Hungry 24/7? HCI Design for Sustainable Food Culture: Proceedings of the Workshop held in conjunction with OZCHI 2009

This workshop proposes to explore new approaches to cultivate and support sustainable food culture in urban environments via human computer interaction design and ubiquitous technologies. Food is a challenging issue in urban contexts: while food consumption decisions are made many times a day, most food interaction for urbanites occurs based on convenience and habitual practices. This situation is contrasting to the fact that food is at the centre of global environment, health, and social issues that are becoming increasingly immanent and imminent. As such, it is timely and crucial to ask: what are feasible, effective, and innovative ways to improve human-food-interaction through human-computer-interaction in order to contribute to environmental, health, and social sustainability in urban environments? This workshop brings together insights across disciplines to discuss this question, and plan and promote individual, local, and global change for sustainable food culture

HCI, politics and the city: Engaging with urban grassroots movements for reflection and action

Grassroots initiatives enable communities of stakeholders to transform urban landscapes and impact broader political and cultural trajectories. In this twoday workshop, we present opportunities to engage HCI research with activist communities in Vancouver, the city hosting CHI’11. Working directly with local activist organizations, we explore the processes, materials, challenges, and goals of grassroots communities. Our bottom-up approach, including explorations of urban spaces and activist headquarters, participatory design sessions, reflection, critique and creative design of political artifacts will bring together a diverse group of HCI researchers, activists and artists. The workshop will result in concrete strategies for bottom-up activism and serve to inform the design of future interactive systems in the domain of political computing

Audiocentric interface design: A building blocks approach

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Boston, MA, July 7-9, 2003.The advent of mobile, wearable, and ubiquitous computing presents opportunities for audiocentric interfaces that use sound as the primary or only means of displaying information to users whose eyes are otherwise engaged. While interface designers have a wealth of technological capabilities at their disposal for capturing, storing, transmitting, and displaying sound, there is a lack of appropriate resources to inform and inspire the design of compelling new audiocentric interfaces. This paper presents work towards developing guidelines for audio interface designers by developing a suite of interface ``building blocks:'' common interface elements that can be incorporated into the design of complex interfaces. Several audio progress meters and experiments in directing user focus in a spatialized audio environment are discussed

DIY)biology and opportunities for HCI

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, a diverse community of biologists, artists, engineers and hobbyists has emerged to pursue biology projects outside of traditional laboratories. Though still in its nascent form, this DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) movement has given rise to a host of technical innovations and sharing mechanisms that enable hobbyists to experiment with organic materials. As these developments continue to expand science practice beyond professional settings and into hackspaces, art studios and private homes, HCI research is presented with a range of new opportunities and concerns. Our workshop will bring together a diverse group of designers and HCI researchers, as well as biologists, bioartists, and members of the DIYbio community to critically re-envision the role HCI might play at the intersection of biology, computation and DIY. This actionbased one-day workshop will engage directly with DIYbio initiatives in the UK to explore the materials, practices and challenges of 'garage biology'. Drawing on presentations from DIYbio participants who work with organic materials, hands-on biology activities (such as extracting DNA), and structured discussions, we hope to address themes such as: opportunities and implications for integrating organic materials into interactive systems; technologies that support and hinder public engagement with science; and HCI's role in the public discourse around bioethics and biosafety

Optimized Inhibitors of MDM2 via an Attempted Protein-Templated Reductive Amination

Innovative and efficient hit-identification techniques are required to accelerate drug discovery. Protein-templated fragment ligations represent a promising strategy in early drug discovery, enabling the target to assemble and select its binders from a pool of building blocks. Development of new protein-templated reactions to access a larger structural diversity and expansion of the variety of targets to demonstrate the scope of the technique are of prime interest for medicinal chemists. Herein, we present our attempts to use a protein-templated reductive amination to target protein-protein interactions (PPIs), a challenging class of drug targets. We address a flexible pocket, which is difficult to achieve by structure-based drug design. After careful analysis we did not find one of the possible products in the kinetic target-guided synthesis (KTGS) approach, however subsequent synthesis and biochemical evaluation of each library member demonstrated that all the obtained molecules inhibit MDM2. The most potent library member (Ki=0.095 μm) identified is almost as active as Nutlin-3, a potent inhibitor of the p53-MDM2 PPI

2005 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal

The Electronic Crop Circle is an interactive installation that allows users from around the world to send messages to nearby alien intelligences that are assumed to be monitoring electromagnetic radiation on and around the planet Earth. The project functions as a communications platform and a research tool. Taking seriously the observation that attempts to communicate with alien intelligences are really exercises in self-talk, the Electronic Crop Circle provides a means for cataloging the content of human desire for interplanetary contact (rather than just the form that various attempts take). It is believed that this will provide a novel window into the human condition, reflecting the way we understand ourselves and - quite literally our place in the universe