Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Making a Task Interruption-Friendly


We are interrupted every 11 minutes. We are interrupted by incoming email, the phone ringing, and colleagues stopping by our office. We even interrupt ourselves sometimes, to go read Facebook or browse the web. You very well may not make it through this post without an interruption. Research suggests that it is hard to recover from an interruption, with it taking us up to 15 minutes to return to focused activity. Given we are interrupted so often that we never achieve full efficiency, interruptions cause a significant loss in productivity.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Selfsourcing Example: Presentation Creation


In addition to playing around with the selfsourcing of photo organization, I am also building a desktop selfsourcing application to support brainstorming and create a presentation with the results. A slide from a selfsourced presentation (on the topic of selfsourcing) is shown above.

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Selfsourcing Example: Photo Organization


People have amassed large archives of digital photographs that have significant value to them but are difficult to use because they lack structure. For example, I have thousands of pictures of my four boys that I never get to enjoy because they sit in an unorganized mess of flat folders labeled with dates. To help people make better use of their photographs, Dan Liebling and I are developing a mobile selfsourcing application that supports the creation of a photobook from an unorganized set of photographs. I can’t wait to use it!

Friday, February 21, 2014

CSCW 2014 Trip Report


CSCW 2014 in Baltimore, MD was a lot of fun. There was so much good work presented that I often had a hard time choosing which sessions to attend. However, the common themes I paid attention to while there were:

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Selfsourcing


Peer review is an important part of the scientific process. It is used to identify high quality research and establish norms and common practices within the scientific community. But it is also my least favorite part of my job. Reviewing seems to require long uninterrupted periods of effort to make meaningful progress, and it feels too overwhelming to get started unless I absolutely have to get the task done. I find it almost impossible to review an article without a deadline looming over my head.

You probably have tasks like this, too. Perhaps you find it hard to sit down to write a blog post, or to edit an academic article, or to make a scrapbook with the thousands of photos you’ve taken. The task is very important to you, but actually getting it done is almost impossible.

Good news: We can fix this!

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Related Work: TaskGenies


TaskGenies: Automatically Providing Action Plans Helps People Complete Tasks
Nicolas Kokkalis, Thomas Köhn, Johannes Huebner, Moontae Lee, Florian Schulze and Scott Klemmer
TOCHI, 20 (5): 2013.

The proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” is attributed to the sixth century BCE philosopher Laozi. People have attempted to accomplish large tasks by decomposing them into manageable parts for millennia, and modern approaches to time management continue to take Laozi’s words to heart. For example, agile software development breaks large, failure-prone software projects into smaller tasks with corresponding time estimates.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

100 Mile Walk: Day Two


[This post is part of a series detailing Cale and my plans for each leg of our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. Our goal is to establish a safe route that follows sidewalks and trails as much as possible, and provides good places to stop, refuel, and refresh along the way. We actively solicit your suggestions if you know the area we will be walking through.]

Day Two of our 100 mile journey is slated to be much longer than Day One. Our goal will be to walk from Bellevue all the way to the SeaTac airport. Bing Maps tells me it is only a 20 minute drive, but it will be a day-long walk for Cale and me.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

A Formula for Academic Papers: Authors


Chances are, as a computer scientist, you will write very few papers alone. Of all of the refereed conference papers that I have published, I have been sole author for only two. Instead, as the chart below shows, I am much more likely to publish papers that have three to five authors. Writing collaboratively creates interesting challenges and opportunities. This post focuses on your responsibilities as an author and how to work effectively with your co-authors.

100 Mile Walk: The First Leg


[This post is part of a series detailing Cale and my plans for each leg of our 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. Our goal is to establish a safe route that follows sidewalks and trails as much as possible, and provides good places to stop, refuel, and refresh along the way. We actively solicit your suggestions if you know the area we will be walking through.]

The first leg of our 100 mile journey will probably the easiest - and is unquestionably the easiest to plan. The expected route is short and covers terrain we already know well. On the Friday we leave, I will come home from work a little early and hit the road with Cale by 4pm. We have been walking a lot recently, but I wonder if it will feel different to walk away from the house knowing we're not coming back? Perhaps we'll throw a bit of a bon voyage party to celebrate our departure with confetti and poppers.