Today I gave a keynote at CIKM 2011. I argued that in addition to all our work on tools the process information for users, we should also be looking at tools that make people better able to apply their innate information processing talents for themselves. I talked about the following tools that reflext that idea, [...]
With my background as a theoretical computer scientist, I’m a terrible programmer (Back in college taking operating systems, my team got special mention for having the most elegantly designed operating system, all built around a single semaphor API. Of course it only executed for 30 seconds before crashing). But sometimes, when I can’t convince any [...]
[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 [...]
As forewarned in my last blog post, I’ve submitted a first draft of our Knight News Challenge proposal at their site; you can read and, more importantly, comment upon the proposal here. I welcome your feedback. And as I mentioned last time, if you’re interested in being one of our Guinea pigs, step right up—especially [...]
The Knight News Challenge is an ambitious undertaking to fund innovation in tools that can help digital journalism. I’m planning to submit a proposal around our Datapress data-blogging plugin for WordPress and am seeking some early-adopter WordPress bloggers who’d be interested in experimenting with our tools on their sites. I believe that publishing rich interactive [...]
A couple of days ago Adam Pash at Lifehacker posted a criticism of “everything buckets”—applications aimed at gathering every kind of information you work with into a single place. I can’t resist responding as the article touches on some of the issues that have framed my past 15 years of research into information management. It [...]
Seeing the Future by Mining the Past: The Exact Average UIST Paper by Bernstein, M.S., with the largest contributions from eigenauthors Hudson, S., Balakrishnan, R., Myers. B.A., Feiner, S., Hinckley, K., Rekimoto, J., et al. History repeats itself: computer science research continuously reinvents past work. Thus, to predict the future of UIST, we trained an n-gram [...]
When someone describes a person as a “messy” or “tidy”, we can instantly guess something about their appearance, their personality, and the way they organize their physical and digital artifacts – around the house, office, or on their computer(s). There is little disagreement around these definitions, and many stereotypes (both positive and negative) are commonly [...]
While Situational Awareness (SA) theory [1] has primarily been applied to analyzing how people act in highly time-critical military and industrial roles, such as how fighter pilots assess their aerial and tactical situations to decide what maneuvers to make, it may also serve as a useful theoretical model to inform the design of future personal [...]
In a post last week I argued that the key to making structured data pervasive on the web was tools that make it easy for people to create interesting data visualizations that share their data by default, without adding effort. This prompted a pair of responses that I’d like to address here. One, from Glen [...]