GVU Center Brown Bag: Beth Mynatt - "Beth Goes to Washington: Advancing Audacious Computing Research"

Abstract:

Since 2008, I have served as a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and now chair this organization for the next two years. The CCC (cra.org/ccc), has the mission to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. We are a standing committee of the Computing Research Associates (CRA) and are primarily funded by the NSF. It has been an amazing journey to unpack and then facilitate the formation, articulation and eventual implementation of important computing research programs that capture the innovative spirit and societal relevance of the computing field. In this journey, I've learned a bit more about how good ideas sow good partnerships that enable computing research. In this talk I'll describe my view from this bleeding edge of the computing research horizon. I'll unpack examples of the evolution of ideas to programs and speculate what may be ahead of us still. Our field is changing and its relevance to national and societal priorities is growing in importance. However, we live in challenging times, not to mention facing a pivotal election in November. As a community, we must continually work to foster audacious visions for our field and to align our visions with national and societal priorities.

Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt is the Executive Director of Georgia Tech's Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), a College of Computing Professor, and the Director of the Everyday Computing Lab. She investigates the design and evaluation of health information technologies including creating personalized mobile technology for supporting breast cancer patients during their cancer journey, evaluating mobile sensing and mHealth engagement for pediatric epilepsy patients and their caregivers, and investigating the positive and negative influence of social media on self-harm behaviors such as eating disorders. She is also one of the principal researchers in the Aware Home Research Initiative; investigating the design of future home technologies, especially those that enable older adults to continue living independently as opposed to moving to an institutional care setting. Mynatt is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of ubiquitous computing and assistive technologies. Her research contributes to ongoing work in personal health informatics, computer-supported collaborative work and human-computer interface design. Mynatt is also the Chair of the Computing Community Consortium, an NSF-sponsored effort to engage the computing research community in envisioning more audacious research challenges. She serves as member of the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and as an ACM Council Member at Large. She has been recognized as an ACM Fellow, a member of the SIGCHI Academy, and a Sloan and Kavli research fellow. She has published more than 100 scientific papers and chaired the CHI 2010 conference, the premier international conference in human-computer interaction. Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 1998, Mynatt was a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC, working with the founder of ubiquitous computing, Mark Weiser. Her research is supported by multiple grants from NSF and NIH including Smart and Connected Health, CHS, HCC and CAREER awards. Other honorary awards include being named a Mobility Star in 2014 by the Atlanta Metro Chamber of Commerce, the Top Woman Innovator in Technology by Atlanta Woman magazine in 2005 and the 2003 College of Computing's Dean's Award. Mynatt earned her Bachelor of Science summa cum laude in computer science from North Carolina State University and her Master of Science and Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech.