Making change in Zimbabwe without coins
This is a message in a bottle. I’ve got an idea for addressing a problem in Zimbabwe and no idea how to reach the people I’d like to share it with, so I’m going to see if perhaps it can propagate to...
View ArticleForums in the Document Margins for Classes and Reading Groups
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...
View ArticleAllocating CHI reviewers, a sequel
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...
View ArticleFor CHI 2012: Discussion Forums in the Document Margins
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...
View ArticleTo improve the CHI conference, would you share which talks you attended?
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...
View ArticleCongress, the NSF, and Social Science Research
For the past few weeks I’ve been following the Monkey Cage blog as it has followed the vote by the House of Representatives to prohibit the National Science Foundation (NSF) from funding Political...
View ArticleFaculty Summits and Industy-Faculty Collaborations
By some statistical fluke this summer I got invitations to and attended faculty summits at Google, Microsoft, and Facebook within a period of two weeks. All were well run and a lot of fun, but left me...
View Article“Living with Big Data: Challenges and Opportunities”, Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay...
As part of the Big Data Lecture Series — Fall 2012, Google’s Jeff Dean gave a talk on how Google manages to deliver services which involve managing huge amounts of data. In order to make things work...
View ArticleTwo Funny Things at the 2012 International Semantic Web Conference
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...
View ArticleConverging Online Education and Online Journalism
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...
View ArticleTry out Habitbug!
One of the things that’s been interesting to us for a while now is how we can use our friends to help us get things done – friendsourcing. (See some example previous posts here, here, here, and here.)...
View ArticleKeynote at the European Semantic Web Conference Part 1: The State of End User...
I’ve just returned from the European Semantic Web Conference, where I gave a keynote talk on “The Semantic Web for End Users”. The slides are here . My talk addressed the problem that has interested...
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Keynote at ESWC Part 2: How the Semantic Web Can Help End Users
I’ve just returned from the European Semantic Web Conference, where I gave a keynote talk on “The Semantic Web for End Users”. My talk addressed the problem that has interested me for eighteen years:...
View ArticleWatch This Space
I was planning to post about the third and final part of my ESWC keynote today—about changes I’d like to see in the research mix at ESWC—but I’m hoping the post will generate discussion that I don’t...
View ArticleKeynote at ESWC Part 3: What’s Wrong with Semantic Web Research, and Some...
I’ve just returned from the European Semantic Web Conference, where I gave a keynote talk on “The Semantic Web for End Users”. My talk addressed the problem that has interested me for eighteen years:...
View ArticleSemantic Web for End Users: Keynote from ESWC 2013 now Online
A final addendum to my series of three posts on the Semantic Web and End Users. The talk that I summarized in those posts is now online here, synchronized with the slides I presented. I think I did a...
View ArticleCan Academics Make a Difference in CS Research?
I don’t get them often, but by some statistical fluke I last summer I got invitations to and attended the faculty summits at Google, Microsoft, and Facebook within a period of two weeks. I’ll spoke...
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PhD: Part 1
Fig. 1: An early version of SIEUFERD, the Schema-Independent End-User Front-End for Relational Databases. It’s my sixth year in graduate school; my committee has been formed, my PhD thesis proposal...
View ArticleDemanding a Replicability Paragraph in Conference Submissions
This past month I finished reviewing 4 papers for CHI and 6 for the WWW conference. For CHI, 3 of the 4 papers described small, simple applications intended to test some user interface idea. For WWW,...
View ArticleShining some Sunlight on Conference Reviews
There’s ongoing discussion of our conference review process. Unsurprisingly it seems to spike around the time people get reviews of their own work. A lot of the griping tends to assert that reviewers...
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