William Erdly
Preferred name: Bill
Associate Professor Emeritus
Dr. William Erdly is a graduate of the University of Washington where he received his Ph.D. in social/organizational psychology. He has held significant leadership positions in a variety of industry and government technology organizations - and continues his involvement in entrepreneurship and software innovation. This on-going experience serves as a baseline for his research interests in social computing/analytics, human-computer interaction, game design/mechanics, wide area network (WAN) design, computer science research methods, health care informatics and software engineering/project management. He was the founding director of the CSS program and has since retired.
Research and Scholarship Interests
Knowledge management systems; game design for health care; computer science research methods/analytics
Dr. Erdly’s research involves developing methods to assess near-vision problems in children, and vision therapy games to assist in training the eyes and cognitive processes. The development of multiple systems and games (GWAPs — or “Games with a Purpose”) is a way to assess, share, and aid diagnosis of vision problems in children. He also developed a project partnership with tribal communities to build a semantic web application to link cultural learning objects (CLOs) to current STEM-related curricula. This research focuses on creating digital rights management (DRM) protocols for sharing tribe-specific CLOs, building cloud-based architecture to extract/annotate content from a variety of multi-media sources into a shared repository; analysis of CLOs are used to evaluate the impacts on student learning outcomes.