CS Department Open House

The Computer Science Department Open House was on Friday. GroupLens, my research group, had five posters: two on Wikipedia, tagging, Q&A sites, and Cyclopath.

Katie Panciera is a Ph.D. student and the newest member of the Cyclopath team.

Alex Stuart is an undergraduate working on Wikipedia.

Jesse Vig is a Ph.D. student with some very nice tagging work going on.

Morten Warncke-Wang is a Ph.D. student working on Wikipedia.

Cyclopath Writeup in the Minnesota Daily

An article about Cyclopath was published on Tuesday in the Minnesota Daily, the University of Minnesota student newspaper. Brief excerpt:

Loren Terveen, associate professor in the computer science and engineering department, worked with Priedhorsky to get the project off the ground.

Terveen said Cyclopath creates several technical research challenges, including figuring out how to monitor geographic editing in a wiki and what tools are needed to edit a geographic entry.

“The tools you need to edit a map are more complicated than those for a text wiki,” he said.

p.s. It's getting cold, which means that the cat it getting cuddlier. The cat likes to sit on my lap even if I'm trying to type. This makes typing somewhat more difficult.

Reid on KMSP

I was interviewed about Cyclopath by KMSP ("Fox 9"), one of the local TV channels, for their 10:00 news on 10/14. Here's the video:



Some thoughts, carefully numbered but in no particular order:

1. The news people at KMSP, as a whole, know nothing about bicycling -- pedal misspelled as peddle, intro refers to the map as a way to "get off the streets" (the whole point of the cycling movement is to get accepted as traffic).
2. Talking to the press is fun.
3. Being interviewed by local TV news is extremely cursory. Few follow-up questions; basically it was "Tell your story. Go."
4. If you're interviewed for TV or radio, observe whether the interviewer is miked: if not, then remember that the questions will not be included in the final cut, and adjust your answers accordingly.
   
5. Overall, I thought the story was decent. Good publicity.

I also have a piece coming out in the Minnesota Daily on Tuesday. I'll blog about that too when it's out.