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…
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…
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…
I've been reading Michael Ignatieff's CBC Massey Lecture The Rights Revolution and I had to laugh a little when I came across this section regarding authenticity: The central idea I absorbed then---chiefly, if not exclusively, from feminism---was that each of us has a right to choose the life we lead and that we must fight [...] Read More…
Now that I have my master's degree wrapped up, I am officially for hire! I am primarily looking at opportunities in the Seattle area. If you are on the hunt for a creative, smart, and hard working Software Engineer, have a look over my resume and feel free to get in touch. [...] Read More…
I recently came across LizardFeeder, a "compilation of data feeds representing activity within the Mozilla community." I think it's a pretty nice tool. It shares some ideas in common with my awareness tool for developers, especially in that both tools aggregate discrete events in a software project. Obviously, the scale of our [...] Read More…
I've put together a demo version of the tool (code name: Aufait) that I developed for my research. Feel free to try it out! If you haven't been following my work, I developed Aufait as an awareness tool for software developers. Specifically, it is designed to support awareness of peer activities and [...] Read More…