The Neiman Journalism Lab recently collected a number of opinions on interesting trends in online journalism. You can read the whole set here, but for those too lazy to click, here’s my own contribution. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are widely believed to be revolutionizing education. But I think they also suggest some really interesting [...]
I spent last week at the 2012 International Semantic Web Conference. This conference addresses the important topic of structured data on the web. I had two “funny” experiences; one humorous and one peculiar. At the beginning of the conference, I was amused to see that ISWC, whose central theme is linking the web’s data together [...]
I sympathize with Google’s efforts to prevent impersonation on plus. But I didn’t think the real names policy was the right approach, and I don’t think the verification badge approach addresses the right problem either. Taking a concrete example, my real name is David Karger, and I can certainly get that verified. But there’s another [...]
Among the other talks I attended at CHI 2011 was Justin Matejka et al.’s “Ambient Help” (paper and video here). The Ambient Help system is designed for complex desktop applications like AutoCAD or Photoshop, which tend to come with a steep learning curve, and which tend to require a continued learning process even from more [...]
There’s a lot of discussion about the right way to evaluate and support systems research in SIGCHI. Maybe too much. (I’m allowed to say that because I contributed to it, right?) But for this to be a productive conversation, we need to tackle the other half: what makes for a bad systems paper? I say [...]
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 [...]
Recently the CHI workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation got some press courtesy of Jim Giles and New Scientist. Near the end of the workshop, the working group on Future Directions and Community had some interesting suggestions that I’ll echo here. Can we take some of the crowdsourcing tools and techniques we have developed as [...]
I’ve been attending the CHI conference in Vancouver this week, presenting some of my work on database user interfaces. It was interesting to attend Tuesday’s “Re-Engineering Health Care with Information Technology” panel and hear about what appears to be one of the biggest application areas for database UIs on the planet: Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). [...]
Although I’ve been going to CHI for a few years, I still feel like something of a foreigner, not certain which talks to attend. Many of my friends and colleagues probably have a much better idea than I of which talks are given by speakers I would like and which offer insights I would find [...]
A few weeks ago, I finished writing a thought piece with Mark Ackerman, Ed Chi, and Rob Miller about the state of systems research in social computing. It grew out of conversations with a lot of researchers in the area, and examines questions of novelty, evaluation, and the industry/academia question in the field. I submitted [...]