Seeking nominations for SIGCHI Awards

SIGCHI seeks nominations for its five major annual awards.  All nominations are due by November 15, 2015.

SIGCHI identifies and honors leaders and shapers of the field of human-computer interaction with the SIGCHI Awards. We recognize individuals who have contributed to the advancement of the field of human-computer interaction. There are five kinds of SIGCHI Awards that are selected by two committees based on your nominations, so please submit them! We encourage you to consult the SIGCHI Awards web page (www.sigchi.org/about/awards) for past awardees and more detailed award descriptions.

The SIGCHI Achievement Awards committee selects the following three awards. Submit nomination material to sigchi-achieve-awards@acm.org, to the attention of Steve Feiner (CHI Academy Member) who is the committee chair:

1. SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award: Individuals who have contributed the very best work in shaping the field, SIGCHI's highest honor for research contributions.
2. SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award: Individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the practice, application, and understanding of human-computer interaction, SIGCHI's highest honor for practice contributions.
3. CHI Academy: Individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction should include a summary of the person's contributions with evidence of the cumulative contribution, influence of the work on others, and development of new directions.

The SIGCHI Service Awards committee selects the following two awards. Submit nomination material to sigchi-service-awards@acm.org, to the attention of Ben Bederson (SIGCHI Adjunct Chair for Awards) who is the committee chair:

1. SIGCHI Social Impact Award: Individuals who through their work have made substantial contributions to pressing social needs.
2. SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award: Individuals who have contributed to the growth and success of SIGCHI through extended service to the community over a number of years.

Nominations should include:

• a brief summary (maximum one page, preferably a PDF) of how the nominee meets the criteria for the award.
• (optional) a link to the nominee's CV, if available
• (optional) names and contact information of people who both endorse and are knowledgeable about the qualifications of the nominee.

All nominations must be submitted by November 15, 2015. General questions can be sent to sigchi-ac-awards@acm.org.

Books I've Read Visualization

I am the product of my experiences, and a significant part of my lifetime experiences are the books I have read. Strangely enough, I have kept track of every non-work (and many work-related) books that I have read since 1991. I used to write these down on paper, but a few years ago I started keeping track of them on goodreads.com. Goodreads is a fine service, and offers a nice way to see what your friends are reading.

But Goodreads does not offer any way of seeing any overview of the books one has read, and loses the opportunity to gain any insight into a person's overall readings.

So I created an interactive visualization to try and understand what the 246 books I read over the last 24 years actually were. Go try out the interactive visualization (which is not mobile friendly), and then finish reading this. The visualization is based on Keshif, a free and general tool built by Adil Yalcin, a grad student working with me. It works by showing "facets" of the dataset and supports very lightweight exploration by mousing over the facets to see how they interact with other facets. For example, in 2014, I read a lot by Hugh Howey (I loved Wool!), and those books were mostly written in 2009 or later. Also, I clearly got re-hooked on science fiction.

This approach lets you see things like most commonly read authors and genres. Also when I read books. For example, you can see that I read a lot in 1992 right after I finished my B.S. during my "gap year" when I lived in Alaska. I also started reading significantly more books 3 years ago - exactly when I bought my Kindle - which seems to be consistent with what others have found.

Anyway, take a look and see if you can learn anything else about me. Also, the code is all freely available, and shouldn't be too hard to adapt to your books if you are a bit of a web hacker.

Some technical notes:

• Data comes straight from Goodreads API, but I downloaded it to avoid cross-site permissions issues.
• Goodreads does not provide book genres through their API, so I manually created those in a google docs spreadsheet and load them separately and merge the two data sources.

New Google Drive design forgets about desktop users

Update 8/15/14: Google has fixed this! The list view is now properly dense with about twice as many items as the thumbnail view. Thanks Google!

I was excited to see Google post their new design for Drive. Given that this is a major new design with no doubt significant thought behind it, I was surprised - and dismayed - to see that the two primary views of documents (list view and thumbnail view) show the same number of documents. The textual list view, typically designed for efficient scanning of large numbers of items based on full title and some metadata shows no more items than the image based view.

New Google Drive with list view on left, and thumbnail view of same documents on right.

This may seem like an esoteric design detail, except it isn't. It goes to the heart of design decisions where there is a single design that must serve a huge community (probably hundreds of millions of users). Depending on your view, design is driven down to the least common denominator, or perhaps it is better viewed as regression to the mean.

My guess is that the whole redesign is built to better support touch screen systems given the huge vertical space between items. This is great for all those phone and tablet users, and even the occasional Chromebook Pixel user. But what about us folks in an office with a big screen and a mouse? I know that Apple serves the causal computer using market first, but now even Google has abandoned the regular office worker!

The reason this is an issue is because the trade-off between these two approaches - at least in my view - is primarily between the density of items, and amount of interaction. That is, one view (typically the thumbnail view) should have fewer items with a sparser layout requiring more interaction to see more items. But the painful and expensive scrolling operation (in comparison to moving your eye) is sometimes worth it because of the additional information made available by the additional information per item. The other view (typically the list view) should have more items with a denser layout so you can quickly scan through many items without having to scroll as much.  Arguable, the additional owner and date information in the text view provides the relative advantage, but make no mistake - the text view is a very sparse design.

No doubt, the major vendors are wise to provide an excellent experience for mobile and touch users. But PLEASE don't abandon us desktop users. Don't make the mistake that Microsoft did with Windows 8. You can not design a single experience for all people and all form factors. You must detect what systems people are using and provide an optimized experience for that design. Or at least offer customization options.

Interface designers that build a single experience for all humans on the planet or doomed to disappoint huge segments of the market. Don't let this be you.

My new job: Associate Provost of Learning Initiatives

I am excited to start a new job on campus as Associate Provost of Learning Initiative and Executive Director of the Teaching and Learning Transformation Center.

For those of you wondering why I would give up the world's best job as a professor developing the future of interactive computing technologies: Technology is on the cusp of significantly changing the way that people experience higher education (actually, it already has - from MOOCs to GitHub to YouTube and StackExchange, Twitter, Skype & Google docs...). Now it is poised to change the classroom experience as well. I see this role as an opportunity to apply all that I have learned from my work in the field of HCI over the past 20 years directly to the campus that I love and want to see thrive. From enhanced user experiences to analytics that balances transparency and privacy across multiple stakeholders, this is HCI's time to improve our campus. And if you want to know how I got to this point, then learn about the HCIL - the world's best HCI research group: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/. (Oh, and of course I can always revert to being a regular faculty member if this doesn't work out...)

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Dear University of Maryland Faculty:

I am pleased to announce the formal establishment of the Teaching and Learning Transformation Center (TLTC) and the appointment of Professor Benjamin B. Bederson as the new Associate Provost of Learning Initiatives and founding Executive Director of this new center.

The TLTC will be the hub on campus that brings together support, incentives, infrastructure, assessment, and innovation for the University's educational mission.  It will provide leadership around teaching and learning, including the use of technology to transform the students' and instructors' experiences, both in the classroom and in an online environment.  The TLTC will integrate the Center for Teaching Excellence from the Office of Undergraduate Studies and the Learning Technologies and Environments group from Division of IT.  It will also add a campus-wide resource in assessment and learning analytics.  Together, this critical mass will further promote innovation and excellence in education at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Dr. Bederson (www.cs.umd.edu/~bederson/) is a Professor of Computer Science and prior director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and iSchool.  An ACM Distinguished Scientist, his research is on technology-enhanced education, interaction strategies, crowd sourcing, mobile device interfaces, visualization and digital libraries.  He is a widely respected innovator, entrepreneur, and scholar in interactive systems who has worked on a wide variety of interdisciplinary projects, published broadly, and founded a successful mobile apps company.

Please join me in welcoming Professor Bederson to his new position.  Many of you will no doubt hear from him in the coming months as the center is developed.  He also asked me to say that he welcomes hearing from you about your concerns and ideas about teaching and learning on campus.

Mary Ann Rankin
Senior Vice President and Provost