I read a lot about software interaction design these days. I recently read an article providing this bit of advice: create designs that allow people to forget about the software they're using. As an example, if you're trying to pay your bills using your bank's website, you should be able to focus on [...] Read More…
I'm behind in my blog reading lately and I just now came across Whitney Hess's great post My Best Advice for Conducting User Interviews. If you're new to interviewing, I highly recommend checking out her tips to see what it's all about. Her advice is applicable whether you're doing casual or empirical user [...] Read More…
It has been a whole year since I graduated in Toronto. My, how time has flown! In an overdue attempt at a victory lap, I tried to publish some of my research at the VLHCC 2010 conference. Unfortunately, I didn't make the cut. It was worth a shot though and I'm [...] Read More…
A few months ago, I made a jump back into industry after my brief but enjoyable stint in the world of big science research. My niftiest project at Institute for Systems Biology is described in a software article that I recently published along with Eric Deutsch and John Boyle in BMC Medical Genomics. [...] Read More…
As someone who regularly crosses the Canada-U.S. border by road, I've been closely following the trial of Peter Watts, a Toronto sci-fi writer. He was charged with resisting and obstructing a U.S. border officer following a vehicle search last year. It's worth noting that U.S. officers conducted the search on U.S. soil as [...] Read More…
I recently watched a Frontline episode on avatars and virtual worlds that summarized some really interesting research going on at Standord's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL). This short clip is a good overview: The projects underway at VHIL show a lot of really exciting potential for collaboration in virtual worlds. They have a number [...] Read More…
Senate reform in Canada has received newfound attention lately thanks to Stephen Harper's recent appointments that give the Conservative Party a plurality in Parliament's upper chamber. Conservative dominance in the Senate increases the likelihood that pending Senate reform legislation will be approved, notwithstanding any challenges to legislation's constitutionality by the provinces. According to recent polls, [...] Read More…
My initial reaction to the Google Wave demo at I/O was luke warm. C'mon, it's just a nifty UI over publish/subscribe messaging! Along with pubsub, the federated aspect of Wave---the seamless integration of users across multiple domains---is just standing on top of vanilla XMPP. From a cynical point of view, Wave is [...] Read More…
One of the reasons that Twitter has become so popular is that it is a successful ambient awareness tool. With each tweet from a friend or person of interest, you get a subliminal sense of what he/she is up to. Each tweet also represents an opportunity for ad hoc, informal communication between Twitterers: In [...] Read More…
Good news! I'll soon be starting a software engineering gig at the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in Seattle, a non-profit biomedical research organization. ISB is full of really great people and they're doing some exciting work in proteomics and computational biology. I'll be joining the Shmulevich Lab and I'll be starting [...] Read More…