Welcome

So have been off of the radar for a little over a week. So I will be posting a few catch up post of the events of the past few weeks.

I enjoyed the last few days of CHI even though we didn’t win the student design competition we had two finalists and the competition was really strong. The question for next year seems interesting looking at homeless people. That has to be a difficult group to get human subject committee clearance to work with. I know some of the professors are going to write to the coordinators to see if they might consider changing the question or adjusting the population group. It will be interesting to see what happens with this.

On Friday I went on the tour of the Berkeley Information school, Yahoo Research Berkeley and the Berkeley Institute of Design (BiD). The first stop was BiD they had a lot of really cool projects they were working on. http://bid.berkeley.edu/ The ones that really stood out to me were: the cell phone that you could use motion from the camera to control. A video conferencing setup where you could see the other people in a more realistic way, gestures were not reversed and it was easy to refer to a specific person, http://bid.berkeley.edu/papers/chi_2007/multiview07/. The other one that I connected with more than the others was looking at group design processes. The student was looking at the possibility of putting together a design process that would make it easier to avoid the pitfalls that groups often fall into. This sounds like an interesting project to follow since we are taught that there really isn’t a method for design there are just structures that can help you.

The information school talked to us about their masters and doctoral programs. They also had a few students come in and present their final projects. The professor who talked to us had been working on a project looking at flickr and the social implications of it. Another student had created a map for organizing social activities that would allow people to nominate and vote on where they wanted to go. http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/

The culture of the I school seemed a lot like IU Informatics. The professor who talked to us about the program told us how the students were friends and enjoyed doing things together. The school is not computer science and doesn’t have anything to do with computer science. Instead they are the evolution of the library science program.

Yahoo research Berkeley was an interesting place. They showed us a few of the projects they have developed. My favorites were Tag Maps they used flicker tags and mapping software to display text to show you where there were photos tagged with a certain label. http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com A related development was the zone tag photo uploaded that allows you to upload photos to flickr with tags, http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com. http://www.yahooresearchberkeley.com/

All in all it was a good day and I saw a lot of interesting things.