Research – C3 Lab – The human condition

#PositiveComputing #SocialComputing #InclusiveDesign

Welcome to the C3 Lab!

Our research explores the design of human-centered technologies to bridge Cultural barriers, improve Collaboration, and build Community. On a high-level, our lab aims to tackle timely, high-impact, human-oriented societal challenges. Our goal is to design socially-conscious, technological solutions that can benefit social good. Check out our C3 Team and current research projects here!

Diversity is a key focus of this work. The solutions we develop aim to embrace and leverage the many benefits of diversity, rather than being hindered by its challenges. Our research is highly interdisciplinary, and we regularly collaborate with psychologists and artists. Our work explores the following application areas:

Re-thinking social media design to foster meaningful connection
Biofeedback and artistic technologies to promote emotional regulation
AI interventions to foster equitable hiring across cultures
Collaboration systems to mitigate culture and language barriers in distributed work teams
Interactive technologies to prompt spontaneous joyful encounters between strangers in public spaces
Meaningful data tools for emergency shelter staff (In collaboration with Prof. Geoffrey Messier [Engineering] and Prof. Gina Dimitropoulos [Social Work])
Empowering the public with open data and visualizations
Indigenous technology and data (In collaboration with Prof. Melanie Zurba, Dalhousie University)

This work is situated within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Inclusive Design, Social Computing and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Information Visualization (InfoVis). We draw heavily from psychology, cultural anthropology, media art and urban studies to design creative technological interventions and nuanced studies of the interplay between humans and machines.

Prospective students

Thank you for your interest — unfortunately, my lab is currently full and I am not taking on any new students for the foreseeable future. I will update this when I have open spots in C3 Lab again. The contact form is currently closed until I have open spots in my lab again. Thanks for your interest!

Welcome students! Great that you’re here.

I’m seeking technically-skilled, highly creative students with keen intrinsic interest in issues of diversity, equity and inclusion and a passion for developing socially-conscious technologies. In particular, I welcome applications from students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds to contribute their unique expertise to these challenging research domains. Before contacting me though, first take some time to read through my past work. Then, think about these questions:

From the research domains that I work on, what problems or societal challenges do you find most interesting, and why?
What skills or perspectives could you uniquely contribute that no one else could? Importantly, how can your skills or perspectives contribute to equity, diversity or inclusion?
Read through some papers from my past work. Do you have ideas of where this research could be taken in the future?
- Draw from your own experiences, e.g. about culture or language barriers you’ve experienced while using email, Zoom or Slack. Or, how to redesign social media systems to foster high-quality. meaningful social connection to address loneliness and isolation. Or, during this global pandemic, how data and visualizations can better engage and empower the public.
- Be specific and concrete about your ideas (as it helps to better distinguish your application from other students). If you like, you can include a hand-drawn sketch of a rough idea, or whatever helps you best communicate your idea. Good writing and creativity are valued.
And finally, why do you wish to pursue graduate studies?
- As I mentioned before, doing a MSc or PhD in a novel reserach domain can be hard. So its important to clarify for yourself (and to me) why you want to do this. e.g. Is it to gain new skills? To receive mentorship on how to advance scientific knowledge? Is it to challenge yourself and push out of your comfort zone? Are you willing to fail? Do you have a desire to tackle creative endeavours that others haven’t done before?

Only after you’ve thought about these questions, fill out this contact form.

I look forward to hearing from you. (Please note that positions in the C3 Lab are extremely competitive, and due to a high volume of emails, I may not be able to reply to every message).

For more details for prospective students, go here. To check out the exciting research going on at the Interactions Lab (iLab), go here.

To submit an official application through the University of Calgary, go here. Deadline for the Fall start date is January 1 (international students) and May 1 (Canadian citizens and permanent residents).

Research areas

Below is a selected sample of previous research areas. New and ongoing research may not be featured here yet. For Dr. Helen Ai He’s Google Scholar profile, see here.

Cross-Cultural Collaboration Systems for Global Virtual Teams