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 over the distributed infrastructure of Google’s several data-centers, they use services and sub-services. Each service uses a protocol to communicate [...]
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 Science research. These days I tend to roll my eyes and feel helpless when Congress takes silly positions for political reasons (though [...]
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 already analyzed historical data that demonstrates that we can substantially reduce reviewer workload. We’ve also created a way you can use [...]
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 margins of documents being discussed. Its original intended usage was for discussion of classroom lecture notes, [...]
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 replication, I figured it was worth testing the same procedure with this year’s review data, which [...]
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 hopes of getting some comments on it that can help us prepare our presentation. We’re also making nb available [...]
I spent last weekend at the 2012 PIM workshop, located at CSCW 2012. This was the 5th such workshop. Appropriately for its setting, this one focused on “PIM in a socially networked world”—i.e., the aspects of PIM emerging in the interactions between multiple individuals. The focus clearly highlighted the distance between two different notions of [...]
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 [...]
I sympathize with Google’s efforts to prevent impersonation on plus. But I didn’t think the real names policy was the right approach, and I don’t think the verification badge approach addresses the right problem either. Taking a concrete example, my real name is David Karger, and I can certainly get that verified. But there’s another [...]