Jason Hong's Confabulations

http://www.loopt.com/ , description via Joe McCarthy ...they already have 40K users, and will be doing a major launch in December (at which point the application will be pre-installed on all Boost phones). ...Managing privacy issues will be crucial to their success; Mark said everything is opt-in, requiring an explicit invitation, acceptance, and activation, and it only works if you know someone's phone number."

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~simonscholar/ The goal of the China-Carnegie Mellon University program is to promote and influence next-generation Chinese academic leaders in Computer Science. ... The Simon-Scholar program is designed to bring exceptional young professors (lecturers, assistant professors, and assoicate professors) at leading Computer Science Departments in China to visit Carnegie Mellon for 6 to 12 months. Carnegie Mellon will match each scholar with a host professor, and together they will conduct research of mutual interest. This program is supported by The Chinese Ministry of Education, The China Scholarship Council, and Carnegie Mellon University.

From ConsumerAffairs, Top 10 Scams of 2006 and Top 10 Scams of 2005 . Some of these scams are quite ingenious, preying on people's fears, greed, or compassion. Some highlights: Government Grants : This was the most common scam in 2005. A typical version of the scam worked like this: The caller claimed that you won a $12,500.00 federal grant and all you must do is pay the taxes, either by wiring the money or by providing your checking account numbers over the phone. Jury Duty : A widespread scam where the caller claimed that you missed jury duty. One version of the scam said that an arrest warrant had been issued, and when you would insist that you didn't receive a notice for jury duty, the caller would ask for your personal information to verify they were speaking to the correct person. Another version of the scam would ask you to pay a fine by using your credit card or checking account. Phony Job Scam : Scammers are increasingly responding to job seekers posting their resumes...

Quite impressive, you can simply demonstrate the gestures you want the Nintendo Wiimote to recognize. http://wiinintendo.net/?p=1857 I wonder if it uses a simple linear classifier? I also wonder what their threshold value is for recognizing gestures, since it seems to be able to classify things as unknown gestures. Lastly, how good is the performance? The program seemed to have a slight lag in recognizing gestures, but the Nintendo sports game I tried out seems to respond quite well.

Overheard at the 60th birthday celebration of our department director, Dan Siewiorek : A: You look familiar, have we met before? B: I'm not sure, I'm [anonymized]. A: Oh, you were on my dissertation committee along with Dan!

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsID=7386&pagtype=all By contrast, the new study, Finding Phish: An Evaluation of Anti-Phishing Toolbars [jih - we actually spelled it "Phinding Phish"] , was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, backed by organisations as worthily anodyne as the US National Science Foundation and the US Army Research Office. ... Even the best of the bunch - Earthlink, Netcraft, Google, Coudmark, and Explorer 7 - detected only 85 percent of fraudulent websites, a good but far from secure level of effectiveness. The rest scored under the 50 percent mark, with McAfee’s SiteAdvisor unable to spot any. Here's a link to our study, Phinding Phish: An Evaluation of Anti-Phishing Toolbars

A new study by the CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University, "Phinding Phish: An Evaluation of Anti-Phishing Toolbars" shows that anti-phishing browser toolbars are generally not up to the task. The research, carried out by Lorrie Cranor, Serge Egelman, Jason Hong, and Yue Zhang, examined 10 of the 80-90 free anti-fraud toolbars currently available. http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/81635 Here's a link to our study, Phinding Phish: An Evaluation of Anti-Phishing Toolbars

FYI, Rich Gold was an artist and designer that was part of the original ubiquitous computing team at PARC. He also helped establish the PARC Artist in Residence program. I just found out that a book he had been working on before his untimely passing away is online (and his wife is also looking for a publisher, if any of you know of one). http://www.o-art.org/Plenitude/ Rich has some really good insights about the nature of art, science, design, and engineering; intelligent houses; and how the act of reading has changed over time.

I've heard a lot about embodied interaction, but until now, haven't yet seen a good explanation of why it is so important. Oddly enough, the article is about the upcoming Nintendo Wii. http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/11/a_console_to_make_you_wiip.php "What kind of an emotion of fear would be left," James wondered, "if the feeling of quickened heart beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose bumps nor of visceral stirrings, were present?" James' answer was simple: without the body there would be no fear, for an emotion begins as the perception of a bodily change. When it comes to the drama of feelings, our flesh is the stage. For most of the 20th century, James' theory of bodily emotions was ignored. It just seemed too implausible. But in the 1980s, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio realized that James was actually right: Most of our emotions are preceded by changes in our physical body. Da...

This looks neat, Yahoo! is providing a way of distilling text into the main terms. However, it's not clear to me how much content you can send it (their demo only has about a dozen words) or how well it works. http://developer.yahoo.com/search/content/V1/termExtraction.html

A favorite of grad students, my Grad School Advice Page is now back, and is new and improved: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/advice.html

I finally saw Good Night, and Good Luck today, and was greatly inspired by Edward Murrow's closing lines: To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost. This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. Good night, and good luck. And then, just now, I checked out CNN's web site and see that the main headline deals with what an alleged murderer ate on the plane: There are days when I thi...

According to MSNBC / Newsweek / Kaplan College Guide , Carnegie Mellon University is one of the "New Elite 'Ivies'". A major national research university, Carnegie Mellon serves 5,500 undergrads and 3,000 grad students in seven colleges reflecting CMU's academic diversity: Carnegie Institute of Technology (engineering), the College of Fine Arts, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Mellon College of Science, the Tepper School of Business, the School of Computer Science and the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. I have to admit that I don't quite understand this obsession with Ivy League schools. Perhaps it's the journalists writing these kinds of stories. At any rate, it's good that CMU is getting more recognition. Hopefully, we'll be able to avoid more of Randy Pausch 's experiences when he was trying to give away Carnegie Mellon branded CD's of Alice , where one person asked "Why is a bank giving away free so...

Just discovered this nice resource, Google has about 130 seminar talks online. Topics range from current affairs and science to entertainment and the arts. http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=techtalks

Back in the early 1990s, Kathleen Gomoll wrote a short and useful article on running user studies. I find myself sending this to people all the time. Link 1. Introduce yourself. 2. Describe the purpose of the observation. 3. Tell the participant that it's okay to quit at any time. 4. Talk about the equipment in the room. 5. Explain how to ìthink aloud. 6. Explain that you cannot provide help. 7. Describe the tasks and introduce the product. 8. Ask if there are any questions before you start; then begin the observation. 9. Conclude the observation. 10. Use the results.

http://www.webdesignpractices.com/ Web Design Practices is a site devoted to helping designers understand what design practices are currently in use on the Web—and aims to gather research about the usability of commonly-employed design practices. Sort of like web design patterns, shows what are common practices for online design. Author also has a nice summary article on boxesandarrows entitled Examining the Role of De Facto Standards on the Web .

From an ACM Queue article written by John Canny entitled The Future of HCI . (Disclosure: John was two offices down from me at Berkeley :) ) In spite of their unfamiliar content and methods, HCI courses are strongly in demand in university programs and should be part of the core curriculum. At a recent industry advisory board meeting for U.C. Berkeley's computer science division, HCI was unanimously cited as the most important priority for future research and teaching by our industry experts.

A collection of the dreaded "404 Page Not Found" errors for your enjoyment. http://www.plinko.net/404

From the Devil's Dictionary 2.0 The name given to the social and technical sophistication and maturity that mark the— Oh, screw it. Money! Money money money! Money! The money’s back! Ha ha! Money! http://www.eod.com/devil/archive/web_20.html

Rich Presence trials are participatory, distributed, and experimental. Participants download and install a specially tuned integrated communications client on their laptops. This client allows participants to initiate voice, instant messaging, and video calls to each other using the receiver's email address as a single, converged electronic identity. Communication is enhanced through the inclusion of rich presence services, through which participants may see not only who is on-line, but also where they are and what they are doing. As participants connect to the wireless LAN, their location and calendar presence is updated automatically. Room location is derived through triangulation of 802.11 signals and is cross-referenced with the meeting calendar to learn the name and duration of the session in that room at that time. Link

As the universe of people who want a cell phone and don't already have one gets smaller, wireless carriers are counting on advanced services to generate the bulk of new revenue in coming years. ... That has providers working hard to make their devices easier to use -- fewer steps, brighter and less cluttered screens, different pricing strategies -- so consumers will not only use data functions more often but also be encouraged to buy additional ones. ... "IPod was not the first MP3 player on the market, but once they figured it out (the user interface), they became the predominant one overnight" http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/biztech/05/29/cellphone.usability.ap/

From the Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2006/05/2006052401c/careers.html?top20 According to Human Capital Research, a college-admissions consulting firm, rated on an index from zero to one, SAT test scores predict a freshman's grade-point average at 0.03 to 0.14. "I might as well measure shoe size," the firm's president, Brian Zucker, was quoted as saying in "The Best Class Money Can Buy," one of a series of thoughtful articles on the admissions process that appeared in the November 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Zucker argues that the SAT's have "made schools lazy and stupid at the same time." The opportunity costs involve "looking past literally millions of kids who would do a great job."

Google has just released a web toolkit that lets you convert Java GUIs to AJAX. I proposed something like this as a class project for SAUI (Software Architectures for UIs), and even thought about doing this as a long-term research project. I'm now glad I didn't because I would have been seriously scooped. http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

Whole Foods' watermelons are simply amazing, the best I've ever had. That is all.

I'm about halfway thru Vernor Vinge's new book Rainbows End . What's really amazing is how he ties together a lot of technology trends in a single coherent story, including: wearable computers with contact lens displays sensor networks augmented reality robotics new biomedical therapies (I'm sure there's a sexier name for that) silent messaging (I'd love to know how people could do text entry that fast!) paper displays autonomous vehicles (self-driving taxis) micropayments holographic displays digital libraries There's a funny section early on where the protagonist, who has missed the last decade due to Alzheimer's, is asking where all the robots and flying vehicles are. Vinge also does a good job of tying things to our present world by forecasting how existing entities such as Bank of America , Google , and Homeland Security fit in. Vinge also seems to subscribe to Brin's notion of a transparent society, where everyone can easily find almost any pi...

Very interesting look at Nigerian email scams, takes you thru one person's story (who has a PhD in psych, no less). http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060515fa_fact ------- The scammers, who often operate in crime rings, are known as “yahoo-yahoo boys,” because they frequently use free Yahoo accounts. Many of them live in a suburb of Lagos called Festac Town. Last year, one scammer in Festac Town told the Associated Press, “Now I have three cars, I have two houses, and I’m not looking for a job anymore.” ... When I asked Worley what he wished he had done differently, he didn’t answer directly. Instead, he spoke about hoping that the Abachas would get back in touch with him. However, before they could resume work on the multimillion-dollar transfer, he expected them to send the six hundred thousand dollars that he needs for restitution.

All right, the phishing scams have moved up from $20 for surveys to $1000! Now that's progress! ----- • The Washington Mutual Bank Online department kindly asks you to take part in our quick and easy 5 questions survey. In return we will credit $1000.00 to your account - Just for your time! ...

I've been chatting with many of my friends and colleagues about an issue that's been bugging me for a while, namely whether academic research has any role to play in the emerging Web 2.0 . I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that the answer is not much. I had a similar discussion with other researchers at HotMobile a few weeks ago. When the web first came out, pretty much every systems researcher ignored it because it was so ugly. The web was not very sophisticated in terms of distributed systems, HTTP lacked elegance, HTML conflated many different ideas, and so on. There were also not any really new ideas with the web, as evidenced by the fact that Tim Berners-Lee 's first paper on the Web was (probably rightfully) rejected from an ACM conference on hypertext. I'm sure one thing that really irked researchers about the nascent web was that it completely ignored the large body of work in hypertext and distributed systems that had preceded it. Even in 1997, as ...

I can't take any credit for it, but two of the six that this person lists were developed as part of the Software Architectures and User Interfaces class I taught last Fall. Just a quickie to bubble up some novel Quicksilver plugins that are new-ish or even a bit esoteric. ... 3. Abracadabra triggers - Associate a mouse gesture with any command. Seems especially cool for people using pen and tablet. (more) 4. Constellation Menus - Love it, hate it, or just find it wildly geeky and beautiful, this is kinda A1c0r’s version of right-click on graphical steroids. (more and more) http://www.43folders.com/2006/04/13/qs-plugins/

See where movie stars are in Manhattan in near-realtime based on reports by people. A weird (and somewhat scary) form of a smart mob. http://www.gawker.com/stalker/

I made this prognostication a few years ago, and it just keeps coming true. Now, you can run not just Doom, but Doom II and Halflife on a video ipod. YouTube Link Reminds me of Zawinski's law : "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

At the latest HotMobile: Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications , IBM researcher John Barton poses an interesting question: Why can we connect to Amazon so much faster than the computer across the room? Also reminds me of Bruce Sterling's question: why can I easily pull up pictures of the moon, but can't see what's inside my walls?

Wired Magazine's web site has an article about people using Craigslist to find things that they've lost. It would be really compelling if we could actually figure out the stats for how effective something like this is. In an increasingly cynical world, there are still places where people try to do the right thing. Everyday on Internet message boards, honest folks post notes about valuables they found: cash, bank cards, diamond bracelets, engagement rings, wedding bands, digital cameras, and even a cockatoo valued at $1,200. In turn, when there is no place left to look for something missing, the desperate sometimes take the longest of longshots and look online themselves. Occasionally, it works for both sides. People such as Silliman get back their iPod, still loaded with Radio Head and Broken Social Scene. Link

I'm not sure what's scarier, the fact that one of the students in our Usable Privacy and Security class showed the video of the exploding whale today, that there's a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale">Wikipedia article on exploding whales , or that there is a series of Wikipedia articles on exploding animals .

Makezine thinks that online games and credit cards will combine, similar to what I wrote about it a few weeks ago . Very soon, credit card companies and game makers will reward their customers who spend money in the real world using private label "rewards" credit cards. They will use gifts of virtual currency such as Blizzard's World of Warcraft gold and Second Life's Linden dollars. Link

There's a (somewhat) interesting article in today's New York Times on adopted Chinese children. I have to say that my experiences with adopted Chinese children and their parents here in Pittsburgh have been highly positive. The children are all wonderful, and their parents go to extraordinary lengths and sacrifices for their children. Shelley and I (along with others) have been helping to teach the children basic Chinese and a little about Chinese culture, and everyone is so excited to keep learning. I also can't help but think that this will help the United States' relation with China in the long term. When there is greater awareness here in the United States (that China is more than Chinese food, the Great Wall, and martial arts), as the young girls go back to visit China, as we strengthen our connections between our two countries, we have a better and more grounded understanding of each other rather than the stereotypes and caricatures often presented in the media. S...

Jorge Cham, creator of the PhD comic strip, will be on campus as the keynote speaker for the Graduate Student Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, April 5, 2006 . The time for the event is still being set up but should be around 5:30pm in Kresge Auditorium in CFA. The Award Ceremony and Jorge's keynote speech will be followed by a reception and book selling/signing in the CFA Great Hall. We will be providing publicity about this event in the next couple of weeks. This is one of the main events in Graduate Student Appreciation Week- April 3-7.

A huge collection of different kinds of infoviz maps. Very cool, some of them look like Jackson Pollock created them. http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

My colleague Satya has an intriguing idea for quantifying security: http://csdl.computer.org/comp/mags/pc/2005/03/b3004.pdf [B]etween the first and second editions, Knuth had become very famous. For many people, his autograph was worth more than $2, so many saved the check as a souvenir rather than cashing it. This suggests a metric for that elusive attribute we call fame: what is the largest amount Knuth could have offered such that some fixed fraction of the checks (say, 50 percent) would never be cashed? That dollar figure is a reasonable metric of fame. ... An operational approach to [security] might proceed as follows: Use software package A to guard some secret (such as a large random number), and welcome Internet attacks on the package for some time period (say, a week). Offer a reward of $X to the first person who discovers and reports the secret. If someone reports the secret, the package is clearly not usable. The interesting case is when no one reports the secret within the...

. . . . anyone can be a scientist. I saw people walking around in sweatshirts and jeans. Who knows? Maybe I can be a scientist. Drawings and notions of scientists by seventh graders, before and after a visit to Fermilab. Very cool. http://www-ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/amanda.html

HCII 12th Anniversary Celebration Thursday, April 20, 2006 Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Carnegie Mellon has been at the forefront of human computer interaction research since the field's inception. The early book by CMU professor Allen Newell and CMU alumni Stu Card and Tom Moran coined the field’s name in the early 1980s. We created the first Human-Computer Interaction Institute in 1994. Help us celebrate 12 years of HCI Institute progress by attending a one-day seminar with distinguished speakers from the HCI community followed by the 50th Anniversary of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon! You are welcome to join all events, including the Spring Carnival festivities! Link

Note: This is a rant I wrote back in 2003 or so and had at my home page at Berkeley. I'm putting it up on my blog now since my old home page is no longer there. I've made some updates to the original, with additional updates at the bottom. This is going to be a lengthy but serious discussion of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). I wrote this after talking with Jen Mankoff (a fellow professor here at CMU), and after reading this article on the New York Times about how this person spends 7+ hours a day online playing a single game, having racked up 2400+ hours already. Usually, when I read these kinds of articles about game addicts, I always think, "if only we could use his powers for good!" If only we could make it so that people get more out of games than just fun. If only we could actually get something genuinely useful at the same time (so we don't end up with stories like this one from The Onion ). My canonical example is Crazy Taxi ....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blind Very interesting, I would never have thought of it this way. I wonder if there are ways of building information visualization tools along these lines too. Color blindness is usually classed as a disability; however, in select situations color blind people have advantages over people with normal color vision. Color blind hunters are better at picking out prey against a confusing background, and the military have found that color blind soldiers can sometimes see through camouflage that fools everyone else. Monochromats may have a minor advantage in dark vision, but only in the first five minutes of dark adaptation. ... The United States Military has found that color blind individuals can be more easily trained as snipers due to the fact that they are more acutely aware of differences in texture and pattern and thereby less likely to be fooled by camouflage patterns.

I had a whacky idea today, that these MMORPGs like Everquest and World of Warcraft should have special rewards program that are like frequent flier miles. Some examples: Buy products with the Everquest credit card, and get 10 gold pieces per dollar spent For every dollar you donate to charity, Dark Age of Camelot will give you 100 experience points For every captcha you help us break, Ultima Online will give you a lottery ticket to get [insert some powerful item]

Last weekend, I came to my office in Newell Simon Hall and found that a small army of action figures were poised to invade. Reminds me a little of Toy Story.

I was digging around my old photos, and found some videos I took at UIST2004 of PARC researcher Ed Chi getting kicked in the stomach. This was part of his demonstration of a SensorHogu he and others helped develop for better scoring in Tae Kwon Do. Plus, it's just fun to watch Ed get kicked (sorry Ed, it's true!) Videos Video 1 (5meg avi) Video 2 (4meg avi) Video 3 (1meg avi) Original Paper: Ed H. Chi, Jin Song, Greg Corbin. 'Killer App' of Wearable Computing: Wireless Force Sensing Body Protectors for Martial Arts. In Proc. of 17th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 277--285. ACM Press, October, 2004. Santa Fe, NM.

I was expecting things like the Great Wall and the Three Gorges Dam, but it's really about modern buildings. Check out the Central Chinese Television CCTV building, I can't believe it doesn't fall over. I'd hate to work on the top floor of that building! Link

Some of our students have organized a wiki about CMU's HCII and Pittsburgh. http://hciguide.bradenkowitz.org/index.php?title=Main_Page Also very useful: the CMU Acronym Secret Decoder Ring

NYTimes article on The Cute Factor . Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others. Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire. ... Whatever needs pitching, cute can help. A recent study at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center at the University of Michigan showed that high school students were far more likely to believe antismoking messages accompanied by cute cartoon charact...