Some fascinating real abstracts of presentations/talks/seminars at the UCI "Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences":
Nota Bene: all material below is quoted verbatim from actual public announcements.

• Title: Indigenous Thought, Media, Technology, Climate Change, Learning and the Future: A Multi-Modal Examination of Storytelling in Media and Collaborative Community Research
  Talk Type: PhD Defense
  Abstract:
  The Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island have long objected to the imposition of, and illogic behind, colonial-capitalism. As this system's flawed core logic of infinite growth on a finite planet becomes ever more clear, many struggle to envision positive possible futures. Technology is often pointed to as a "solution" to problems of the future, however, technology and media designs embedded in the foundational assumptions of colonial-capitalism (hierarchies, infinite growth, and individualism) are ill-equipped to do so. Simply incorporating more voices of Indigenous or otherwise minoritized people into institutions, systems, and protocols that were established, and continue to operate, under the rubrics of colonial-capitalism is too often a move to tokenism rather than a commitment to widespread systemic change. Instead, I argue, we need to examine foundational rubrics and shift them to principles that allow for noncolonial and regenerative versions of design, story, learning and play to become legible enough in both volume and dispersion that widespread adoption of different ontologies, epistemologies and ethics becomes more possible. Utilizing a hybrid approach of media analysis combined with participant co-design and storywork, this dissertation seeks to make recommendations for shifting foundational assumptions as a starting point for restructuring our lived relationships to technologies and story: in our learning spaces, our leisure and play, and our technology designs for the future. I trace the history of media in the United States and the ways it reflects erasure and direct opposition to Indigenous Thought, then utilize defined elements of colonial-capitalist narratives as an analytic lens to look at how this inhibits two video game franchises specifically -- Sid Meier's Civilization and The Sims -- from being capable of allowing for the portrayal of realistic positive possible futures (Hartland Trefoil et al, 1991-2025; Electronic Arts, 2000-2026). I choose video games specifically because they are a unique link between more long-lived media, learning, and technology. Once identifying the ways that these games replicate foundational assumptions, I take these findings and try several different ways to collaborate with learners on strategies to change media design to be able to go in different directions. I describe the research I conducted in collaboration with learners across multiple contexts—in two multi-week programs, workshops, and a curriculum intervention across five years of a university class. My goal in this is to find routes toward commercial and educational design that desettle some of the embedded colonial norms that have become standard. Only then can we reconfigure a starting place from which to design and tell stories that imagine livable futures. I argue that this reconfiguration could be grounded in Indigenous Turtle Island philosophies or ontoepistemologies of which there is already a wealth of scholarship and that have long sounded warnings about the short-sighted nature of colonial-capitalism. In approaching this through games and pedagogy, my work adds hope and provides evidence to support a much needed change to how we teach, learn, and tell stories.
  
  
• Title: Research as the Practice of Freedom
  Talk Type: Faculty Seminar
  Abstract:
  As systems of domination increasingly grip the academy with anti-intellectual, anti-democratic, and uncaring force, professors like me despair: what can we do? I have found a way to hope again through research praxis rooted in the testimony of the historically and multiply-minoritized. In dialogue with bell hooks, I will share my story as a western, white, wealthy woman with a disability who constructs Accessible Computing research in mutually-caring relationship with the community. In doing so, I extend bell hooks's critical pedagogy to research and show how adding "ableist" to hooks's refrain "imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy" can expand our capacity to care. When we do research that cultivates a multicultural and multiability community; when we dare to share our lived truth and vulnerability with the other; when we theory our lives and live our theories -- then research is the practice of freedom.
  
  
• Title: Playing Karaoke: A Lived Experience of Play as Method
  Talk Type: PhD Thesis Defense
  Abstract:
  This dissertation argues that understanding play requires embodied participation rather than detached observation. To study play, one must play. Through thousands of hours of participant observation and autoethnographic engagement within karaoke venues across Orange County, California, and beyond, I examine karaoke as a play medium using play as a method of inquiry. By engaging directly, authentically with the karaoke, and within my community, I was able to pursue a search for the play itself, a phenomenological engagement with play as lived experience rather than abstract theory. As part of this inquiry, I contend that karaoke is a uniquely revealing activity for exploring the possibilities of play. Karaoke's multilayered frames, game, show, activity, and party, operate not as ontological categories but as dynamic states of appropriated play media reframed within a single ecology of karaoke play, each organizing distinct rhetorics of procedure, performance, leisure, and affect. When any frame dominates, the karaoke experience changes dramatically. But when these frames coexist in balance, that karaoke holds the potential to be well-played, provided its participants' intentions align. By engaging play as an object and as a method, this work attempts to "liberate play from games" and push against the "progress narrative" that has long constrained its study, the notion that play must justify itself through productivity or moral worth. Karaoke's frivolity becomes a site of philosophical resistance, reminding us that while play can be wielded toward any number of purposes, it is nonetheless not for anything but it can be everything. Within karaoke's liminal gatherings, participants enact a collective negotiation of vulnerability, joy, and belonging that reveals play as a mode of being rather than a category of behavior. Ultimately, playing karaoke repositions play as a lived ontology of human creativity and connection. It demonstrates that play is not simply what we do but how we become, how we encounter ourselves and one another through moments of shared, improvised creation. Karaoke matters because it doesn't matter, and as such its play is of play's most essential quality, toward its own ends, autotelic and quintessential, constituent of being human.
  
  
• Title: Play, Remembrance, and Closure in a Minecraft Community for Bereaved Youth
  Talk Type: PhD Thesis Defense
  Abstract:
  This dissertation explores the experiences of bereaved youth within a private Minecraft server specifically designed to focus on grief. Sitting at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and bereavement studies, this dissertation follows a qualitative, multi-method approach to provide a rich account of how this community used a shared digital world to build shared values, practice remembrance, and navigate the eventual closure of their space. Drawing on interviews with adult counselors, ethnographically-informed observations of in-game activities, and an analysis of digital artifacts, this work examines the intricate ways that play, loss, and community life are interwoven. My findings are presented across three results chapters. First, I found that the server functioned as a "digital home" where youth established a powerful sense of community through collaborative building projects and shared sociotechnical practices that reinforced values of mutual support and stewardship. Second, within this community, players engaged in complex practices of remembrance and loss, creating both formal, designer-led memorials and informal, youth-led tributes that forged new rituals for continuing bonds with those they had lost. Finally, when faced with the server's own shutdown, the community navigated a collective grieving process, leading to powerful moments of reflection and catharsis through "packing" their digital objects and creations. My findings highlight how the flexible and sociotechnical affordances of a playful space like Minecraft can provide youth with a robust toolkit to navigate loss, forge connections, and engage in profound meaning-making on their own terms. Finally, this dissertation advocates for the need to design specifically with closure in mind. I argue that for online communities, thoughtfully planning for their end is a critical and ethical component of care.
  
  
• Title: Advancing AI Education: The Computational Equity Approach for Minoritized Youth
  Talk Type: PhD Thesis Defense
  Abstract:
  This dissertation explores the development and implementation of a community-based educational program, iDREAM, aimed at teaching minoritized youth about Artificial Intelligence (AI) with an emphasis on ethics and social justice. Partnering with two NGOs, this study integrates Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) and Critical Computational Literacy (CCL) to co-design an accessible, community-centered approach to AI education, referred to as the Computational Equity Approach. The research investigates how initial perceptions of AI among youth evolve through their engagement in the program and their visions of possible futures (RQ1), and also examines the role of the co-design process in shaping these experiences (RQ2). The findings demonstrate that when youth are provided with the tools to critically engage with technology, and when their cultural identities and interests are celebrated and sustained, they not only develop a nuanced understanding of the technology but also feel empowered to influence it. This indicates the importance of creating safe, collaborative environments with accurate and relevant content tailored to the community, fostering meaningful engagement and learning starting from the co-design session. This dissertation highlights how non-technical aspects of a program, such as care, flexibility, and cultural sustainment, are essential to the successful integration of emerging technologies like AI into community-based technical educational programs. By prioritizing these elements, we can create learning environments that are not only technically enriching and necessary, but also culturally sustaining and responsive to our youth.
  
  
• Title: Taiwanese Emerging Adults and Mental Wellbeing: Conceptualization, Coping Strategies, and Role of Digital Tools
  Talk Type: MS Thesis Defense
  Abstract: Mental wellbeing has emerged as a vital component of overall health and has drawn increased attention amid growing public awareness of mental health concerns. However, current research predominantly reflects Western cultural perspectives, leaving gaps in our understanding of mental wellbeing and coping strategies from Eastern cultural viewpoints. To start to address this disparity, I examine the mental wellbeing of Taiwanese individuals, particularly focusing on those in their emerging adulthood aged between 18 and 29 -- a demographic uniquely susceptible to mental health challenges due to the transitional nature of this life phase. Through 19 interviews with Taiwanese emerging adults, I explore their conceptualization of mental wellbeing, the challenges they encounter, the strategies they employ for managing mental wellbeing, and the role of digital tools in this process. My thesis contributes to the HCI literature by shedding light on various aspects of mental wellbeing, including its conceptualization, contributing factors, and coping mechanisms, from an East Asian cultural perspective. Additionally, it highlights the intricate influence of cultural, political, social, individual, and technological factors, and their interactions on mental wellbeing.
  
  
• Title: Whose Story is Told When the Corporation Speaks? An Investigation into the Benefits of Participatory Data Narration
  Talk Type: MS Thesis Defense
  Abstract: Low-cost hyperlocal air quality sensing networks seek to empower citizens by addressing environmental concerns through data collection and real-time reporting. HCI scholars highlight local knowledge and contextual understanding as key foundations for data visualization design that hopes to effectively communicate environmental information and inspire behavioral change. Narratives using environmental data must be articulated with special consideration for their situated context to allow users to incorporate new knowledge and habits into their daily lives. In 2021, Microsoft led an initiative deploying over 100 air quality sensors throughout Chicago in collaboration with local environmental justice leaders to tackle ongoing air pollution concerns. I conducted semi-structured interviews with Microsoft's community partners to better understand how data might be narrated in this context. In this dissertation, I investigate this corporate collaboration which used community participation to design a citizen-focused eco feedback system. This work illuminates how cultural context, pre-existing access to support, and audience-specific goals breathe life into data. Furthermore, it asks how this approach to participation distributes access and support to those seeking to use air quality data to bring about change. I examine this by using Arnstein's analytical model for participation, which evaluates top-down collaboration through the assessment of power redistribution. I argue that this collaboration did not engender empowerment but instead highlighted known discrepancies in power distribution, specifically regarding data authorship.
  
  
• Title: Karaoke Play: Game Studies as a Lens into Ubiquitous Leisure Play
  Talk Type: PhD Advancement
  Abstract: Karaoke is a leisure activity. It is also a unique physical social casual simulation game that relies on performance as its primary method of engagement, turning that social engagement into performance play. Performance play is a form of mimicry, of play "as-if," providing players with opportunities to perform as "not me," allowing a certain degree of protection against criticism. This protection, which affords the player an opportunity to confront personal vulnerabilities, also provides bad actors with a shield against criticism of bad behaviors. Game studies, as a lens for exploring this leisure play, provides useful explanations for how and why such social games work, and how and why they fail. In this talk, I will discuss three essays built upon over a thousand hours of participant observation of karaoke played in public spaces. The first essay, "Adapting the Empty Orchestra: Performance of Play in Karaoke," published in conference proceedings from DiGRA 2019, examines how karaoke is encountered by players, how the game is structured, and how karaoke is adapted by play communities. The second essay, "Play and Performance: Confronting Vulnerability through Karaoke," published in a special issue of Well-Played on intergenerational play, explores the power of performance play toward providing a sense of protection for confronting personal vulnerabilities. And the third essay, "No Fun Karaoke," presented at the 2019 SLSA conference, exposes the toxic side of the protections of performance play, when the shield play provides is wielded by bad actors in order to harass and dominate other players, exploring the role of the spoilsport and the killjoy as a final protection against this abuse. Through these works I synthesize a perspective toward real world social play as avenues for exploration in game studies, emphasizing the value of games scholarship for studying and understanding leisure play activities, and the value of game studies as a lens for exploring social play in the real world.
  
  
• Title: Passive Pedestrian Walkway Accessibility Data Collection with Scooter Riders
  Talk Type: MS Thesis Defense
  Abstract: Pedestrians, especially those with disabilities, rely on mobile map applications to plan their daily trips and navigate unfamiliar spaces. Yet, many of these applications do not provide crucial real-time information for pedestrians, including foot traffic, semipermanent and permanent obstacles, sidewalk accidents, and other barriers common to pedestrian spaces. Over the past decade, researchers and engineers in academia and industry have explored accessible navigation in a variety of mobile applications. Despite significant effort, accessible navigation features can only provide limited real-time information to select major metropolitan areas. One substantial obstacle preventing real-time accessible navigation from being more informative and deployed to more places is the expensive and manual process of regularly collecting and updating pedestrian walkway data. This thesis presents an initial feasibility study with eight student volunteers who commuted with scooters regularly at the University of California, Irvine. Data collected through custom GPS modules and the follow-up survey revealed insights about the plausibility of extracting real-time pedestrian walkway accessibility information from scooter riders' travel patterns. My work calls for future researchers working on accessible maps to delve deeper into travel patterns of different human-controlled or autonomous wheeled devices, not just wheelchairs, on pedestrian walkways. Only when pedestrian walkway data collection becomes less manual and costly can updates happen often and more areas be covered.
  
  
• Title: Clash of Cultures in Elite Hiring: How Social Class Background Shapes the Hiring Process of Large Technology Companies
  Talk type: PhD Defense
  Abstract: Elite companies have long expressed a desire to hire the most talented applicants. They report wanting to hire applicants strictly based on individual merit. However, elite conceptualizations of “the best and the brightest” have historically favored upper-middle-class individuals. How these conceptualizations play out in practice and shape the hiring experience for both evaluators and applicants in elite settings remains underexplored. In this dissertation, I investigate the role of social class background in the hiring process of large technology companies. To gain insight into both sides of the hiring process, I interviewed evaluators at top-tier technology companies in the U.S. and conducted longitudinal research on the application experiences of computer science Ph.D. students. I show how current hiring practices reproduce elite workplaces by prioritizing applicants who have the privilege of learning upper-middle-class interactional styles. Current hiring practices also impose emotional and temporal burdens on working- and middle-class applicants who diverge from the valorized upper-middle-class interactional styles. My data suggest that elite organizations—companies and educational institutions that are well-resourced and well-informed about upper-middle-class practices—can scaffold working- and middle-class applicants' process of learning the valorized interactional styles. Building on these insights, I offer strategies for evaluators, educators, and designers to support applicants from different social class backgrounds and ease their entry into elite workplaces.
  
  
• Title: Occult Infrastructure: Human Relations to Hidden Systems
  Talk type: PhD Defense
  Abstract: Infrastructures subtend the contemporary but can be difficult to critically examine. Infrastructures are occult in their relation to the human, and as they proliferate they become increasingly invisible or insensible for reasons of scale, scope, and complexity. This dissertation examines depictions of occulted infrastructures in both technical and non-technical contexts to develop a more general framework of how relative occultation informs and inflects human/infrastructural relations. A combination of automated and manual qualitative analysis methods has been applied to responses from two groups for whom occult infrastructures are a primary concern. The first, informatics students, described their relations to and conceptions of relatively occult technical systems such as Wi-Fi or the internet. The second, magical practitioners, described their relations to and conceptions of relatively occult magical systems, networks of cosmic, elemental, or supernatural forces. Through analysis of these groups and their related corpora, this dissertation provides a theoretical framework for understanding the efficacy of magical practices in relation to occult infrastructures, technical or otherwise. This project presents the occult as a dimension endemic to infrastructure, and a vital aspect of infrastructural studies. The results and implications for further research into non-anthropic relations to occult infrastructures are discussed.
  
  
• Title: Offensive Play: The Design of Conflict, Kindness, and Trust
  Talk type: Faculty Candidate, Hired
  Abstract: All games contain conflict, and all good games have uncertain outcomes. Whether conflict over resources, knowledge, or territory games challenge players to overcome obstacles in interesting and fun ways. Pokemon GO, for example, challenges players to find and capture Pokemon, which requires time, patience, skill, and the freedom to access the game map (i.e. spaces in the real world) to its fullest extent. When players are denied full access, either through a technical glitch in the game-like when a server crashes or when networks become unavailable, or through real or imagined threats of violence or harassment, the game becomes inherently unfair. How might we make sense of issues of accessibility, privilege, and difference raised by the game? When players say, "I might die if I keep playing," what might be learned about conflict and the ways in which pervasive play comes to be embedded in society? This talk will reflect on these questions and more, as the speaker shares lesson learned in her work about the design of conflict, kindness, and trust.
  
  
• Title: Supporting Novice Cooks through Sensor-Enhanced Computing Technologies
  Talk type: PhD Advancement
  Abstract: Novice cooks routinely encounter problems with the execution and timing of recipe steps due to information not embedded in the recipe. In this talk, I describe research exploring how to help people, particularly novices, improve their cooking. I am currently exploring the viability of using various ubicomp technologies to detect cooking processes. One way to do this sensing is through detecting the gases released during cooking. Previous research has shown that gas sensors can be used to classify odors when used in highly controlled experimental testing chambers. However, potential ubicomp applications require these sensors to perform an analysis in less controlled environments. In this talk, I present my design of a gas sensor system for sensing smell in ubicomp environments, which I evaluated through four experiments: basic efficacy, effects of airflow and distance, classifying bathroom activities, and tracking cooking state. Then I present as preliminary results from an interview investigating the cooking experiences of non-expert cooks. I close with a discussion on opportunities for optimizing classification, opportunities for using shapes and patterns for recognition, and future directions for using this technology to help guide cooks.
  
  
• Title: Transnational Play: (Mis)aligned Culture, Embedded Values, and Youth Resistance in Games and Streaming
  Talk type: PhD Advancement
  Abstract: For this presentation, I look at how games operate in transnational spaces, readily crossing cultural and territorial borders, during which they express a myriad of values and objectives of designers, publishers, and the State. I am examining this through three research projects which focus on culture implementation in games, embedding values in design practices, and youth resistance to conditions under global Neoliberalism. In the first project titled "Double-Ventriloquism and Aegyo in Overwatch" [1], I use a close reading of voice audio in Overwatch, identifying how it is utilized in games to enable development of corporate and state interests, while additionally disguising the stakeholder through a process termed "double-ventriloquism". In the second project titled "Mermaids of Iedo: Balancing Design and Research in Serious Games," [2] I looked at how cultural and historical values are mechanized to create emotional experiences as well as educational outcomes by designing an analog game that deals with the contemporary history of the haenyeo, South Korean diving women of Jeju Island. And the third project "Take the Keys to the Happy Hob Hotel: Affective Support and Youth Resistance in Streaming," looks towards streamers and streaming communities in challenge-run communities and how they utilize "affective support" as a means of resistance to the daily challenges of Neoliberal culture.
  
  
• Title: Team Cognition under Stress: How Generalizable Communication Styles Relate to Team Performance in Competitive Games
  Talk type: PhD Defense
  Abstract: Much of team communication is a trained process for teams in high pressure environments, like the highly regimented checklists that structure aircraft takeoff and landing. Competitive League of Legends teams use communication to maintain tight coordination in the face of chaotic and stressful stimuli. This 2 x 2 factorial design explores differences between in-game communications in League of Legends teams that vary in both experience as a team and experience with the game. The findings describe how content, style, and amount of communication differ between novice and expert teams; whether those differences relate to experience with the game, experience as a team, or both; and whether differences in communication relate to how teams react to stressful in-game situations. This work explores whether these same communication patterns and solutions can effectively transfer across domains in the interest of training for safety and performance in higher consequence domains.