Nicolas LaLone

Biography

Dr. LaLone began his undergraduate career at the age of 25 in Austin Texas at the Austin Community College in 2004. Over the past 16 years, he has moved from Electrical Engineering to Anthropology to Sociology and finally to Information Science.He came to work in and around Emergency Management due to his father's being a Fireman and in seeing how much work can be done to make emergency management more in line with current ways that humans communicate.When not writing, Nick is often searching for rare board games or hanging out with his 3 cats. Nick's partner, Kristen, is finishing up her last year of vet school and upon finishing, will begin to work in the Omaha area. Nick and Kristen hope to work together on the place of pets in disaster in the future.

Teaching Interests

Dr. LaLone is interested in statistics, emergency management, social network analysis, history of technology, and science and technology studies. He has begun to develop courses that will touch on each of these concepts.

Research Interests

Nick is interested in how things break, how they resist being broken, and how, once broken, they get put back together. He approaches the study of crisis response and emergency management through information flow and technology.His primary domains of research are: Crisis InformaticsEmergency ManagementCoordination and Training in Emergency ManagementHuman-Computer InteractionPlay and Simulation

Service Summary

In his first semester, Nick joined the search committee for 2 new faculty to replace retiring faculty. In addition, Nick was elected to the Undergraduate Program Committee starting in the Spring of 2020. In addition to these two committee appointments at UNO, Nick serves as Area Chair of the Games and Play sub-committee of the ACM special interest group for computer-human interaction. He additionally serves for the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work committee as an Area Chair focusing on Critical Theory.

Education

Ph D, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, Information Sciences and Technology, 2018

MA, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, Sociology, Gender, Race, and Ethnicity, 2012

BS, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, Applied Sociology, 2008

Selected Publications

LaLone, Nicolas, Toups, Z, Papangelis, Konstantinos. 2022. Practical Considerations on Applications of the Popularity of Games: The Case of Location-Based Games and Disaster, 213--233.

LaLone, Nicolas, A. Alharthi, Sultan, Toups, Z. 2019. A Vision of Augmented Reality for Urban Search and Rescue, Proceedings of the 1st Halfway to the Future Symposium, 1--4.

LaLone, Nicolas. 2019. Dungeons and Dragons: The First Platform, Analog Game Studies, 6, 3.

LaLone, Nicolas. 2018. Association Mapping: Social Network Analysis with Humans and Non-Humans.

LaLone, Nicolas, Tapia, Andrea, Zobel, Christopher, Caraega, Cornelia, Neppalli, Venkata, Halse, Shane. 2017. Embracing human noise as resilience indicator: twitter as power grid correlate, Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, 2, 4, 169--178.

Externally Funded Research

Collaborative Research: HCC: Medium: Connecting Practitioners to Design: Methods and Tools for Live Participatory Design Fiction, National Science Foundation, Federal, 07/01/2021 - 06/30/2025

Department, College, and University

Undergraduate Program Committee, Committee Member, Meet monthly with other committee members to discuss the state of the undergraduate ISQA program and attend to its growth, maintenance, and configuration., 01/01/2020 - 01/31/2020

Professional

Area Chair - Play and Games Subcommittee, Conference-Related, Shepard 6-20 papers through each year's conference by organizing 3 reviews from relevant peer reviewers. , 01/01/2018 - 12/31/2018