The Innovations in Visualization research group (innovis.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/) in the Interactions Lab (ilab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/) at the University of Calgary is offering a PhD position starting either September 2014 or January 2015 for an exceptional student. This is a fully funded position (comfortably covering living expenses and health insurance) for at least 4 years. In particular, I am looking for an outstanding PhD student who has information visualization, visual analytics, and/or human computer interaction background, and who is interested in creating new visualizations and interfaces to help empower people with their own health-related information. Traditionally visualization and visual analytics have been applied to data arising from science and industry. In fact, previously data was not often thought about as being part of people's personal lives. However, in the last few years, this has been rapidly changing. Much of the often discussed "big data" is generated by individuals and their activities on social networks, as consumers, etc. Additionally, people are becoming more aware of data in their lives and are actively starting to collect it.This type of activity, perhaps typified by the Quantified Self movement, has triggered an industry response and now all kinds of self-monitoring devices are proliferating. However, while methods of gathering personal data are becoming ubiquitous, little has yet been done to make this data understandable and usable. One significant area in this regard is health. People are often collecting their own health data, to empower themselves, and to gain better control of their health.Sometimes they are collecting data because of their doctors instructions, sometimes they feel that if they monitored their activities they could better understand what factors trigger chronic conditions such as migraines and seizures. I would like to conduct research to discover how to help people work with this data, to find ways of presenting this data so that people can understand it and can make decisions and take actions based on it. The University of Calgary iLab is one of the leading information visualization and human computer interaction research labs. It is part of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and is known for cutting-edge interdisciplinary research. It is composed of four faculty members (Drs. Carpendale, Greenberg, Sharlin, Tang) and approximately 30 to 40 graduate students and Post Doctoral Fellows. You will be supervised by Sheelagh Carpendale in collaboration with doctors, researchers and medical personal at Ward of the 21^st Century (www.w21c.org/) at the Foothills Hospital. Please send your application, including CV, academic record and references, to sheelagh@ucalgary.ca. Please include a one-page statement of your research motivation and interests. The for best consideration, send your application by March 10, 2014. ------------------------------------------- Prof. Dr. Sheelagh Carpendale Innovation in Visualization (InnoVis), Interactions Lab (iLab) Department of Computer Science University of Calgary Calgary, Alberta, Canada Telephone : +1 403 220 6055 E-Mail: sheelagh@ucalgary.ca Web: http://innovis.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/