Research Colloquium at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey presents

BRIAN SMITH

October 24, 2007 at 2:30 pm

SFU Surrey Campus, Room 5380 (5th Floor Galleria)

Title: Understanding and Improving Everyday Decision-Making

Abstract:

People make numerous decisions everyday, some good, some bad. I'll discuss two projects that examine everyday decision-making tasks: diabetes management and fantasy sports gaming. While health and fantasy basketball may seem unrelated, my students and I are trying to understand 1) the similarities and differences between formal and intuitive decision-making across domains, 2) how we can create systems that help people understand the nature of their decision-making. More generally, we are trying to improve decision-making by designing systems that capture implicit aspects of experience and make them explicit for reflection and learning.

Bio:

Brian Smith is an associate professor in the College of Information Sciences & Technology (IST) and the director of IST's Solutions Institute at the Pennsylvania State University. Smith's research examines the use of computation to enhance learning and decision-making in everyday settings. The core of his work is developing environments where people articulate prior knowledge in order to identify misconceptions, confront existing beliefs and attitudes to adopt new ways of doing. Smith earned a B.S. degree in Computer Science & Engineering from UCLA, a Ph.D. in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University, and spent five years on the faculty of MIT's Media Laboratory before moving to Penn State. He received a Faculty Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation in 2000 to begin a research agenda around visual learning. He is a recipient of the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies from the American Education Research Association and an Apple (Computer) Distinguished Educator.