Activities, Awards, and Honors

Professional Awards & Honors

  • Program Chair of Computer Science (2023 through 2026).
  • Program Director for Masters in Computer Science at CI (2020 through 2024).
  • Undergraduate Adviser for Computer Science and Information Technology (2018 through 2024).
  • Interim Chair of Computer Science for Fall 2021.
  • Faculty Sabbatical (2020) “Design and Construction of SocialXYZ Lite.” Semester Sabbatical for investigating the design and implementation of Mobile SocialXYZ. Provided professional leave to advance skills in mobile apps development, collaborate with experts in my field and construct an initial version of the mobile Social XYZ social learning platform. Software was successfully implemented in cross-listed COMP449 courses in fall 2021.
  • Best Paper Nomination – 53rd Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences.
  • IRA #1107– Computer Science Speaker Dr. Nathan Botts ($650). Funds from this IRA will support an honorarium to host Dr. Nathan Botts, Senior Study Director at Westat. Dr. Botts is an experienced health IT professional with a demonstrated history of working in the health informatics research and development industry.
  • IRA #1097– Computer Science Capstone Event Preparation ($493). Funds from this IRA will facilitate the Spring 2019 COMP 499 and IT 499 Capstone Event. The capstone event invites students, faculty, administrators and local businesses to engage with students as they demo and present their work.
  • IRA #1096– Field Trip to Cal Tech & Earnest C. Watson Lecture ($2,230). Funds from this IRA will allow a group of CI students to attend Dr. Azita Emami’s presentation, “Tiny Chips for Brain-Body-Machine Interfaces.” The field trip will provide students the opportunity visit the Cal Tech campus,which consists of unique academic buildings and high-tech labs, as well as attend Dr. Emami’s presentation, which is a part of the Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series. Earnest C. Watson lectures feature speakers from Caltech and JPL, speaking on cutting-edge research and are open to the public.
  • IRA #1025 – 2018 ACM Intercollegiate Programming Contest ($4,150). Awarded in summer 2018, the funds will afford Computer Science to send four teams to compete in the 2018-2019 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest at Riverside Community College in November. Past results can be found here: https://compsci.csuci.edu/about/news-and-events/acm-programming-results2017.htm.
  • IRA #976 – ACM Intelligent User Interfaces Conference ($4,500). Funding to bring 1 student and 1 faculty to an academic conference to present a co-authored paper titled, Dynamic Visualization of Quality in Online Conversations.
  • IRA #973 – Guest Speaker Evren Eryilmaz on Research and Development in Design Science ($300). Funding to bring Dr. Eryilmaz from California State University, Sacramento to present on his current research in Design Science.
  • IRA #922 – 2017 ACM Intercollegiate Programming Contest ($4,150). Awarded in summer 2017, the funds will afford Computer Science to send four teams to compete in the 2017-2018 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest at Riverside Community College in November. Past results can be found here: http://compsci.csuci.edu/about/news-and-events/acm-programming-results2016.htm.
  • 2017 CI Summer Minigrant – Analyzing the Effect of Software Design on Sentiment in Online Conversations ($1,800). This project will allow undergraduate student research assistants to gain valuable research experience, providing them with exposure to data science and social networking theory with the real chance of publishing in high-quality scholarly outlets.
  • Graduation 2025 Data Analysis Project ($1,000) – To better achieve the goals of the CI 2025 Graduation Initiative, this stipend was awarded to faculty members from each undergraduate major who is willing analyze program-level data and provide a written summary by August 15, 2017. Successful applicants must commit to attending a kick-off workshop on program level data availability, a debriefing session focused on preliminary conclusions, and complete a written report that addresses the questions related to student success.
  • IRA #851- Field Trip to Cal Tech Seminar Series ($2,535). Awarded in Fall 2016, IRA funds will accommodate a group of CI students to attend Dr. Adam Wierman’s presentation, “How Clean is the Cloud.” The trip will provide students the opportunity to tour the Cal Tech campus, which consists of unique academic buildings and high-tech labs, as well as attend Dr. Wierman’s presentation, which is a part of the Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series.
  • IRA #485- Competitive Programming Preparation ($1,150). Awarded in Fall 2016, IRA funds will be used to facilitate 3 programming meet-ups, in preparation for the Computer Science (CS) Programming Guru Contest, which will be held on April 21, 2017 and the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). The greater goal of these meet-ups is to introduce and open up participation to a larger population of students.
  • Content Creator for CIValues.orghttp://civalues.org, which allows CI community members including faculty, administration, alumni, students and staff to publicly acknowledge their commitment to support students regardless of their background or chosen lifestyles in line with the university’s four mission pillars that center on international affairs, integrative studies, multicultural learning and community engagement.
  • CI Research/Scholarly Activity Travel Funds (2016-2017) ($900).
  • IRA #806- 2016 ACM Intercollegiate Programming Contest ($2,520). Awarded in Spring 2016, the funds will afford Computer Science to send four teams to compete in the 2016-2017 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest at Riverside Community College in November. Past results can be found here: http://compsci.csuci.edu/news-and-events/acm-programming-results-2015.htm.
  • Project ACCESO Summer Research (2016) – Provides small teams of students an opportunity to conduct research with CI faculty in STEM disciplines. In 2016, students from CI, Oxnard College and Santa Barbara City College collaborated on a data mining project analyzing online discussion data. The analysis helped guide the construction of new discussion software that aims to improve the quality of online discussions in educational settings. A write-up of the project can be found here: http://blog.socialxyz.com/a-simple-program-for-enhancing-quality-in-online-discussion-boards.
  • CI Minigrant Award (2016) – Health e-Consent Framework for Patient Generated Data: Considering the Needs of At-Risk Populations ($5,400). Awarded in spring 2016, the three-unit buyout for fall 2016 / spring 2017 will provide course release to work towards a framework for guiding electronic consent (e-Consent) policies to help govern increasing multitudes of personal medical devices, health apps and related personal health information systems (PHIS).
  • ALAS/OLAS/CIS Faculty Fellowship ($1,300) – The Fellowship is designed to help faculty include high impact practices into their courses. During this program, COMP / COMM / SOC 342 was redesigned to include a community-based service-learning component, where students work and learn alongside community partners as they work towards completing course milestones. Final outcomes here: http://blog.socialxyz.com/social-networking/.
  • 2015 CSUCI Foundation Funds – Toward the Construction of Next Generation Online Discussion Boards ($3,610). Awarded in December 2015, the foundation funds allowed two undergraduate researchers from computer science and sociology. A complete report can be found online: http://socialxyz.com/pubs/Foundation Report-brianthoms.pdf.
  • IRA #718 – 2015 ACM Intercollegiate Programming Contest ($2,220). Awarded in July 2015, the funds afforded Computer Science to send four teams to compete in the 2015 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest at Riverside Community College in fall 2015. More information can be found online: http://compsci.csuci.edu/news-and-events/acm-programming-results.htm.
  • 2015 Project ACCESO Summer Research – Provides small teams of students an opportunity to conduct research with CI faculty in STEM disciplines. In 2015, students from CI and Ventura College collaborated on a data mining project analyzing online discussion data. The analysis helped guide the construction of new discussion software that measured the sentiment of online conversations.
  • IRA #690 – Logging-on to Internet-based Social Networks Offline ($5,520). Awarded in January 2015, the IRA fund were put to use in spring 2016, where a group of students toured the Facebook campus, met with job recruiters and visited the The Tech Museum in Palo Alto. A summary of the field trip can be found online: http://blog.socialxyz.com/?p=320.
  • Blended Learning Preparation Program (BLPP) Cohort V ($1,500) – BLPP is designed to improve student learning at CI by improving the use of technology in teaching. During this course COMP / COMM / SOC 342 was redesigned to include a course learning community. More specifically, course learning objectives were designed in a way to integrate widely popular social networking software such as Twitter.
  • CSUCI Computer Science Start-up Funds (2015) ($10,000).
  • Best Paper Nomination – 47th Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences.
  • 2013 SUNY Outstanding Scholarly Publication Award, received for “A Dynamic Social Feedback System to Support Learning and Social Interaction in Higher Education,” published in IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, IEEE computer Society Digital Library. IEEE Computer Society, Mar. 2011.
  • SUNY Title III Grant. Funds from the Title III grant, “Strengthening Institutions” were part of a strategic initiative to transform SUNY Farmingdale into a Learner-Centered Institution. The funds allowed me to higher 1 student-researcher and resulted in the redesign of an innovative recommender system to support learning in STEM disciplines. This research, titled, “Designing a Peer Support System for Computer Programming Courses using Online Social Networking Software,” was published in the 47th Annual Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 47), Jan. 2014.
  • United University Professions (UUP) Individual Development Award. This award is designed to support a variety of professional development projects or activities by assisting eligible employees to develop their full professional potential and to prepare for advancement.
  • Kay Center for E-Health Research Post-doctoral Fellowship.
  • Distinguished Service Award at the Persuasive Conference.
  • Best Paper Nomination – 41st Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences.
  • CGU Travel Award for Spring 2008.
  • School of Information Systems and Technology Doctoral Screening Exam (Passed with Distinction).
  • Best Research Paper Award – 2007 IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Sciences.
  • Best Research Paper Award – 40th Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences.
  • Best Research Paper Nomination – 2nd Annual Design Research in Information Systems.
  • SISAT Student Council Summer Travel Award (2007).
  • Hillcrest Transdisciplinary Research Award (2006).
  • Preparing Future Faculty Fellowship.

 

Professional Peer Reviews

  • ACM Transactions on Computing Education
  • AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction
  • Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS)
  • Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology
  • Communications of the Association for Information Systems (CAIS)
  • Computers and Education
  • Computers and Human Behavior
  • Decision Support Systems
  • Education and Information Technologies
  • Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)
  • IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (TLT)
  • IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference (ISI)
  • International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS)
  • International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organizations (IJNVO)
  • International Journal of Information and Communication Technology Education (IJICTE)
  • International Information Management Association (IIMA)
  • Journal of Information Technology Education (JITE)
  • Persuasive
  • Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE)

Professional Memberships

  • Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (active member)
  • Informing Science Institute (ISI) (past member)
  • Association for Information Systems (AIS) (past member)

Volunteer Work and Charities