The Lake Sunapee Protective Association is a lake association with a variety of educational and conservation goals. One of their projects is to increase awareness of the lake's health by providing data from a variety of buoy sensors. This buoy is just one of a network of such sensors providing data to scientists and the public as part of the Northern Temperate Lakes Long Term Ecological Research program. This piece of cyberinfrastructure provides opportunities for science education, lake association members' engagement with their lake, and data for scientific research.

I am particularly interested in the ways that the design of the cyberinfrastructure helps or hinders the engagement of people, and whether it emphasizes design for certain types of people, goals, or uses.

Monitoring, Modeling, and Memory: Dynamics of Data and Knowledge in Scientific Cyberinfrastructures

In this large study, we are looking at four different scientific cyberinfrastructures to look at the lifecycle of data as it passes through monitoring, modeling, and memory phases. I will be studying a climate modeling community. It's a joy to be in a domain closely related to my long-time hobby interest in weather.

Related publications are available here:

• Paul N. Edwards and Archer L. Batcheller. “Social Science Studies of ESMF as Cyberinfrastructure.” Poster at AGU 2008. IN21B-1066. 16 December 2008. [pdf]

We studied the use of knowledge infrastructures (e.g., museums, libraries, online journals, etc.) as they relate to development in Africa. The study closely aligns with my research interests of computer use in international development, and issues of cross-cultural technology transfer. In this case, trasnferring not just specific technologies, but looking at the transfer and growth of entire institutions and infrastructures. Furthermore, it relates to my research on tribal issues, where knowledge infrastructures play an important role as well - be it for finances specifically, or for tribal development in general.

We produced a final report for our funders, the World Bank, and proposed a set of workshops that could help further this work. Our report includes a set of recommendations (tenatively made!) for policy and practice, and our aim is that the workshops would develop these more. It currently does not look like the workshops will occur for a variety of reasons.

The final report is available here:

• Steven J. Jackson, Archer L. Batcheller, Paul N. Edwards, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Steve Cisler, and Susan Leigh Star. “Extending African Knowledge Infrastructures: Sharing, Creating, Maintaining.” Report for the World Bank. March 2008. [pdf]

The NSF supported a workshop titled History and Theory of Infrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures, as part of their efforts to grow cyberinfrastructure for the sciences. The idea was to gather lessons from studying the growth of other infrastructures, and theory from the study of infrastructures, to suggest how funding agencies can help facilitate growth of cyberinfrastructure. As part of this, I built the website, and helped coordinate workshop activities. It was also a great opportunity to sit in on the workshop, and meet people doing interesting work in the area. This work serves as a good foundation for thinking about knowledge infrastructures and cyberinfrastructure.

The final workshop report is available here:

• Paul N. Edwards, Steven J. Jackson, Geoffrey C. Bowker, and Cory P. Knobel. “Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design.” Report of a Workshop on History and Theory of Infrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures. January 2007. [pdf]

This project began for me as a means for satisfying my programming appetite, as a security consultant and script programmer. However, I have become increasingly drawn to the research effort and ways that it coincides with my research goals. The Carepartners program is designed to assist informal caregivers (e.g., adult children of ailing parents) with caring for someone with a chronic illness. The current study is in a pilot phase, and is focusing on patients with chronic heart failure. We help support the care process by calling patients on a weekly basis with a fixed script that inquires about their current health status. Patients respond through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, and their responses are then sent to an informal caregiver, with directions about how the caregiver can help the patient manage their illness in light of the latest status. If the self-reported symptoms look dire, a clinician is alerted automatically via fax.

I led an exploratory effort to extend the Carepartners project with an email system that connects informal caregivers and clinicians - a link that is typically weak in practice. There are additional opportunities for connecting informal caregivers as a community, or in building a shared knowledge base for caregivers, patients, and clinicians.

There is a possibility that the system will be replicated in Santiago, Chile. I was particulaly interested in issues of cross-cultural transfer of technology to a new region of the world. Will the model work for Chileans? What adjustments would need to be made?

I have been involved in a several related efforts to encourage information exchange in order to positively impact tribal access to the capital market. This includes the creation of a tribal finance portal, tribalfinance.org, that helps connect tribes to appropriate resources. Later versions of the site hopefully will include financial literacy resources for tribal leaders, a database of tribal bond issuances that can serve as a reference, and a history of the tribal capital markets. A related branch of this research has involved investigating and documenting the deleterious effects of some IRS regulations that govern the taxing of tribal debt.

I am personally interested in the similarities between tribal access to capital and development and development in the international context. Do developing countries face similar informational barriers as they seek capital? As projects work to help tribes, would similar solutions work internationally?

This line of research actually has three different branches, the Media Gateway, Playing Games with Video Conferencing, and the Connection Project. All fit within the CSCW space and have involved more non-work uses of video. I am brining this branch of my research to a close for now, as I have found it not to align very well with my research interests.

The Media Gateway was a design idea for the new building (NorthQuad)that SI is moving to. The idea would be to include a video wall in a public space (like a cafe), and allow students to informally interact with people on the other side. The connection would be always on, and could be used for games, visiting, or collaborative projects. It could be connected to another dormitory on campus, or at another university in the US or abroad. This project drew to a close as NorthQuad underwent a major architectural redesign; it is not clear what the new building will include.

The Connection Project is a set of research efforts that study the use of video for collaboration. As part of this, I did some technical work, implementing a custom circuit board to control video hardware. I also designed two experiments. One would test an alternate arrangment of visual displays and video cameras to see if it is more effective than typical arrangements (a ‘video galley’). The other experiment would test ASL recognition over a video connection, both testing the technology's utility for ASL users, and developing a metric that could be used to measure the perceptual quality of the video connection (e.g., in terms of gesture recognition.)

Research about Playing Games with Video Conferencing originated as part of a class project for my CSCW class with Gary Olson. We had subjects play common social (party) games in both a collocated condition, and with the group separated between two locations that were connected via video conferencing. Our main finding was that people had as much fun while playing over video as when they were face to face with others (contrary to the literature about video media spaces). We strongly suspect that there are shifts in strategies, such as an ‘us vs. them’ effect for the video groups, but the data measuring this were mixed. We submitted this work as a CHI Note, which was presented at the 2007 CHI Conference in San Jose, CA. Abstract and citation are below.

Video connections can establish a media space in which games may be played, just as people play games while collocated. Experiments with participants playing the game ‘Mafia’ indicate that people in a video condition have similar levels of satisfaction, fun, and frustration, to those that play while collocated. This finding holds for both those with prior experience using video systems and those without, suggesting it is not merely a “novelty effect.” Results differ about whether there exist differences in focus of attention, suspicion/trust, and pointing for people playing the game while using a video system. Implications for both fun and work uses of video are suggested.

• Batcheller, A.L., Hilligoss, B., Nam, K., Rader, E., Rey-Babarro, M., Zhou, X. “Testing the Technology: Having Fun with Video Conferencing.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing. ACM Press. 2007. [pdf]

I also designed a multimedia mail system that will work on top of the Postmanet infrastructure being developed by Randy Wang , et. al. for distance learning in India. My multimedia program is still in development, but it's now in a workable condition. Below is a paper explaining the goals and current state of the project.

• The latest source code and installation binaries are available here.
• Batcheller, Archer. “Multimedia Mail for the Digital StudyHall.” May 2005. [pdf]

During my undergraduate years I became interested in using technology to deliver information and services that would help people in developing regions of the world. This interest yielded two projects in my senior year.

First, I put together a review of current work in the field, made some observations about needs to address and important design criteria, and made a proposal for a new design in light of these observations. The proposed system would encourage exchange of economic information to connect people with opportunities for trade.

• Batcheller, Archer. “Information and Communication Technologies for Economic Opportunities in Developing Regions.” January 2005. [pdf]

With a research group at Sandia National Laboratories, I helped develop a program that surveys network traffic for vulnerabilties and/or anomalous network behavior.

• Durgin, Nancy, Yuqing Mai and Jamie Van Randwyk. “NetState: A Network Version Tracking System.” Sandia National Laboratories. [pdf]

I studied non-mechanical actuators that could be used for robotic fish. This research resulted in the following papers:

• Batcheller, Archer. “Analysis and Engineering of Silicone Actuators as Artificial Muscles for use in Biomimetic Underwater Robots.” Jan. 2001. [pdf]
• Batcheller, Archer and Richard Kimball. “A Procedure for the Calibration of Pressure Transducers.” Sept. 1999. [pdf]