I’m having a great time at CHI (including my first time two-stepping today) but I strongly believe, as Jonathan Grudin asserted today, that we can make use of data to improve the conference. I’ve already analyzed historical data that demonstrates that we can substantially reduce reviewer workload. We’ve also created a way you can use [...]
Would you like some feedback on your CHI paper? We’ve set up a site to let people read and comment on it. On Wednesday at CHI, we’ll be presenting our paper on nb, a discussion forum situated in the margins of documents being discussed. Its original intended usage was for discussion of classroom lecture notes, [...]
Last year I used an analysis of CHI review data to argue that we could save a lot of reviewers’ time on low quality papers by modiyfing our review process. With all the current talk of the value of replication, I figured it was worth testing the same procedure with this year’s review data, which [...]
This year at CHI we’ll be presenting a paper on nb, a tool that lets students have forum-style threaded discussions in the margins of pdf documents. We’ve posted it in advance at the link above in hopes of getting some comments on it that can help us prepare our presentation. We’re also making nb available [...]
I spent last weekend at the 2012 PIM workshop, located at CSCW 2012. This was the 5th such workshop. Appropriately for its setting, this one focused on “PIM in a socially networked world”—i.e., the aspects of PIM emerging in the interactions between multiple individuals. The focus clearly highlighted the distance between two different notions of [...]
[cross-posted from the CrowdResearch blog] Crowds are already powering novel interactive systems like word processors and question answering systems, but their reach is too limited: crowds are reasonable choices only when the user can wait a minute or more for a response. Users, of course, hate waiting — they abandon interfaces that are slow to react. Imagine [...]
There is little I like more than a fine cheese and fresh-baked bread. Still, to fill the rest of my day without expanding my waistline, I go for a mix of databases and human-computer interaction. That’s why I was excited to see several database-oriented papers presented at CHI. While many papers contained some amount of data, [...]
This past week at CHI, our very own Michael Bernstein participated in a panel discussion about the role of replication and reproduction in the CHI community. Thanks to Max Wilson, the panel coordinator, I got the opportunity to log the event and live-tweeted the whole thing; here are my notes. Max starting things off, with [...]
Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve been looking at the way people ask and answer questions on Facebook. Much of this work happened with the phenomenal Merrie Morris and Jaime Teevan (haystack alum!) at Microsoft Research. I’ve been interested in the ad hoc way people ask questions as their status messages [...]
I attended the VISSW 2011 workshop last sunday. It was fun, but a few of the papers exhibited a painfully familiar pattern: they put together a plausible-seeming user interface but didn’t evaluate it with a user study. I left frustrated, with no sense of whether the ideas of the interfaces would be good or bad [...]