In this post, I would like to offer some (unsolicited) advice to graduate students and perhaps to recent graduates about how to further their careers. Some of this is based on personal experience as a student and as someone who has been involved in the hiring process, some of it is advice I’ve received from others, and some of it is conjecture. The advice is both tactical and strategic: I would like to cover things that people should do on a regular basis, and more long-term planning as well. While this advice is aimed at people in HCI and related disciplines, most of it should be broadly applicable.

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In response to the question “What will change everything?,” Marti Hearst wrote in edge.org on the increasing ubiquity of video and audio, and on how these media are encroaching on the “market share” of text for communication in our society. It’s an interesting piece: the premise is that as video and audio have become increasingly easy to create and distribute, their use has started supplanting text in communication. She cites examples of success rates of podcasts as marketing vehicles, YouTube video comments, and people pointing cameras on themselves to pose questions to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.

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Yahoo! Search Pad was released last week without much ado, certainly not to the kind of media buzz surrounding Google and MS announcements. Search Pad collects documents you click on in search results, and allows you to annotate them with notes. The interface, while simple, is not necessarily easy to figure out. It took me some time to poke around and figure out how it works. It some ways, it is similar to Bing’s history mechanism. It’s more useful than the history mechanism because it allows the user to type notes or copy pieces of documents into the Search Pad to help with document triage and other recall-oriented aspects of exploratory search. On the other hand, the history mechanism works in a more intuitive way, and keeps track of documents you’ve already seen when you re-visit a query.

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I dodged being empaneled on a jury, and I made it to IBM Almaden to attend most of NPUC. I did miss the talk by Brad Myers, which I’ll have to view on video, but got to see most of the other presentations and the poster/demo session. One demo I found particularly interesting was Mira Dontcheva‘s Blueprint work. Blueprint is an Eclipse plugin for Flex programming that allows people to search for snippets of code directly from the IDE, and displays them in an overlay or side bar. Blueprint makes it possible to search the web with an interface similar to the typical auto-complete functionality. Furthermore, because it understands Flex syntax, its ranking should more accurate than a regular full-text index that happens to contain code. When you select a search result, Blueprint inserts it into your code, and automatically annotates the code to include the URL at which the snippet was found so that you can re-visit that page later.

Adobe Blueprint screenshot

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Every year since 1993, IBM Almaden has organized a one-day research/technology conference called New Paradigms in Using Computers (NPUC). This year’s theme, organized by Jeff Pierce and John Barton,  is “The Future of Design and Software Development” Featured speakers include Brad Myers, Ethan Eismann, Gina Venolia, Caitlin Kelleher, Kimberley Peter, and Rastislav Bodik. In addition to the speakers, there are lots of demos both from within IBM and from others.

I was looking forward to attending again, particularly because I had at one point considered looking at the HCI of programming for my dissertation. Instead, I  will be spending at least part of the day in Redwood City in a jury selection process for the Superior Court of California that did not conclude today.

This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to being on a jury in 26 years of being a registered voter in California, and I admit to mixed feelings about tomorrow’s decision: On one hand, it would be interesting to observe  a trial and (hopefully) see justice done, but on the other hand, I can certainly find more productive things to do for the next three weeks.

ps: For those who cannot attend but are not trapped by the legal system, streaming video of the event will be available.

Thanks to @davefauth I came across an interesting blog post by Naumi Haque on the diminishing returns of collaboration. The basis of his thesis is that as the number of explicit collaborators in a project increases past a certain point, the overall utility decreases due in part to costs associated with maintaining the collaboration. This reminds me of the notion of group coherence that Morten Hertzum wrote about in his paper on Collaborative Information Seeking. He focused on the need for teams to devote resources to ground the collaboration to prevent loss of coherence (and thus shared goals and values).

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We are happy to see that the summer issue of the AIEDAM journal is now published (editors:  Ellen Yi-Luen Do and Mark D. Gross). It contains our article on the electronic-paper-based Post-Bits system, “Prototyping a tangible tool for design: Multimedia e-paper sticky notes.”

So, what are Post-Bits? We were looking for new ways to use e-paper, and at the same time, we were (and are) very interested in tangible tools for enhancing all kinds of work. This project started when Takashi Matsumoto interned here at FXPAL.  You can see Takashi talking about Post-Bits in the video below the fold:

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In his comment to an earlier post, Miles Efron reiterated the usefulness of the various TREC competitions to fostering IR research. I agree with him (and with others) that TREC has certainly been a good incubator both in its annual competition and in follow-on studies that use its data in other ways.  And, as Miles points out,we have seen a proliferation of collections: everything from the original newspaper articles to blogs, video, large corpora, etc.

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Miles Efron posted recently on his take on the progress of the IR field in response to a question posted by Andrew Dillon at the last ASIST conference. Miles’ take was that progress was indeed being made for two reasons: the SIGIR conference has become more competitive over the years, and the diversity of corpora in the TREC umbrella has also increased. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to hear the question or the subsequent discussion, but my guess as to what Andrew Dillon actually meant was not a question of statistical significance, but rather one of magnitude.

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Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle have written an interesting opinion piece on recent trends in collective intelligence on the Web, something they and others have called Web 2.0. The article covers a lot of ground, touching on everything from medical imaging to politics to Twitter. It is a vision, and one that isn’t so far off: we can see the technological dots forming recognizable patterns. Emboldened by the success of Google, Twitter and Mechanical Turk, the authors call for similar engagement in healthcare, energy policy, and financial regulation, among others.

While what they describe is not exactly a technological Utopia, their picture is somewhat rosy. Continue Reading