Hello, there!
In this first post, I will introduce myself talking about my educational and industry experience. Well, I graduated in Computer Engineering at the State University of Amazonas (UEA) and started to get involved in scientific research as an undergraduate student. Being an undergraduate student, I worked on a project that aimed to conduct a survey on educational computer games and figure out the requirements to create games. As result, I developed an educational game to help teaching and learning of mathematical concepts. I developed a computer game engine using computer graphics called GameKid, and a paper called “GameKid: a computer game with a multidisciplinary profile” was published in 2009, 1st Regional Informatics School – North Region – Manaus, AM – Brazil. This experience motivated me to continue working in research projects. As my final course project I developed a Java application which collected the measured data in a blood pressure monitoring equipment and processed it in a Set – top Box / Digital TV in order to support the monitoring of the health of potential users. A paper “Monitoring of hypertensive patients through conventional medical devices integrated to the Brazilian digital TV” presenting the results of the project was published in the Journal of eHealth Technology and Application in 2010. That academic experience was invaluable to me; I really enjoyed the process, the method and results acquired.
After graduating, I had the opportunity to work at Samsung Development Institute for Informatics of Amazonas (SIDIA) as a Junior Developer Engineer. I worked as developer for mobile devices. This experience gave me the opportunity to participate in an industrial environment, presenting me a new perspective. As an employee, I already received the product’s technical features defined and this situation bothered me because I wanted to participate in the group who identified the opportunity, did the fieldwork to elicit the requirements and elaborated the final proposal, I wanted to be more active in the analysis and research part of the project. This experience made me feels a strong desire to pursue a researcher career and choose a specialized field. Motivated by this experience, I also finished a specialization in Development of Web Information Systems and decided to continue my studies in a graduate program and focus on my researcher career.
So, I applied and pass on a master degree program. I concluded my Master Degree on the graduate program of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). My master´s thesis focused to create Affordable Solutions for Classroom Response Systems, which cost of deployment and simplicity of operation make its use possible in the Brazilian education system, especially in rural or remote communities. The project presented two low-cost solutions, our image-processing proposition: Paperclickers and our BYOD proposition: Virtualclicker. Both projects we had the opportunity to run some users experiments and validate the interface visual elements. During my master program, I was selected for a scholarship from Santander Bank which gave me the opportunity to spend that Fall Semester of 2014 at Penn State, working with Dr. Carroll’s research group. My purpose for this period was to take advantage of the research expertise and academic resources at the Pennsylvania State University to advance the research for my master’s thesis. Over my visit there, I had the opportunity to participate in one of the group project called Community Animator which I could contribute actively with my mobile programming knowledge and also had a chance to learn more about human-computer interaction research. Also, that experience benefited not only me, but the group of research at UNICAMP through the experience exchange and research contribution that the internship brought us in the area of Human–Computer Interaction.
Due the very positive experience I had in Penn State and my personal identification with the Ph.D progam, I decided to apply to this program. I believe the interdisciplinary Ph.D program offered at IST is extremely interesting, because it fits my research interests, giving the student the opportunity of study interdisciplinary methods that would be used in the information science and technological research. In Brazil, there is no program as the Ph.D program offered at Penn State and I think this program would offer me a unique training as a researcher.
Nowadays, I am currently enrolled as a PhD student at Penn State. I am looking forward to learning from great professors and to study in an interdisciplinary environment, to relate with people from different cultures. I am aware of the dedication and perseverance I will need to achieve my goals, but I am one hundred percent committed to the program.
That´s it! On the next posts, I will talk more detailed about my projects and research interests.
Cheers,
Jomara Bindá
