With an exceptional pool of dedicated GSIs and Readers to choose from, the School of Information is pleased to recognize two outstanding teaching assistants: Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (OGSI) Award winner Richmond Wong, and OGSI Honorable Mention Guanghua Chi. I School teaching assistants enrich the learning environment in our courses for students and provide highly valuable support to our faculty.
Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award 2017
School of Information Ph.D. student Richmond Wong has been selected for the 2017 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award from the GSI Teaching & Resource Center. Wong was a GSI for Info 239. Technology and Delegation for Professor Deirdre Mulligan in Fall 2017. He was cited as an excellent GSI who consistently enriched the course with thoughtful insights and provided detailed and careful feedback to students.
The Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award honors UC Berkeley GSIs who have demonstrated excellence in teaching, capacity to promote critical thinking, skills in presenting course material, utilization of pedagogically effective approaches, skills in developing course materials, command of the subject area, ability to motivate students, and engagement in departmental and campus-wide activities that enhance teaching and learning.
Wong is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the BioSENSE group, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow, and a Berkeley Fellowship recipient. His research investigates how design-based methods and approaches can be used by designers and engineers to better explore, expand, and define the problem space of privacy and related social concerns during the technology design process. His recent work investigates these themes in the relation to internet of things devices and bodily sensors. His current and prior work has brought together perspectives from a wide variety of fields, including human-computer interaction, privacy, cybersecurity, public policy, science and technology studies, values in design, and speculative and critical design.
Honorable Mention
School of Information Ph.D. student Guanghua Chi has been selected for a 2017 Outstanding GSI Honorable Mention by the I School. Chi was a GSI for Info 251. Applied Machine Learning for Professor Josh Blumenstock in Fall 2017. Chi supported a large class of students who had highly variable experience with the subject matter and was commended in particular for his dedication to answering questions and working with students in office hours.
Chi is currently a third-year Ph.D. student (he completed his first year at the University of Washington before joining the program at Berkeley). He has an interdisciplinary background that includes computer science, geographic information science, and now information science. His research focuses on recognizing how new sources of data and machine learning methods can be used to better understand physical and social mobility of marginalized populations. Much of his research to date has been mining geospatial “big data” to better comprehend the interaction between individual activities and the larger geographical context. Currently, he is expanding this line of work to address the huge “data gaps” that exist in economically disadvantaged countries.
