I’m incredibly honored to have received IEEE’s 2014 Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award. Thank you to my incredible teachers who committed time and energy to teaching me!

Our CSCW paper titled “The Role of Crowdfunding in Community” received an honorable mention. This paper explores the role of online and offline community in crowdfunding. (pdf)

Our papers titled “Learning to Fail: Experiencing Public Failure Online Through Crowdfunding” and “Combining Crowdsourcing and Learning to Improve Engagement and Performance” were accepted to appear at CHI 2014.

I’m honored to have been included on Crain’s 40 under 40 Next Generation of Leaders and am grateful to my supportive and smart colleagues for their role in making my work possible.

Dr. Matt Easterday, Dr. Haoqi Zhang, and I are thrilled to announce the formation of the Delta Lab, an interdisciplinary research lab and design studio at Northwestern University, where we study, design, and build systems in social and crowd computing, human computer interaction, learning sciences, civics, design, and innovation.

The lab builds on the growing excitement of Northwestern as an amazing place to do research in HCI, design, and social computing. Darren Gergle, Jeremy Birnholtz, Ann Marie Piper, Mike Horn, Aaron Shaw, Matt, Haoqi, and I form the core HCI faculty; many more of us in Computer Science and Communications are involved through the Technology and Social Behavior program.

Lead architect for the Digital Lot, Brantley describes his work for the Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship. This work would not be possible without his brilliance, creativity, and commitment.

Currently, we can predict with 68% accuracy whether a crowdfunding campaign launched on Kickstarter will succeed based on features of the campaign established pre-launch including – the project category, whether or not the campaign has a video uploaded, and how many rewards are offered. We are hoping to get a higher degree of accuracy to better advise campaign creators pre-launch.  Check out the recent press coverage in The Guardian and Popular Science.

The Design Observer just posted my OpEd on The Trifecta of Feedback.  If given feedback, first thank, then listen to the feedback, then bucket as keep, reject, or save for later.

This year, DFA Swipesense team was recognized as one of the top ten start-ups by the Wall Street Journal and they continue to impress.  Check out Yuri Malina and Mert Iseri delivering their outstanding elevator pitch.

This past month, we were thrilled welcomed two new PhD students to the lab.

Emily Harburg joins us from Disney Research where she was working on fascinating research on leadership, design, and the customer experience of waiting in lines at Disney.  Dan Rees Lewis joins us from Design for America where he led a highly successful instructional design effort to develop the design and innovation curriculum for extracurricular project based learning.