Fall Technology Innovation Forum Day One - Webcast

• Hi, I’m Jenn Stringer, and I’m the campus CIO, and I am so thrilled to welcome you to the Fall Technology Innovation Forum. You know, when the innovation program was created to be run by our chief technology officer, Bill Allison, just last year, we were really thinking about how we could support innovators on campus and show that IT is really a strategic partner in almost everything that the campus does that’s mission-focused and is teaching and research, and honestly creative problem solving with our day-to-day issues as well. And when we came into the COVID world, it was even more important for us to support innovation in a way that enabled people to continue to be creative and solve challenging problems. I’m looking forward to all of the presentations, the lightning round presentations over the next couple of days, that really show how technology can transform the way we do our work, the way we teach, the way we do our research. And I’m thrilled to actually be able to help support something like this, even in such difficult times.

01:19 - So with that, I hope you enjoy the presentations at the Fall Technology Innovation Forum. And I hope that you share with others, because these will be recorded and made available, and I think that they will be well worth watching maybe even more than once. - Thank you, Jenn Your support means a lot to this community. I’m Bill Alison, UC Berkeley’s CTO, and the creator of the Berkeley Technology Innovation Program. Berkeley is known as a home of innovation and for pushing the frontiers of knowledge.

01:50 - What we aim to do with this program is connect those academic innovations happening all around us, to the operation and administration of the university. The CTO Innovation Program has three efforts. The largest piece and the focus today’s talks is the Berkeley Changemaker Technology Innovation Grants, the grant program launched in February, to fund proof-of-value experiments that support our university mission and align with the spirit of Berkeley Changemaker. We sought proposals that would deliver immediate value to the university, and I’m thrilled with the progress our awardees will be sharing with you today, four months later, towards addressing Berkeley’s most important challenges. The second part of the program, and the focus of tomorrow’s webcast, is the Berkeley Connected Campus Initiative that explorers and engages the concepts, challenges, and dilemmas behind smart cities to create new experiences and efficiencies for our own campus.

02:44 - Finally, the third part of the Innovation Program, Student Impact Partnerships, give technology support to organizations that support student innovations, such as Berkeley Changemaker and the Blum Center. The Fall Technology Innovation Forum was originally envisioned as a day-long, in-person event at the MLK Center. With the stress on our community as we collectively respond to the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve adopted Chancellor Christ’s charge of, “Do less with less.” We took this as a challenge to be better editors, focusing on what really matters and what makes Berkeley great. When the call for proposals went out, the world was still in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, and still is today.

03:24 - Our theme, “Innovation in the Time of Coronavirus”, reflects this time and the university’s role in meeting this moment. As I mentioned before, immediacy was always a key goal for the Innovation Program. In a few short months, during a pandemic, our amazing presenters have taken up challenges that are immediate in nature, but also strategic. Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoy the event. Many presenters are here live and are looking forward to chatting and engaging with you online during the event. Before we continue, I would like to pause and thank the many people who have been involved in helping the Technology Innovation Program and the Forum itself. We couldn’t have done it without you.

04:06 - And now we will turn it over to Rich Lyons and Berkeley Changemaker. - Hello, I want to start by thanking Bill Alison and his whole CTO team for this partnership. This Berkeley Changemaker Technology Innovation grants. I am Rich Lyons, the chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer on campus. And the CTO office, this is their initiative and it’s a wonderful one.

04:29 - I know a lot of us who are part of this event, have benefited greatly from it and I’ve seen some of your videos, which are great. I wanted to talk a little bit about the front end of that phrase, the Berkeley Changemaker part, and that’s where the partnership with my office is coming in. I worked very closely with Laura Hassner and we have been part of a larger team that has been working on a Berkeley Changemaker effort. So, just a couple of quick comments so you have that frame right up front. And then what I’ll do is I’m also going to provide one minute of advice from one of our faculty members that fits into a course called the Berkeley Changemaker. Maybe I’ll start with that course.

05:05 - So, the course was taught this summer for the first time. It was called the Berkeley Changemaker. And we pitched it at incoming freshmen, so this was just before they started late in the summer. We weren’t quite sure how many would sign up. We got over 500 incoming freshmen to sign up for this course called the Berkeley Changemaker. And we had faculty participation galore. It was actually built on a course, a faculty member in the business school, Alex Budak had originally started a kind of pilot course, if you will, a couple of years ago.

05:35 - And we augmented that content with content from Carol Christ from Janet Yellen, from Lisa Wymore and theater dance and performing arts with Glenda Hull with Oliver O’Reilly the chair of the faculty Senate. Anyways there’s a whole list of about 15 different faculty names that people that said no, I want to be part of that because it was that exciting. So in any event, the course went obviously, well, certainly demand was high. It went very, very well. The students were talking about how transformative it was for them. And, and there’s, an important inclusion theme.

06:09 - If this course had been called entrepreneurship, for example, it might’ve been judging from past course demands, 60% men and 40% women. This, course had 62% women participation from groups across our whole university. And we think it can be even more inclusive. So there is something in this concept as narrative of Berkeley Changemaker that makes people feel like they’re part of it. Whereas some of the other more traditional words, somewhat less. So it’s got a lot of critical thinking in it. A lot of communication, a lot of collaboration team skills. I won’t go through all the content of the course, but it is really a neat course. And as I said, Bob, the actual snippet is about a minute long. It’s Bob Jacobsen, our dean for undergraduate studies, who is focusing on, what advice would you give to our incoming students, our incoming freshmen and transfer students. And it’s just a, lovely minute.

07:01 - It’s one minute out of a whole course worth of content, but I thought it would be helpful for you to see some of what he’s up to. So we’re building out a set of connector courses, you know, what is the follow on course that the students can take? Will these follow on courses, not knock out graduation requirements? I mean, that’s ultimately an important thing to do to get even more students involved in this. And, ultimately it could, lead to something like a C school, a change school. Now, if, if Berkeley isn’t about change making, I don’t know what it is about. In fact, it’s precisely the distinctiveness in those two words together that has allowed us to trademark that phrase, Berkeley Changemaker.

07:39 - So it’s a theme that’s taking on great energy. And we going back to the relationship, the partnership with the CTO office, Bill, and our team early on we’re discussing, what could we partner on together? And we’re just super happy to be part of this technology innovation grant program and to be partnering on it. I just thought it would be helpful for you to have a little bit of a sense for Berkeley Changemaker, right? I’ll give you one example and I mean, no disrespect, but a Harvard University is of course, a very, very terrific university, a very creative university. If you thought about the phrase Harvard Changemaker does it, does it work? Does it resonate? So this is really an identity that Berkeley has been about for a long time. So it’s a values-based question. The status quo beyond yourself. A lot of the other things that are distinctive about Berkeley’s values.

08:32 - They are part of what are carrying this narrative. I’m going to to stop there. You, have get a lot out of this session today. We will run the tape on one minute of Bob Jacobson. You know, what advice would you give to our incoming freshmen? Thanks. (upbeat music) - What best advice would you give to our aspiring Berkely Changemakers Bob. - You’re starting off on a long and spectacular career along spectacular life. But don’t forget that part of the job is to change you. Part of the job is to turn yourself into who you want to be not necessarily who you are. You may want to change the world. You may want to change business. You may want to change technology and that’s great. But you don’t get to say I’m going to do it with the skills and the contacts and the friends and the abilities, memories, the stories that I have now, I have to build all of those.

09:34 - So this is the start of the time when you’re building the person, that’s going to go out and make the changes that you want to see. And you have to balance both of those. You’ve got to keep working on yourself to be the person you want to be able to do the things you want. (upbeat music) - I’m joined by Deepshikha Dhanasekar an undergraduate business and EECS student in the MET program. What are your thoughts on that? And maybe talk a little bit about your experiences working with Changemaker from the CTO office. - Yeah, definitely, thanks, Bill. My experience working with the lovely folks at Berkeley Changemakers and the big ideas contest, Berkeley students are itching to change the world.

10:20 - And, I’m super excited that we’ve been able to work on these student impact partnerships to kind of give them a voice and give them the ability to make change and kind of have that platform to actually bring their ideas to life. So much of the academic experience is not just classes anymore. And the thing that makes universities like Berkeley so attractive to high schoolers, is the fact that they get to build this entire Co-curricular experience. And I’m happy to say that we have kind of given them a first step to kind of get going in that direction. - So now let’s turn to instructional resilience.

10:56 - And the next set of speakers are going to show you some of the amazing work that they’ve been doing using innovative approaches to address their labs, and classrooms during the pandemic. - Remote learning has been a struggle on both sides. As a student instructor myself, it’s definitely been a challenge to keep students engaged. A lot of our Changemaker technology, innovation grants have provided different departments on campus with the resources to actually change and make their remote learning, a little different, like we’ve seen a lot of different ways of engaging with students and making it a lot more interactive, and I’m really excited to see how those projects are turning out and hearing from those individuals. - Chemistry was one of the first departments to decide to cancel in-person lab classes in the spring.

11:53 - This gave us some time to develop some initial videos to finish out the semester. - We’re the number one chemistry program in the world, and the top public institution. And when we looked at the lab classes we were offering in the fall, we wanted to make sure our students got that quality of education. - To say that we were apprehensive is an understatement, but we knew we had over 2,000 students that we had to take care of. - In talking to students in GSIs, we kind of got the idea that people were afraid that, you know, since we were going to continue like this, that their education would continue like that, and we knew we had to do better.

12:30 - - I was a little bit anxious going into it just because I think learning chemistry, and especially I’m taking an instrumentation class right now, is very, very hands-on. - Yeah, to be honest, before the semester started, I was kind of very worried about like the online organic chemistry lab format, because I know like organic chemistry, you learn in doing things, and you learned in doing things wrong. - I thought that the students wouldn’t be able to get anything out of online labs, mainly because when I like took lab classes, I wasn’t really able to kind of internalize anything until I did it myself with my own hands. - [Dr. Michelle] Part of the problem is the miniature size of some of our materials and equipment. Using cell phone cameras and cheap camcorders just doesn’t get down to that level of detail.

13:31 - Lighting needs to be such that you can still see the objects but also not have overwhelming glare off of the glassware and instruments. We spent a lot of time trying to get right, but it turned out we really needed some prosumer or professional quality equipment. - Hey, what’s up guys, welcome back to “Basics with Babish, Pasta”. (laughing) Chemistry has a lot in common with trying to learn how to cook. It’s not possible to really learn the material without having a hands-on experience.

14:02 - However much like short cooking lessons on YouTube, it can be useful to have a very concise informative video to help you figure out some of the basics, or fundamentals of the material. - [Woman] This grant helped us get the right equipment, so we could get the job done faster, and the job done right. We assembled a large team of lecturers, staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students, and ended up being able to digitize over 20 lab lessons over the summer, and we’re up to about 40 right now and working toward finishing out the semester with just about 45 digital labs. - [Instructor 1] Students are naturally disappointed when they can’t come to the labs in-person, but in general, the digital lab lessons have been very well-received. We structured it by building Google sites and embedding the short video clips that the students can watch.

14:50 - They can follow along as they’re doing the labs. We also put alternative paths in the lab, a kind of choose-your-own-adventure style, that really makes a difference. - [Instructor 2] The Choose Your Own Path feature of the sites is definitely my favorite part. Here’s the Palmer’s Lab in CHEM 1AL. It focuses a lot on trial and error and optimizing the properties of a polymer. Here, students can page through over 20 experimental results to find optimal mixes of ingredients.

15:18 - The point of this lab is not to have a single person view all experiments, but rather each student should pick their own path, and report back to the group. By adding their own observations to the class, they were able to construct optimal mixtures for polymer formulations. Here’s an example from organic chemistry. This experiment is relatively straightforward where students mostly have to follow a recipe. However, we put a few wrong turns in the lab. And they’re usually common mistakes students make during the live lab.

15:48 - Wrong paths in chemistry can be super-frustrating, and students often get discouraged in the class. We hope that seeing digital wrong turns will get them used to this, so that they might be expected to make mistakes in class, but still make it through the lab. We also included wrong paths students are cautioned to never take. This is great to show how unsafe certain situations can be done if they don’t follow directions. I would rather they make this mistake digitally, than have a potentially unsafe situation.

16:16 - The flexibility of the sites doesn’t end at wrong turns. My staff were able to do things like distribute customized data to students, which is super nice given that they can’t get the data themselves. It is a natural part of chemistry to see and obtain your data, and to be able to compare your results to your classmates. We also want them to make their own individual calculations and wrangle with real messy data like in the lab class. Possibly one of the more challenging labs to adapt was the Smells Lab in CHEM 1AL, which by its name obviously means, students should be spelling compounds in person.

16:49 - Instead we offered students animations created by our demonstration lead, Karen Chan, to have characters offer their opinion of the compounds. - Well, the most interesting thing I found the advantage we have in online lab is that we can rewatch the things over and over again. So if we miss something at the first time, we can catch it later on. And I think, yeah, our lab, like we share Zoom links and watch links together, watch videos together, watch those sites again together, and we can have like a deeper discussion among our groups. And like I said, more times to ask questions with GSIs.

17:28 - - Definitely didn’t feel like a lack of any content, but I did really like also how some of the procedures include what would happen like, if you did the wrong thing, or like they asked like, should you do this option versus this option? So there’s kind of like a flexibility in the learning aspect of actually doing the lab that I really enjoy. - I was really impressed. I think their website format and like having like multiple videos of what is happening in the lab was a much like better format, I think. Like we were doing a lot of TLC, and the students have like the options to choose between like, what is a good TLC technique and which one to proceed with. And then they can choose to proceed with the wrong one and see how that turns out. And I think that that’s a lot more representative of what is actually happening when you’re doing an in-person lab.

18:31 - - Very impressed, I thought it was like very thoroughly done, and I especially liked that you could go down the wrong path. - [Narrator 1] We love the way these digital experiments turned out. We would never offer a fully digital chemistry class, because it’s just too important to get these hands-on skills. However, we are looking forward to taking advantage of this now quite comprehensive digital library. - [Narrator 2] This can help us as events such as wildfires, cause brief educational disruptions, or if a student needs to make up an assignment.

19:07 - We have all sorts of great uses for these digital labs, even outside of a pandemic. - [Narrator 1] Not everyone involved in making digital chemistry we’re able to make an appearance in this video. So I’ve put their names on the screen here. Our process was highly collaborative and involved a diverse range of people that run the gamut at Cal. Regular staff, faculty, lecturers, graduate and undergraduate students were all involved. We are continuing our efforts well into the spring of 2021. - Hello. My name is Amin Jazaeri and I’m the Director of Instructional Support and the Physics Department, I’m the Principal Investigator of the PEARL Project. PEARL stands for Physics Experiments Accessed Remotely Laboratory. Traditionally, physics experiments are very hands-on and the students should interact with the equipment to control the experiment, make observations and collect data. During COVID we started sending kits to our students, to do the experiments at home and give them the opportunity, to still be able to double up some of the hands-on skills.

20:08 - Nevertheless, there are certain experiments that cannot be duplicated using these kits due to safety reasons, costs and complexity. The outcome of this project allows students to multi-access experiments and control them through the internet. We have converted a number of experiments, that they’re controlled either mechanically or electronically to achieve this goal. In some instances, we had to modify the traditional laboratory setup, in a way to be able to fit the model that we had in mind. My team members now, introduce themselves and explain what they have achieved so far.

20:39 - - Hi, my name is Jeremy Rahe and I built this mechatronics module. We’re using an Arduino board to create a wireless network that students can communicate to, through a web interface. They will be able to control this stepper motor, which is powered by our power supply and will run this drive belt, which will position the center platform. In this particular experiment. We have it set up with an object lens, focusing lens and a screen. When students position the center platform, they can take a measurement of the object on the screen and the position of the lens, and be able to determine the focus length of the lens through a web camera.

21:27 - (machine buzzing) - Hello, my name is Eric Deck and I’m a fourth year physics student here at UC Berkeley. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been working with my colleague, Jeremy Rahe, to build this setup that allows students to explore oscillatory motion, by controlling this off the shelf wave driver, as well as a custom built linear rail system, students are able to control both the amplitude and frequency of waves, as well as the tension on the cord that we’re driving. This will allow the students to explore oscillatory and wave-like motion in an introductory class. So as one example here, I apply frequency. You can see that on our spring we have, de-coherent motion.

22:21 - As I change the frequency applied to this wave, you’ll see that we eventually find standing waves. And if my colleague Jeremy adjusted tension, you’ll be able to see that, the character of the standing waves changes. (machine buzzing) We’re also able to control, this via remote access computer and students can observe this cord directly via camera. I’m here to demonstrate both custom software and hardware. I’ve built, to allow students to remotely control physical experiments from anywhere in the world.

22:55 - Here, you can see that I have custom control software, that allows these digital dials, to communicate with a microcontroller running dedicated control software and turn these motors mounted to our apparatus, via custom 3D printed parts that I’ve designed. So in essence, if I turn these digital dials, I can control the correct voltage and the correct current into our power supply, allowing us to observe this beam of plasma bending inside of this bowl, which would allow a student to make a measurement of the charge to mass ratio of an electron and learn about electromagnetics and particle physics. - I’m Billy Pierce. I developed the software module, what this module allows you to do is act as the software interface between the students on the front end and the electronics we’re controlling on the backend. If you see here, you can, if you look here, you can see the scheduling side of things. So let’s say I was a student. I wanted to do a lab tomorrow at 12:00 PM.

23:56 - I could here click sign in order to sign up for that time slot. If I realized it didn’t work for me, I clicked sign again to unsign up for it. I can move around and sign up for multiple different time slots and if another student is signed up for a time, I can’t also register for that team, same time slot. It requires me to sign up with my Berkeley email, which acts as a really nice authentication function, to make sure students aren’t able to randomly sign up for things. We’ve got other security features to, limit the number of, site signups they can have in a certain time period. And other things like that.

24:27 - In addition, once this data is, once the signup is scheduled, it means that only during your time slot, can you push data to the backend, which will make sure that students aren’t able to write or change the lab when they’re not physically there. And we’ll also make sure that only students who are currently doing the lab are able to view the video. - Hi everyone. I’m Tammy Mau, the Lab Instruction Manager for the Department of Integrative Biology. And I’m thankful for this opportunity to present a few short videos about our project, Integrative Biology Takes Remote Learning Outside. In IB, this is what our classroom can look like.

25:04 - We had a bit of a challenge when COVID hit and we were forced into remote learning. And this is because our field and lab courses are very much experiential. Here, you see students in the weather, carrying their quadrats and nets, ready to measure and observe. Our courses are skills-based. They learn tools and techniques. They are literally hands-on. They can occur in labs or be outside, even in very remote places. Lastly, our courses are places where a community is built. Longtime friendships are often made here.

25:41 - So our challenge is, how do we replicate this in the time of COVID? And I’m so thankful for the Changemaker Technology Innovation grants that really helped us meet that challenge. We did a few things. We designed a website where our instructors could come to innovate. We provided ideas for technology and techniques. But one of the best things that we did was just to fund graduate students for their ingenuity and hard work. I wanna highlight three innovations from two of our field courses and one of our lab courses. So let’s get outside.

26:24 - - One of the pictures that we took in the botanical garden, we used to create an online site that the students could see during the lab period and also in their own time. And we used these pictures as well to evaluate in each of the quizzes or midterms, and also they need, they used these pictures to make their own drawings, In this class we usually (voice muffling) drawing component that they need to draw all the plants and learn the plants in that way. So all the picture that we created in this, in this class were used for drawing purposes. - I think a very unique thing about the Ethnobotany Lab is that we have a lot of hands-on activities, and that’s something definitely that students missed from having to be in this online virtual world with us. But the way we came at it was we decided to record all these activities that we typically do with them in lab.

27:41 - Things from creating your own lip balm, your tinctures, other alcohol-based extractions, cream, sauce, tea blends, and you name it. There’s many activities that we did in class to try to engage with them through their senses on how are all these plants that we study not only very common to use in your daily life, the idea was through these demos, video demos that we prepare for them, so that they would get an idea that they can actually do these things, too, in the comfort of their own home. And some of the students are actually trying some of these preparations out for their group presentations. All the products that we made during these video demos, were the products that were placed in their care packages. So it was a win-win overall for both the students and us.

28:33 - - Hi, I’m Isaac Krone, and I am the head GSI for Human Anatomy this year. During COVID we had to take the class all online this year, which is very difficult transition for a class that is, first off, a lab class, and second, a class that relies a lot on spatial thinking and learning to recognize structures in the human body. So one of the things that I wanted to do, and have been pretty successful in so far, is getting students to use their hands to actually learn anatomy. And instead of palpating structures and going through the cadaver, like we would in a normal year, I wanted students to draw things out since that’s something that I’ve always heard students say is very helpful to them. So every week I had a couple of short, maybe 10-minute drawing lessons on structures that we were going over that week.

29:35 - And I tried to make it something that would be very easy, just visually for students to replicate, making those structures myself, drawing them all out from the simplest (voice cutting out) organization to the smallest degree of organization. So for instance, in the skull, going from just drawing the cranial skeleton versus the facial skeleton, and then going in and drawing the major features in the bones, and finally going in and filling in the foramena and all of these little details. I think it worked very well for students. And I got some good feedback from students just saying that these were good resources. I think we’ll keep them around in future iterations of this course. - Like everybody in this COVID pandemic, we really want to try to make the best of a really bad situation.

30:29 - And, especially felt a lot of responsibility to this group of students. Thinking about that they have been isolated in their homes, away from their friends, some of them isolated from their family members, and trying to finish their education. Especially in my class, it’s a lotta seniors. So this is really often their last year at Cal. And I just felt an enormous responsibility to those students to try to give them the best experience that I could, and I knew that the way the students really engaged with the learning is to be outside and to really immerse themselves in learning their trees and shrubs, and wooden vines, learning their names, learning how they vary in different places across California.

31:18 - And so I had to think about how could I replicate that in this really strange year, when we weren’t allowed to congregate. We weren’t allowed to be together in a group. And I thought the best way to do it was to make sure that the students had access to the places that we were gonna go learn the plants. And so I required the students to be present in the Bay Area. I set up field trips for them, where they could go on their own, or in small groups, socially distanced, of course, and learn the plants.

31:51 - And to do that, it required a lot of work for myself and Isaac, the graduate student instructor, to go to those parks ahead of time and record videos to explain how to identify the plants that we were learning that week, and then set up a quiz for them where it’s like a scavenger hunt, where sometimes we use little bits of flagging tape. Sometimes we use natural landmarks on the trails, and the students find the plants and tell me what they are to kinda quiz themselves and make sure that they’re learning. And so far we’ve learned over, I think about 110 species, 120 species of woody plants. The students have really, really gotten a lot out of being able to go outside. They just report, just being so overjoyed to be outside and away from their computer, engaging in the material, engaging in learning the plants, engaging in learning about the outdoors.

32:48 - And so it’s been worthwhile for the students, and it’s, I feel like it’s been a success. - Well, thanks Bill. And hi everyone. I’m Chris Hoffman from Research, Teaching and Learning, or RTL. I was just testing a VR experience that we recently developed. And I was exploring an ancient tomb from Egypt’s 26th dynasty. My colleague Owen McGrath and I are excited to be working with Bill on the Changemaker projects to build a community of practice around AR, VR, and immersive visualization technologies.

33:47 - This effort will bring together four Changemaker projects that you’ll be hearing from today as well as others working on these emerging technologies, both on campus and beyond. We’re especially excited to be exploring the intersections of these technologies across the spectrum of activities that take place on our campus. For teaching and learning, for research and scholarship, and for outreach and public service. In addition to supporting the work of the projects that you’ll be hearing from, Owen and I will be exploring with the community several themes that have emerged in our work with these XR or extended reality technologies. First, accessibility. We want to ensure that the experiences we are developing are inclusive to diverse users across a truly representative range of visual, auditory, motor and cognitive capacities. Second, curation.

34:38 - To develop best practices for creating and managing content that can withstand the rapidly evolving technology landscape. Third, interoperability, to help these digital assets and experiences coexist with other tools and resources that we already rely on. And finally, security and privacy, and a host of other ethical issues as well, so that we can address very real concerns around personal privacy, the cost of access to technology and the responsibilities that we take on when representing knowledge and experience. As community, we at UC Berkeley have an opportunity and are already leading the way in many of these areas. Now coronavirus has caused immense challenges for the University, and all of our presenters today are working on important challenges that we face, in education and society in general.

35:30 - We’ll hear from a team in Ethnic Studies, under the leadership of Dr. Pablo Gonzalez, who are using media and augmented reality to bring powerful stories to life. Let’s begin with Dr. Pablo Gonzalez of the Ethics Studies department about his project, Scaffolding Stories, Building Communities, Ethnic Studies and Podcasts and Augmented Reality in the 21st Century Campus. (inspirational piano music) - [Dr. Gonzales] The purpose of Scaffolding Stories Building Communities is to work collaboratively with students, ethnic studies faculty, and community partners to bridge the gap between ethnic studies and technology through the use of podcasting and augmented reality.

36:13 - The vision is to amplify stories, stories untold, left behind, and stories waiting for their moment. The stories of communities of color - [Student 1] The questions we asked ourselves were how can we contribute to this unfolding? How could we add to the critical thinking taking place in ethnic studies? And where could we take this? Our first response was through podcasting. Ethnic studies based podcast offers a space for narratives that too often go untold or unheard, and they create discussions around issues and topics that are relevant to the current moment we are living through. - [Student 2] Secondly, we are at a watershed moment in the United States. Marginalized communities are contesting monuments that represent a broader experience of suffering and violence.

37:04 - Augmented reality gives us the opportunity to respond to and comment on the erasers in history through new technologies and forms of telling stories. - With the pandemic not allowing us to work on campus, We have reoriented the fall semester goals to work on support and infrastructure. We began our own encounter as a collective. Our collective consist of nine highly dedicated ethnic studies based faculty and students. None of us were experts or highly trained in podcasting or augmented reality, so we trained with the intent on producing step-by-step easy to follow tutorials.

37:49 - We have conducted trainings for six ethnic studies courses and one campus community partner. We also created a series of tutorials on how to produce a podcast and how to produce augmented reality projects. - I’m one of the ethics studies students that has been working on trainings and tutorials for ethnic studies classes. I’ve learned a lot about podcasting and AR from creating this content alongside my peers, and I’m very grateful that I can share this knowledge with other ethnic studies students. Technology is really important for us to stay connected with other students and community members, especially now that we’re unable to meet in person.

38:31 - But I think that years from now, the work that we’re doing will continue to evolve and be just as important for ethnic studies students who are interested in using technology to document their stories and perspectives. As ethnic studies student, it’s rare that we have the opportunity to integrate technology with our field of study. So I’m very grateful that I get to be a part of this project and learn about podcasting and AR, and that I can help train others to do the same. - [Student 2] As an ethnic studies student, I spend a lot of time engaging with the stories of communities of color that emphasize resilience in an ongoing fight for liberation. It is extremely important to cultivate a safe space for students of color to have these conversations to develop their own voice and understanding of themselves.

39:15 - Through podcasts and augmented reality, I’m able to take an active part in cultivating these spaces for students just like me. At a time where we depend on our technology to sustain our connections with our community, this project allows us to expand the possibilities of communication and develop a new avenue of knowledge that will remain accessible for generations to come. - [Dr. Gonzales] Our initial goals for the year are to build a working website that houses podcast and augmented reality projects that ethnic studies courses create throughout the fall and spring semester. It is also to offer skilled assistance for community-based organizations that want to create podcasts and use augmented reality as a tool We hope to also offer assistance to faculty, student groups, and staff on possible podcast ideas as a way of communicating to broader off-campus audiences. - [Female Student] One of our main projects is the development of an ethics studies archive.

40:22 - The archive focuses on the use and implementation of augmented reality and mixed reality technologies to see below and also to see above the clouds. It is our inverted Periscope project, a project dedicated to remembering and preserving our stories. Augmented reality is the future. It lays at our fingertips information like the vast archives housed at the ethnic studies library. Our mission is to preserve and amplify the archive in ways that make these primary sources literally jump off the page. We are excited to learn and use up and coming AR software and applications that faculty, students, and communities can use to usher in a new era of remembering the past and building the future.

41:11 - - [Female Student 2] We see this project as a continuation of a longer struggle for ethnic studies at Cal. we continue to reflect on the sacrifices and accomplishment of the original 59th strikers, the third world liberation front, and generations of students of color who insist on telling their stories. - [Female Student 2] In the future, we envision of physical space, a studio where students will be able to come together to engage with the technology and with each other. We hope to integrate more forms of technology, such as the HoloLens 2. This allows us to bridge with other mixed reality projects on campus. - [Dr.

Gonzales] We hope to continue building partnerships 41:53 - with community members and organizations on and off campus. Community is at the core of ethnic studies, and we believe our current work with podcasting and augmented reality can bring our community closer together, especially during these times. Next we will turn to InsightXR a project led by Dr Luisa Caldas 2 00:42:21,300 –> 00:42:25,270 of the Department of Architecture and Elnaz Tafrihi, a PhD student in Architecture, Building Science and Technology - [Bailey] Hi everybody my name is Elnaz Bailey and together with my faculty advisor, Professor Luisa Caldas we’re going to discuss our project, InsightXR: Re-imagining the Future of Design Learning Through XR Collaborative Technologies Design learning in the field of architecture mainly happens in the studio environment, Which is characterized by extensive collaboration and by sharing of physical prototypes. Although online collaboration was already used in academic environments and professional practice, unprecedented times such as COVID-19 drastically increased the demand for such collaboration methods, inevitably altering the way that we will practice design in the future. Through remote collaborative platforms such as video conferencing do not provide an adequate environment for sharing complex three-dimensional models.

43:18 - Furthermore, students are often relegated to passive viewer positions. Now those students feel comfortable offering voice-based feedback, what became known as Zoom silence, further contributing to their sense of isolation. Due to COVID-19, all student experiences suddenly had to transition online. This increased need for online design learning was what motivated our team to develop InsightXR, to provide a platform with enhanced designed collaboration features for today’s needs. InsightXR enables multiple users to collaborate from different locations using AR, VR and MR technologies.

43:52 - It provides users, in this case design students and faculty with information about areas of their design models, that ellicit high concentration of focus and interest. This data can be ultimately used to inform the generation of new design ideas. In order to understand our user’s needs, so far we have conducted eight interviews with graduate students in architecture using Zoom. The goal of these interviews was to understand the correlation between the designers feedback, and their non-verbal interaction with design content, as well as discovering ways to enable designers to receive and provide feedback in remote conditions, to improve their design work. Participants were asked to view two design projects using their phones or tablets using an eye tracking application called Hawkeye.

44:40 - Next, they were asked to use a conventional whiteboard to provide feedback on physical features of each design project, by scribbling and marking up any areas that they felt should be improved. We combined the raw eye data from Hawkeye, with the user’s positive, negative and neutral feedback from Miro and visualized them over each image for each project portal. Then we cross classified and color coded the eye tracking data according to its association with positive, negative, and usual feedback marked by our user on Miro. Our results from experiment one, were used to inform the first iteration of InsightXR AR platform. In our application, scribbling was substituted for a color based markup system, precluding the need for additional classification.

45:28 - By selecting a color coded key red, blue or grey, users explicitly classified their own feedback. This feedback can then be correlated with eye tracking data that captures the intensity of the user’s engagement. Verbal annotations provide complimentary qualitative feedback and additional drawings and images can be accessed by the user, to further clarify other design aspects. At this point, we will discuss InsightXR user interface. Users first goes through an authentication process, where they can sign up or log in to use the application.

46:02 - The user can place the model in the scene, by selecting an anchor point individualized point cloud. Users can use different methods to provide feedback to their peers, using our apps such as Direct Feedback by tapping on different areas of the model, or painting it a certain color based on their positive, negative or neutral feedback. Users can also leave the designer of the project comments and visualize uploaded images of the project. While the user is interacting with the content, data regarding the user’s phone movement, as well as eye movements are tracked and saved to our database. Which is then exported to Grasshopper to visualize and further modify the design.

46:42 - In order to test and analyze InsightXR AR application, we are conducting interviews with students in the course, ARCH 249, Daylighting in Architecture. Our interviews are semi-structured and are done using Zoom. During the process, the student participant is asked to use the app to view two projects. One project designed by their classmates and the second the project designed by our research group. Based on our interview results, the user was extremely satisfied with the 3D content visualization, ability to comment and access to 2D design documents within the InsightXR app.

47:19 - While using our app, students are no longer passive viewers, but active agents. After testing InsightXR AR application, the user was then presented with their visualization results in Grasshopper, based on their interaction with the 3D content in AR. Participants were then asked about the accuracy and usefulness of our visualizations in Grasshopper. In the future ,this visualization data will be used to further evolve solutions, using evolutionary design methods. In terms of future work, we will be conducting more user studies on the AR application, to inform our next steps in the design of the InsightXR app, as well as Grasshopper development side of the project.

48:00 - We will streamline the submission of 3D models from Grasshopper into the AR application. Finally, we will use AR feedback results as an input degenerative design in Grasshopper. InsightXR will also explore virtual reality as a ground to generate new design ideas based on user feedback, thank you. Let’s listen to Dr. Eric Paulos faculty member in EECS who will describe Lucid Learning a tool to help students practice collaboration, early in their careers (upbeat music) - Hi, I’m Eric Paulos, I’m an associate professor in electrical engineering computer science here at UC Berkeley. I’m also on the faculty of the Berkeley center for new media.

48:44 - I’m going to tell you a little bit about the Lucid learning project. You got a chance to see an early prototype in action and also meet the incredible team behind its research and development. Now, Lucid sort of means something that’s obviously easily communicated or easily understood but it also can mean bright or luminous. And we find inspiration in both of those definitions in the way that we think about this project. It started by thinking about creativity and particularly across different domains of practice.

49:14 - We want to understand if there were commonalities in the way that people worked and the kinds of artifacts they produced during the process of their creative pursuits. We were really interested in how they used and reused these kinds of documents, and we think of that broadly as kind of artifacts that are produced in the creative process. We did some early semi-structured interviews with 15 different creative practitioners across the broad range of disciplines. So, folks like AR, VR artists, ceramicist, weavers, fashion designers, industrial designers, violin makers, computer scientists and so on. And we looked for the commonalities of how they used these artifacts within their creative process and how they also reuse them.

50:01 - And we drew a lot of inspiration to design a sort of creativity support tool that would be beneficial to a sort of studio practice for any of these different disciplines. However, we also thought about it as an educational tool that could be used in the classroom to support the kinds of teaching and pedagogies that lend themselves towards more open-ended problems, those found in design, a lot of artistic practices and those in the humanities that lend themselves towards more of a qualitative assessment. And the tool that we developed is called Kaleidoscope, it’s modeled after the kind of busy, messy, but inspirational workspaces that we all inhabit. And it supports a range of different artifact productions, things from of course, text and Google docs, but also images and videos, you know, 3D models, Figma designs, collaborative support, kinds of repository such as GitHub. And the ideas that really rather than focus on the sort of final showcase and artifact production that might be part of the final piece, we really wanted to sort of capture all the sidesteps and the pivots and all the beauty and valuable messiness that’s part of that creative process, and it’s a new approach to documenting and of this creative work, and we put it into a classroom setting.

51:26 - And in the classroom it allows elements of the designs that students are working on to receive really quick feedback from either a fellow classmates or from the teaching staff, or even outside domain experts. Within teams Kaleidoscope helped facilitate sort of best practices of team communication, setting of roles, measuring progress and all the kind of distribution of tasks that go in on in groups. For the teaching staff, it provides a valuable new lens to observe and understand how group dynamics are merging, the kinds of participation and contribution that’s occurring in these different groups, highlight when groups are actually struggling, but also when they’re actually succeeding. And we also allow individuals to tag specific artifacts and elevate them to a sort of portfolio showcase, and this can be used to showcase a series of final designs in a course and also a personal portfolio for students to take with them while still retaining all of the underlying process and messiness that is important to reflect and think about those individual projects. We’ve developed this prototype Kaleidoscope, we’ve deployed it in a human centered design course, a computer science course at UC Berkeley, and it’s running now, we have about 110 students in this class, and we’re learning a lot about how students are reflecting on it and using it, and we hope to actually iterate on our design and deploy it in further courses outside of engineering in the future, we look forward to your feedback but I really want you to get a chance to see some of the elements of how Kaleidoscope works. So I’m going to hand off to the team now.

53:10 - (upbeat music) - [Instructor] Group collaboration during remote instruction can be challenging. Design courses like CS160, user interface design and development include highly collaborative group projects. Kaleidoscope allows teams to share their creative artifacts in a shared digital studio building a reflective collaborative space that evolves with the team. Artifacts are generated throughout the creative process ranging from temporary low fidelity artifacts to final polished outputs, these include sketches, meeting notes, reports, prototypes, and many others. While sketches and brainstorms might usually be kept separately from CodeCommits or digital video, Kaleidoscope brings all these artifacts together into a studio space where they can be seen as parts of a larger whole.

54:00 - The visual layout provides rapid foraging behaviors, foregrounds progress, and collects the history of ideas chosen and set aside, directions taken and not. One student describes kaleidoscope as a go-to place where we can know that all of our developed ideas and drafts are kept. Besides providing a centralized history of a project Kaleidoscopes flexible interface allows direct interaction with the artifacts. Users can rearrange and group artifacts to find new inspiration and ways of thinking or resurface old ideas. Kaleidoscope also situates feedback directly within the context of the project’s history.

54:36 - Students can request feedback from team members or publicly from the entire class. Feedback is visible in context with the artifacts so it can be recalled and referenced. Students have found this feature particularly useful allowing them to converge on and improve ideas within a team as well as lease inspiration and franchise from classmates. Kaleidoscope provides insight to instructors about the class as a whole by easily grouping all submissions from an assignment in a single view. Instructors can get a sense of a class’s strengths and weaknesses as well as share exemplary examples of students.

55:08 - Students can see their classmates work as they develop their own projects learning from each other’s techniques and processes. After a project is complete the studio provides a history, it contains resources used, knowledge gained, and decisions made. It can also be reformatted easily into a publishable portfolio webpage showcasing only chosen artifacts. Kaleidoscope is still under active development releasing new features weekly, we’re developing visualizations to help students learn about their own approaches to design as well as features to support domains beyond CS160, such as costume design, theater or technical research. We also envision extensions connecting to AR and VR mediums for collaboration and exploration.

55:47 - Kaleidoscope provides a flexible platform for remote collaborative creative projects especially in Berkeley courses, as well as a launchpad for future research into effective documentation and artifact focused process across creative disciplines. (upbeat music) Thank you. Let’s listen now to Dr. Bjoern Hartmann of EECS, and graduate student Bala Kumaravel as they describe VRTutor, a platform that helps people work together collaboratively in virtual reality - Oh, hi everyone. I didn’t see you there. This is one of the problems of VR today. If you’re in virtual reality, it’s hard to have interactions with people outside of virtual reality. Our research project, VRTutor, addresses this and related challenges of integrating VR into courses. My name is Bjoern Hartmann. I’m an Associate Professor in EECS and the Faculty Director of The Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation here at UC Berkeley.

57:05 - In this talk, my PhD student Bala Kumaravel will give you an overview of VRTutor. But before that, I’d like to sincerely thank the Berkeley Changemaker Technology Innovation Grants for encouraging and supporting all the great projects we’re seeing today. We appreciate the financial support, the regular check-ins as well as innovation forums such as these, which allow for exchange of ideas across different teams. Let me now turn it over to Bala. - Hi everyone. Today I will be presenting the progress on a research initiative, VRTutor. This work is close to my heart. It addresses a core issue that we users and instructors of VR face so often.

57:49 - But before I go into the technical details of the initiative itself, I would like to set some context of why and how this work came about. Since 2018, I have been involved with the running of the course CS 294 137, Virtual Reality and Immersive Computing. This course caters to students having a wide variety of academic backgrounds. Students use a popular and well-documented game engine, in our course, we use Unity. So we walked through the students on working with Unity and the students tried this alongside in their own VR systems.

58:24 - And of course, some of them run into program bugs and some of them would want to showcase their work so that they can get feedback from their peers or their instructor. To do either of them, students first launched their VR application, they then wear the VR headset and proceed to use and point to different elements in the VR application. The instructor or a peer then views the first person video feed of what the student in VR actually sees. Users are not in the same location anymore too, we are all working from our homes. As an item to solve these issues, we developed the first version of VRTutor and we presented the system at the UIST 2020 conference that happened a few weeks ago.

59:13 - The current status quo for communication with the VR user is the VR mirror. It shows what the VR user sees at that moment. But the VR user doesn’t see the external user and their actions. And this often leads to frustrating and inefficient between the two. The external user constantly tries to guide or get to look at some particular points of the VR user and this is hard to communicate.

59:42 - Such interactions are commonly referred to as asymmetric interactions where the users use two different interfaces. What a VRTutor System does is that it allows the external user to not just view the VR user, but also to interact with them by providing them with affordances to draw over a 3D space. But let’s walk through an example scenario that illustrates working with VRTutor. The task is a collaborative 3D modeling task, done using an existing closed source application named Blocks which is made by Google. Here, a first-time VR user collaborates with an experienced external users who’ve used the VR activity in real time through VRTutor’s iPad interface.

00:27 - To onboard the VR user, the user is new to VR, with the actions of VR controller, the outside expert uses the controller panel. The interaction is quite simple, they press a button on the panel and the corresponding button gets highlighted in blue on the VR users controller. Not that these blue highlights are entered by VRTutor and not the Blocks application itself. The external user, then proceeds to explain its role verbally and tells him what it does. Now, they need the VR user to load a specific 3D model from a grid of choices.

01:05 - So they share a prior frame to the VR user. The VR user places that frame at a convenient location in the environment and external user then marks the grid element to be chosen. Using that as a reference, the VR user proceeds to select that model and performs or continues with the tasks. Now, let’s see how does interaction plays here for the external user. Since the 3D model grid changes continuously, it becomes hard for the external user to refer to a specific thing.

01:36 - So the external user chooses a prior frame from below. They then share that frame to the VR user. Then they proceed with marking the right object for the user to pick. This allows the external user to carefully inspect dynamic scene elements and also avoid frequent back and forth communication regarding this. After opening up the right model frame, the external user wants the VR user to pick up a specific part.

02:06 - They directly annotate the part over the mirrored feed and then VRTutor projects those annotations at the corresponding position in the 3D scene. Compared to annotating on a shared screen there is an easier and a more direct interaction. Note that this works because unlike before, content objects here are static and stationary. If the part is not in the view of the VR user the external user browses the frames captured in different angles in the VR scene, selects the desired frame and then annotates over it. The VR user is then guided to that object through direct (indistinct) arrows rendered in the VR scene.

02:44 - This scenario also resembles our users training task. With VRTutor, users completed such tasks significantly faster with fewer errors and pursue the lesser workload. It’s important to note that these annotations need to be placed at the right depth. As they will not make sense when viewed from a different perspective. But how do we do this with just 2D video feeds? For this We use a batch of video feeds, one each for the left and right eye of the VR user.

03:17 - We compute a live depth map on the scene through computing optical flows and subsequently disparity between them. To get the right constants, we calibrate using two cross to square grids at known positions in the scene. Now where do we go next? I said, COVID has added new layers of problem but it is also an excellent opportunity for innovation. Can we get VRTutor to work remotely? As a first test, we used current version of VRTutor together with Zoom screen sharing to all of our remote usage and expert VR artists from the San Francisco Creative Arts Community, used it to teach what your reality painting and art to my housemate who’s not just new to VR, but hasn’t even held a VR system in their hand. Work is on progress in this and we plan to open source the upcoming tool that will be tailored specifically for Berkeley’s classroom usage.

04:18 - So stay tuned to the project website for more details. Thank you for providing me an opportunity to present our progress in this forum. - I now want to take a moment to thank some of the people who’ve been so instrumental in supporting the Innovation Program. This was a fledgling program on a shoestring budget in a tumultuous time. And I have tremendous appreciation for the enthusiasm, ideas, effort, and above all heart that so many people brought into their work here.

04:44 - I’d like to start by thanking our IT leader, Jenn Stringer, the campus CIO. A huge shout out to my student worker in the CTO office, Deepshika Dhanasekar. Deepshika has been here from the start contributing ideas and feedback, helping with logistics, getting the word out to students. Deepshika also acted as the lead for the student impact partnerships, and her voice was instrumental in shaping it. Thank you to Jean Cheng from RTL’s Academic Innovation Studio, and Cristóbal Olivares, the director of student technology and student affairs, for their role in shaping the evaluative process and the selection committee.

05:19 - Thank you to the committee who did a ton of work and reviewed a ton of material very thoughtfully, to make recommendations back in June. I’d like to thank Deepshika, Elisa Huerta, the director of the Multicultural Community Center, Gold Okafor, a doctoral student in psychology, Les Gorski, academic director in new strategies for the humanities and the division of arts and humanities. Stacy Reardon, the digital humanities and American literature librarian, and Ted Zhang doctoral student in chemistry, and Tim Abraham, in clinical services technology strategist in university health services. Thank you to Berkeley Changemaker, especially our campus’s chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer, Rich Lyons for his leadership, sponsorship and overall body of work on innovation. Strategic advisor, Laura Hassner has been a great thought partner and collaborator, as well, from Berkeley Changemaker.

06:14 - Thank you to the student impact partnership colleagues at the Blum center, Marianne McCormick, the executive director and Phillip Denny, the director of the Big Ideas Program. Thank you to RTL that’s Research, Teaching and Learning. Shawna Dark, the executive director. Ken Lutz, director of research IT. Chris Hoffman, Owen McGrath, who you met earlier. RTL is the home of the extended reality community of practice launched as a part of the innovation program. Thank you to Caroline Winnett from Berkeley SkyDeck for her leadership on innovation, her optimistic spirit, and a collaborative ethos, and her always very pragmatic advice.

06:48 - - Thank you to Lucy Greco, who helps us keep all of these innovations accessible to everybody. And thank you to all of our presenters, the Berkeley Changemakers for showcasing all of your work today. You’ve been an inspiration to us all. Thank you, and I will see you all tomorrow for the Connected Campus. .