Janet Davis

Teaching

• CSC 151: Fundamentals of Computer Science I
• CSC 295: Human-Computer Interaction
• Past Courses

Summer research

This summer, I am looking for a couple of good students to work with me on the design of new computer systems to influence behavior with respect to environmental sustainability. You can read more about this project; if you are interested, you should plan to submit my application and the division's application by Monday, February 18.

Last summer, I worked with Sam Rebelsky and students Lorelei Kelly, Max Kuipers, and Tim Miller on implementing the media computation approach in CSC151. 

Interests

I recently completed my dissertation (woohoo!) on computer simulations to inform regional urban planning decisions.  My focus was on designing interactions with UrbanSim to support the legitimacy of using it as part of the political process.  In particular, I looked at designing new interfaces to enable citizens to interact directly with simulation results.

Other professional interests include Value Sensitive Design, Participatory Design, human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, networks, distributed systems,  the role of human values in the CS curriculum, and computational nutrition.

My personal interests and pleasures include beadwork and other crafts, walking, backpacking, yoga, gardening, cooking, reading, talking with cats, and collecting computer science jokes. You can look at my increasingly out-of-date personal web site.

I recently had way too much fun with my new Mac. You can see a photo tour of my garden in Seattle or my first office at Grinnell.

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, August 2006.  Advisors: Alan Borning and Batya Friedman. Dissertation: Value Sensitive Design of interactions with UrbanSim indicators [PDF].
• M.S. in Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, May 2001.
• B.S. in Computer Science, Harvey Mudd College, May 1999.

Selected Publications

• Janet Davis. Engaging and informing citizens with household indicators. In Proceedings of the Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-41), January 2008, Waikoloa, Hawaii.
• Janet Davis and Samuel A. Rebelsky. Food-first CS: Starting the first course right with PB&J. SIGCSE 2007.
• Janet Davis, Peyina Lin, Alan Borning, Batya Friedman, Peter H. Kahn, Jr., and Paul Waddell, Simulations for Urban Planning: Design for Human Values. IEEE Computer 39(9): 66-72, September 2006.
• Janet Davis and Tammy VanDeGrift. The Journey to a Teaching-Oriented Faculty Career: A Handbook of Advice for Graduate Students.  In Proceedings of the 2006 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, June 2006.
• Janet Davis. Household Indicators: Design to Inform and Engage Citizens. ACM CHI 2006 Extended Abstracts, April 2006.
• Alan Borning, Batya Friedman, Janet Davis, and Peyina Lin. Informing Public Deliberation: Value Sensitive Design of Indicators for a Large-Scale Urban Simulation.  Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Paris, September 2005.
• A.J. Brush, Morgan Ames, and Janet Davis. A Comparison of Synchronous Remote and Local Usability Studies for an Expert Interface. In Extended Abstracts of CHI 2004, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1179-1182. ACM Press, April 2004.
• Robert Grimm, Janet Davis, Eric Lemar, Adam MacBeth, Steven Swanson, Thomas Anderson, Brian Bershad, Gaetano Borriello, Steven Gribble, and David Wetherall. System support for pervasive applications (PDF, 1,777 KB). ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 22(4):421-486, November 2004.
• Janet Davis. REP: A communication mechanism for pervasive computing (PDF, 218 KB). Technical report, May 2001.
• B. Barden, J. Davis, R. Libeskind-Hadas, and W. Williams. On Edge-Disjoint Spanning Trees in Hypercubes. Information Processing Letters, 70(1):13-16, April 16, 1999.

Created August 14, 2006
Last modified March 15, 2008