Blog
From the beginning of September 2022 until the end of August 2023, I am on maternity leave. While I am not yet a parent (still waiting), I have already logged off/passed my duties at work and completed ongoing academic commitments from postdoc times. I do not commit to any mentoring or academic activities until the end of February 2023.
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Since May, I work as a Qualitative UX Researcher at WhatsApp, and I wanted to share my interview experience and the resources I found useful during the preparation.
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Since last November, I have been reflecting on my research career. I started my second postdoc, and I didn't want to stay postdoc for too long. I see postdoc as some sort of limbo. You gain experience, improve your publication record and try to check all the boxes necessary for the next step while staying on short-term contracts and most probably relocating to have international experience.
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In July 2021, we launched an online user study on digital COVID-19 immunity certificates in the Republic of Ireland. The study design included an initial online screening survey with a random prize draw among those who completed it (20 euro Amazon voucher), which attracted a bot attack with a massive number of fraudulent survey responses threatening the integrity of our screening survey. In this post, I describe the challenge and suggest strategies to mitigate or even avoid it for future studies.
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Ethics approval is an important and inevitable stage in any human-computer interaction research project. The evaluation time of the ethics of our crisis-response COVID-related research proposals was a long wait. While the pandemic is an exceptional time with quickly changing situations that require rapid response, in the end, it was well worth the wait and important not only for academics but for ... everyone. Why?
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I work as a postdoc, but how did I come to this? How does one become a postdoc? Here is the second part of the answer to this question; please, see the first part here: How does one become a postdoc? My story (part 1). Towards the end of the PhD, everyone starts thinking of “what’s next”. There are different paths one can take after adding a Dr to their title. In computer science, you are often asked whether you want to stay in academia or switch to industry…
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I am a postdoc in human-computer interaction and digital health, but how did I come to this? How does one become a postdoc?
Short answer: "You get your PhD and stay to work in academia," but here is my long(er) answer. I share it to show that a path leading to academic research in human-computer interaction (HCI) can be very different, and mine wasn’t straight and smooth.
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Since March 2020, I started thinking of what happens after my current postdoc position at Trinity College Dublin. I want to share my search experience and reasoning to reveal what happens before social media messages, starting with "I am happy to announce that I join...". For me, it was a long and tiring process, complicated by the pandemic and almost an existential crisis and re-evaluation of life priorities that it caused.
[4 mins read]
My work in computer science research is closely related to social factors and, ultimately, people. All my research projects involve participants and stakeholders to learn their experiences and views on various technology and health-related topics and issues. A big part of my academic work is being involved in a variety of activities designed to engage the wider community and broaden participation. These activities also contribute to "Education and Public Engagement (EPE)", which includes many and varied ways university staff and students engage with others outside the institution. While I am used to some EPE activities, I am still learning to use other ways and channels, like radio.
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The recent shift of academic (and not only) life into digital space due to lockdown and social distancing removed lots of important things from us, such as meeting colleagues face-to-face and going on conferences, but also made participation easier in some way. One of the drawbacks of that is the fear of missing out, as there is a large number of interesting online events on the topics of digital health, security and privacy, and human-computer interaction that seem to happen almost every day.
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Two weeks ago, I had an excellent opportunity to talk about my computer science career with young people from Kazakhstan interested in IT. I have shared my educational experience and the path that led me to my academic position. Talking about it and answering the questions, I have realised that it's not always clear what IT researchers do and how our work in Academia is different from the work in IT companies. I decided to write about it, but then I had an even better idea. As my experience can be biased and non-generalisable, I decided to run a little survey among my friends and colleagues who have both: academic and industrial experience in computer science. Next, I describe the main points that came up from our reflections.
[13 minutes read]
The effect the COVID-19 outbreak is currently having on the digital health sector is unprecedented. Still, it is accelerating the trends that were in place before: health apps were already becoming a part of everyday life as accessible resources for personal health. Yet, to maximise the positive impact of these trends, it is crucial to ensure the privacy and security of users’ data that has been the subject of concern and controversy. In this post, I talk about our recent work that consolidated recent research on the topic to support the design and evaluation of mHealth applications.
[10 minutes read]
Swedish national PAEHR system called Journalen is a service that provides patients with access to their health records, reflecting the legal right to read their health records on paper. However, the transition and progression from paper medical records to digital format was quite controversial and resulted in a number of papers on a different aspect related to it.
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Today is my 17th day in self-isolation. The number of cases in Ireland is increasing every day, like in most of the countries, and the official response is also similar to the rest of the EU. I am trying to follow the guidelines as best as I can, which for me means almost no human contact the whole quarantine time. This post is about my experience that I would like to document and share, as it's tough for me and I am learning how to deal with the situation. Because of these advantages and not having a background in physiology or working from home, I hesitated with this blog post, as it felt not worthy of sharing - there are so many great posts written already and mine will not add much to the “body of knowledge”.
[8.5 minutes read]
Almost 3,5 years of research work, 5 countries where it was conducted, 230 pages of the doctoral dissertation, 40 mins of defence presentation, many sleepless nights but also gratitude that is impossible to quantify to everyone who supported me along the way and participated in my studies! In this post I briefly (less than 230 pages) discuss what I have been working on, how was this unique experience for me, and what I have learned and obtained during those years. Of course, there is also a “future work” section.
[5,5 MINUTES READ]
During the first year of my Ph.D., I have focused on the accessibility design of touchscreen applications. This interest was motivated by the fact that the older population is increasing globally and older adults are interested in using technology. My grandma (on the photo) is a beautiful example of that. In response to these changes, there is a growing body of literature on how to make touchscreen devices and applications more accessible to them. In our systematic literature review, we look into the last decade of research-based design guidance, analyze it, extract individual guidelines, and categorize them based on two taxonomies: capability model and touchscreen design categories.
A year of maternity leave passed both quickly and very slowly, and in less than a month I am back to work full-time. It was out of my comfort zone to stop working and, before Emilia arrived, I was worried about how I’d adjust to my new stay-at-home mum life. Now, I have to figure out how to re-enter “il mondo del lavoro”, “the world of work” as Italians say it, having new responsibilities and a new life, really.
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