Archive for October, 2013

QOTD – physical computing

October 13th, 2013

Personal computers have evolved in an office environment in which you sit on your butt, moving only your fingers, entering and receiving information censored by your conscious mind. That is not your whole life, and probably not even the best part. We need to think about computers that sense more of your body, serve you in more places, and convey the physical expression in addition to information.

Dan O’Sullivan and Tom Igoe, Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers

via Jon Froehlich at DSST 2013 in his talk about the UMd HCIL hackerspace.

Slides for Jon’s talk, “If You Build It, They Will Come: Reflecting on the Successes (and Failures) of Building a Collaborative Workspace to Support Creativity, Experimentation, and Making”, are available via his talks page, as a huge PPTX here). Highly recommended if you’re interested in makerspaces/hackerspaces in academic institutions.

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Ph.D. viva – public talk

October 1st, 2013

Here are the slides from the public part of my Ph.D. viva (thesis defense), on “Enabling reuse of arguments and opinions in open collaboration systems”. There is also a downloadable PDF version of the slides. Or see the thesis/dissertation itself and its data (index page) (note added 2016-04-22).

Video to follow: thanks to Hugo Hromic for streaming & recording that!

Title: “Enabling reuse of arguments and opinions in open collaboration systems”

Abstract: The World Wide Web enables large-scale collaboration, even between groups of individuals previously unknown to one another. These collaborations produce tangible outputs, such as encyclopedias (Wikipedia), electronic books (Distributed Proofreaders), maps (OpenStreetMap) and open source software packages (Firefox). In such open collaboration systems, decisions are made through open online discussions in which anyone can participate, and those decisions are based on the written arguments and opinions that individuals contribute, sometimes in large volumes.

Sense-making and coordination is an important component of collaboration, but it is particularly challenging when individuals disagree. When large volumes of opinions and arguments are expressed, popular or emotive choices can be identified through coarse approaches such as sampling, sentiment, or voting. But these do not identify the reasons for disagreement, which may be needed in order to reach decisions. For example, about 500 discussions each week in Wikipedia concern whether a particular topic should be covered in the encyclopedia. Discussions may involve comments from 2-200 people, and some topics are contentious.

This thesis addresses the problem of analyzing, integrating, and reconciling arguments and opinions in goal-oriented online discussions. We emphasize the structure of arguments by providing a new, reconfigurable Web interface. Our interface improves the perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and information completeness, thus providing meaningful support for the discussion.

The thesis addresses the following three research questions:
– What are the opportunities and requirements for providing argumentation support?
– Which arguments are used in open collaboration systems?
– How can we structure and display opinions and arguments to support their use and reuse?

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Ph.D. viva defended!

October 1st, 2013

Happy to say that I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis today.

Successfully defended: Twitter messages from my institute


“Congratulations to Dr @jschneider who successfully defended her PhD at @insight_centre @deri @nuigalway today!”

As for that “at @insight_centre @deri @nuigalway” bit? Our Galway-based research institute is in the course of changing names. DERI, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, remains a part of the National University of Ireland, and under a new Irish national funding scheme, becomes INSIGHT Centre – Galway.

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