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Faculty of Information Welcomes New Professors

Submitted on Tuesday, October 27, 2015

This fall, the University of Toronto welcomed new professors, and four of them who joined the Mississauga campus have graduate appointments at the Faculty of Information.

Jeff Boase, Alessandro Delfanti, Victoria McArthur, and Cosmin Munteanu bring a wealth of research and practical experience guaranteed to further enrich the iSchool’s ever expanding academic diversity.profilepic_jboase1

Jeff Boase’s research focuses on the relationship between communication technology and personal networks. He is particularly interested in how emerging technologies such as smartphones and social media platforms may enable or hinder the transfer of information and support within personal networks.He takes an international approach to this topic by examining and comparing personal networks and technology use in several countries, primarily in Japan, the US, and Canada.

While working toward his PhD at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Jeff spent a year at the Harvard Kennedy School on a pre-doctoral fellowship at the National Center for Digital Government. After completing his doctorate, Jeff spent two years working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social Psychology at The University of Tokyo.

Jeff is already busy teaching KMD1002; Knowledge Media Design: Contexts and Practices and CCT490; Topics in Communication, Culture and Information Technology.

alessandro%20delfanti1Alessandro Delfanti is an Assistant Professor of Culture and New Media in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information & Technology (ICCIT) at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). He is teaching undergraduate courses in both the CCT program and Professional Writing and Communication program, which includes Journalistic Investigation and Critical Analysis of Media. In the future, he will also be teaching graduate seminars at the iSchool.

Alessandro joins us from the University of Milan, the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), and McGill University, via the University of California Davis, where he completed a Postdoctoral fellowship in Science and Technology Studies and Innovating Communication in Scholarship.

His work spans digital cultures and communities, and science communication and technologies, and recent publications include Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science, and a co-edited special section of “Science, Technology and Human Values” entitled, “Hacking Hacked!”

Beyond academics, Alessandro is a freelance journalist covering digital cultures, science politics, and social movements, with articles in a number of magazines/newspapers such as La Scienze and Il Manifesto.
In his online profile delfanti.org, Alessandro also mentions his past life as a Vet, and his degree in Veterinary Medicine from the University of Parma.

Victoria McArthur’s research involves the ways in which game interfaces reconfigure player experiences in computer and video games. She also researches self-representational practices in Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), game interfaces and analysis, using games as pedagogical tools, and gender and videogames.vicki%20mcarthur1

Victoria’s doctoral research focused on the tension between affordances and self-representational practices in console games and MMOGs.

Outside her work, Victoria enjoys muay thai boxing and flying single engine airplanes. She is also the proud owner of a bichon/shih tzu.

 

 

cosmin%20munteneau1Cosmin Munteanu joined the Faculty of Information in 2014 as an Assistant Professor cross-appointed with the Department of Computer Science, where he is Co-Director of the Technologies for Ageing Gracefully Lab. Cosmin’s primarily appointment is at the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

While at the iSchool he will be supervising reading courses, while at UTM, he is teaching a number of courses including Human-Computer Interaction and Communication; Introduction to Immersive Environments; Topics in Communication, Culture, Information & Technology; User Integrated Design for Interaction; Individual projects, and starting next year, both The Interactive Society and User Experience Design.

Cosmin’s area of expertise is at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Automatic Speech Recognition, Natural Language Processing, Mobile Computing, and Assistive Technologies. He has designed and evaluated systems that improve humans’ access to and interaction with information-rich media and technologies through natural language. Cosmin’s multidisciplinary interests include speech and natural language interaction for mobile devices, mixed reality systems, learning technologies for marginalized users, usable privacy and cyber-safety, assistive technologies for older adults, and ethics in human-computer interaction research. URL: http://cosmin.taglab.ca