I rarely have a single album on repeat, but this one has been on my playlist for the last week and I just can’t stop listening to it. It’s incredibly good, AND of course the dork in me also recognizes it as a MASHUP! Anyways it’s a mashup of Jay-Z’s Black Album with Radiohead songs. It’s free, and you can download it at http://jaydiohead.com.
I can’t really say that it’s better than the Grey Album by Danger Mouse, but it’s still really really good. Listen to it!
I’ve been looking for a reference manager or bibliography plugin for Wordpress for quite some time. The only thing close that I’ve found is Bibliofly, but there’s a lot of functionality that’s missing. For example, exporting or importing from Bibtex or Endnote would be great. Also automatic formating into ACM or APA bibliographies would be useful as well. Finally, being able to easily insert them into posts or pages and also having an associated link or pdf file would be great.
Quite a few academics use Wordpress, so I’m quite surprised that there aren’t any other plugins that has these functions. I’m going to try and adopt some of the code from Bibliofly and see if I can come up with a nifty plugin. Once I get something that’s working (and won’t randomly purge a database), I’ll post it up here to get some feedback.
Merry christmas everyone!
I can’t really can’t say very much about succeeding in grad school. My attitude has always been to enjoy myself the best I can. Moreover, I do my best to find interesting projects to work on and if I have an interest that I want to pursue, I do my best to find people with similar goals and interests to come together (does that make any sense?)
Looking at some of the sites suggested in IST 590 (Alice Dreger, Ron Azuma, Marie desJardins), there are 3 lessons that I find to be most important: enjoy your time in grad school, learn to write well, and stay motivated.
There are a lot of students who come to grad school and just stay in the office day in and day out. They’re trying very hard to be the best they can be. This is admirable, but I think many of them need to understand they will burn out much quicker if they do this. Also, this is probably going to be the most relaxed time of their lives. Once we leave grad school responsibilities kick in. It just so happens that this is a great time to be a great time to be in school:
Another important part of being in grad school is that you need to learn how to write. I can’t profess to be a good writer, but the most important thing is that grad school is the perfect time to learn how to write. There are many resources including other students, faculty advisors, and also resources provided by the university that will help students in improving their writing skills. The main point here is that you may have the best idea in the world, but if you can’t explain the idea clearly then its effects are much lessened.
Finally, it’s vital that grad students stay motivated. This motivation is what drives you to produce good research and pushes your success.
I’ve never really considered myself as an academic. Instead, my goal in grad school has always been to learn more about how people interact with computers, and bolster my technical skills. For the next couple of years, I’d really like to get some real world, hands on experience working with users and designing systems that are actually “usable” and used. I’ve always wanted to build tools, but in academia it’s rare that we create an actual product that is actually used by real users in everyday tasks. Of course this sounds more like product R&D, but that may be an area I want to explore.
In the short term, while I’m still in grad school, I’d like to explore my options during the summer with some internships. I tend to have very broad interests, so it’s hard for me to predict what I will be doing in the future, but one option would be something like this:
User Experience and Interactions Consultant - 2014 - Present
User Experience Researcher, Microsoft, Redmond, WA - 2010 - 2014
User Interactions Intern, IBM Research, Alameda, CA - Summer 2009
I’ve always wanted to start my own company and work on projects that I find interesting rather than projects managers dictate. Occasionally these two paths do coincide. For example, I’ve always thought of companies like Microsoft is that they only care about profit. Yes, I know it’s kind of naive to only think in these terms, but I’m pretty new to this. Anyways, just talking to some of the researchers at these institutions has opened my eyes to some of the great work they’re doing.
So I guess the question of “what will I be doing in 2015″ is that I don’t know what I will be doing, and I don’t want to know. I want to keep my options open and do what I enjoy. Yes, some may consider this as a lack of a plan for the future, but I don’t think of it that way. Instead, as cliche as it sounds, I think about it as living in the now.
This week’s blog is brought to you by Slurm!
Anyways, to the topic at hand. HCI has gotten to a point where it is a conglomeration of many different research fields and not just one. For example, designers from industry do “HCI work” but are quite a bit different from those who do HCI work in academia. Thus, picking a single “famous” person is quite hard, but I did end up finding a single person who I respect. This, of course, does not include any faculty who are here at Penn State. So now I’ll go ahead and talk about Jonathan Grudin.
I’ve only met the man on one occasion, but even from our short chat I could tell that he was not only a prolific researcher, but also a person who cares about the field. He started his academic career at Reeds College in the early 70s in math and physics. He continued with a masters in Math, but then moved to Purdue for a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology. Afterwards he worked in many different research groups including Wang Labs, MCC, and MIT. He settled down in 1991 at UC Irvine and became a professor. He’s now at Microsoft Research working in CSCW as it relates to the “design, adoption and use of group support technologies”
Currently, he is pushing an initiative to study the history of HCI. How it has come to be and the consequences of how decisions to move down paths of research have effected our current situation. I really agree with him, in that keeping a historic understanding of the field helps us position our work and hopefully recognize past errors. Dr. Grudin’s experiences in the field gives him a unique position to work towards this goal. He is one of the few people in HCI that have extensively studied the field from a historic perspective.
While he doesn’t have a direct connection to my own research, many of his past work has affected the way that design is being done now. He pointed out, early on, that iterative processes when designing features and interfaces is really needed to develop a user-centric system. Moreover, it is important to realize that inundating users with a bunch of features all at once does not help them adopt a new system. Instead, introducing single important features and allowing the users to get used to them and then moving forward with new components.
Generally, Jonathan Grudin is not only a knowledgeable researcher but also a warm and friendly person to talk to. His experiences give him a unique perspective on the world and he continues to provide insight to everyone around him.
So I’ve been asked to write about where I publish. Simply, my answer is “to as many conferences as I possibly can.” By this I mean, good, peer reviewed, well established conferences. While journal articles are more prestigious in most cases, I enjoy the interactions I get at conferences so I am for those as much as possible. My top six, in no particular order, are CHI, VL/HCC, ICSE, CSCW, IUI, and UIST.
CHI is fully titled the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Its been around, in its present form since 1995, and is the premiere conference for HCI. Because of it’s wide spread coverage, the CHI conference is probably the largest in the field. Of course, it’s also very selective. So far I’ve had work-in-progress published there, but I’m going for a Workshop this year and another work-in-progress this year. Hopefully I’ll actually get a full paper there at some point.
VL/HCC is the IEEE symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing. Quite a few the people who study end user programming publish there. I had the great opportunity of publishing and attending the conference. Great place, great people. What’s awesome about VL/HCC is that it’s almost the opposite of CHI. It’s a much smaller conference and the interactions with the people are much more personal. VL/HCC is a place that is very specific. It’s tailored towards a specific group of researchers, so if you’re interested in End User programming, visual languages, etc, it’s a good place to publish.
The last 4 conferences are ones that I’ve heard a lot about, but have not had a chance to pursue them. They’ve all been suggested to me as good places to publish. Most of the names are pretty self explanatory: ICSE is the International Conference on Software Engineering, CSCW is Computer Supported Cooperative Work, IUI is Intelligent User Interfaces, and UIST is User Interface Software and Technology.
Academic communities are an interesting topic. There are many of them, and while many of them intersect, there are some groups that really don’t talk to each other. I guess to start, my main community would be under the huge umbrella of HCI, but then again, HCI is a pretty big group. It’s almost like saying “I like cheese”. Of course the big cheese would be the CHI community, but there are also many cheeses under CHI, so I guess more specifically I should say “I like Munster, Gouda, and occasionally blue cheese.” Just to be a bit weird, I’ll associate gouda with Usability Professionals, blue cheese with End User Programming, and munster with Gaming research (bet you didn’t think I would mention this one).
From early on I’ve been interested in how to help less expert users become more experienced or at least use technologies to help them in everyday tasks. That is how I first became interested in End User Programming (EUP). When I applied to grad school, I didn’t even know that this community existed, but by interacting with my adviser and people I met at conferences, I’m getting a better understanding of what this academic community is all about. Their main goal is aimed at helping users who participate in programming-like tasks, but who are not programmers. This includes things like working with macros, debugging spreadsheets, and even making web pages. Basically this group is interested in studying the barriers that people encounter when approaching programming related tasks, and finding ways to fix the problem.
Leading from that, the reason I originally became interested in IST is because of web development side job. I was continuously hired to fix usability problems that previous designers had left in sites. While my research has slightly shifted, I am still very interested in the practical application of usability. Because of this, I’m a member of the Usability Professionals Association (UPA). Not really an active member, but I do try and keep track of the cutting edge work this group is focused on. While not necessarily an academic community, they do have a major presence at the CHI conference, and actually have own meetings every year.
Finally there is gaming research. Gaming has always been an interest I’ve had. Not only because I enjoy gaming, but also because I think games are a way to engage youngsters and teach them almost anything. I’m a firm believer that you can turn anything into a game and so why not use it to our advantage. Hell, the US Army uses an FPS game to train their soldiers. Why can we use it to teach a student how to program. Moreoever, games have become an important part of what people do. Massively multiplayer online (MMO) games have taken over, and with it many very interesting things that can be studied. Even now, researchers are working on studying group dynamics in games. Even well known researchers (i.e. Bonnie Nardi) are very interested in games.
With that I leave you with a video of dancing bears:
Yay, more IST 590 blogging. This week, it was my job to examine some of the work that a more senior grad student has done. I decided to pick on John… why? well because he’s sitting next to me.
John is a PhD student who actually got his master’s here in IST as well. He works at ARL at Penn State and was previously at Raytheon. His research is mainly concentrated on studying programmers. His master’s thesis was about APIs. Both of us actually went to CHI last year. Unlike my research that focuses on the novice or non-programmer, his concentrates on experienced programmers.
So Dr. Mary Beth Rosson is quite active in many conferences. She’s considered a matriarch of the CHI conference where she has been on the program committee for many years and also a general chair 2007. She’s also very active at the OOPSLA conference, VL/HCC, and DIS. Finally, she’s a founding member of the EUSES consortium, a group of researchers working towards making end-user programming easier.
In the past few years she’s taught numerous graduate level courses, including CSCW (IST 525), HCI Methods (IST 521), and the introductory IST Integration course (IST 501). This semester she is also teaching IST 110.
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