received a Faculty Early Career
Development (CAREER) Award
The $500,000 grant supports Bickmore's
interface agents can conduct very long-
term interactions with users--spanning
months or years of daily use--and the
impacts these interactions can have on
user health education, behavior change,
and overall well-being.
developed animated conversational
agents that simulate face-to-face
conversations between users and health
professionals, such as exercise trainers,
health counselors, and nurses.
health behavior, and automated counselors
have the potential to have a significant
impact in this area," says Bickmore.
target one application domain--physical
activity promotion--and one user group--
urban older adults from the Geriatriacs
Ambulatory Practice at Boston Medical
Center--in order to focus and ground
the research.
studying long-term interactions will also
be used as a teaching tool in the gradu-
ate computer science course in human-
computer interaction, the undergraduate
information science course in empirical
in behavioral informatics.
to educate hospital patients about their
health condition and post-discharge
self-care (funded by the National Heart,
Lung and Blood Institute); a wearable
exercise adviser to promote walking
(funded by the National Library of
Medicine); a health adviser to promote
medication adherence in patients with
schizophrenia (funded by Eli Lilly
pharmaceuticals); and an exercise adviser
that can automatically assess the quality
of user workouts based on a wearable
sensor (funded by Partners Healthcare).
The CAREER award will enable Bickmore
to conduct basic research that contributes
to all of these applications.
program provides students in the
College of Computer and Information
Science with the opportunity to
develop outstanding professional skills
and qualities, and it shows in the
career success they enjoy. But as the
cover story makes it clear, our students,
with strong support from the college,
are also able to leverage the real-world
skills they develop on co-op with their
ethos to build student groups that enrich both the educational
and social fabric of the college.
Group, have value well beyond that of the old model of the
extracurricular student club. Today, CCIS students use the
resources of their groups to make a difference on a professional
and industry-wide scale.
for freshman women, as part of an overall effort to draw more
women into computing careers. Accomplished members
profiled in this issue--and CISters cofounder Andrea Grimes,
the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Female
Undergraduate in 2005--are the kind of role models who can
forums, workshops, and social events to bring the industry's
leading researchers onto campus. As a result, our students
have avenues of learning and sources of inspiration that
extend beyond the classroom and their co-op experiences.
provides students with the means to initiate and bring to
fruition projects that challenge their professional skills and
significantly enrich the college's computing environment.
This is chronicled in stories that describe the recent success
of two very promising graduate students who were able
to leverage external interest in their work into promising
internships, which will enrich their research and enhance
their professional opportunities.
their student experiences, but that they frequently use these
experiences to have a real-world impact.
Dean