HLF2016 / Spotlight on Preethi Srinivas: HCI Researcher Improving Coordination and Communication in Hospital ICUs

This blog post originates from the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Blog. The 4th Heidelberg Laureate Forum is dedicated to mathematics and computer sciences, and takes place September 18-23, 2016. Abel, Fields, Turing and Nevanlinna Laureates will join the forum and meet 200 selected international young researchers.

Meet Preethi Srinivas, our next featured young researcher in a series about some of the women attending this year’s Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September 2016.

Photo courtesy of Preethi Srinivas

Preethi is currently wrapping up her PhD at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing and is originally from Chennai, India. She is also a Senior UX Designer at Regenstrief Institute Inc.

Preethi’s dissertation work has the potential for making a huge impact on communication in hospital intensive-care units. Notes made on paper and synchronous communication in ICUs can lead to issues in awareness and coordination. Preethi proposes a method for “rapidly generating, managing, and sharing clinical notes and action-items among ICU providers” as well as a “visual and tactile notifications system that induces minimal interruptions to an ongoing activity.” Long term, her research provides novel guidelines for mobile communication tools for ICUs. She says she is “proud of this little accomplishment although this research is a small, design-based contribution to the medical and HCI communities.”

As for many graduate students, Preethi’s ultimate success comes from learning to embrace failure. She also learned that it’s ok to switch projects if you aren’t engaging sufficiently with your current research direction.

I started my PhD program working on a research project that seemed to work well, but I soon learnt that I was not meant to be working on the project since I did not really find myself interested, even though I was working hard. This experience taught me that one of the huge factors to research is involvement or drive to being committed to a project. I soon moved onto another project that kept me committed, without which I would have never made as much progress as I did.

As someone who switched topics completely between Masters and PhD, and who went through a few project ideas before settling on a thesis topic for my PhD, I can relate to this completely!

Preethi is excited for HLF for the opportunity to interact with some of the world’s best and most passionate researchers. The forum’s interdisciplinary nature is also very appealing. She hopes to receive some great advice from fellow researchers on how to embark on independent research post-PhD, and is “looking forward to making new friends with whom I could potentially collaborate in future.” Plus, she loves to travel, and who wouldn’t want to visit such an interesting city as Heidelberg!

I believe you won’t be disappointed in the city nor the forum, Preethi. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Stay tuned to meet other young researchers, a special post about mentors, and the advice our featured women want to share with others.

The Low-down on Speaking at GHC

So you're speaking at GHC16. What do you need to know? How can you prepare to be the best you can be? How do you calm your nerves?!

Although I wasn't lucky enough to have any submissions accepted to this year's conference, I have spoken at Grace Hopper before along with many other venues. Let me start by reassuring you that this is one of the very best places to present. I have rarely found a more wonderfully supportive audience.

Let's get some of the official stuff out of the way. As a speaker, you need to thoroughly read through everything on the speakers section of the conference website. In particular, note the quick references on the right.

I'd like to draw your attention especially to the Speaker Ready Room info. There, you'll learn about uploading your slides before your presentation, and you'll see a link to the slides template. Please take the time to design your presentation using the template right from the get-go. Trying to shoehorn an existing presentation into the template tends to look unprofessional, and not using the template at all even more so. Also make sure to leave plenty of time to upload your presentation and test it. You'll want to make sure any embedded media is actually embedded, and that your fonts and colours look ok.

The conference website also includes some tips on speaking. I'd also like to share another amazing resource that brings you weekly inspiration and advice on speaking: a newsletter called Technically Speaking. Subscribe now and you will benefit leading up to your talk, and check out the archives as well.

Finally, I have a few tips of my own:

• Design your slides with as few words as possible. Convey the main idea through pictures and a short phrase.
• Add speaker notes into the notes section of the slides. When practising, you can simply read the notes at first. This should make you familiar enough to be able to improvise more day-of.
• Practice in front of colleagues at some point with enough time to receive feedback. Provide them with a written feedback form they can use to give you anonymous ideas for improvement.
• On the day of your talk, arrive in the room early to give yourself time to calm your nerves.
• Make sure you have access to water during the talk.
• Before you start, take some deep breaths, maybe with your eyes closed. Think yoga breathing.
• Invite the audience to chat with you after the talk, and stand somewhere where it's easy for the audience to actually do so.

Good luck with your talk – I'll know you'll be awesome!

HLF2016 / Spotlight on Hana Khamfroush: Research Associate in Wireless Communications and Networking

This blog post originates from the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Blog. The 4th Heidelberg Laureate Forum is dedicated to mathematics and computer sciences, and takes place September 18-23, 2016. Abel, Fields, Turing and Nevanlinna Laureates will join the forum and meet 200 selected international young researchers.

Meet Hana Khamfroush, our next featured young researcher in a series about some of the women attending this year’s Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September 2016.

Photo courtesy of Hana Khamfroush

Originally from Sanandaj in north-west Iran, Hana has a PhD in telecommunications engineering and currently works as a research associate at Penn State University in the United States.

Hana’s PhD focused on applications of network coding for geographic communications in dynamic wireless networks. Her Masters was on reducing energy consumption of routing protocols in wireless sensor networks. Hana’s current work looks at security and recovery issues of interdependent networks. More specifically, she says, “I work on modelling and analyzing cascading failures in interdependent networks and network recovery after massive disruptions.”

Hana’s proudest accomplishment is impressive indeed: she was named as one of the rising stars in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) by MIT in 2015. But despite such an amazing background, success did not always come easily. It was, at times, difficult to maintain motivation and perseverance as a graduate student.

I think the biggest lesson I learned from my PhD was to stay patient and work hard toward your goals, and be sure that “Hard work pays off.” I learned not to get disappointed by defeat, instead to learn from them and always have hope for better results. In the first two year of my PhD, I was not getting very promising results for my research and I didn’t even like what I was doing. I kept working harder and changed my research topic. The last year of my PhD was the best; I got many papers accepted and it felt like everything changed! I learned a lesson: I am the only one who can help myself, so I solved my problem by finding a more interesting research problem! Don’t wait for others to help you, change your status by yourself.

For HLF, Hana is particularly excited about the positive energy she finds at any conference or academic gathering. HLF is an even more amazing opportunity since she’ll get to meet some amazing new role models. She says, “it is very exciting to meet with those who were internationally known for their scientific contributions, and who actually made a change to the world.” She expects to learn a lot and bring back the positive energy when she returns home.

Hana is also looking forward to meeting other young researchers in her field. If you share research interests, don’t be afraid to reach out and say hello!

Keep up your amazing work Hana, and see you in Heidelberg!

Stay tuned to meet other young researchers, a special post about mentors, and the advice our featured women want to share with others.