James Landay raised the right idea – it is time for systems people in the CHI community to take control of UIST. That conference was setup in the 1980’s because systems papers were being excluded from CHI. So, rather than complain, I think a half dozen senior people in CHI community should get themselves on the UIST program committee, including the Chair. Then, make the conference you want it to be.
James, you might be the best choice for PC Chair.
Some time this summer Twitter announced its RT (retweet) API, a structured way of expressing the forwarding (often with comments) of others tweets that has, until now, been expressed informally by prepending the letters RT to another person’s tweet. The practice of retweeting (described in a forth-coming paper by danah boyd, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan) has evolved several conventions for crediting the source and incorporating comments. In addition to forwarding and commenting on the message, it can also serve as a useful mechanism to introduce people to others worth following.
The new API formalizes this notion, but also subverts established practice.
Merrie Morris, Jeremy Pickens and I are organizing a second workshop on collaborative information seeking to be held in conjunction with CSCW2010 on Feb 7, 2010. More details on an earlier post about the workshop, and on the workshop site itself. Look over the position papers from the first workshop (some of which will be published in an IP&M Special Issue soon), and submit one yourself!
Looking forward to lots of good discussion!
Angst turns to anger to acceptance (of your lot, if not of your paper). Yes, it’s the CHI 2010 rebuttal period. A short few days to try to address the reviewers’ misreading of your paper before the program committee throws it into the reject pile, requiring you to rewrite it for another conference. While it is easy to find fault with the process that puts one or more person-years’ of work into the hands of “three angry men” who may or may not be in a position to judge the work fairly, it is not clear how to improve the process. James Landay recently wrote about the frustrations of getting systems papers accepted, and in a comment on that post, jofish pointed out that the concerns apply more widely because CHI consists of many small communities with different methodological expectations that are not necessarily appreciated by reviewers.
Steven Pemberton gave a talk at FXPAL today where he talked about the virtues of declarative programming, and specifically about XForms. He cited some interesting statistics about the incidence of errors as a function of the size of the program, including the observation by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month that the number of bugs increases as L1.5. So the way to increase the reliability of code is to reduce the amount of code that has to be written to achieve a particular result. Declarative programming, Steven argues, is an improvement over its predecessors (high-level programming languages, and interpreted programming languages) because declarative programming focuses the programmer’s attention on the application logic and dispenses with worrying about the “fiddly bits.”
We’re happy to note that the book “Designing User Friendly Augmented Work Environments” (edited by Saadi Lahlou) has been published by Springer, in hardcover with an online version available. We have a chapter in it on our USE smart conference room system: “Designing an Easy-to-Use Executive Conference Room Control System.” The chapter starts with some of the field work we did to understand the work flows of the stakeholders, and then describes the evolution of the system we built to support the executive, his assistant, and others who used the meeting room. The system developed during this project was the precursor to the DICE system.
The process of writing and publishing this chapter took a considerable amount of time, and thus it is interesting to look back on some of our early designs to see how they have evolved. One aspect that changed was the name of project: we started out calling the system USE (Usable Smart Environment) and that terminology is used in the book chapter. By the time we completed this project and moved onto the larger conference room, we changed the name to DICE (Distributed Intelligent Conferencing Environment). DICE now runs in both rooms, and USE is the name of Gene’s group, just to add to the confusion.
For more information on this work, check out the video, some before/after pictures, and the CHI 2009 paper. We’re also working on a journal article that extends the CHI findings. Look for it in a few years!
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is increasingly being used to obtain judgments of relevance that can be used to establish gold standards with which to evaluate information seeking experiments. The attraction is clear: for a few bucks, in a few days, you can obtain data that is every bit as useful for evaluating simulations and other off-line experiments as data collected in the lab from “live” participants, and may be a good substitute for TREC assessors’ judgments. And of course the scale of the enterprise is such that you can run complex multi-factor experiments and still retain enough power. If you’re not up to doing this yourself, companies such as Dolores Labs will do it for you.
ReBoard architecture (from a ReBoard image)
Over the last year or so, Scott Carter, Jacob Biehl, and I have built and deployed an interesting system for managing whiteboard content. The system, ReBoard, consists of a camera that takes pictures of a traditional (or electronic, if you wanted) whiteboard when whiteboard content changes. The images captured by the camera are cleaned up by adjusting contrast and correcting for skew, and then saved into a database along with a bunch of metadata that identifies the changed region, the time and place the image was taken, and whether the content was likely created as a collaboration. Once captured, images can be shared with others and can be annotated by adding tags and notes.
There is an interesting discussion on Panos Ipeirotis’s blog about open-access publishing, and the ACM. He argues that the ACM should grant open access to its digital library because ACM’s stated goal is “Advancing Computing as a Science and a Profession,” and that this would be an effective way to do so. I’ve always thought that the ACM digital library fees were unnecessary. Like Panos, I don’t know what ACM’s expenses are, but I do know that conferences are profit centers, and that too many non-profitable years can lead to trouble for the sponsoring SIGs. Given that
what is the rationale for charging for subsequent access to these papers? Continue Reading
A couple of weeks ago I attended the SIAM/ACM Joint Conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling and heard a lovely talk by Richard Riesenfeld. Riesenfeld and his wife Elaine Cohen were this year’s Bézier award winners for their work in computer aided geometric design (CAGD). He spoke about his correspondence with Bézier and showed us many of the letters they sent back and forth in the early days of CAD/CAM, with their many hand drawn diagrams and the typed text with the math symbols added in by hand. I spent the time marveling at how they managed to have an effective collaboration over such an impoverished communication channel. But even with all of the wonderful 3D rendering capabilities we have today, it is still hard to communicate about 3D objects and spaces over a distance. Having a visual rendering is not sufficient. Spatial reasoning requires more. Riesenfeld mentioned Bézier’s view that “touch is more discriminative than eyes.”
This theme reminded me that I’ve been meaning to describe and send to the math factory folks a suggestion for an exhibit in the math museum. Instead, I’ll first write about it here.