IST doctoral students sweep at Innovation Week 2024 poster competition

Teresa Donnellan — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 13:46:37 +0000

IST doctoral students sweep at Innovation Week 2024 poster competition Teresa Donnellan Tue, 04/09/2024 - 09:46

In This Story

Information sciences and technology doctoral students Sajad Kargar, Ashish Hingle, and Julia Hing-ping Hsu won first, second, and third place awards, respectively, at the college’s Innovation Week 2024 graduate student poster competition. Their projects explored sustainable methods to cool data centers, effective methods to teach engineering ethics, and AI-driven methods to analyze community-based technology.

First Place: Sajad Kargar

Sajad Kargar, Innovation Week 2024

Sajad Kargar's project, “Improving Free Cooling Systems for Data Centers Through Simulations, Experiments, and Data Analytics,” focuses on the pressing challenge of cooling data centers, which consume large amounts of energy and have a significant carbon footprint. Kargar aims to design and implement novel cooling solutions that reduce energy consumption while maintaining optimal operating conditions for servers. For his poster project, he proposed leveraging natural convection and external temperature variations to efficiently cool data centers without reliance on powered equipment. Through his research, Kargar envisions a future where data centers operate more sustainably, aligning with broader efforts to reduce energy consumption in the digital infrastructure sector. Kargar is advised by Jeffrey Moran.

Second Place: Ashish Hingle

Ashish Hingle, Innovation Week 2024

Ashish Hingle’s project “Using Fictional Role-Plays for Engineering and Computing Ethics Instruction” focused on the innovative use of role-play to teach engineering and computing ethics. Under the guidance of his advisor, Dr. Aditya Johri, the project explored how, through role play, students engage in active discussions about ethical dilemmas in engineering, fostering critical thinking and empathy. The project explores both a quantitative element to understand how role-plays can be better assessed and a qualitative element highlighting what students learned through analysis of the discourse. Hingle's work is part of a broader initiative in the college to revolutionize ethics education in engineering, computing, and technology fields. The work focuses on fictional case studies grounded in reality rather than focusing solely on disaster cases and Hingle advocates for a more nuanced understanding of ethics as an everyday practice. In addition to his Innovation Week award, Ashish Hingle recently won second place in a graduate student research competition at the ACM Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education conference for his work on “Accessing and Democratizing AI for Whom? Student Learning through an Algorithm-Centered Supply Chain Case Study” as an ICICLE National AI Institute Educational Fellow. Hingle is advised by Aditya Johri.

Tied for Third Place: Julia Hsin-Ping Hsu

Julia Hsin-Ping Hsu, Innovation Week 2024

"How Do Gaming YouTubers’ Collaboration Shape Their Success? Implications for Embeddedness in Streamers’ Collaboration Networks,” explored the interconnected dynamics of collaboration among YouTube creators, specifically focusing on gamers on the platform. Julia Hsin-Ping Hsu and her team created a data collection pipeline using application programming interface (APIs) provided by Google’s YouTube and OpenAI’s GPT-4, analyzing over 4,600 YouTube videos across more than 500 channels. What emerged from analysis was not just a network graph of YouTubers’ collaborations but also insight into the relationship between collaboration patterns and channel success. By employing regression models, Hsu and her team established the significance of metrics like out-degree centrality in influencing subscriber count; in other words, the more a user collaborates with other accounts, the better their subscriber numbers. Hsu’s project offers a glimpse into the intricate interplay of social capital, credibility, and community-building in the digital age. Hsu is advised by Myeong Lee.

Hsu shared third place with Kadmiel Adusei, a doctoral student in civil and infrastructure engineering, who presented, “Alternative Disinfectant for Emergency and Point of Use Disinfection.” Adusei is advised by Kirin Emlet Furst.

Topics

information sciences and technology

Information Sciences and Technology Department

Community-Based Research

Artificial Intelligence

Developing a techno-ethical mindset

Rena Malai — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 14:35:12 +0000

Developing a techno-ethical mindset Rena Malai Wed, 08/24/2022 - 10:35

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Aditya Johri

Alexander Monea

Huzefa Rangwala

When it comes to technology, ethics can be complicated. With the rapid pace and evolution of digital technology, it can be tricky to understand how ethics plays a role, let alone stay on top of challenges, protocol, and procedures.

That’s why Ashish Hingle, PhD student and graduate researcher at George Mason, is helping students navigate the ethics terrain. Through an NSF grant titled Situated Algorithmic Thinking: Preparing the Future Computing Workforce for Ethical Decision-Making through Interactive Case Studies, Hingle will work alongside School of Computing’s Aditya Johri and Huzefa Rangwala, and Alexander Monea in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Their work will help technology-focused students think through ethical dilemmas, and provide the tools to imagine how ethics plays a role at school and work.

“To develop an ethical mindset, it is critical that students in IT, computing, and engineering learn to examine a problem, design, or a possible solution from different viewpoints and perspectives,” says Johri. “They should be able to take a morally sound and humanistic appraisal of the impact they have in the world through the technology they design, build, and deploy.”

Through role-play, case studies, and other activities Hingle hopes students will be engaged in technology ethics in a more creative and hands- on way.

“We want students to develop situational learning skills, and make the learning process more engaging, rather than encouraging the notion that technology ethics is closely associated with catastrophic or inequality driven events,” says Hingle. “Our job is to help students feel ready and to think of their own course of action to any ethical challenge they face with the technology they use or create.”

According to Hingle, sometimes the immediate solution is to solve ethical issues within technology, by applying more technology. This reliance on technology was a central theme of the Summer Institute of Technology Ethics at Santa Clara University, a research residency program where Hingle was selected as a research scholar. He says by giving students the tools to imagine their own course of action, it could be a more productive solution.

“We want ethics learning in technology to be more of an inclusive, fair, and transparent conversation, rather than students getting a history lesson of what went wrong in the past,” says Hingle. “Our students have been very receptive to exploring what technology ethics looks like in 2022, and are especially engaged when they realize how ubiquitous and pervasive technology can be. We want to continue to find ways to make technology ethics more approachable and adaptable.”

He says while digital technology is a relatively new concept, technology ethics have been discussed for decades. In our current landscape, they are often an afterthought. But by starting students on the path to an ethical mindset as it applies to technology, it could help prevent issues before they start.

“I’m excited about the work we do,” says Hingle. “When it comes to technology ethics, it makes sense for people to be at the center of our choices, not the tech.”

This work is partly supported by U.S. NSF Award #1937950. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies.

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