It's been awhile and I'm just wrapping up a month of travel, so thought I'd share a few  updates. I took full advantage of the quiet campus in August to attend several conferences and present on some of the recent findings. Speaking engagements included talks at the Human-Computer Interaction International (HCII), American Psychological Association (APA), and International Energy Program Evaluation Conference (IEPEC) as well as an Energy Behavior Leadership workshop for Marriott International. 

At HCII (photo above), I presented a paper entitled, “Diffusion of Feedback: Perceptions and Adoption of Devices in the Residential Market,” which I expect will be the last publication to come out of the uci@home project I worked on early in my graduate career. It is co-authored with three of my closest grad school pals (Angela Sanguinetti, Nora Davis, and Kristen Bendanna), two amazing research assistants that are now doing great at NYU and UCLA (Kristen Holdsworth and Jessie Baker), and our fearless faculty leaders David Kirkby and Daniel Stokols. The paper analyses survey data from 836 individuals through Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation framework to assess the current and potential market of energy feedback. 

At APA, I presented on our FloodRISE project in a session on Community Resilience in the Face of Global Climate Change alongside Susan Clayton and Christie Manning. I also fulfilled my duties as Treasurer of APA's Division 34 (Environmental Psychology) and chaired two great sessions:

1. Technology and Environmental Behavior (with talks from Ezra Markowitz and Angela Sanguinetti)
2. Environmental Activism in the Digital Age (with talks from Cindy Frantz and David Miller, President of WWF Canada)

At IEPEC, I presented a paper entitled, “Exploring Deep Savings: A Toolkit for Assessing Behavior-Based Energy Interventions,” co-authored with my good friends Becky Ford (University of Otago) and Cindy Frantz (Oberlin College). The paper argues for a more systematic and comprehensive approach to the evaluation of behavior-based energy interventions and describes a preliminary toolkit that is currently being developed and validated in conjunction with the International Energy Agency Demand Side Management Programme (IEA-DSM) Task 24 on Behavior Change as well as two large investor-owned utilities in the state of California. 

It was a great month and now I'm heading out to reboot for a week in the desert. Excited to see what the coming academic year brings...

If you're going to be in Washington, DC this December or already plan on attending the BECC conference, join me for a fun and interactive workshop on Storytelling, Engagement, and Activism for social change (SEAchange). It will be held on Sunday, December 7 just before the conference kick-off from 1:30 p.m.-4:00p.m and I'm excited to be joined by Allison Cook from The Story of Stuff Project. The workshop is limited to only 25 participants, however, anyone can attend!  See the flier below for more details. 

Additionally, Allison and I will be leading the opening dessert reception at BECC with a fun storytelling activity and I'll be giving a talk on UCI's FloodRISE project Monday morning. 

Here is my schedule for the conference:

• Sunday, December 7, 2014
  

1:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.- Pre-conference workshop: SEAchange: Leveraging Storytelling, Engagement and Activism for Social Change
7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.- Conference Kick-Off and Dessert Reception: interactive roundtable activities on how to tell concise and compelling stories. 

• Monday, December 8, 2014
  

10:30 a.m. t0 12:00 p.m.- Telling Richer Stories with Technology
Moderator: Rebecca Ford, Victoria University of Wellington
Topics and Speakers:
FloodRISE: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Leverage Technology for Resilience
- Beth Karlin, University of California, Irvine
Energy Communication Goes Hollywood: Moving the Masses with Personalized Movies 
- Brian Jackson, Apogee Interactive, Inc.
Community Voices: Incorporating Personal Narratives to Elicit Pro-environmental Culture Change 
- John Petersen, Oberlin College
Feedback Technology Can Increase Connection to Nature and Enhance Systems Thinking 
- Cynthia McPherson Frantz, Oberlin College

Hope to see you there!

I had a great time at the Human Computer Interaction International (HCII) conference in Greece. Our session on Engaging Technology for Sustainable Behavior featured the following six papers. 

• Personalised Energy Priorities: A User-Centric Application for Energy Advice 
  Rebecca Ford, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; Ondrej Sumavsky, Auren Clarke, Paul Thorsnes, University of Otago, New Zealand
  
• User-Centred Design of an Audio Feedback System for Power Demand Management
  Rebecca Ford, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; Joe Penn, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; Yu-Chieh Liu, Ken Nixon, Willie Cronje, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa; Malcolm McCulloch, Oxford University, United Kingdom
  
• Energy Graph Feedback: Attention, Cognition & Behavioral Intentions
  June Flora, Banny Banerjee, Stanford University, United States
  
• Pumping up the Citizen Muscle Bootcamp: Improving User Experience in Online Learning
  Beth Karlin, Birgit Penzenstadler, University of California, Irvine, United States; Allison Cook, The Story of Stuff Project, United States
  
• Energy Consumption Feedback: Engagement by Design
  Ruth Rettie, Kevin Burchell, Tim Harries, Kingston University, United Kingdom
  
• The Power of Negative Feedback from an Artificial Agent to Promote Energy Saving Behavior
  Cees JH Midden, Jaap Ham, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands

I also had a great time visiting with the other speakers (including a weekend in Chania with Becky, lunch with Cees & Jaap, and dinner with June & Ruth). Here's a copy of the paper that I presented. 

It's finally time... I'll be defending my Ph.D. dissertation on Wednesday, April 23, 2014. See below for details.