Computer Studies Bldg. Room 209
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