My Research Philosophy
I wrote this recently, not as a blog post, but for another purpose. I figured I'd post it here like I do everything else.
Re•search: noun. Investigation or experimentation aimed at the discovery and interpretation of facts, revision of accepted theories or laws in the light of new facts, or practical application of such new or revised theories or laws.
—Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
The last part of that definition has always been the chief motivator for me in my research — practical application. While all research seeks to discover universal truths and deeper meaning, I strongly believe that researchers have a responsibility to contribute to society in other tangible ways as well.
Just as Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1439 made literary works accessible to everyone, the Internet is likewise speeding up the propagation of knowledge now and will continue to do so in the decades to come. We are on the brink of a cultural revolution where ideas, prototypes, discussion and research know no boundaries of location or time. The Free Software Movement is promoting users' freedom to understand and explore computer programs. The Creative Commons project encourages authors, scientists, artists and educators to distribute their creations under licenses that foster the sharing of ideas, encourage discussion, engender a culture of openness, and speed up innovation. This provides enormous opportunities for researchers to collaborate in real-time across institutions, countries and continents, and to serve the community by disseminating their research results via public blogs, videos, slides, prototypes and designs.
As a researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at the Dept. of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, I have developed several tools and prototypes that would be of benefit not just to researchers but also to computer users. It is by studying their habits that I designed these tools — to them, I owe these tools. I work in the area of Personal Information Management (PIM), and study how users access and manage information such as files, calendars, email messages, contacts and bookmarks on multiple devices. I release all such tools and software to the world at my web site under licenses that permit anyone to inspect the source code, build upon it, and benefit from it.
In the process of my research, I developed a program to access Google Calendar which now has over 25,000 users. A calendar converter program I wrote is used by an average of more than 200 users per day. During Sustainability Week 2008 at Virginia Tech, I released a Blacksburg Transit Schedule application for cell phones to encourage Blacksburg citizens to take the bus instead of driving. It is used by about 300 users every month and growing.
In the spirit of working on real products that are used by real people, I interned at Google three times during my Ph.D. (2005, 2006, 2007.) In 2007, my project enabled users of Google Book Search to clip personalized content from books and embed that into their own web site or blog. This enables teachers to excerpt from literary classics for their class home page, for literature scholars to debate the nuances of texts, and for commentators to dissect parts of books. My intern work was covered by several news outlets, chief among them, at Google's Corporate Blog.
Academia encourages published work—publish or perish, they say—while original contributions such as new ideas and untested directions are undervalued in the traditional ways of evaluating research. The Internet changes that too. Several times when I have come up with ideas that may or may not be viable research projects, I have written about them on my blog. The public scrutiny and invaluable feedback I've received made it easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. My advisor has always been supportive of those ideas that were encouraging research directions: the latest among them resulted in a paper that has been nominated for the ACM SIGCHI Student Research Competition 2009.
An area that I have recently been concerned about is the open publication of raw data sets. I perform human experiments which are reviewed by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for ethical compliance. There is inherent tension between the privacy implications of human experiments and the Open Science dream of being able to publish all experimental data publicly so that others may analyze it in novel ways. I plan to investigate the ethical, moral and legal responsibilities of such an endeavor, recognizing that we as researchers owe two allegiances: to our experiment participants and to the scientific community, in that order.
I am happy to be a researcher at a time in our history when competitive collaboration trumps closed confidentiality. Science and innovation can only progress faster when information is freely shared among researchers, scholars and citizens.
10th Anniversary of my First Shareware Paycheck
10 years ago, on this day, I received the first payment for a tiny shareware program I wrote. It was a one-trick-pony, a birthday reminder program.
Folks around me will tell you I'm bad at remembering things, and always choose to write everything down. So I wrote a program to keep track of friends and birthdays, and popup a reminder on the right day, perhaps a few days earlier if I needed to buy a gift first. As a teen writing and distributing my first-ever commercial piece of software, I had named it eponymously as ManasTech Birthdays. I wrote it, released it, and sold a few copies (nothing astronomical, but yeah, it was fun to see the checks coming in.)
As I look back nostalgically, several thoughts cross my mind today. The more things have changed, the more they have remained the same. I loved writing software then, I love writing software now. I used to sneak out of classes and stay up late nights to code up the latest idea that crossed my mind. Today, I procrastinate on my research and take time off to write little scripts and tiny widgets, that -- before you know it -- have hundreds of users and need regular maintenance.
Then, the norm was to release products as shareware, without the hassles of finding a publisher or having to stock shelves with packaging. All you needed was an Internet connection and a program that solved a need. Today, the norm is to free your software, and release it into the wild. The Free Software Movement has been gaining ground ever since.
The most interesting aspect is perhaps the domain in which I've been working. The Birthday Manager helped store your personal information -- contacts and calendar events. Today, I'm involved in Personal Information Management research, which is pretty much the same topic. I even wrote a paper detailing how people manage their calendars. Little had I known 10 years ago that I would be fascinated enough with personal information to pursue a career in it.
Sometimes I wonder what the next 10 years will be like.
Update: P.S. For those curious about how I got hold of the check image for this blog post: yes, I'm a digital packrat and have a copy of all my files dating back to 1997 on my current laptop.
HOWTO Make your Mac speak over the Web
Randall Munroe's XKCD has inspired interesting product features in the past. A recent one has sent a lot of Mac users scurrying to set up an audio doorbell on their Mac Minis.
Here's how you can do it.
The Source Code
Personal Information Backup - Twitter, Gmail Contacts, Google Calendar, Reader
Make a New Year's Resolution to start backing up your data regularly. Not just local files, but even data from the cloud. Here's how to backup your data from a few of the most common online services. More importantly, I've also included instructions on how to restore from that backup.
How to backup?
Copy this URL to a new browser window.
https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/USERNAME.xml?count=10000
Then replace the string USERNAME with your actual Twitter username. Press enter to start downloading. If your browser does not prompt you with a file download box, but instead opens the file showing a bunch of text, choose File > Save As to save your backup to a secure location.
How to restore?
You cannot restore this data into Twitter (neither to your own account, nor to a different account.) But you will have access to your witticisms and interesting web links that you posted to amuse your friends. Do with it as you please.
Gmail Messages
How to backup?
Use an IMAP client such as Mail.app on the Mac, or Thunderbird on any platform. Make sure it's configured to download and cache every email and every attachment.
How to restore?
You can access your messages from these programs even if Gmail is down. If you need to transfer messages to another account, add that new account in the same program as a new IMAP account, then drag-and-drop messages from your old account to your new account to transfer them there.
Gmail Contacts
How to backup?
Login to your Gmail / Google Apps email account, then open the Contact Manager. Click on the Export button in the top-right corner. For maximum compatibility with other applications, choose the third option for data format, vCard format. (It's a standard format for contact information exchange.)
How to restore?
The vCard format is fairly standard. Gmail itself can read back the same file without trouble. To import into Mac OS X Address Book, simple double-click the .vcf file and let the import proceed. Microsoft Outlook also supports importing addresses from vCard files.
Google Calendar
How to backup?
Google Calendar publishes feeds of your calendar in the iCal format. If you save this feed to a file, you can use it as a backup. On the left side of your main calendar, there is a list labeled "My Calendars". For each calendar that you want to backup, click on the little downward-pointing arrow next to the calendar name, and select "Calendar Settings".
On the Settings page, under Calendar Details, locate the section labeled "Private Address". Click on the button labeled ICAL and copy the URL there. Open a new browser window and paste the URL there. This will start downloading a file; save it to a safe location -- this is your calendar backup. Lather, rinse, repeat for each calendar you want to backup.
How to restore?
The iCalendar format (also abbreviated as iCal or .ics) is a standard calendar format. You can import the backed up calendar file into Google Calendar, Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook simply by opening it.
Google Reader
How to backup?
Login to Google Reader, then come back here and click on this link: Export Google Reader subscriptions as OPML. Save the file that your browser will prompt you to download. This is your backup.
How to restore?
Google Reader and lots of other feed readers know how to import OPML files. In case of Google Reader, go to Settings > Import/Export to import it back. For desktop software, try looking for an "Import from OPML" menu item somewhere.
Need instructions for more services? Write a comment and I'll try to provide them.
Book-as-Blog: Encouraging Reading by Posting a Chapter at a Time
I realized I haven't picked up a book in weeks, (non-academic book, that is), but I've read more than my fair share of blogs in that same time. I wonder if part of the reason is the longer time commitment required by a book. This prevents it from being read quickly and keeps it forever on my wish list. If so, then how about a service that breaks down books into blog-post-sized chunks and publishes them every few days?
The idea is inspired by, -- nay, stolen from -- Kevin Kelly, who is reissuing his 10-yr old book as a blog (hat-tip to Seth Godin's post on the topic). His reasons are different, though. The book is out-of-print, and is already available as a downloadable PDF from his web site. Making it available as a blog is just another way of spreading his ideas wider, which is a great idea.
But apart from that, I like the idea of chopping up a book into chapter-sized chunks and making them available to readers one at a time. Not for any economic reasons, but because attentional resources are so scarce these days. A few times during the day, I have some free time which I use to read a few blog posts. If I ever thought about picking up a book during these breaks, I wouldn't do it, simply because of the (arguably artificial) time commitment issues it raises in my mind. But talk about a chapter-sized, or even smaller blog post, and I'd read it.
Of course, not all book content has an affordance for this kind of splicing and dicing. If it takes several minutes for a reader to re-establish context from the last blog post, the purpose is lost. Some authors would consider their books a work of art too precious(ssss) to split it up into anything smaller. That's also the reason why bands are often reluctant to sell singles instead of entire albums (apart from the record labels preferring to sell you 9 lame tracks bundled with 1 great track for $10 instead of $1, thank you very much.) But several non-fiction books could verily adapt to such a format.
The book-as-blog need not be free (as in no charge.) Sure, charge me for it. Implementation would be easy, charge me a micropayment and give me a secret watermarked feed URL. With so much new content licensed under a Creative Commons attribution license, it's also possible to develop a web service that does this for liberally-licensed and public domain works. This is compatible with Creative Commons Attribution (BY), Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA), Attribution-Noncommercial (BY-NC), and Attribution Non-commercial Share-Alike (BY-NC-SA) licenses (but I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, blah blah.)
Maybe something like this will finally get me back to the several-books-a-month club I used to be a member of, until I discovered this newfangled shiny thing called the Internet.
