Jason Hong's Confabulations

Mary Baker and I have created a subreddit specifically for pervasive, mobile, andubiquitous computing , and we’d like you to join and share content. Examples include (but are not limited to): ·          News in the popular press about mobile and ubiquitous computing ·          Works in progress that you, your colleagues, or your friends are doing ·          Fun videos of pervasive computing systems in action ·          Information about interesting research papers, best paper awards ·          Dates, calls for papers, and calls for participation for relevant conferences ·          Smartphone apps that you are working on and you want people to try ·          Discussing trends in ubicomp research, ...

Just learned about this set of questions earlier this week at a DARPA workshop. They seem like a really useful set of questions, for product development and for research. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Heilmeier#Heilmeier.27s_Catechism

Our research group is studying where people go, what it says about them, and what it says about the places they go. Our app is "CMU Mobility Monitor" on the Android Marketplace, please install if you can (no iPhone version yet). You'll also be put into a raffle to win some money.

1. Guaranteed performance levels, so that the system never locks the user out due to thrashing, virtual memory swapping, or cpu overload. For example, have the system always reserve (say) 10% of CPU exclusively for user interaction, so that the UI will always be responsive. 2. A "Wikipedia" like approach for collaborative user interface design, so that open source software developers can actually get real designers into the game. Make it so that it is possible to have a clean separation from back-end and front-end, and that anyone can go in and offer feedback and alternative designs. 3. Make it so that I can "patch" my own UI to fix bugs. For example, Intuit Quickbooks maps Ctrl-A to opening all accounts, instead of selecting all text like every other system out there. I still make this mistake despite using the software for almost two years. Alternatively, make it easy to send the patch to the developers, so that they can apply it and fix it in their next release.

"You know, it's amazing how many supervillains have advanced degrees . Graduate schools should probably do a better job at screening those people out." -- Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory

I got in this great discussion last week about how published psych studies may not necessarily generalize, primarily because the participant pool is typically comprised of undergrad students taking Psych 101. The example used was the Fundamental Attribution Error , where people over-emphasize personality attributes and de-emphasize situational factors. In a separate discussion, Alessandro Acquisti forwarded this paper, which has one of the best titles I've seen: The Weirdest People in the World? Here, WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The argument is essentially the same, that a lot of psych research is based on a narrow slice of the world population.

Alon Halevy is a former professor of computer science at University of Washington, now at Google. This latest entry from his blog on databases and HCI struck me as interesting for two reasons: It is tempting to push these problems [of how users work with structured data and their information seeking needs - JIH] to the HCI community, but I would argue this is a mistake. These problems will not be high enough on the agenda of the HCI community (there, if your device doesn’t move or perform magic, it’s uninteresting), whereas for us they are crucial for identifying good research directions and evaluating them. As a community, we need to find a way to encourage research on usability and to learn from the HCI community how to evaluate such research. We need to bring this agenda squarely into our conferences. The first interesting point is that he sees HCI primarily as being interested in wickedly cool devices. This isn't too far off the mark, unfortunately so in my opinion. The secon...

Rick Rashid, Senior VP of Microsoft Research, has a great talk summarizing research directions at MSR . The most exciting work is perhaps helping developing countries. There is also an awareness that any help should not be done as a charity, as that isn't economically sustainable.

This looks like an interesting paper: The Ghost In The Browser: Analysis of Web-based Malware Abstract: As more users are connected to the Internet and conduct their daily activities electronically, computer users have become the target of an underground economy that infects hosts with malware or adware for financial gain. Unfortunately, even a single visit to an infected web site enables the attacker to detect vulnerabilities in the user’s applications and force the download a multitude of malware binaries. Frequently, this malware allows the adversary to gain full control of the compromised systems leading to the ex-filtration of sensitive information or installation of utilities that facilitate remote control of the host. We believe that such behavior is similar to our traditional understanding of botnets. However, the main difference is that web-based malware infections are pull-based and that the resulting command feedback loop is looser. To characterize the nature of this rising ...

Jefferson Han, the person whose work on interactive touchscreens has been all over YouTube and featured at the TED conference , has founded a startup to commercialize his technologies. I think it's interesting that large interactive screens have been around for quite a while. For example, Stanford's iRoom , Fraunhofer IPSI's iLand , the old Liveworks (that commercialized the LiveBoard), Smart Technologies (that sells SmartBoards), and MERL's DiamondTouch , just to name a few. I remember being the session chair for Jefferson when he presented at UIST 2005 , and thinking that there were two key differences. The first is that the technology is cheaper than anything else out there. Ridiculously cheaper by an order of magnitude. Most large interactive displays cost thousands of dollars, whereas Jefferson's work only required a cheap sheet of plexiglass, a projector, and a camera. It's cheap enough that I've been trying to encourage students in my classes to bui...

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.

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

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...

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.

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/

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 ...

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?