I returned a few days ago from a wonderful 4 day trip to Copenhagen. My main reason for visiting was to serve on the dissertation committee for Kjeld Schmidt’s student, Mika Yasuoka at the IT University of Copenhagen. Mika wrote a very interesting and thought provoking dissertation looking at the creation of project jargon to facilitate collaboration during short-term projects. After a 50 minute presentation and 10 minute break, the 3 committee members (Yvonne Dittrich, Bosse Helgeson, and myself) each…

As you probably know by now, Apple announced and demonstrated the iPad today. While it has a number of interesting and, at first glance, impressive features, I was mostly curious how it would handle books. Specifically, would the iPad do anything differently than the Kindle, or the other e-readers out there? Well, it’s still a little early to tell, but I do know this: It looks pretty cool. For example, watch the first demo video here. I dare you not…

Don’t laugh.  Apparently this is coming soon: Check out the coverage here. Interesting that Amazon is coming out with an SDK (but it’s really a KDK – Kindle Development Kit) at this point in the history of the Kindle device.  I’m even more curious to see how people react to navigating content on a Kindle, or gaming on a Kindle.  I could see Space Invaders doing okay as a casual game, I suppose.

We all knew the Kindle wouldn’t be the only digital reading device (DRD) on the market forever.  The last year or two has seen rapid development of new DRDs, new ways to obtain content, new formats for content, and so on.  But CES 2010 marks the first appearance of some interesting new DRDs, some of which are explicitly designed for specific market segments. Exhibit A: The Plastic Logic Que. The Que is for business travelers, although I wouldn’t mind getting…

The CSC Lab has received official word from the NSF and is pleased to announce that lab director Charlotte Lee has been awarded a coveted NSF CAREER Award! This is great news for the lab to start off the new year with. From the NSF website: The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration…

This week I gave a presentation on the Social Life of Data at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. I was presenting as part of a session on “Strategies for Improved Marine and Synergistic Data Access and Interoperability” organized by Cynthia Chandler, John Graybeal, and Karen Baker. The session was a nice mix of high-level framing papers and experiences with concrete systems. In addition to my presentation, the other presentations were: Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R): Technical Design…

These questions were originally posed by Dennis Severance, and I was introduced to them by Judy Olson as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan School of Information. They serve as a way to guide the research process and structure an argument for a presentation, paper, research proposal, etc. I’ve found them really useful and frequently go back to them as a way to critique my own writing. What is the problem? (in the theoretical debate, the world) Who…

Check out James Landay’s blog, Dub for the Future, for an interesting discussion of the reviewing process at CHI and UIST. James begins: “The CHI reviews just came out and I have to say I’m pretty unhappy… not with the numbers per se… (one paper I co-authored has a 4.5 average out of 5 and I’m sure I’ll get a fair number of papers accepted), but instead with the attitude in the reviews. The reviewers simply do not value the…

Read more here…the decision has to do with accessibility for people with vision impairments.

I just got back from attending the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The conference is a fun venue and most of the Science and Technology Studies world was there. There is a significant overlap with ACM conferences like CHI and CSCW, but the approach at 4S tends to be more theoretical. I presented a talk about “Cyberinfrastructure and Scientific Validity in Metagenomics Research,” in which I looked at how large DNA sequence databases…