[Infovis] Funded PhD student opportunity

[Sheelagh Carpendale]

The Innovations in Visualization research group 
(innovis.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/) in the Interactions Lab 
(ilab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/) at the University of Calgary is offering a PhD 
position starting either September 2014 or January 2015 for an 
exceptional student. This is a fully funded position (comfortably 
covering living expenses and health insurance) for at least 4 years. In 
particular, I am looking for an outstanding PhD student who has 
information visualization, visual analytics, and/or human computer 
interaction background, and who is interested in creating new 
visualizations and interfaces to help empower people with their own 
health-related information.

Traditionally visualization and visual analytics have been applied to 
data arising from science and industry. In fact, previously data was not 
often thought about as being part of people's personal lives. However, 
in the last few years, this has been rapidly changing. Much of the often 
discussed "big data" is generated by individuals and their activities on 
social networks, as consumers, etc. Additionally, people are becoming 
more aware of data in their lives and are actively starting to collect 
it.This type of activity, perhaps typified by the Quantified Self 
movement, has triggered an industry response and now all kinds of 
self-monitoring devices are proliferating. However, while methods of 
gathering personal data are becoming ubiquitous, little has yet been 
done to make this data understandable and usable.

One significant area in this regard is health. People are often 
collecting their own health data, to empower themselves, and to gain 
better control of their health.Sometimes they are collecting data 
because of their doctors instructions, sometimes they feel that if they 
monitored their activities they could better understand what factors 
trigger chronic conditions such as migraines and seizures. I would like 
to conduct research to discover how to help people work with this data, 
to find ways of presenting this data so that people can understand it 
and can make decisions and take actions based on it.

The University of Calgary iLab is one of the leading information 
visualization and human computer interaction research labs. It is part 
of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary, 
Alberta, Canada, and is known for cutting-edge interdisciplinary 
research. It is composed of four faculty members (Drs. Carpendale, 
Greenberg, Sharlin, Tang) and approximately 30 to 40 graduate students 
and Post Doctoral Fellows.

You will be supervised by Sheelagh Carpendale in collaboration with 
doctors, researchers and medical personal at Ward of the 21^st Century 
(www.w21c.org/) at the Foothills Hospital.

Please send your application, including CV, academic record and 
references, to sheelagh at ucalgary.ca. Please include a one-page statement 
of your research motivation and interests. The for best consideration, 
send your application by March 10, 2014.

-------------------------------------------

Prof. Dr. Sheelagh Carpendale

Innovation in Visualization (InnoVis), Interactions Lab (iLab)

Department of Computer Science

University of Calgary

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Telephone : +1 403 220 6055

E-Mail: sheelagh at ucalgary.ca

Web: http://innovis.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/