Bernie Zang

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.