, are among her biggest strengths.
“She has incredible foresight and the ability to identify what are the key societal issues that need to be addressed,” he said. “And she has the deep tech and policy knowledge to know how to actually make progress on addressing those issues. And she does an amazing job of getting stakeholders together to talk about important and challenging topics.”
During her time at EFF, Gebhart has tackled a variety of issues, with a focus on tech giants, including Facebook, Google, Venmo, Twitter and Slack. A lot of her work has also focused on encouraging services such as WhatsApp and iMessage to provide encryption protection for users’ communications.
Gebhart and her team helped convince Zoom to offer end-toend encryption for all calls, not only for paid accounts. She also led EFF’s work after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which showed how user data was being used inappropriately, in par ticular to influence elections.
For the past two years, Gebhart has been managing a team of 14 people. She’s quick to give her team credit, and she appreci ates the professional challenge.
“Mostly, they make me look good while I get out of their way,” she said. “I get these superheroes all the things they need to fly in formation.”
Recently, Gebhart and her team have been dealing with the fallout from the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. One of the biggest threats EFF is seeing is what happens if law enforcement is tipped off about an abortion. Police may search a person’s phone or submit a request to get texts, emails or browser search histories. Among other responses to those privacy concerns, Gebhart and her team are urging tech com panies to minimize the data they collect, delete it quickly, and provide end-to-end encryption by default.
The Information School Distinguished Alumni Award recognizes alumni from the Informatics, MLIS, MSIM and Ph D programs who have made signifi cant and exceptional contributions to the information field through their profession, to the community, or involvement with the University of Washington This award acknowledges those who continue to uphold iSchool values by helping “others discover, learn, innovate, and solve problems” beyond their years at the UW
New in 2022, the Graduate of the Last Decade Alumni Impact Awards (GOLD Alumni Impact Awards) celebrate recent graduates for significant contributions to the information field and/or their community Paralleling the criteria used for the Distin guished Alumni Award, the GOLD Awards focus on alumni who have used their degree, expertise and professional position to make significant contribu tions to the information field and/or their community Those nominees graduating within the past 10 years will automatically be considered for the GOLD Award
The nomination period for the 2023 alumni awards will begin shortly after the new year If you have questions, contact Kristyn Danson, iSchool alumni relations officer, at kdanson@uw edu
Gebhart said that sometimes her work can be overwhelming. But she notes that, while EFF is constantly on the defensive, it’s also working toward a better future.
“We are working toward something, not just fighting against something,” she said. “Surveillance capitalism is not inevitable. We built it and we could build it another way.”
The GOLD award announcement came at a time when she felt she was in a bit of a slump.
“It was a perfectly beautiful email that ended with, ‘We are so proud of you,’” she said. “It took my motivation way up. I am so grateful and so honored.”
“We are working toward something, not just fighting against something. Surveillance capitalism is not inevitable. We built it and we could build it another way.”
In her long career, Professor Batya Friedman has held technology to an exacting standard: what is right, not only what is possible
Batya Friedman taps away at a rock on a remote hillside east of the Cascades. With each strike of her hammer, she brings out the beauty she sees within the stone and transforms a small piece of this landscape of jagged peaks. Friedman’s approach to stone carving is a lot like her groundbreaking work in technology design: methodical, thoughtful, and inspired by her desire to make the world a little better.
It’s an approach that’s made the longtime professor an influential international researcher and a key figure in the growth of the University of Washington Information School. While much of the tech industry privileges speed and profit, Friedman takes a big-picture, longer-term view of technology: Does it make life better for people, now and in the future? Does it account for human values? Is it something we even need in the first place?
STORY BY DOUG PARRY
Hers was once a lonely voice asking such questions. Now, as she takes a step back into semi-retirement from her academic career, those topics are foremost in the minds of scholars, technologists and policymakers.
“We’re fast and furious with these technologies that are at a scale and power that’s beyond our current moral capacities,” Friedman says. “I think right now we have a really great mismatch between the power of our tools and our wisdom to use them well.”
In the 1990s, Friedman developed Value Sensitive Design, an approach that makes human values central to the design of new technologies. Rather than focusing on a narrow set of concerns such as efficiency and productivity, Value Sensitive Design requires designers to think about technology’s broader effects on individuals, groups and society.
Value Sensitive Design has been widely adopted in fields including architecture, civil engineering, computer security, energy, global health, tech policy, transportation and urban planning. It’s a holistic approach, acknowledging that technology reflects the values of those who create it, and asserting that technology should support people’s dignity, respect, autonomy, agency and other enduring values.
“Human values don’t exist in isolation,” Friedman says. “It’s not like there’s privacy over here, and trust over there, and security there.”
IT WAS VERY DIFFERENT WHEN FRIEDMAN was typically one of a few women in her engineering classes of about 100 students at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1970s. Computing was increasingly becoming part of the workplace, but wasn’t yet part of everyday life for most people. The focus then was on expanding the limits of technology, with little thought devoted to its implications on human flourishing, on society, or on the planet writ large.
Terry Winograd, a professor at Stanford University and a leader in the field of human-computer interaction, first encountered Friedman more than 40 years ago and became a longtime mentor and colleague. He remembers a young researcher who asked questions about the emerging field that few others were asking.
“She always had a sense of the people involved, not just the things involved,” he says. “She was very interested in the questions of computing ethics and social issues in a way which was much more unusual back then.”
After earning her Ph.D. at Cal-Berkeley and making a stop at Mills College in Oakland, California, Friedman joined the
faculty at Colby College, a small liberal arts school in Maine. She was the first faculty hire in computing at Colby, where she built a humanistic undergraduate major in computer science over a period of 10 years.
At Colby, she enjoyed the intellectual freedom to dig deeply into her interest in the intersection of computing practice, technical design and human values. Few researchers were doing the kind of work that intrigued her.
“At the time, if you did any search on values and computing or anything related to that, you would come up with nothing. It just was not on people’s radars,” Friedman says.
She saw an opportunity for the field to change. She began
“Batya is a very deep and abstract thinker, and she’s also entirely practical at the same time. The thing she demonstrates better than anyone I know is just how optimistic she is about finding solutions to practical challenges that we have.”Prof. David Hendry, Friedman’s longtime collaborator
looking for theoretical insights and research methods that would give her greater confidence that the technologies she built would enrich people’s lives — protect their privacy, mitigate injustice, and lead to deeper, trusted relationships. As she built information systems, she wanted to engage with the insights of sociologists and applied moral philosophers.
“I wanted to do my work from within computing,” she says. “I wanted to do it as an insider, not as an outside critic, to provide leadership for the field. Transformation can be more compelling when you can say ‘we.’ ”
It was at Colby that she first developed Value Sensitive Design, which over time has emerged as a widely used
approach to addressing computing ethics and responsible innovation in higher education, government and industry. When she joined the UW in 1999 and Michael Eisenberg, who was establishing the iSchool, charged her with developing the Informatics major, she imbued it with the humanistic view of computing that she had been developing in Maine.
At the UW, Friedman continued to develop Value Sensitive Design theory and methods, first with Alan Borning, now a professor emeritus at the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Borning shared lab space with Friedman when she first arrived and became a friend and colleague for the rest of her career.
A short time later, she began working with iSchool Professor David Hendry, her collaborator for more than 15 years. The two run the iSchool’s Value Sensitive Design Lab and co-authored a book released in 2019, “Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination,” that distills their work and explains their approach for considering human values as well as the long-term effects of technology in a technical design process.
Friedman and Hendry have prioritized depth over speed, being selective about their projects and waiting to publish results once they were robust. As a result, they’ve built a reputation for rigorous research, and other scholars and practitioners were able to use their methods with confidence.
“It helps you to conduct research in a way that has a lot of integrity,” Hendry says. “You’ve iterated over and over again and you’ve found where the holes or limitations are. That just takes time.”
UW
Tech Policy Lab, a collaboration among the iSchool, the School of Law and the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Co-directed by Friedman and Professors Ryan Calo and Tadayoshi Kohno, the Tech Policy Lab seeks to support policymakers so they will make wiser, more inclusive decisions around technology.
“Some of the influence of Batya on the lab can be felt in the idea that we don’t try to take on everything,” says Calo, who has a joint appointment with the iSchool and the law school. “We just try to ask ourselves what we can really do well. What can we do rigorously? What can we do that other places maybe can’t?”
One such project was a deck of cards, designed for students and technologists, for brainstorming ideas about security and privacy risks that might emerge with a new technology.
“I think it was pretty visionary,” says Kohno, a professor in the Allen School who collaborated with Friedman and Ph.D. student Tamera Denning on the project in the early 2010s. “One of the things I loved about this effort was the breadth of issues that we covered. Whereas traditional computer security might focus on things like financial harms, with the security cards we focus on a broad spectrum of issues, including, for example, risks to the biosphere.”
More recently, the Tech Policy Lab studied how farmers in Eastern Washington live and work with technology. Amid the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers wanted to understand threats to food supply systems so they could make policy recommendations to mitigate the potential weak points.
Dubbed the Food Resiliency Project, it studied one region as a microcosm of the nation’s small farming communities.
iSchool Ph.D. students Nick Logler, Stephanie Ballard, Elias Greendorfer and Ishita Chordia worked with Friedman on the project. It resulted in a set of policy recommendations to help support civic agriculture, a trend in farming to move away from the industrialized sector and into more localized community efforts to foster sustainable local economies.
Hendry says the project was an example of how Friedman works and thinks creatively. She looked in-depth at how people live with technology, then extrapolated from that to think of ways to improve conditions more broadly.
“Batya is a very deep and abstract thinker, and she’s also entirely practical at the same time,” he says. “The thing she demonstrates better than anyone I know is just how optimistic she is about finding solutions to practical challenges that we have.”
was one of the most challenging and memorable projects of her career. For “Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal,” she built an archive of interviews documenting the work of the international criminal tribunal that investigated the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
The tribunal was finishing its work when Friedman led a team of researchers and videographers that traveled to Africa to collect and preserve the stories of the judges, prosecutors,
investigators and others who were involved.
The stories were often moving and horrifying, but to those who participated in the tribunal, it was important for Rwanda’s future citizens and for the rest of the world to know what they experienced. Friedman collected the videos in an open-source archive, with the hope that they will continue to be shared for generations.
The project helped shape Friedman’s thinking about what she calls multi-lifespan design — the idea that some work unfolds over decades and that information systems need to account for ideas that develop over a long period of time.
“Maybe there are things in 20 or 50 years that you’re going to want to know about the present, so you need to collect them now,” she says. “The people who start the work are not going to be the people who finish the work.”
Ph.D. students including Logler, Lisa Nathan and Daisy Yoo are among those who worked on the project, which spanned a decade. Like that project, Nathan’s current research on climate justice requires long-term, multi-lifespan thinking.
Nathan, ’09, says her work carries forward Friedman’s interest in humanistic questions as well as her demand that research have depth and be able to stand up to scrutiny.
“The rigor of her thinking, and her expectations, and the kind of thinking she really wants people to engage in — that inspired the heck out of me,” Nathan says. “Those are the things that really stand out to me. She’s brought in a lot of money, a lot of grants, and written many papers and books, but the rigor of her work is really outstanding.”
The demand for thoroughness and precision is also something that has stuck with Friedman’s first Ph.D. student, Nathan Freier, ’07, who describes Friedman as “one of the most thoughtful and diligent people I’ve ever met.”
He now works as a responsible technology lead at Microsoft, working to deliver the Office product group’s technology responsibly and safely. He relies on the framework Friedman built for Value Sensitive Design as he works on products and considers their practical and ethical implications.
“The notion of privacy, informed consent, psychological safety, human flourishing — all these concepts that Batya integrated into her research and that she used to drive forward that body of work are things that I often rely on, in terms of how we approach responsible technology at Microsoft,” Freier says.
plenty of signs of her impact on the iSchool, on the field of information science, and beyond. Value Sensitive Design principles are embedded across industry. The Informatics program she designed has grown into one of the most sought-after majors at the UW. The doctoral students she has
mentored are carrying on her work at places such as Georgia Tech and Eindhoven University of Technology.
“I feel a great sense of satisfaction,” she says. “Others are taking these ideas, theoretical constructs, methods, and practices — applying and extending them in their own ways and own contexts. And that’s when you know you’ve contributed to shifts in the world.”
Over the next couple years, Friedman intends to finish her current projects with the Tech Policy Lab and resist taking on new ones. For the past 15 years, she has devoted her spare time to art, and now she will be able to make that her focus. She’s designing a studio for her stone carving, painting and mixedmedia work.
Whether she’s devoting her time to her scholarship or to her art, the goal is the same.
“My scholarly and technical work is about creating the conditions to make the world a better place — a place for human flourishing and for a flourishing planet,” she says. “My art is about beauty and form — in effect, creating the peace that I hope we will all experience when we arrive there.”
“My scholarly and technical work is about creating the conditions to make the world a better place — a place for human flourishing and for a flourishing planet. My art is about beauty and form — in effect, creating the peace that I hope we will all experience when we arrive there.”
After two years without an in-person celebration for graduates, the iSchool held twin celebrations in June. First, it honored the class of 2022 from its undergraduate and graduate programs at Convocation on June 4 at Hec Edmundson Pavilion. Five students who earned their Ph.D. in Information Science were honored at the ceremony along with nearly 250 master’s students, and more than 200 who earned their Bachelor of Science degrees in Informatics.
A week later at Mary Gates Hall, the iSchool held a celebration for graduates of 2020 and 2021. Alumni partied with iSchool faculty and got their pictures taken with Dubs, the Husky mascot, who made a special appearance (photos on Page 32).
PHOTOS BY DOUG PARRY
Where are you now? Let us know at ischool.uw.edu/alumni/updates.
Saksham Aggarwal, ’21, started working at Tesla as an associate software engineer in 2021 and was promoted to software engineer in early 2022
Srinidhi Balaraman, ’22, started her first full-time job as a software engineer at Google/YouTube
Sam Bender, ’17, started a fitness business based on a mobile app that he built and designed This year, the company had received another round of funding and was featured in GeekWire
Simran Bhatia, ’16, moved to San Francisco for a new job as a data scientist at Apple
Chengsu Chen, ’17, is working as a Senior Product Designer at Block
Isaac Chen, ’18, is working as a software development engineer
Zubin Chopra, ’19, started working as a senior software developer at LinkedIn Zubin reports: “It is truly a thrilling experience to work on a product that I used to get this job in the first place!”
Eric Cohen, ’21, is pursuing a Master of Science in Technology Management at Columbia University in New York He co-authored a recently published book, “Understanding Collegiate Esports: A Practitioner’s Guide to Developing Community and Competition ”
Isabella Heppe, ’22, is working as a software development engineer (UX engineer 1) at Expedia in Seattle
Jeremy Hyland, ’04, got married in May 2021, then accepted a new job as the director of cyber defense for Dow Inc , and moved to Midland, Michigan, in November 2021 He and his wife, Claire, celebrated the birth of their first
child, a daughter named Adeline Joy Hyland
Colin Kwiecinski, ’22, moved to San Francisco to start as a software engineer at YouTube
Casey Lum, ’19, is working as a software engineer at FreeWill, a startup that makes free estate planning software and helps non-profits fundraise
Tristan Macelli, ’20, is working for Icon Technologies, a late-stage startup that 3D prints full-size houses on-site using a proprietary mix of concrete as the building material for the wall structures Tristan works as a software engineer developing back-end services that manage the printer state, operator app alerts, and more
Kendall Marshall, ’21, is an IT project manager at REI, focusing on IT infrastructure She assists with managing requirements for REI’s fourth distribution center opening and is leading the IT scope for 14 store remodel projects
Michelle Pham, ’22, started at Amazon as a software engineer
Mikhail Savvateev, ’17, is director of product management at CPM Educational Program, leading initiatives to roll out a new online mathematics learning program to be used in middle and high schools across the U S and abroad
Jesse Sershon, ’22, went to work at Amazon as a software development engineer working on Alexa
Sathvika Shakhamuri, ’22, began working as a software engineer on GoDaddy’s Marketing Technology team
Andre Stackhouse, ’14, is the campaign director of Whole Washington, a statewide grassroots campaign to put universal single payer health care on the ballot in Washington state
Godgiven Grogan, ’20, is working as a product manager for GMR Marketing She works on Orchestrate, an experience management platform used for enormous sports events all over the world She reports: “We just started prepping for the Paris Olympics!”
Kateryna Tymofeieva, ’22, started a full-time job as an associate product manager at PitchBook Data
Yiren Qu, ’20, joined Google as a software engineer III
Satvik Vats, ’20, is working at GoDaddy Payments as a product manager II Satvik is responsible for onboarding and risk experience for all GoPay merchants and internationalizing in CA/UK markets
Cheryl Wu, ’22, accepted a fulltime position after an internship as an associate content designer at Workiva
Audrey Barbakoff, ’10, founded Co/Lab Capacity LLC, providing community-centered consulting for social good As CEO, she works with libraries and mission-driven organizations to support authentic community engagement for equity and inclusion, strategic planning, digital equity, and leadership development
Angelina Benedetti, ’96, became the director of Outreach, Programs, and Services for the King County Library System
Jennifer Brady, ’17, followed her MLIS with her Doctorate of Education at Lindenwood University in Higher Education Administration and Instructional Design She works as the Creighton University head librarian for the Research & Instruction Department
Gabriel Chrisman, ’10, was hired as the director of the Gibson Memorial Library in Creston, Iowa
Claire Davies, ’10, graduated from the USC Ed D program in Organizational Change and Leadership with a research focus on diversity in public library collections
Hannah Edlund, ’21, started working as the government information librarian at Rice University’s Fondren Library, the Kelley Center for Government Information The Kelley Center is home to Rice and Fondren’s Federal Depository Library Program and Patent and Trademark Resource Center
Lauren Fleming, ’22, got a new job as a bookseller at Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle
Megan Fontaine, ’22, stepped into a new role as the assistant director of the Association for Rural & Small Libraries through local Seattle library consulting firm Primary Source She worked as an administrative assistant for ARSL/ Primary Source throughout her time at the iSchool, and is excited to continue working in support of our “small but mighty” libraries nationwide
Sheila Hosner, ’78, has been working with a community in the Bududa District of eastern Uganda since 2018 to help them build a Health Center III, the Bukobero Community Health Centre
Holly Hudson, ’22, started as an instructor and health sciences librarian with the University of Illinois, Chicago, at its Rockford, Illinois, campus
Katherine Jardine, ’14, recently moved back to Seattle, where she now works as a library associate in the International District/Chinatown branch library
Alison Kubeny, ’22, moved to Bellingham to start her dream job as a children’s librarian at the central branch
of Bellingham Public Library.
Robbyn Gordon Lanning, ’16, is the recipient of the British Columbia Library Association’s 2022 Eureka Award. The award recognizes individuals who created an innovative approach to address a barrier, solve a problem, provide a powerful new insight, or introduce an original idea in the library field.
Jacob Lackner, ’22, moved to Atlanta to start work as a teaching and learning librarian at Oxford College of Emory University
Elizabeth Miller, ’22, got her dream position at a new library shortly after graduation. She has since been working as a full-time youth services librarian in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Darlene Nordyke, ’00, moved to Premera Blue Cross as the Rev Ops Senior Process and Procedures Analyst
Robert “Bob” Pankl, ’70, has been volunteering with the Cascades Butterfly Project. Volunteers survey butterfly populations in various parts of the Cascades to measure abundance from year to year
Isaac Pattis, ’12, moved with his wife and two boys to the Cotswolds outside of London He found work with Oxford University Press, building lexical datasets for various industries
Leah Rayvon, ’14, is working in the retirement planning field with Fidelity, serving as a Virtual Education Consultant, hosting online retirement education
Conrrado Saldivar, ’21, was elected as Vice President of the Wyoming Library Association He then started a new job as Outreach and Development Librarian at the Wyoming State Library at the end of 2021 In January 2022, the president of the WLA stepped down and he became acting president
Stephen Richards, MLIS Law ’18, was appointed the director for the Marin County Law Library
Daniel Schrader, ’15, is working as a principal UX researcher at Slate ai
Gina Strack, ’09, was honored with the 2022 CIMA Service Award from the Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists, an association of archivists, conservators, historians, and archival professionals from Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho and New Mexico
Christa Strickler, ’12, started a new position as a collection metadata integrity and management librarian at the University of Notre Dame
Veronica Tabares, ’00, published her newest novel, “Stone Woman ”
Julie Tanaka, ’12, returned to her home state of California and started as the new director of Special Collections and College Archives at Occidental College in Los Angeles
Amy Vecchione, ’07, completed a book on collaborating for student success She also took a new position as associate director for research and innovation of the eCampus Center at Boise State
Michael Wallenfels, ’16, is the communications manager for the Washington State Arts Agency He is also the public records officer for the agency He reports: “I have helped the agency launch a podcast and a new statewide program for veterans ”
Michael Wagner, ’18, entered his fourth year in Amazon’s Product Knowledge org and recently was promoted to Ontologist II
Miriam Wnuk, ’13, was awarded the 2022 RUSA STARS Virginia Boucher Distinguished ILL Librarian award, presented by OCLC at ALA Annual in Washington, D C She received the award for her work as the chairperson of the Northwest Interlibrary Loan and Resource Sharing Conference She has also been promoted to Librarian II at Vanderbilt University
Stephanie Zero, ’07, transitioned from being a KCLS teen services librarian at Redmond Library to being a KCLS operations manager at Crossroads Library She became chair of the CAYAS section of WLA (Children and Young Adult Services)
Fei Guo, ’15, moved from Finance to Experiences + Devices (Office, Exchange, Surface) at Microsoft and was promoted to senior product manager
Chan Im, ’17, started working for Salesforce as a senior security GRC analyst
Harsh Keswani, ’17, is leading the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Observability team as a principal product manager for their logging and security products
Amy Lee, ’13, is working as a group product manager at Zendesk
Zheng Li, ’13, is working as a solutions architect at Snowflake
Jacob Nelson, ’13, went from being an MSIM grad to being featured in Japan as a global design expert He founded a company at the end of 2021 to provide personal and professional development services and education for design, brand, marketing, growth and products
Clint Posey, ’19, is a program manager on the Reporting & Insights
Zoshua Colah, ’22, works for Zesty io (a CMS) as a senior product designer and product manager His primary role is to help them redesign their interface to make it more intuitive In his free time, he serves as a product design mentor at Pathrise, where he helps people in the job search
Rachel Ivy Clarke, Ph.D. ’16, was award ed tenure and promoted to associ ate professor at the Syracuse University School of Informa tion Studies Her research focuses on the application of design theories and methods to facilitate the systematic, purposeful design of library services and education
team of Microsoft’s Worldwide Learning group He creates reports and runs statistical models for his business partners, including data science models that show business impact
Umang Sehgal, ’19, joined Microsoft as a product manager
Maureen Shaughnessy, ’21, is working at Microsoft as a program manager and using skills from the MSIM program in UX design and information architecture to improve the onboarding experience for new employees
Ashley Varma, ’22, is working as a program analyst at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, working on cost, schedule and risk analysis for human space flight missions
Matt Woicik, ’05, started a digital marketing agency called ML2 Solutions, helping small-business owners who are struggling with their digital marketing
Phillip Wood, ’13, is working as a senior product manager at Google’s Austin office, working on finance and deal performance software
Mason Wrolstad, ’13, is working at a start-up after almost three years at Tableau and six years at Boeing before that He is working on web crawling at scale, machine learning and Google-like search to help inform companies on marketing intelligence via publicly available data
with software engineer Smai Fullerton. DemocracyLab is a nonprofit that pairs skilled volunteers and socially responsi ble companies with worthwhile projects.
“I’m a big believer that sunlight’s the best disinfectant,” Frischmuth said. “If you want government to be effective and accountable, then the best place to start is by making it possible and easier to see what’s actually happening. And I think that this project does a great job of that.”
Frischmuth, who moved to Montana a year ago from Seattle, knew Brown when they both were organizers of a group called Open Seattle, a Code for America brigade that advocates for open data and civic technology. Frischmuth said that the earlier ver sions of the Council Data Project were clunky, or as he recalls Brown describ ing it, having “a front-end interface only a back-end developer could love.”
“The big, big leap that they made a few years ago was making it some thing that was dead simple to use,” Frischmuth said.
The Council Data Project continues to develop new tools to make city coun cil data accessible. For instance, a new feature being rolled out allows broad cast journalists to download a video or audio clip of a portion of the transcript to use on the air, offering those journal ists easy access to testimony at meet ings that they may not have attended.
About 1,500 local governments oper ate in the U.S. between cities, counties, legislatures and other jurisdictions. Most follow open meeting laws that re quire meetings to be open to the public and deliberations as well as decisions to be recorded for future access by the public. Most also use software called Legistar that compiles the votes.
The Council Data Project obtains most of its data from Legistar and pairs it with the recordings of the meetings. With machine learning techniques us ing open-source tools, the project team was able to take recorded speeches at council meetings and transform them into written texts.
“Ninety-nine percent of it is automat ed,” Brown said. “I just go to a dash board every day to see if everything is running OK. Then, I close it and I go
work on other stuff.”
Weber directs the project while Brown holds the lone paid position maintain ing the Council Data Project. Brown is pursuing a Ph.D. at the iSchool in infor mation science with a special interest in open infrastructure. More than 50 peo ple — including several iSchool alums — have volunteered on the project.
Brown said she was taken aback by how opaque city government can be. “One of the things I’ve discovered that surprised me is that most city council websites do not even have a page for a voting record,” Brown said.
One of the hard decisions that the team made early — and a decision that has paid off — was to upload committee hearings onto the website, Weber said.
“If you think city councils aren’t stud ied, committees in city councils are not studied at all,” Weber said. “When you have arguments about budgets and you have arguments about union contracts, those debates get settled in committee before it even comes to the city council. It is shocking how little attention is paid to committee deliberations.”
The Council Data Project hasn’t incorporated some other local govern ments, such as school boards, into its work. The reason is that the meeting laws are slightly different at school boards and recordings are not as de pendable as municipal government.
The goal for the next two years is to have the Council Data Project host pages for the 50 largest cities in the U.S. The challenge is funding. While most of the work is automated, there is a cost to set up each location. It’s been hard to communicate the need for a searchable council database and its uses to philan thropies and other funders.
“Everyone that we talk to that’s either a researcher, a journalist or even just a civic technologist, it takes five or 10 minutes to explain the premise of the project, but once they start playing with it, they get it,” Weber said. “Our infrastructure really changes the kinds of questions you can ask, and ultimately what you can answer about local gover nance in action.”
Visit the Council Data Project at councildataproject.org.
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• iSchool Ph D students Tessa Campbell (Tulalip/Tlingit) and Mandi Harris (Cherokee Nation) were among the seven recipients of the inaugural ALA Spectrum Doctoral Fellowships — Catalysts for Change Recipients of the fellowship receive tuition and stipend support along with opportunities to participate in specialized coursework grounded in social justice and anti-racism to inform fellows on equity in action
• Dean Anind K. Dey and Professors Batya Friedman and Jacob O.Wobbrock were recognized as ACM Fellows by the Associa tion for Computing Machinery The ACM Fellows program recog nizes the top 1% of members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community
• Professor Amy J. Ko was inducted into the CHI Academy, the top honor in human-computer interaction research She joins Dey, Friedman and Wobbrock as UW iSchool faculty who have received this recognition
• Harry Bruce, UW iSchool dean emeritus, is the 2022 recipient of Association for Information Science & Technology’s highest honor, the ASIS&T Award of Merit The award recognizes an individual who has made particularly noteworthy and sustained contributions to the information science field
• Nicola Kalderash, a Master of Science in Information Manage ment student and Informatics alum, was named a Slade Gorton Leaders Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research
• Devin Barich, MSIM ’21, won a Presidential Management Fellowship Awardees have the opportunity to interview for jobs in government that fit their professional skills and academic back ground Barich’s information management training made him a candidate for jobs that involve supporting organizations in their technical operations and artificial intelligence policies
Inventors who are women received just 13% of all patents awarded in 2019 in the U.S., a disparity seen around the world.
What can be done about it? Mike Teodorescu asked that very question. Most inventors on their first try at a patent receive a rejection letter filled with legal jargon. Many abandon their attempt at that point.
Teodorescu and his colleagues found that inventors who receive a simple phone call explaining their options have vastly better chances of successfully obtaining a patent. For women, the odds increase by 29%.
Teodorescu isn’t a patent attorney.
He’s a researcher whose sense of curios ity has led him to study a wide number of topics, from space stations to medical equipment to informing public policy on the patent process.
This fall, Teodorescu brings this in quisitiveness to the Information School as an assistant professor.
Generally, academics study one sub ject intensely. But Teodorescu found the iSchool to be open-minded about “studying things that you’re passionate about.”
Teodorescu will start by teaching two data-science courses for the iSchool’s Master of Science in Informa tion Management program. He’ll also recruit Ph.D. students for 2023-24 to assist with his current research areas —
machine-learning fairness, innovation economics and biomedical engineering.
Teodorescu has a strong technical knowledge and breadth of understanding bolstered by his interests, said Dan Frey, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology mechanical engineering professor. They collaborated on a medical startup, and later, on a U.S. Agency for International Development-supported project studying fairness of machine-learning implemen tations in emerging economies.
“When he talks about a subject, he doesn’t just stick to the script,” Frey said. “He can go off and tell a story about some engagement that he had and he never would’ve had those experiences if it weren’t for his natural curiosity. It’s really made him a stronger teacher.”
Teodorescu grew up in Iași, a univer sity-filled city in Romania founded in the 14th century. In high school, he placed three times, including two grand prizes, in 2003, 2004 and 2005 in the worldwide National Space Society Space Settlement Contest sponsored by NASA.
Two of the years, Teodorescu trav eled to NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Those visits led him to decide to go to college in America. In 2007, he started his undergraduate career at Harvard, majoring in computer science after taking CS 50, one of the university’s most popular classes.
As an undergraduate, Teodorescu in terned at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. After graduating in 2011, Teodorescu
Libraries are a vital part of Indige nous communities, but there’s very little academic research that focuses on those libraries. Sandy Littletree is working to change that.
“A lot of people, when you say ‘li braries,’ get warm, fuzzy feelings about books and story time, and that’s great,” said Littletree, who was recently hired as an assistant professor at the Information School. “But there are really complex issues of information access for Native communities.”
In her new role, Littletree is excited to have more time to dig deep into her research, which focuses on Indigenous systems of knowledge and how they intersect with library and information science. Before being hired for the tenure-track position, Littletree was a teaching professor at the iSchool, where she also earned her Ph.D. Tribal libraries are a relatively recent development, and they have not been well researched. Littletree wants to help remedy that.
“There is so much complexity to these issues that don’t often get the opportu nity to be investigated or highlighted,” she said.
Littletree, an enrolled member of the
Navajo Nation (Diné) from her father’s side and Eastern Shoshone from her mother’s side, says it’s important to have researchers working to understand that complexity. Native communities face a variety of issues, including a history of colonization and boarding schools that attempted to take away their knowl edge and culture. Each community and sovereign tribal nation will deal with its information needs in a different way, and researchers like Littletree need to understand that complexity.
For her dissertation, Littletree studied the history of tribal libraries, looking to understand how those institutions came to be. She didn’t grow up with a tribal li brary in her community, and she wanted to understand more about their devel
opment and their important role. Those libraries have helped preserve and share Indigenous knowledge, as well as offer ing a place for gathering and cultural and language renewal. She’s continued doing research in that area since.
Among Littletree’s current research is a Mellon Foundation-supported project called “Centering Washington Tribal Libraries: Building Relationships and Understanding Libraries from the Stories of their Communities.” Along with Cindy Aden, iSchool professor of practice, Littletree is working to build relationships and understanding of what is happening at tribal libraries around the state.
Littletree is also working on a second Mellon Foundation-supported project, “Data Services for Indigenous Scholar ship and Sovereignty.” Indigenous data has a history of bad management from non-Natives. This project is working to help overcome that by creating a framework that will ensure Indigenous
LIBRARIES, continued on Page 43
Scientific papers can be daunting, with convoluted findings, baffling jargon and key takeaways buried in a blur of details. Lucy Lu Wang uses artificial in telligence (AI) to make these documents more accessible and usable. “I’m trying to find better ways of surfacing relevant information and making it discoverable,” says Wang, who joined the iSchool facul ty as an assistant professor this fall.
Wang comes to the iSchool from Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), where she has worked several years as a postdoctoral young investigator. At AI2, she helped develop methods to extract useful information from scientific documents using data science techniques and natural language processing — the branch of AI that enables computers to process human language, rapidly summarizing large
volumes of text.
Most of her work focuses on biomed ical research, where new findings are constantly discovered and published. Those publications can be challenging for people seeking cutting-edge medi cal information. “We’re trying to help health-care consumers make better and more data-driven health-care decisions,” says Wang, who has a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Insti tute of Technology, a master’s in biomed ical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in biomedical informatics and medical education from the University of Washington.
To help readers decipher medical research literature, Wang and her AI2 team created an experimental prototype called Paper Plain, an interactive inter face with automated supports for users. Those supports include reading guides, definitions of unfamiliar terms, plain
language summaries and key questions that guide health-care consumers, clini cians, clinical researchers and others to the answers they seek.
Wang also helped develop a search sys tem called SUPP.AI that looks at almost 60,000 interactions between medica tions and the dietary and nutritional supplements many people routinely take. SUPP.AI was an idea of Wang’s that was quickly prototyped during the AI2 annual hackathon, she says. It now serves more than 25,000 people a month.
“The goal of both Paper Plain and SUPP.AI is not to replace the clini cian-patient relationship; it’s to augment that relationship with more information to help people have better conversations with medical providers, help them ask better questions, and maybe feel like they have a way to get informed.”
Wang and her AI2 team were quick to respond when COVID-19 broke out in 2020, setting off a deluge of new scien tific documents on the pandemic. In a narrow window of time, they helped other researchers create a text-mining database to dig up nuggets of relevant
information for those trying to keep up. “New results were emerging every day and a lot of them were not vetted or peer-reviewed,” says Wang. “We needed a way to distribute these results quickly to data scientists and computing researchers so they could make them accessible to policymakers and other audiences.”
As the flood of COVID findings con tinues — several hundred new papers are published every day — the database evolves. “We continued to release an iteration of the text-mining dataset weekly, sometimes daily, over the past two-plus years,” says Wang.
Wang is part of AI2’s Semantic Scholar team. Semantic Scholar is an AI-powered tool that searches more than 200 million academic research papers. Daniel Weld, chief scientist and general manager of the team, describes Wang as a new leader in health informatics.
“It has been tremendously exciting to watch Lucy’s trajectory at AI2, from intern and hackathon star to Young In vestigator and now assistant professor at UW — I can’t wait to see what she does next,” says Weld, professor emeritus at the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Com puter Science and Engineering.
Wang was born in China and spent much of her life on the East Coast. Seattle is her first West Coast city, and settling in here suits the young adven turer, who cycles and hikes when she’s not cooking or making her specialty sourdough bread with hand-milled rye berries, a recipe she concocted during the pandemic.
She’s also an avid mountain climber. Wang has already summited Mount Rainier, Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens. They’re just starters. “I would love to climb Mount Baker and Glacier Peak and other Cascade volcanoes at some point over the next couple of years,” she says. “Now I will have the opportunity to do that.”
She is excited about her move to the iSchool, where she’ll be teaching a course in data models and continu ing her AI research. “The iSchool is a unique, highly interdisciplinary place with a long history of really impactful re search,” she says. “I’m looking forward to sharing an environment with colleagues from whom I can draw new ideas to ap ply to the problems I’m interested in.”
Three faculty members familiar to the iSchool community are taking on new roles this academic year
Ryan Calo, the Lane Powell and D Wayne Gittinger Professor in the School of Law, now holds a joint appointment in the Information School He is a founding co-director of the interdisciplinary UW Tech Policy Lab and the UW Center for an Informed Public
A well-known law and technology scholar, Calo has testified before the German Parliament, the California Little Hoover Commission, and the full Judiciary and Commerce Committees of the United States Senate He has organized events on behalf of the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Obama White House, and spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival and NPR’s Weekend in Washington
Calo serves as an advisor to a wide range of organizations — including the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation — and is a board member of the R Street Institute
Also taking new roles at the iSchool are Wes Eli King and Jeremy Zaretzky Both joined the full-time faculty as assistant teaching professors
King has been at the UW since 2013, both as a graduate student and an instructor, and brings more than 20 years of technical writing and technical training experience to the classroom King is passionate about teaching
and offers a critical informatics lens for students to adopt as they develop their career goals and imagine the future of information As an activist-researcher, King locates their research at the intersection of technology, religion and gender King holds a Ph D in Information Science and a master’s in International Studies: Comparative Religion from the University of Washington They also hold a master’s in Ministry Leadership from the Portland Seminary and a bachelor’s in Organizational and Interpersonal Communication with a concentration in Psychology and Computer Science from The Ohio State University
Zaretzky’s courses span UX and design, product management, information architecture and software development, leveraging more than 20 years of industry experience to connect learning objectives with real-world scenarios
Zaretzky co-leads the iSchool’s undergraduate Capstone program and serves as a faculty advisor for DubHacks Next, a student-run startup incubator He is also a Venture Partner at Loyal VC, which is a global venture capital fund that has invested in more than 250 startups
During his career as a technology entrepreneur, Zaretzky launched new products; built and managed strategic relationships with customers, vendors and channel partners; negotiated complex contracts; and hired and managed teams He also led several initiatives designed to grow the Seattle startup ecosystem, including serving as managing director of the Founder Institute accelerator program
“Critically Conscious Computing: Methods for Secondary Education” (self-published), co-authored by Professor Amy J Ko, is one of the first books to approach computer science education critically, teaching foundational ideas in computer science through a social justice lens, and then offering several teaching methods for teaching these foundations ways that raise students’ critical consciousness about computing in their lives and society more broadly You can access the book for free at criticallyconsciouscomputing org
“A Guide to Writing Data Statements for Natural Language Processing” (Tech Policy Lab), co-authored by Professor Batya Friedman, contains information about data statements for language datasets used in natural language processing systems The schema elements have been honed to the particular characteristics of language datasets, including speech context, speaker demographic, and annotator demographic This guide for writing data statements, available at no cost at techpolicylab uw edu, provides the rationale, definitions, and suggestions for each of the elements as well as general best practices
“Reflections on Risk VI” (Tautegoy Press), authored by Associate Teaching Professor Annie Searle, contains 27 research notes focused on current operational risk gaps and technology issues in generally well-known corporations The research notes are both concise and diagnostic, covering topic areas such as global regulation, privacy, operational risk, cybersecurity and information ethics and policy
“Keywords for Children’s Literature” (NYU Press), co-authored by Beverly Cleary Professor Michelle H Martin, presents original essays on essential terms and concepts in the field Covering ideas from “Aesthetics” to “Voice,” an impressive multidisciplinary cast of scholars explores and expands on the vocabulary central to the study of children’s literature The second edition of this Keywords volume goes beyond disciplinary and national boundaries Across 59 print essays and 19 online essays, it includes contributors from 12 countries and an international advisory board from more than a dozen more
“Ríos que Convergen: Sistematización de Experiencias del Diplomado ‘Liderazgo, Comunicación y Cambio Climático,’ Vaupés, Colombia” (self-published), co-authored by Associate Professor Ricardo Gomez, presents some of the methodological contributions of the Leadership, Communication, and Climate Change Diploma in two Indigenous communities in the Querarí
“Viral Cultures:
Cifor, is the first book to critically examine the archives that have helped preserve and create the legacy of AIDS activism Positioning vital nostalgia as both a critical faculty and a generative practice, the book explores the act of saving this activist past and reanimating it in the digital age
River and in the Yapú area, Department of Vaupés, in the Colombian Amazon The activities of the course were facilitated by an interdisciplinary team from Fundación Colombia Multicolor
“Resilience: Latinx Stories and Immigration Enforcement in Washington State” (self-published), authored by Associate Professor Ricardo Gomez, features interviews with Latinx students and alumni from Eastern Washington and contrasts their stories with an analysis of immigration enforcement and collaboration between ICE and local police and sheriff’s offices Gomez wrote the book in collaboration with UW Center for Human Rights
“Smart Cities and Smart Governance: Towards the 22nd Century Sustainable City” (Springer), co-edited by Professor Hans Jochen Scholl, provides a foundation for global efforts to envision and prepare for the next-generation city by advancing understanding of the nature of and need for novel policies, new administrative practices, and enabling technologies required to advance urban governance, governments and infrastructure
worked at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center to be closer to his wife, Debbie, who was attending Harvard Medical School.
After two years, Teodorescu left to pursue his doctoral studies at Harvard Business School. He was interested in business strategy, curious about such things as why companies invest in research, move a headquarters or open a subsidiary.
This was more than a theoretical interest. He and his wife launched SurgiBox together after the Haiti earth quake in 2010, which killed hundreds of thousands and forced surgeons to operate outdoors, greatly increasing chances for infections.
The startup has developed an inflat able, battery-powered “operating room in a backpack” that can be opened and draped like a sleeping bag over a patient, creating a sterile surgical environment. They have partnered with governmental and private entities around the world to help improve access to safe surgery in disasters.
At SurgiBox and beyond, Teodores cu has an interest in patents, having been awarded four with many others pending. Given his passion for patents, his dissertation chair, Tarun Khanna, connected him with the U.S. Patent
Office’s chief economist, with whose group Teodorescu did research on how to encourage entrepreneurism, bolster green technology and level the playing field in patent granting.
After he obtained his doctorate from Harvard Business School in 2018, Teodorescu was hired to teach in Boston College’s Information Systems Department. He also collaborated with Frey to develop an MIT open course on machine learning fairness.
His research on improving the gender disparity in patenting was the runner-up for Academy of Management Annual Meeting Technology and Inno vation Management’s (TIM) Best Paper, and his paper on improving outcomes for lower resource inventors won the TIM Best Paper at the same conference. He wrote both with coauthors from pat ent office, the chief economist and one of his colleagues, a supervisory patent examiner, and a professor in Paris.
Teodorescu is thrilled to be moving back to Washington state, and especial ly to meet iSchool faculty and students.
“They have a very collaborative envi ronment,” Teodorescu said. “I thought it was fascinating that you can have computer scientists, human-comput er-interaction philosophers and man agement people, all under the same umbrella of the school, coexisting happily and doing impactful research together.”
communities and scholars can decide how their data is controlled.
In addition to her research work, Littletree will be teaching Indigenous Systems of Knowledge and Indige nous Ways of Knowing in the Digital World.
Miranda Belarde-Lewis, an assis tant professor of North American Indigenous Knowledge at the iSchool, said Littletree’s teaching skills are among her greatest strengths.
“She comes in with a lot of humil ity,” Belarde-Lewis said. “She doesn’t assume that folks know a lot. And she doesn’t do that in a patronizing way. And she has a very empathetic teaching philosophy.”
Belarde-Lewis has taught students who had also taken Littletree’s class, and saw how effective and inspiring her teaching was.
“Students would just come in with hearts in their eyes and fires in their souls after being in her classes,” Belarde-Lewis said. “Her ability to inspire our MLIS students was some thing I got to see.”
The two have co-authored articles, which Belarde-Lewis said was a great experience, in part because Littletree is such an effective communicator.
her vision of making people analytics a more globally recognized approach to strategic business. This conversa tion initiated a partnership between the two in which Whiteman taught an online class in people analytics for the professor at UFM.
The experience of teaching that class led Whiteman to pitch to Ful bright the idea of educating Guatema lan leaders in people analytics so they will adopt the concept in their coun try’s business practices.
“In a region where the concepts of people analytics have yet to be im plemented, that’s where introducing these new approaches to thinking hold
transformative value,” said Whiteman. “I want to teach from the mindset that people data is not like other data. We need to think about the social impacts and effects of quantifying humans.”
The Fulbright Scholar Award is given to scholars who will teach, conduct research or carry out profes sional projects in a country outside the United States. Whiteman traveled to Guatemala in June and July of this year to run the pilot program and will return to finish setting up the program in January and February 2023.
“I definitely see this as something that’s growing,” Whiteman said. “The goal is that this program would become a standard part of the UFM curricu lum, something that they can sustain and lead on their own.”
“As a collaborator, as a professor, as a researcher and as a fellow faculty, she is such an asset to the iSchool,” Belarde-Lewis said. “She would be an asset to any school and we’re so lucky.”
Littletree won’t be teaching again until March. Until then, she’ll be work ing on her research and other projects and connecting with students.
“Being tenure-track gives me an opportunity to dive into some of these topics and hopefully bring students along with me,” she said. “I’ll have the capacity to recruit Ph.D. students or more MLIS students to work on these projects with me. I would like to see a lot more of that representation in our students. … Indigenous librarianship is a growing area and there aren’t many of us in academia at this level focusing on it. I’m really excited to have this platform and this oppor tunity to focus on some of these big issues that really need addressing.”
