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Computer Science @ Rochester
Monday, December 05, 2011
11:00 AM
Computer Studies Bldg. Room 209
David Karger
MIT
Creating User Interfaces that Entice People to Manage Better Information
Much research in information management begins by asking how to managea given information corpus. But information management systems canonly be as good as the information they manage. They struggle andoften fail to correctly infer meaning from large blobs of text and themysterious actions and demands of users. And they are useless formanaging information that is never captured. Instead of accepting the existing information as an immutablecondition, I will argue that there are significant opportunities tohelp and motivate people to improve the quality and quantity ofinformation their tools manage, and to exploit that better informationto benefit its users. The greatest challenge in doing so is developing systems, andparticularly user interfaces, that overcome humans' perversereluctance to invest small present-moment effort for large futurepayoffs. Effective systems must minimize the effort needed to recordhigh-quality information and maximize the perceived future benefitsof that information investment. I will support these ideas with examples covering structured data management andpresentation, notetaking, collaborative filtering, and social media.

BIO: David R. Karger is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. David earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1994 and has since contributed to many areas of computer science, publishing in algorithms, machine learning, information retrieval, personal information management, networking, peer to peer systems, coding theory, the semantic web, and human-computer interaction.

An ongoing interest has been to make it easier for people to create, find, organize, manipulate, and share information. He formed and leads the Haystack group to investigate the topic. A major theme has been to free people from the straightjacket of existing applications by giving them the ability to define and manage their own information schema and visualizations on the desktop and on the web. He co-led MIT's SIMILE project, a collaboration with MIT Libraries and the World Wide Web consortium developing Semantic-Web tools to improve the management and retrieval of information at the institutional level.

Refreshments will be provided at 10:45 AM