Courses at SIMS
These courses have been completed in pursuit of a Masters (2005, School of Information Management and Systems, U.C. Berkeley), with an emphasis on user-centered design of systems, interactions and interfaces.
Spring 2005
Master's Project: Teaching with the Tree of Life - a needs assessment and usability evaluation project conducted in partnership with Denise Green and under advisement by Prof. Nancy van House and Prof. Brent Mishler.
SIMS 214: Needs and Usability Assessment, with Prof. Nancy van House.
SIMS 211: Group and Organizational Approaches to Information System Use, with Dean Anna Lee Saxenian.
SIMS 290: The Secrets of Consulting, with Prof. Larry Downes
Fall 2004
SIMS 246: Multimedia Information, with Prof. Marc Davis. Our final project team envisioned a new application in Apple's iLife suite of applications for organizing and producing media: iFlix. We designed screens and functionality for iFlix, and sought feedback from potential users and multimedia professionals.
Geography/Landscape Architecture 188: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with Prof. John Radke. My lab reports are available online.
HAAS 290: Rescuing Mismanaged Projects with Prof. Richard Grant. As a final report, I conducted an Independent Project Assessment of the upgrade of a computerized chemical testing system at a pharmaceutical services company.
I also audited several lectures this semester on Model-Based User Interface Design (Prof. Glushko, SIMS), Metaphor (Prof. Lakoff, Linguistics), Rapid Prototyping (Prof. Wright, Mechanical Engineering) and Organizational Culture (Prof. Euske, HAAS).
Spring 2004
SIMS 213: User Interface Design and Development, with Prof. Marti Hearst. The MaNIS Interface Design project was a semester-long team practical experience.
SIMS 247: Information Visualization and Presentation, with Prof. Marti Hearst. See Week 12 for my presentation on Visualizing Biodiversity. My final project was Visualizations for Phylogenetics - an exploration of what parallel coordinates visualization can contribute to the science of making phylogenies.
SIMS 206: Distributed Computing Applications and Infrastructure with Profs. Doug Tygar and John Chuang. A team project involved collaborative programming and resulted in a Java peer-to-peer application.
SIMS 290: Document Engineering with Prof. Bob Glushko.
IB 200A: Principles of Phylogenetics, with Profs. Brent Mishler, Kip Will, and Adam Leache. This course informed the final project for SIMS 247. The final project for this course was a test of Hershkovitz's theory of metachromism within the howler monkeys (Neotropical genus Alouatta). Download: presentation | report.
Fall 2003
These courses are core requirements for the MIMS degree.
SIMS 202: Information Organization and Retrieval with Profs. Marc Davis and Ray Larson. Covering the practices, issues, and theoretical foundations of organizing and analyzing information content for the purpose of providing intellectual access to textual and non-textual information resources. Introduces the principles of information storage and retrieval systems and databases; that effective information search and retrieval is interrelated with the organization and description of information to be retrieved. A semester-long, team-executed whole-class project involved generating an application for gathering metadata on images taken with camera phones, from generating application ideas through to metadata vocabulary design.
SIMS 204-1: Information Law and Policy, with Prof. Larry Downes. An introduction to intellectual property law relevant to technology, including copyright, patents, trade secrets, and the appropriateness of various policy approaches.
SIMS 204-2: Social Theory of Techology Use, with Prof. Nancy van House. An introduction to studying the contexts in which technology is used, and the effects of introducing new technologies.
SIMS 255: Foundations of Software Design with Prof. Brian Hayes. An intensive introduction to programming principles and practice, covering the fundamentals of how computers work, standard algorithms, data structures, design patterns, and an introduction to formal languages via regular expressions. Students study and practice principles of object oriented design and software development.