To P or Not to P, is the question

Blog XXVIII of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

You must have heard by now about HP Labs researcher Vinay Deolalikar who has claimed to have presented a proof for P != NP in over hundred pages long paper. You must have also read that experts have pointed out certain problems in the analysis which need to be fixed by Vijay. Overnight this has become a trending topic with almost every technical blog worth its salt wanting to do a piece on it even if admittedly many of the authors have no idea about the consequences of such a proof.

Inspired from comments by a newbie on one such blog (cannot find the link anymore), I came up with the following joke:
Teacher: Who can solve this… (jots down on blackboard) P = NP
Ram (student): Sir, I think I have a solution.
Teacher: Go ahead..
Ram: P = NP, dividing both sides by P, we get N = 1. So P = NP iff N has a value 1.
Teacher (totally dismayed): Does anybody in class want to point out a critical flaw in Ram’s proof.
Shyam (another student): Sir, may I ?
Teacher (excitedly): Yes yes, go ahead !
Shyam: Teacher, the flaw in Ram’s proof is that he divides both sides by P which would be incorrect if P is zero…
Teacher (getting a bit uneasy): Umm..actually..
Shyam (going on): ..so if we were to subtract both sides by P and take P out common we get P(1-N) = 0 which means that  P = NP only when either P = 0 or N = 1.
(Teacher faints)

Few secrets of getting that ring

Blog XXVI of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

Few blogs back, I talked about my pursuit of naukri, which was a global overview about how and what helped me become employed. I tried to share some tips and tricks and I was surprised at the enthusiasm that the blog received. I had made a mental note then to elaborate on certain aspects of job search in future posts.

One of the most dreaded stage of job search is the waiting period when you apply through various channels and cross your fingers hoping that you would get that golden ring from employers soon. Everybody have their own tips & tricks when it comes to beating others at getting an interview call, here are some of mine:

• As an old adage goes, teach your child how to fish and he would eat for the rest of his life. Many of the points below were borne out of an innate desire to get some kind of a competitive edge over other job aspirants because frankly speaking, there exist very few differences. Everybody is smart now-a-days and you simply cannot afford to let your skills speak for yourself. Often in USA, it is not the best technical resume, but the best marketing resume that gets the initial call. To be in the priority list of employers, you need to adopt this kind of attitude. Once you do that, remaining points would appear trivial. Utilise all available resources you might have at hand for your job search.
• Portfolio/proof of work accompanying your resume helps the employers in making the leap from “Can he do this for me ?” to “Alright, he can do it, lets call him !”. Before you think this point is applicable only to arts majors, think about your LinkedIn recommendations, letters from professors or word from an ex-colleague.
• Professional website, in continuation to the point above, can be used to provide past work samples as well as detailed information that you could not squeeze in your one page resume. I log visitor statistics on my website & I can tell you that many prospective employers checked it before calling. It also gives you a 2-3 days heads up on whom to expect a call from to fine tune your preparation. Of course, as you can see on my website, one does not need to be a webmaster to develop a basic website template.
• App marathon was the name I gave to my Friday night or Saturday morning sessions when I would stop breathing, sleeping, eating and drinking for few hours and do nothing else but apply to various positions online. Also I would update an excel matrix with the status and date of my application so that I do not miss out visiting any company’s website for too long. This helped me a lot in going systematically through my desired company’s list. It also helps in maintaining temporal locality as explained in previous post.
• Be proactive in replying to even mundane HR emails asking for same old stuff. I am not saying HR would put an endorsement on your application but atleast it helps them understand that you are sincere about application. If the HR person gets to make a random call, he would surely reject people who took a week just to reply back. Also if you are speaking to a consultant, it would help him understand your interest in job seeking and will directly determine his commitment towards you.
• Resume crowd-sourcing: sometimes there are different ways of saying the same thing and you realise it only when you observe other people’s resume. If your employers are using a keyword search or looking for a specific phrase in your resume, you can miss out, so be sure to ask your peers to review your resume time & again and also politely ask for their resumes to see what kind of keywords/phrases have they used.
• Never too late: If in the last post, I was driving the point that you can never be over-networked then let me also emphasise that it is never too early to start networking. I attended my first career fair at TAMU as a fresh student. I was carrying along a handbag then to collect various goodies being distributed and in between, I tried talking with people from various companies. It might be coincidental but one of my later interviews happened on the basis of a recruiter relation that started in the first semester with a a free T-shirt request. Three semesters later, the recruiter was impressed to see me appear for every career fair and probably put in a strong endorsement for an onsite call. At another company, I was able to answer one of those spot on questions about “what do you know about us” pretty well because I had been hearing that marketing talk from them for over an year.
• Second chances are rare but when you see them, you should grab them. On one specific instance, I landed a dud interviewer who for sure would have thrown away my resume but I salvaged the situation by simply re-entering the company booth but this time choosing to approach another interviewer. Second time around, interviewer was more patient  and I was more confident, we clicked and I got an on campus interview call soon afterwards.
• Read through your resume also, and not just keep on preparing the technical stuff. Remember most interviewers would start off with “tell me about yourself” and “tell me about this project” questions and if you have not read your resume ever since the day you typed it, you are going to be in a tight spot.
• On-campus and on-call interviewers are professionals but humans first. They are equally susceptible to sleep and limited attention span. When given a choice, try to schedule your interviews at around 10am in the morning because that is when people are most charged. In case there are multiple people being interviewed, try to get yourself in second/third spot and then try and find out from the first person the kind of questions they are asking so that you are not caught off guard.
• As you would personalise your resume and cover letters, it might be difficult to keep track of different versions. A good option is to use some way to indicate versioning in your resume. I include a LUO date on the footer of my resume. On two occasions, I remember asking the interviewer for the LUO date to figure out if they had my latest resume or not.

Some interviewing anecdotes

Blog XXV of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

During my pursuit of naukri, I gave several interviews at various places and while almost all the interviews were very professional and regular, once in a while there would be some comic moments. Sometimes they make you smile right during the interview, sometimes you smile over them later. Here’s a brief compilation of some interviewing anecdotes that are purely based on my experience. Company/interviewer names and questions have been altered to avoid any conflicts.

How would you test a whiteboard marker ?
This was the first question & I was ecstatic because I had been preparing for such kind of questions. I almost barfed all my responses. Interviewer was looking for a specific response and was happy when I gave that. He communicated this to next interviewer who said “Normally I ask a testing question but I would ask a coding question now". Perhaps the word had spread far & wide. Over lunch I was asked to test an ATM. Interviewer kept on smiling throughout my answers. Apparently interviewers like barf-puppies.

I would let you speak as well..
Interviews were being held en masse in a crowded room and it was hard to listen as it is. To top it, half of interview was already past and John had not let me utter a single sentence and was introducing himself & his work instead. I tried to politely interrupt only to be snapped back “I would let you speak in a short moment..”. I spoke only for 5 minutes out of total 15 minutes of interview.

He is fast with logic..
(I generally like to derive things instead of putting the answer upfront.)
John: Design an AND using MUX
$ (after deriving the equation): Here
John: Design an OR now
$ (after deriving the equation again): Here
John (slightly worried): Design NOT using NAND
$ (Without deriving this time): Here
John (a bit relieved, left and said this to next interviewer): He is fast with logic.

How would you solve this problem ?
It is last interview at the end of a long day full of interviews and a sleepless night at hotel. Even after a coffee dose, I am feeling lightheaded. Thankfully, the interview is with a trainee and he assures me that it was more of a formality. He goes on at length explaining his work (that I was supposed to take over) and I try as hard I can to not doze off. Then comes a question that drives away my sleep, “How would you have solved it ?”. I had no idea what ‘it’ was. Needless to say even before speaking a word, I had lost my case. The only consolation was the interview ended soon afterwards and I got to catch up on my sleep.

We have bunch of hardware here
$ (at career fair): Excuse me, you told me your company has hardware jobs.
John: Oh yes ! Are you interested ?
$: You bet !
John (pointing to a bunch of hydraulic machines): This is the kind of hardware we design.
$: Thanks John, it was nice meeting you.

Can you design it using a regular FSM now ?
(Ever heard the proverb of right arm not knowing what left arm does ?)
Lisa: Design a sequence detector.
$: Here, I have used FSM.
Lisa: It is all bookish knowledge, everybody does it the same way. Do you know any other way ?
$ (after some quick thinking): Here is one without using FSM
Lisa: Great, I would call John now.
John: Design a sequence detector.
$: Here is one without using FSM.
John (a bit baffled at the unconventional answer): Show me how it works
$: Here.
John: Write the code & test it.
$: Here.
John (still a bit unconvinced): Can you design it using a regular FSM now ?
$: (sigh) Here.

Is that how your name is pronounced ?
Lisa (walks in with a resume in hand): Hello there, I am sorry how do you pronounce your name ?
$: Soo-bodhh
Lisa (a bit perplexed): Could you please repeat ?
$: Soo-bodhh
Lisa (showing the resume to me): It is strange, your name’s spelling seems so different from your pronunciation.
$ (taking a glance at resume): That is because, it is not my resume.
Lisa (profusely apologetic): Ohh, I will print yours right away.
$ (feeling happy to get rid of a resume printed long time back): Here you can have my spare copy.

power of backup

Blog XXI of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

Not a long time back, big computer racks were needed to compute (hold your breath) KILOBYTES of data. Punch cards were used to work with such limited memory. Fast forward to 2005, when I got 40GB disk space in my first computer, my neighbour with ‘only’ 20GB of data burned in jealousy. Back then, data was carried in floppy disks of ~1.4MB and data backup meant either emailing yourself ‘things’ or carrying an army of floppy disks. Soon came CDs but they gave this false sense  of security. Unlike their floppy siblings who cried out aloud every time as if it was their last time, CDs would silently lap up 700MB of data or more and then become unreadable after few weeks of usage or months of storage. Random files would go corrupt rendering a whole heavyweight application unusable, precious pictures would be lost for ever and movies would appear choppy intermittently.

Today with DVDs and mammoth USB HDs, a lifetime of memories in photos, songs, videos and documents can be stashed away in a book shaped device. No surprises then, that Apple named its device Time Capsule. However, it also means that a data calamity that previously could happen only in case of a major fire, flood or earthquake could now happen merely by dropping/misplacing your laptop, or your dog mistaking your disk for a shiny rug or your daughter deciding to use your DVD for her art project.

Few months back, I went through a similar HD crash. Luckily I was prepared. Unluckily I was not fully prepared. While I had been taking regular backups and synchronising stuff online, there was some data that was still lost. As a result, I had to rebuild my music collection from scratch, go to Facebook and Orkut to download some of my photos that were not backed up. Some photos and some licensed softwares were lost for ever. It came as a lesson that one can never be too backed up.

After the crash I made a list of things that one should do as part of backup plan.

• Primary is not backup: If you are using it regularly, it is no longer backup. So your laptop/desktop HD, USB drive, used DVDs do not qualify as backup since they are also susceptible to damage.
• Classify and rule: your data can be classified along three dimensions of relevance, replaceability and updating frequency. Only important or irreplaceable data needs to be backed up. Data that is updated frequently (emails, work files, resume) should be online auto-synchronised (Dropbox, SugarSync, Syncplicity) so that they are backed up as soon as they get changed. Rest of the data can be backed up at regular intervals either online or offline (but note above rule).
• Backup ALL irreplaceable data: I was not fully prepared for my crash because I had skipped out on this chunk of data. Installation setups of licensed softwares, custom playlists, music albums seem like data that are not so important but are not easily replaceable. As a result it took me a long time to restore all my data after a crash.
• File structure image: it is a good idea to create an image of file structure of your hard disks so that during recover stage you can know what all data you had (Use DiskManager).
• Good thing about backing up less: In case everything else fails and data is lost for good, forget it and remember the lesson. A good thing about any crash is that you lose some old junk which you did not need but could never get yourselves to delete.

DISCLAIMER: In above post, I am talking about personal backup. In corporate realm, backup has always been a major concern. Some of the links above are referral links, but I would have recommended them regardless of the referral. Here are the plain links: Dropbox, SugarSync, Syncplicity.

VM510 (LG Rumor Touch) also does

Blog XX of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

PROLOGUE: Continuing with the theme of making choices that one believes in, for sometime now I was planning to buy my first non-basic phone. Some of the must-haves were

• Camera (2MP atleast)
  
• GPS/navigation tool (preferably Google Maps)
  
• Media player (atleast audio)
  
• A regular Internet browser (atleast Opera)
  
• 3G access for anywhere internet access
  
• Bluetooth and PC connectivity
  
• Nationwide coverage
  
• Optional: keypad, large (touch) screen
  
• Allergic to contracts but will do if coverage is good
  
• Cheap (a default requirement)
  

***

One of the first thoughts that I had was to ape everybody else and purchase the then latest Android phone HTC Droid Incredible. Verizon was an attractive option coverage-wise. However I had been allergic to contract plans all along. If the mandatory smartphone data plans and bloated prices of monthly plans and so-called subsidized phones was not enough, the fact that I was stuck with a carrier for two years with a penalty for breaking contract seemed so wrong to me (remember how you feel on hearing employment bond).

Then I decided to compare Virgin mobile plans despite the fact that I live in partial coverage area of Sprint (Virgin carrier) and was I shocked to see that Virgin was offering data+voice plans in the price that Verizon was offering voice (that too at corporate discount). And the most expensive phones on Virgin (no contract) were cheaper than similarly featured phones on other major carriers. Notably, Sprint was offering the same phone for double the price. How this is possible is beyond my comprehension except that carriers intentionally bloat the no-contract pricing for their handsets so that customers are forced to buy contracts.

As you can understand, by this time I had tipped towards purchasing LG Rumor Touch from Virgin. I had to face numerous questions about why I took a phone that was so unconventional but I am happy with it. Thank God that I did not read the faulty review here.

***

EPILOGUE: The title of this post is a spin on the Google-Verizon marketing campaign of Droid Does aimed at things that Droid can do that iPhone (who else but its main competitor) does not. Here is a list of things that I have been able to achieve with a 130 $ VM510 LG Rumor Touch phone with 30$ monthly plan with no contract (in addition to must-haves above):

• watch videos on YouTube.
  
• upload photos/videos to a host of services: Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube & more.
  
• casual internet browsing, the physical keypad comes in handy in typing, a feature which would be sorely missed by most of the other smartphone users
  
• dedicated app for email/IM on Yahoo, Google, AOL & Microsoft with option for custom IMAP
  
• not that I am very active, but a social networking app for Facebook, Twitter & MySpace
  
• a paid app for voice based navigation, Google Maps is free.
  
• makes calls without dropping in partial coverage area.
  
• does not need to be held in a particular way.
  
• setup custom ringtones, wallpapers although third party apps are blocked.
  
• apps multitask (except media player, which engineer came up with this dumb idea !).
  
• access to notepad, voice memo, document viewer.
  
• unlike what is said in many reviews, has an easy touch screen (takes a little getting used to after touch calibration)
  

Agreed it is an exaggeration to compare it with Droid, but my point is can Droid do all that for 130$ ?

Making the choices you believe in

Blog XIX of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

This post is about two different ways in which choices manifest themselves. Both manifestations are rooted in the fact that humans by nature are social and tend to seek acceptance of society.

Often in my mentoring sessions (Mentorpolis, NSIT, ISMA, GSC), I come across students who know what they want to do & have a stellar profile to help them in that but yet when it comes to final execution moment they decide to take a backup ”just in case”. Now, backup is a good thing in general, but if I start working out of my USB drive instead of HD, then it is no longer my backup but working copy. There is a thin line between taking backups and losing focus. When a HW engineer thinks about learning a bit of software so that he can apply for SW positions, that in my view crosses this thin line. When a  GRE aspirant talks about preparing for CAT, that also in my view crosses this line. Now what was that proverb about trying to stand on two boats..or was it the other proverb about a pigeon in hand being worth two in bush..

Another trend is to go along with what everybody else does or what is fashionable. I am also guilty of this at times. People want to do MBA or engineering, purchase smartphones, cars, SLRs, switch jobs, because that is what everybody else is doing. It is cool and happening. Often in doing this, they do not care about what they themselves want or if the cool thing fits their case or not. That explains why people run after 3G phones in places without a 3G coverage or look at DSLRs when what they want really is a P&S.

This post is neither a lament nor a criticism. It is just an observation. C&C (comments and criticism) are most welcome.

International Students Funding 101

Blog XII of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

I receive emails which start off like “Can you tell me about the research/group/academics at ..?” but end up with “Also can you tell me how is the funding scenario for ..?”. It is hard to miss the true intent of these emails. My replies start with “Texas A&M has …” and ends with “Btw, if funding is a big concern for you, then RELAX because..”. I imagine that last paragraph sends a smile across most people because their next few emails are solely about funding ! I figured from a past article, that a blog on the basics of securing funding for international students might have some utility value. (Who is interested in what I could have ended up as ??) Ok so first of all, 101 code refers to a basic primer course in any subject, often used in academic lingo.

First things first, this article is aimed towards international students who are going to be studying abroad and (often) are in need of financial aid to sustain themselves. Please note that notwithstanding the aid options available, you would often need to show enough financial resources to visa officers to convince them that you can financially support yourself through the whole course duration, unless you have received some aid ALONGWITH your admit offer. In reality, the living cost estimates made by colleges are often conservative and one ends up spending only 50 to 80% (depending upon location). This is possible due to sharing apartments, cooking at home, living frugally, sharing / lending / downloading books, relying on free food opportunities (religiously !!), etc. In addition, following aid options are available to ALL students :

• Scholarships: Often there are plethora of one-time financial aid options available in the form of scholarships (link) through university. Often these are merit based and in some cases almost always offered once student accepts an offer and reaches university. These may also be available through various departments/research groups or communities. Loan based scholarships (link1, link2) are also available in one’s home country which are marginally better than taking a loan.
• Graduate Assistantships (GA): As the name suggests, GA are assistantship options available for graduate students. Usually GAs imply that students COMPLETE tuition is waived in addition to receiving a monthly stipend/pay. Senior UG students MAY qualify depending upon local policies.
  • Research (GAR/RA): If you have got a PhD or MS admit AND been conversing with some professor for your research topic, chances are high that you could get an RA. Sometimes, professors may insist on seeing you perform for a semester before funding. RA is the best option available as you get paid to perform your research. However, it implies a commitment which may scare those unsure about their future plans.
  • Teaching (GAT/TA): If you are a graduate student, your department may need you to assist a faculty in conducting undergrad classes as a TA. Opportunities may be availed by applying to department OR talking to concerned professor in advance. Often prior working relation with professor may be required. While RA options are limited by research funding, TA options are limited only by courses and department funding. The flip side is you might have to attend UG classes, evaluate loads of marksheets and help UG students understand their course.
  • Non-teaching (GANT): If you are REALLY good in office skills like IT, programming, web development, helpdesk, customer handling then you could seek part-time employment in various campus offices as GANT. While this implies working 20 hours a week on non-academic work, but can be a great value addition to your resume (apart from offering the much needed aid). These positions are fiercely competed for and requires due diligence during application.
• Fellowships: Many government / research organisations and companies institute a fellowship to promote work in a field of their interest. While fellowships accepting international students are far & few in between and fiercely competed for, landing one ensures worry free education and a bright future. Some fellowships may require participation in campus activities or exhibiting exemplary performance in campus. Many fellowships require endorsement from faculty or multiple references.
• Part time (SW): If nothing else works, one can be a student worker by working on-campus part time UPTO 20 hours a week during session and 40 hours a week during holidays. Some universities may also allow international students to seek off campus employment (please check your college’s international students organisation link). Usually universities have some system for searching and applying for such jobs (link). Tasks may be as varied as cafeteria, sports centre, librarian, support. Some senior SWs are incentivised by offering them GANT.
• Full time (CPT/OPT): During the complete education term, based on local policies, usually students are eligible to work full time provided their work is related to their academic field. Often students achieve ‘breakeven’ by working in companies during summer (internship) or regular semesters (co-op) thus avoiding the need for any financial aid (although it would require you to pay tuition cost initially and recover it later). It also entails a chance of being extended a full time offer once academic course has been successfully completed. The flip side is one’s academic plans may get delayed due to being absent from university.
• Others: Depending upon locality, other options such as participating in a research experiment, contests, etc could offer additional sources of income although these are not strictly considered as aid. In USA, FAFSA is a good resource to claim federal aid but involves a long drawn process.

DISCLAIMER: Since I have only one MS to speak for, this blog may/may not stand true for situations in colleges other than Texas A&M but should come close. Please use discretion.

pursuit of naukri

Blog VI of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

This blog is about my efforts for securing a naukri (Hindi for job) as a graduate student in TAMU. Hopefully it would help those who are still searching for jobs/internships back in TAMU or elsewhere. I am dividing this blog in two sections, first describes my own experience and second describes a list of resources that I found useful. So if you are in a hurry, jump straight ahead to second section or else you may continue reading.

the pursuit

On a sultry afternoon in Aug 2008, I found myself sitting along with about 100 odd students listening to our Director of Graduate Studies trying to impress upon us that the industry was concerned only with the M in our degree and not the second letter that follows it (i.e. S for MS and E for ME). Fast forward eight months, while searching for an internship I was not sure if our DGS remembered to inform the industry about this fact. Summer of 2009 was the height (or rather the depth) of recession and it appeared as if all the job postings had been sucked dry by Texas sun. Not so bad for me because I still had experience from India to rely upon but the graduates 2008 and graduates of 2009 with no industry experience had it very difficult because of this. Some of them went on to delay their graduation or seek higher studies just to avoid being unemployed.

By Fall 2009, it was time to seriously think about where I wanted to go. While my love towards technology and inclination towards semiconductor industry in general was quite clear, I was equally interested in position in web technologies that required fair bit of understanding of how computers work. Over next few months I was interviewed for Microsoft and Intrinsity (now part of Apple) but nothing clicked. By this time, I was shooting for full time positions only. The rationale behind this being that the industry would recover (it already was showing signs) and applying straight for a fulltime might make things proceed faster considering my research was already near completion.

Spring 2010 was the final countdown, roughly one third of my semester was spent preparing for my defense and rest of it on preparing and applying for jobs. I interviewed left right and centre but in some cases the profile was not right (Intel), in other cases compensation (Garmin, Mathworks) and in some cases my preparation (Cirrus Logic). One good thing about these interviews was that they helped me in strengthening my weaknesses and further leveraging my strengths. The next round of interviews showed some great promises and although Texas Instruments had a hiring freeze, I received offers from Marvell Semiconductors and Cisco Systems. Ironically though, when I had almost decided, I was further interviewed by Freescale, AMD and Qualcomm although I had to end those discussions after I accepted Cisco’s offer. Phew ! Looking back, I never thought I would be interviewed in so many places, job yes but multiple interviews, no.

what helped

This may not be an exhaustive list but definitely covers most of the resources and tips that were instrumental in my preparation and search for naukri.

• Network Network Network: you cannot be over-networked, it is surprising how subtly networks can help and how their importance is often underrated. Some great ways to build networks are using LinkedIn, attending career fairs, talking to professors, senior students, ex-colleagues & anybody anywhere who can hook you to the job. Ok, let me repeat, you can never be over-networked, and it helps much more than you think. Looking back at my calls, exactly half of them were initiated by my network than me for ex. I received a call from TI out of nowhere only to realise that I was recommended by a consultant who knew me on LinkedIn.
• Spread your DIRECTED resume: hold it before you spam your resume to hundreds of employers. Different companies have different ways of accepting resumes and unfortunately that means that you do need to painstakingly enter all your information into various company and resume portals. If you have a network (read above), you can spread your resume there also. However, it is VERY important to customize your resume for each company/post. An Intel manager once told me “…in our job description, we already have given the things we are looking for, make sure that you include those in your resume…”. Often this implies re-wording your resume to reflect different ways of saying the same thing while laying more emphasis on sections of your resume relevant to job requirement. For ex. I had three flavours of my resume and dozens (yes, dozens) of cover letters fitting different needs.
• UPDATE your resume: During my job search I read up so much on creating a good resume that now I wonder how did I ever decide on creating my first resume template. So much has been said about writing resumes that I would not attempt touching it here. Only two advices, your resume is a living document, update it frequently and do catch hold of some resources or get your resume reviewed to make sure it is your best foot forward in job search.
• Prepare: yes, if it was not obvious, you do need to prepare for interviews. If you have got an interview call, it is already too late to start preparing for it, ideally you should be preparing while applying so that when the call comes, you are ready for it. I would often alternate between ‘prep’ and ‘app’ which helped me in handling back-to-back interviews each of which had their own areas of interest.
• Brush up: another thing that people forget is that interview is not an exam, it is a conversation made out of an exam and you need to excel in it to be able to get a job. That includes preparing ‘about me’ sections, hooks that allow you to plug yourself and 'sketching out' things to talk about. Our counsellor from undergrad once said that “you need to sell yourself” to the employer. I could not agree more. I know people who are technically strong but miss out on chances because of their soft skills. TAMU Career Center was an excellent resource in this.
• Be enterprising: I was not proactive initially during my job search which I am sure had its repercussions. Job search can be months long at the least and you should be geared up to stay focussed over the whole duration. This means you need to periodically apply to new openings on various portals, follow up on various contacts and keep revising your preparation.
• Brute force: extreme situations require extreme measures. Yet there needs to be a method to your madness. Some of the things that I did as ‘last mile’ effort were :
  • contact employees/consultants of interesting companies directly through LinkedIn.
  • frequently discuss my job search with my professors.
  • include your recommendation letters (say) from LinkedIn in the list of attachments that you send to employers. If it applies to your field, include prior work samples.
  • focus more on recent openings as often month old openings are already taken.
  • find out hiring trends and shoot resume to recent hirers. Temporal locality is true in these cases.
  • corollary to above principle, relay your job search status to trusted people only till things get finalised to avoid creating competition. It is a sad but true part of job search that it is a race in which your fellow colleagues are also running. Collaborate but not at personal expense.

Ten cool tools you ought to know about..

Blog I of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

It is funny how less than ten years ago I did not know what a computer was and actually took a course to learn MS Office. Then sometime in 2002 when I got my first computer, I remember the first software that held my attention was Borland Turbo C++ compiler, not because of its enticing blue screen but because I could not figure out how to exit it !

Hopefully I have come a long way since then, considering I have taught basic computer course to little kids under STF. Over a period of time, I have come to like a bunch of software and time and again I am surprised to see when i come across people who have not even heard about them. These softwares are instantly liked by anybody who uses them (or at least by me !) and are like those cute kids that you bump into once in a while. You simply like them ! So here is a list of ten softwares that I have come to like over the years that I have used them. Below each software is the year since I have been using them and the source which initiated me into the software.

Disk Manager by Broken Cross

2003/Abhinav M

Every wondered which one of your removable medias had that favourite song or movie or game of yours that you were having trouble restoring. Disk Manager could just be the solution for that, it automatically indexes each and every file on any removable media of your computer. So even when the CD/DVD/removable HD may not be connected to your computer, you can find out in matter of seconds which disk has what stuff on it. I even use it to store contents of my fixed hard disks. During a recent hard disk crash, it helped me figure out which all data/SW I had not been able to recover.

Dropbox by Dropbox

2009/Online search

The magic of some softwares is that they make you wonder few months into their use how did you manage without them. Dropbox is one such software. It adorns multiple hats, data synchroniser, data backup, online storage, revision control and the list goes on. In the short span of 1.5 years that I have started to use it, it has helped me survive my HD crash, allowed me to collaborate on my publications and thesis with my professor, synchronised my workspace across multiple computers and provided me 5GB of free hosting space (out of which 3GB came from referrals that I made). No doubt there is a bunch of MITians behind this tool.

Editpad by Jan Goyvaerts

2003/Online search

Yes, even in this age of productivity tools, you still need to type in plain text. Reasons could be as varied as grocery list to list of project ideas. And while Notepad is as basic as a text editor gets, it does not cut the mark when you want to handle multiple files or do some serious search and replace. Editpad is probably one of many contenders for a decent text editor but I have been loyal to this software.

jetAudio by COWON Media Center

2002/Self

“Umm where are your songs running from ?”, “Hey I like the way songs fade in and out in your computer” & “Wow that video looks so better on your screen” are some of the compliments that my main media software has received over the ages. I still remember the first time I saw jetAudio when it had a different tile for audio, video and disc player. But it had an amazing (far better than WMP) playback quality, had keyboard shortcuts (which means I can completely control the playback using key combos) and VLC-like ability to play any file based on codecs. These have been the main reasons why it still remains the default player for ANY media file on my computer. Over the years, jetAudio has got a major face uplift and with many new functions added (try tag edit & crossfade features) its free version can give many paid media players a run for their money.

RocketDock by Punk Software

2008/Kunal K

“Wh..what was that ? That thing that appeared out of nowhere !” No it is not Superman, but PC guy’s The Dock equivalent. I know Windows allows you to create toolbars but nothing is more intuitive and CHI zen-ish than having an app launcher pop out of hidden ends of your screen and leave as quietly as it appeared. RocketDock is perfect way to launch tools that you access frequently.

SequoiaView by Technische Universiteit Eindhoven

2003/Self

Hey you, yes you over there ! I know you probably have close to half a Tera Byte of storage on your computer and hence you feel justified in not deleting stuff ever from your computer. But remember that’s how everybody felt when they got hard disks with dozens of Giga Byte in them. How wrong they were !

Nope this next tool of ours is not an automatic file remover that removes files from your storage. But it gives you a visual snapshot of your disk usage, colour-coded by file extensions, filtered by various parameters so those hard disk guzzlers can no longer hide in obscure folders. Being an disciplinarian, SequoiaView has helped me to time and again remove locate and remove unnecessary files from my computer.

Snipping Tool by Microsoft

2008/Came with MS Vista Ultimate

As a webmaster, often I would need to take snapshots of specific regions of screen. Now probably there exist many tools to achieve this but this inbuilt tool from Microsoft in MS Windows Vista and above has kept me happy because of its minimalist interface and fabulous flow.

Streets & Trips by Microsoft

2008/Won in MS CPC 2008

Now I know ever since Google unleashed AJAX experience on Google Maps, Web and mapping softwares are no longer the same, but when I am aboard a bus from place A to place B with no internet access on my phone or laptop, it is Streets & Trips software by Microsoft which helps me figure out my way and whereabouts. This tool is the least used tool in this list but has been of immense value.

TClockEx by Dale Nurden

2002/Self

Early on into my PC usage, I was not satisfied with the default clock on Windows and needed some customisation. TClockEx has been adorning my start bar for eight years now displaying my clock in MS Comic Sans 9pt with a ‘$’ in between date and time. Apart from fulfilling my vanity requirements, it has a neat calendar view & also provides a view of memory/CPU usage.

TeamViewer by GmBH

2009/Online search

Remote desktop access is not a new topic, nor is the list of tools offering it short but TeamViewer struck me in what all it offered for free and the amazing UI. For an year, I used this software to access my personal laptop remotely from my college machine and boy was it exciting.

Hey, you said ten softwares, then why are we moving onto 11th one. Because it is free silly !

Free Studio by DVDVideoSoft

2010/Online search

The most recent entry in this list is a suite of a bunch of tools that come handy so often but surprisingly do not have a single tool that offers them all for free. Ranging from performing media file format conversion to downloading media in various formats from online sources, Free Studio is now a one-stop tool for my various media conversion requirements.

DISCLAIMER: All softwares are copyright of respective copyright holders and no infringement is intended. This entry captures my personal experience with these softwares and individual experiences may vary.

Record of CPSC 436 Work

Lists all the blogs and comments posted as part of CPSC 436 coursework

Paper Blogs

* Assigned paper readings

UIST 2008

• Multi-Touch Interactions on a Spherical Display
• Foldable Interactive Displays
• User Experiences Across Multiple Personal Devices
• Re-framing the Desktop Interface Around the Activities of Knowledge Work*

IUI 2009

• Learning to Recognize Valuable Tags
• Do You Know? Recommending People to Invite into Your Social Network
• Tagsplanations: Explaining Recommendations Using Tags
• Searching Large Indexes on Tiny Devices*

CHI 2009

• Evaluation of Expert Recommender Systems
• SmartPlayer: User-Centric Video Fast-Forwarding
• Performance Model of Selection Techniques for P300-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI)
• Autism Online*
• Tilt Techniques
• Digital Games for Rural Indian Children
• Single Large vs Multiple Displays
• Sketch and Run: A Stroke-based Interface for Home Robots*

UIST 2009

• DiffIE - Changing How People View Changes on the Web*
• Bonfire: Hybrid Laptop-Tabletop Interaction
• TapSongs: Tapping Rhythm-Based Passwords
• Mouse 2.0: Multi-touch Meets the Mouse

Paper Comments

• UIST 2008 : Zachary Edens*
• IUI 2009 : William Hamilton
• CHI 2009 : Aaron Loveall
• CHI 2009 : Ross Peterson
• UIST 2009 : Mike Chenault*

* Comments posted on substitute papers in cases where nobody from class had blogged on my assigned reading.

Book Blogs

• The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper II
• Emotional Design by Don Norman
• The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper I
• Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

Disclaimer

This post was created as part of course requirement for CPSC 436.

IE9 Test Drive comes here !

At the recently held MIX10 event, Microsoft proudly launched the Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9 accompanied with a presentation on the future roadmap and progress made till now in its development. The word catch-up seemed to be written large on the faces of presenters who valiantly put a case for why Internet Explorer 9 would be a good tool to browse future of web with HTML5, CSS3, SVG and AJAX and JavaScript thrown in. Perhaps the highlight for the presenters was when they were able to show how IE9 supports one feature that other browsers could not which was support for latest ICC colour profiles. Needless to mention that presenters did not elaborate on how the platform preview lacked video support or that ALL of the demos present on Platform Preview could be viewed easily in current Firefox version without any hitch (except for one minor feature, tell me if you find it; hint: it is in HTML 5).

To the credit of presenters, one thing that they impressed upon was the graphics intensive nature of HTML5 and why it is a good idea to have a browser than can delegate its rendering to GPU while processor can handle other tasks such as document layout and JavaScript.

While certainly a news worthy event, it would be interesting to see how IE9 matures in coming weeks and if it can introduce any game changer in the browser warfare instead of just catching up to other players. All signs till now indicate – maybe not.

The Inmates are Running the Asylum II

Alan Cooper

Discussion

Continuing from my previous blog on first half of this book, author says that programmers want more power and control in an application such that it often ends up leading to more complex designs for common user. Most people would rather give up the power to have a simpler interaction with a computer (“less is more”). Programmers do not understand this and it is a mistake to let them design the interaction. Author advocates the need to have dedicated UI designers instead of programmers assuming this role.

Author describes how for many programmers, end user is a distant thing and how often because of working in socially isolated areas, they start harbouring an inferior feeling towards everyday person. Author presents one solution of inventing personas for end user so that programmers design with these in mind. Author presents several case studies in the end of the book.

This book was an interesting read and one could identify with certain descriptions of a programmer. I would have liked to see mention of some way using which a programmer could become "enlightened".

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.

Multi-Touch Interactions on a Spherical Display

Hrvoje Benko, et al., Microsoft Research

Summary

This paper presents Sphere, a multi-user, multi-touch spherical display with shared projection and sensing paths and 360 degrees access without shadowing or occlusion effects. They also present some new interaction techniques and applications based on Sphere.

Details

Authors were attracted to the concept of a spherical display because of its 360 degrees field of view. While existing such devices were display only, authors combined a Magic Planet display with an IR camera to use the same optical axis as the projector for touch sensing. Touch sensing happens in IR spectrum using light from an IR illumination ring and hence is not disturbed by projector which has an IR cut filter to operate in visible spectrum only. The raw image from sphere is normalised, binary encoded and labelled to enable tracking using a C ++ library. Real time interaction requires runtime spherical distortion correction projection and sensing which was achieved using a vertex shader. Similarly content data needs to be authored in cylindrical or 3D Cartesian models.

Authors present a sample application for photo and video browsing which incorporates basic multi touch gestures such as drag, rotate and scale. To facilitate collaboration, auto-rotating (to ensure alignment irrespective of radial position), flicking (inertial flick movement) and send-to-dark-side (flat hand for 1s to send onto other side) were introduced. Circular menu items are selected by using orb like bimanual gestures. Another application for spherical data viewing introduced tether axis to to tether the manipulation of data display. Two games were also created using entire touch area.

User study provided following observations:

• Photo/video browsing happened independently but data display proved to be a problem due to conflict in multi-user inputs.
• Users were more willing to interact if display were left with ‘messy’ objects.
• Radial heat maps showed that there existed no master user position for Sphere although users tend to stay at one position initially.
• Many users requested zoom functionality in maps.

Review

The device sounds like a futuristic concept which could very well be used in public displays, education and sophisticated control. Zoom functionality in maps could be introduced by zooming only the region indicated by user so that displays for other users remains unchanged. In all a very exciting read.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at UIST 2008 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.

Foldable Interactive Displays

Johnny Chung Lee, et al., Carnegie Mellon University

Summary

This paper explores foldable projected display with low cost tracking and orientation sensitivity.

Details

Much interest has been attracted towards flexible display but OLED prototypes remain rigid and rectilinear. Authors explore augmenting passive surfaces using image projection and IR dot tracking. While such a system suffers from occlusion problem, minimal object tracking, use of passive surfaces allow various foldable prototype designs such as newspaper, scroll, fan and umbrella. Subtle display movements can be detected by monitoring edges of surface to provide orientation sensitive behaviour. Similarly extra tracking points can be used to provide stylus-like input.

Review

This is an exploratory paper and as author admits, there are serious hurdles to be crossed in making this mobile and accurate in tracking. Introducing IR dots seem to counteract potential benefits of using a passive surface in the first place. Using computer vision techniques instead, coloured dots could be used to serve similar purpose.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at UIST 2008 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.

User Experiences Across Multiple Personal Devices

Jeffrey S. Pierce and Jeffrey Nichols, IBM Research

Summary

This paper presents an infrastructure which could be used to seamless experience across multiple personal devices. This attempts the software infrastructure part of the scalable computing problem that I discussed in a previous blog.

Details

Users today work with multiple computing devices but do not have seamless interaction because providing such functionality requires a basic framework which does not exist. Authors set off to develop an infrastructure that would allow exchanging information, events and commands across a user’s devices. They achieve this by elevating device ownership and creating twenty odd applications some of which they discuss in this paper.

Authors chose to adapt to existing user practices and as a result had to build in room for device unavailability. They based their design on Instant Messaging (IM) architecture for its familiarity and support for various communication modes. They chose XMPP standard or Jabber for its open source and extensible nature. Users create an account in PIE (Personal Information Environment) servers and affiliate their devices as PIE clients. The infrastructure supports services that connect to clients and route messages. This reduces burden on server and makes app development simpler. Finally asynchronous communication support was improved to store and retrieve the most recent version of any shared state information. Applications can either be built as Java client using an Eclipse plug-in or communicate to clients over local socket using XMPP messages.

Amongst various applications built were Notebook and Shared Lists service for modifying common text files and lists across different devices. Another service synchronises or transfers files across personal devices. Send a URL service can open a URL on any device using a Firefox plug-in. Browse and Search Console services allows users to browse or search across multiple devices. Recent Shortcuts and Phone Events shares user history and events. Context service monitor input devices to tag devices  with server side aliases such as InUse or RecentlyUsed. Sever-side aliases were also used to support multiple communication models such as WorkDevices, Laptops, etc. Services register for XML namespaces on clients to handle traffic diverted towards them. Authors have described some sample codes for implementing an example service.

In the user study, 5 developers were given 4 tasks to achieve for which they were timed. It was observed that typically 2/3 of the time was spent in looking up API guides than in implementing tasks. Person 5 who spent a day reading the guide was able to achieve tasks in shortest time. Developers particularly liked reusability of XML namespaces. It was also observed that while some services perform in a peer-to-peer model others need to store most of their data on the server.

Review

I was amazed by the amount of work described in this paper. Not only do authors discuss the infrastructure but also describe several applications built to allow seamless interaction across various devices. I am not sure if authors discuss how a PIE server could be implemented and what happens in case a PIE server itself is unavailable. Another question left unanswered is if PIE clients can acquire the role of PIE server if so required. Authors should be credited for sticking to an open source and extensible framework.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at UIST 2008 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.

Re-framing the Desktop Interface Around the Activities of Knowledge Work

Stephen Voida et al., University of Calgary

Summary

This paper argues that current desktop systems are too much focused on documents and applications and that in the age of multi-tasking and collaboration, an activity oriented desktop system has substantial advantages.

Details

Authors present historical background of existing desktop systems and how they are not a good fit for handling ‘fluid work’ practices. Authors start off with a scenario where a person organises his computing into activities and desktop switches context according to current activity of user. Key points here are enabling activity based resource storage, multitasking, tagging and collaboration support. This exist from existing solutions which are either standalone or do not provide contextual resources.

The Giornata interface designed for this purpose feels familiar to the concept of ‘workspaces’ except that instead of fitting activities into fixed workspaces, a ‘workspace’ is created for each new activity. Giornata goes further by providing activity specific storage, contact palette and tags. This supports collaborative work and implicit hierarchical organization of resources instead of having users to handle it themselves.

Giornata is implemented as a Carbon, Cocoa and AppleScript based application for OS X and works by adding two layers to existing window manager. Explicit layer provides Contact palette and activity management while implicit layer acts as a persistent information display for each activity. While authors envisage more tools like Contact palette to provide activity-based interaction, they admit that extending closed source window managers and balancing ‘local work’ and ‘communicative interactions’ is technically challenging. Supporting a reliable restore facility in case of system crash would require development of new programming frameworks. User study performed on five people provided positive reviews although authors do not discuss them in detail.

Review

On the face of it, Giornata comes across as an efficient tool in organizing day-to-day activities for anyone who does serious computing work. Parallels can be drawn between mobile apps and Giornata activities and it is clear that such an activity oriented desktop system has substantial benefits.  More than the development of such a tool, I feel the challenge would be to loosely divide various tasks into per-activity or across activity and provide activity specific interactions for former. Authors present Contact palette and resource storage as two such tasks.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at UIST 2008 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.

Learning to Recognize Valuable Tags

Shilad Sen, Jesse Vig, John Riedl, University of Minnesota

Summary

Tags are ubiquitous on web and this paper explores various algorithms for evaluating tags. Specifically it attempts to find optimum metrics for tag selection, performance of tags based on implicit or explicit user behaviour and performance of each algorithm with rising tag density.

Details

For their research, authors use MovieLens movie recommender website which allows people to tag and evaluate movies and rate other tags using thumbs up or down.

To collect gold standard for tags, authors then asked their active user base to take a survey on tags and feedback. Inspired by prior work, three different metrics were chosen – classification accuracy, precision for top-n and precision of top-n%. While classification ranks a selection algorithm on the classification for all the tags, precision based techniques test accuracy for only the top-n and top-n% tags. Authors chose to proceed with top-n since it was easily interpretable for their tagging system

Authors then evaluated a bunch of implicit and explicit tag selection algorithms. The interesting observations made were:

• Explicit techniques perform remarkably better than implicit ones.
• The popular technique of ranking tags on the number of times they were applied performs fairly well.
• A combination of a variety of implicit and/or explicit techniques outperforms other individual techniques.
• apps_per_movie (Average number of times tag is assigned to a given movie) performs best amongst implicit techniques
• hierarchical_rating (composite algorithm) performs best amongst explicit techniques

Above results were also validated in a user study. Finally it was also observed that with rising tagging activity, the performance gap between implicit and explicit techniques increases although authors did not check it for tags more than 200.

Review

This was a very interesting paper to read. Authors have done very detailed and scientific study of various tagging algorithms although and considered different metrics before finally choosing one. An open question that authors also mention in their future work is whether the actual performance difference between best and popular tagging techniques is visible to normal user.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at IUI 2009 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.

Emotional Design

Donald Norman

Discussion

In this book, Don places higher importance on aesthetics in contrast to functionality and ease of use as was the case in his previous books. He discusses how design evokes emotions in people and why some of the designs are so successful in doing so.

I thought this book was fairly interesting in that it covers an alternative aspect of looking at designs. One can find companies like Apple or Google which have built an empire partly if not fully based on emotional appeal. Marketability based on aesthetics or emotional value also have a role to play in any design’s perceived satisfaction.

Don puts a case for a robot’s need to have emotions so that it can learn and adapt, avoid deadlock or inaction by expressing frustration. I feel that some of his ideas are a bit over-generalizing. There already exist several different machines in industry that perform their work with pin-point precision without any hitch. It may be argued that best robot work is one which is done in background without any emotions attached. However to the credit of Don, his comments can be interpreted to lay more emphasis on emotional value of design. Recent publications have highlighted how customising Roomba has lead to increased user satisfaction. It has also been observed in the case of Aibo or Asimo that making robots real-world like in appearance has led to their increased acceptance in domestic market.

Overall I enjoyed reading the book. I feel that it certainly has a point to make but it should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.

Do You Know? Recommending People to Invite into Your Social Network

Ido Guy, Inbal Ronen, Eric Wilcox, IBM

Summary

How many times has it happened the last time you paid a visit to your favourite social networking site (SNS) that you would get a recommendation to connect/poke/wink/befriend/link a person that the site thinks you would be interested in. My guess is a lot. This paper discusses a novel UI for presenting these recommendations in an explanatory way.

Details

Authors created a “Do You Know” widget for IBM’s company directory Fringe to connect to people the widget believes they already know. For this the network relies on SONAR which aggregates data from other applications such as organisation chart, publications co-authorship, mutual connections and blog comments. Each such activity is assigned a score which is used to finally make a recommendation. In addition to recommendation, users are also presented with an evidence summary listing the sources (which can further be visited) using which the recommendation was made.

For evaluation purpose, a user study was done over 4 months. SONAR was found to have caused 278% increase in invitations and received several positive comments from study participants. The average no. of connections per user jumped from 11.6 to 39.1 over the period of the study. Despite the fact that people recommended were already known, 31% and 47% found the evidence summary very much and somewhat useful.

Some of the improvements suggested for the widget were enhancing the “No thanks” feature to allow permanent or temporary removal of recommendation, showing only a few random recommendations at a time and allowing multiple recommendation approvals easily.

Review

The interface presented is very nice and clean. It is debatable if such extensive information as was available to SONAR through company intranet is also available to SNS. The solid principle however behind paper is enabling access in a compact interface to the information used for making a recommendation to the user.

Also it would be interesting to see this principle being extended to people who may not know each other but are linked through common hobbies or interests. For ex. the recommendation could read “You would like this person because you share interest in soccer (link to other person’s blog on soccer)”.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at IUI 2009 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.

Some thoughts on Scalable Computing

Preface

For some time now, there has been some great interest in what various vendors have been planning for ‘devices of fourth kind’ i.e. devices which are a notch above the processing capabilities of a handheld and a notch above the limited mobility of a difficult to carry notebook or immobile desktop. Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently summed up the popular netbook solution (to widespread cheers from audience) as something which was “better at none” and went on to bill iPad as the solution. A month down the line, media and experts have pointed out too many loopholes in iPad for it to claim this title easily.

While far from over, the race for ‘fourth kind of device’ is not going to be the last such race. I suspect the problem is deeper than this.

Problem

Without further ado, I state the problem as thus: "We currently lack an efficient resource - software as well as hardware - that can be efficiently scaled up or down to meet customer requirements”. We do not need to look much beyond than our handhelds and computers (of any kind) to understand this, each tech-savvy person today has at least two pieces of what we shall refer to as resource. These two pieces of resources while essentially perform the same basic tasks but yet cannot be merged together to work as a single unit, nor can any one of these be further split into two pieces of resource to work independently. Now replace word ‘resource’ in above sentence with either software or hardware and read it again. The resources referred to above can be ones on your handheld devices, notebooks, netbooks, iPads, desktops, calculators or any other computing device. Each of these devices has a piece of software and hardware on them none of which can either be merged or split further.

The problem therefore is to find a method by which software and hardware resources of a system can be easily scaled to market requirements. Frankly speaking, we have been doing a pretty so-so job at this. New flavours of resources have often been reinvented from scratch (case in point being App Store, mobile development frameworks, mobile processors) or concocted from existing solutions (like netbooks from notebooks or operating systems for notebooks). The problem in this ? While reinventing from scratch costs development effort, it also tries to rebrand an existing solution for a problem that needs a new solution. Deriving from existing solutions seems right at first glance but can miss out on the fact that different form factors have different user interaction models and may require sufficiently different interfaces.

Solution

If I tell you the solution, I would have to kill you ! Data warehousing concepts attack this problem for compute farms and servers but not for mainstream customers. Parallel computing is another step in this direction but still in its nascent stages when it comes to being applied for scalable computing. Lenovo U1 is perhaps first device of its kind which tries to solve the problem of scalability.However much more can be done.

While the problem is too complex to be solved singlehandedly, it would require a redesign of hardware resources as we know them today. Instead of being monolithic designs, they would have to afford themselves to modular designs. In shorter run, we can expect more devices like Lenovo U1 and usage patterns like Air Mouse to emerge. It would be interesting to see how software resources are redesigned in such environments. It is still unclear if they would also go the parallel route or continue being developed in branches.

Disclaimer

The above thoughts are an original work of author and copyrighted. Author welcomes feedback / comments / views from all.

Tagsplanations: Explaining Recommendations Using Tags

Jesse Vig, Shilad Sen, John Riedl, University of Minnesota

Summary

Authors explore the design space of explaining recommendations to user.

Details

One of the research areas explored in improving transparency, trust and user satisfaction in recommender systems is explaining them based on item, user or a certain feature. Authors explore the relevance (relation between item and tag) and preference (relation between user’s sentiments and tag) of tags using explanations called tagsplanations.

For their experiment, authors tested four different interfaces based on different combinations of relevance and preference. Interface that showed relevance and preference while sorting using relevance scored highest in this study pointing that users preferred relevance but did not trust the system enough to view it alone. Both these attributes seemed to be of equal effectiveness.  Subjective tags seemed to perform better than factual tags but if depicting the same idea, users preferred factual tags. For future work, authors propose studying trust and scrutability of such a system.

Review

Authors have presented a strong design space exploration of recommendation explanations and make some insightful observations. In the words of author themselves, it would be desirable to have an empirical measurement of how well the explanations worked instead of using self-reporting.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at IUI 2009 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.

Searching Large Indexes on Tiny Devices

Guy Shani et al., Microsoft Research

Summary

This paper proposes a novel technique for searching large indexes on devices with limited UI (5 keys and one line display). It employs a distribution based OBST (Optimal BST) extended to an OTST (Optimal Ternary Search Tree) using pinning. With shrinking mobile media devices, UI options become increasingly limited and a technique to allow user entry faster with lesser keystrokes is desirable.

Details

OBST relying on probability distribution of search strings would be faster than lexicographic BSTs. Authors extend this structure to an OTST by adding pinning. So while up and down keys traverse OTST in conventional sense to left and right subtree, and left key retraces route taken, right key traverses OTST to middle subtree which is a subtree with an extra character ‘pinned’ in the prefix string shared amongst all the child nodes. Authors argue that with prefixes often shared amongst artist and album names adding this new subtree enhances the search experience. Authors present quantitative comparison showing OTST to be the best technique amongst various other techniques. ROTST (Restricted OTST) represents a design choice based on user feedback where the middle subtree retains previous root as one of the options (even though users can simply end the search by pressing ‘enter’).

User study shows lowest keystroke count and search times for ternary searches although spelling bases searches had lowest error rate because of being a well familiar concept. This tone was also reflected in user comments where though they preferred ternary searches, they recommended spelling based searches for an average user. Ternary searches register an improvement over binary searches in average time for single keystroke as users need to focus only on the working prefix string.

Review

Perhaps this paper represents the classic struggle between the ‘best thing to do’ and ‘simplest thing to do’. While OTST and ROTST ranked highest in the quantitative study, user preference for average user lied squarely with spelling based linear search. In the words of author, a key question that remains unanswered is what an average user thinks about this technique. Authors admit that their results might be skewed by their sample space which consisted entirely of Microsoft employees. Having said that, the technique is very innovative and consolidates existing search techniques in a neat manner.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at IUI 2009 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.