The College seen from the Garden.
The Hall.
The Garden in the snow (view from the Hall).
The Old Granary.
The bridge to the College’s first island on the river Cam.
Darwin College, Cambridge
July 25th, 2010Tyranny of evaluation
July 21st, 2010A recent paper by Gonzalo Génova in the Communications of the ACM talks about the role of empirical evidence in evaluating computer science research. The article talks about computer science in general but it reminds me of Henry Lieberman’s 2003 paper The Tyranny of Evaluation, which attacks the tendency in HCI to reject papers describing groundbreaking systems and techniques solely due to their lack of empirical evidence. Henry makes a comparison to Galileo’s experiments of dropping balls from the Tower of Pisa. As he eloquently puts it: “Trouble is, people aren’t balls.“
Consensus among climate scientists
June 24th, 2010A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that 97-98% of active climate scientists are in agreement with IPCC. Perhaps not particularly surprising (data is always good though). This is slightly more amusing: the paper also shows that those in disagreement have substantially lower climate expertise and scientific prominence. I suppose this settles the question on whether there is consensus among climate scientists.
I love the University of Cambridge
June 24th, 2010As a Fellow of Darwin College I am a member of the Regent House. This means I occasionally get voting papers from the University about important and not so important matters. Today I was asked to vote on the matter of wasting £352,000 in removing a lift from the 15th century University Combination Room. Why? To teach the Council a lesson. The Council installed the lift without consulting the members of the Regent House. Hence, by removing the lift, starting a new investigation on how to enable disabled access to the room, and then (in all likelihood) deciding to reinstall the lift, the Council is taught how expensive it will be for them to make decisions without consulting the members of the Regent House!
Bibliometrics: How easy it is to manipulate citation counts
June 4th, 2010There is a trend to use citation counts as an estimator of scientific esteem of journals, university departments, and even individual researchers. Douglas Arnold has written an interesting editorial on the danger of relying on such citation counts to evaluate anything (pdf copy). The editorial provides evidence of just how easy it is to manipulate citation counts. I find the examples provided very disturbing. I would encourage anyone concerned with bibliometrics to read this article.
Bibliometrics: The importance of conference papers in computer science
May 28th, 2010In this month’s issue of Communications of the ACM there is a paper that shows that selective ACM conference papers are on par, or better than, journal articles in terms of citation counts.
From the paper:
“First and foremost, computing researchers are right to view conferences as an important archival venue and use acceptance rate as an indicator of future impact. Papers in highly selective conferences—acceptance rates of 30% or less—should continue to be treated as first-class research contributions with impact comparable to, or better than, journal papers.”
Considering that the authors only compared these conference papers against the top-tier journals (ACM Transactions), their finding is surprisingly strong. It also strengthens my view that in computer science, selective conference papers are as good, if not better, than journal articles.
Distribution of Nobel Prizes in Sweden
May 10th, 2010Swedish universities with Nobel Prize-winning faculty:
| University | Awards | Last Award |
|---|---|---|
| Karolinska Institute, Stockholm | 5 | 1982 |
| Uppsala University | 5 | 1981 |
| Stockholm University | 3 | 1948 |
| Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm | 1 | 1970 |
| Stockholm School of Economics | 1 | 1977 |
| University of Gothenburg | 1 | 2000 |
Swedish cities with Nobel Prize-winning faculty:
- Stockholm: 10 Nobel Prizes
- Uppsala: 5 Nobel Prizes
- Gothenburg: 1 Nobel Prize
Source: Nobel Prize Foundation: Nobel Laureates and Universities
Three observations:
- Researchers in Uppsala and Stockholm have won all Swedish Nobel Prizes awarded to faculty except one.
- Uppsala University is the only Swedish university to have Nobel Prize winners in more than one category. They have won in Chemistry, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine. All winners at Karolinska Institute are in Physiology or Medicine, and all winners at Stockholm University are in Chemistry.
- The rate of Nobel Prizes won per decade reached a peak in the 1970s and 1980s. Thereafter it dropped to the same rate as in the 1930s and 1940s. See the figure below.
British MPs: climate science is OK
April 1st, 2010It seems the results obtained from climate science are indeed reliable. It is amazing that scientists are held in so low regard nowadays that British MPs feel they need to jump in and “investigate” a bunch of leaked internal emails from the University of East Anglia. Yes, the peer-review process has problems, any scientist can probably tell you that. Yet it is so much better than the alternative: a flood of bad articles and uninformed opinions swamping reports of actual scientific progress.
For anyone that quickly wants to know more about why global warming is highly probable I recommend you read The Economist‘s nice summary.
CHI Academy
March 9th, 2010Fantastic news! My former Ph.D. thesis advisor, Shumin Zhai, has been elected to the CHI Academy by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI)!
From the website, this is what the CHI Academy is about:
“The CHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made extensive contributions to the study of HCI and who have led the shaping of the field.”
Also from the website, this is the citation:
“Shumin Zhai is a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Shumin is a leading researcher in applying quantitative and engineering methods in HCI, and has made fundamental contributions to text entry optimization, physical input device design, eye-tracking interfaces, and the understanding of human performance. His contributions to text entry techniques for mobile and touch screen devices include the ShapeWriter gesture keyboard which has been commercialized. Shumin has also been a visiting professor at universities in Europe and China. He has served on many editorial boards and conference committees and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.”
What are the grand goals in HCI?
February 19th, 2010What are the grand goals in HCI? Do we have any grand goals at all? When you read HCI literature you certainly do not get the impression that some sort of grand goal of an ultimate user interface design was even considered by the authors. In fact, most papers I read do not even seem to have a clear idea of what to do next beyond the paper. They did something “novel” (meaning: not published in the HCI literature before; HCI researchers are notorious for not reading work in the neighboring fields of design, anthropology, comparative literature, psychology and engineering). Then they ran a study and published the results. Now they are doing something completely different… This widespread behavior is leading me to think there is no real progress in the field. Researchers just do a little bit of this and a little bit of that and hope something meaningful eventually comes out of it.
Most of my own work is engineering-focused. I am essentially creating new interfaces that optimize some measurable dependent variable (such as time, error, “insight”, etc.). In my specific work on text entry the primary goal is pretty obvious: I want to create text entry methods that let users write as fast as possible with few errors. Is this a grand goal in HCI then?
I have some reservations. First, HCI is much, much more than text entry. Even I do research in other sub-fields, such as visualization and decision theory. If you narrow down your research objective then sure, you can define a goal, but will it be a grand goal? Second, the above notion only captures the end goal. However, in my opinion, the research trajectory is as, if not more, important than the end goal. It is by repeated trial and error we learn the subtleties behind excellent user interface design. The end goal is fixed while the research trajectory is “elastic” and can be twisted and turned so that you can reach new goals based on it.
This reasoning leads me to think that perhaps my original question was asking the wrong question. Perhaps HCI is actually doing fine. Although the grand goals are hidden in the fog and I sometimes wonder if they exist.