CSCW 2010 #2

Cliff.

Do not feed the alligators.

Brent.

Moira.

Jackie.

Jackie's fish.

No more fish.

Grad Student Review

Every year, the CS department does a performance review for each of its Ph.D. students. Here's mine.

We are very pleased with the quality of your work and with the pace of your progress. We want to congratulate you and encourage you to continue doing such an excellent job. We especially note the unusual and significant achievement of having originated and led the development of Cyclopath, a system that has (a) earned significant real-world usage, (b) resulted in deep collaborations with local government and non-profits, including a sizable grant from the Metropolitan Council, as well as (c) serving as a platform for carrying out excellent research. We also note the unusual and significant leadership role you have taken on the Cyclopath project, engaging in extensive informal and formal mentoring of less experienced students as well as doing large amounts of software project management. We understand that this work certainly has taken away from the amount of "pure" / narrowly construed research you could have done -- that is, you probably could have published more papers if you had not done this. However, you *still* have published a good number of very high quality papers, and the amount and type of effort you have put in have led to accomplishments are much more substantial and longer lasting than just a few (more) research papers.

We congratulate you an reaching an advanced stage in your degree program. At this point, we think you should be ready to finish and defend your thesis within the next year. Please consult closely with your advisor to develop a detailed timetable and verify that your examining committee is appropriate. You also should be seeking career guidance from your advisor if you have not done so already.

Sincerely,

Loren Terveen
Director of Graduate Studies
on behalf of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering
The University of Minnesota

The tone is interesting to me, as Loren is my advisor in addition to being the DGS.

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.

Hiawatha Avenue bridge

Last week when we were cramming to get the CSCW paper done, I had several late-night commutes home. The excessively expensive Sabo Bridge over Hiawatha Avenue is indeed well lit.

Interesting kudos

My CSCW paper from last year is one of half a dozen papers listed in CSCW 2010's Guide to Successful Submissions. Strange. I wonder how those are selected?

Clock

An inappropriate time to be just leaving school.

CHI 2009 - Wednesday (Day 4)

Sean was chairing a session.

Joe got up to ask a question, and Max got in line right behind him. Then Katie asked the next question. (All of these people are in my group.) There weren't any other questions pending, so I got up and complained that Minnesota was underrepresented at the microphone. (For context, you're supposed to state your name and affiliation before you ask a question, so it was obvious that all three questions were from Minnesota people.)

Cavernous ballroom ceiling at one of the sessions.

Snacks and break.

Condom World.

We thought James was looking too professional in his nice collared shirt, so we demanded that wear the lobster hat.

Project 100, #98, #99, #100, #101, #102, #103.

CHI 2009 - Tuesday (Day 3)

I was going to complain that I've never been in a hotel where doing the stuff on these signs made any difference at all. However, the Tuesday housekeeping actually did what was outlined on this sign. So, I'll complain that doing the stuff on these signs almost never makes any difference.

Here's Max giving his talk. It was superb. I was very impressed.

I am wearing a silly hat.

Project 100, #95, #96, #97.

CHI 2009 - Monday (Day 2)

Outside my room, too early in the morning. Note the mediocre newspaper outside everyone's door.

Elevator lobby. I am on the 22nd floor. There are 6 elevators, so many that you have to push the button and then keep alert and hustle to get in the one that appears before it disappears.

Skyway over a street of some name.

Morning light in Boston (from skyway).

Swanky mall on the way to the convention center.

This tower towers over the mall.

Did you know Dunkin Donuts could be swanky?

Entry to the convention center. We are upstairs on the 2nd and 3rd floors.

Giant escalator dome.

Aaron (day captain) and Sara chippering-o-matic before 7am.

Hallway light outside the session rooms. The views from this area are very nice. Sample below.

Dane being "helpful".

Aforementioned view.

Mukesh, day captain. We take our work very seriously around here.

Project 100, #81, #82, #83, #84, #85, #86, #87, #88, #89, #90, #91, #92, #93, #94.

CHI 2009 - Sunday

CHI is the major conference in my field, something like 2,500 attendees.

Waiting for the train to the airport at o-dark-thirty.

Our swank hotel room. I'm rooming with Jilin.

View from aforementioned swank hotel room. It's about 10 minutes walk through a shopping mall to the convention center.

I'm a student volunteer. This is the SV "lounge".

Sara (right) is the SV co-chair this year. She's the friendliest person I know who can shout a room full of people into horrified silence. She got 1-1/2 hours of sleep last night.

Max (left) is the day captain.

This is Sara's messy work area.

Project 100, #75, #76, #77, #78, #79, #80.

More Publicity for my Wikipedia Work

I received an e-mail from a British dude wanting to talk about my Wikipedia work on Friday. I spoke with him on the phone for about 45 minutes that afternoon. That and his other resulted in this article in The Independent. There were two passages which quoted me:

How big is the problem really? Reid Priedhorsky, who studies Wikipedia and similar social projects at the University of Minnesota, estimated in a recent paper that the chances of any one visitor seeing a damaged Wikipedia page are about one in 140, as the average time it takes to repair damage is less than three minutes, and even less for heavily tracked pages. However, there are still more than 100,000 damaged pages at any given time, vandalism appears to be on the increase and it is impossible fully to measure the scale of the problem.

"It's the monster in the closet. You know that it has not grown bigger than the closet and busted down the door, but you don't know exactly how big it is in there," Priedhorsky said. However, the most startling fact about Wikipedia remains how accurate it is, not how inaccurate.

"As a researcher, I'm baffled that it works, but Wikipedia is one of the wonderful things that has happened in the 21st century. Many hands make light work. There are millions of people who edit Wikipedia, and many of them track changes to the pages they are interested in. I have 43 pages on my watchlist, for example, covering subjects I know things about. Any controversial edit is likely to be quickly seen by many people."

The long quote is an amalgam of various things I said during the interview... when I said those things, they weren't all together and didn't read so oddly.

Also, the 100k pages damaged at any one time didn't come from my paper, and is surely wrong. I'm not sure where he got that figure.

Second passage relevant to me:

The foundation's finances are the biggest single threat to Wikipedia, according to Reid Priedhorsky. "A successful community artefact like Wikipedia requires strong buy-in from the community, which I'd wager is much harder to achieve under a for-profit model," he said.

The monster-in-the-closet quote referred to ax-grinding (i.e., the people whose views on Wikipedia are those who have the most time to edit), not vandalism. I liked the description of who I am, which noted that I study Wikipedia but also other things. I don't want to be typecast as someone who just works 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.

Cyclopath Publicity (updated)

A couple of minor publicity items for Cyclopath:

• An article written by Rick Moore for the University's internal news service: U researcher unveils 'geowiki' for cyclists. I'm not sure what the visibility of this is; I was told it would be on the U home page but have not seen it there in the past few days. This was the "Featured Article" in the Education and Outreach section of the (unfortunately Flash-based new) UMN home page; it never appeared on the home page itself, but was two clicks away.
  
• Robin Garwood, staffer for Minneapolis City Council member Cam Gordon, blogged the project on the official Second Ward blog: Cyclopath!

9/19 Radio Interview

Last Friday, I had a brief live interview with WCCO Radio about Cyclopath. Here's the audio (4 minutes): 2008-09-19_wcco.mp3.

More Cyclopath Publicity

Further publicity for Cyclopath: The project is (well, I am) on the front page of the CS Department web site. (Click for image for bigger.) Cool huh?

These news items also display on flat panel monitors the department has wasted thousands of dollars on installed throughout the building.

Mushrooms: In other news, I have another flush of mushrooms going -- 4 mushrooms, perhaps more. Pics on harvest sometime in the coming days.

Cyclopath Writeups in Both Major Twin Cities Newspapers

The Twin Cities are a two-newspaper town. The Pioneer Press also published a nice story about Cyclopath today. Excerpt:

Cyclopath is [...] a geographic wiki, which any user can edit. On a block-by-block basis, you can add, change or correct the roads, paths, bike lanes and even alleys and sidewalks over the seven-county area and rate them for bikeability.

You can add recommendations, warnings, comments and critiques. And you can add important landmarks, such as locations of ice cream vendors, bars, pizza joints, coffee shops, repair stores, drinking fountains and portable toilets, all from a bicyclist's point of view.

I like the Pi Press article slightly better because it describes Cyclopath's features more effectively, and also because it's the lead item, with a photo, on the Pi Press home page.

Other cool things happening this morning:

1. As a result of the publicity, I'm receiving requests to be a tester and/or to be notified when Cyclopath goes live every few minutes.
2. Cyclopath is on the Most E-Mailed list on the Star Tribune front page.
3. Cyclopath is #4 on the Most Viewed list on the Pioneer Press front page.
4. Cyclopath is #1 on the Most E-Mailed list on the Pioneer Press front page:

UPDATE:

Turns out the Pi Press article was on the front page!

Cyclopath Writeup in the Star Tribune

My project, Cyclopath, is featured in a story in tomorrow's Star Tribune. Excerpt:

It's the kind of spokes-to-the-street information that cyclists crave. Riders can rate road conditions block by block, enter text descriptions, pinpoint interesting places and fix faulty map data throughout the seven-county metro area. Then Cyclopath crunches the information and returns personalized routes based on a "bikeability" rating.

"There are lots of bike maps out there, and I think each of them have significant failings," Priedhorsky said. "Who knows where cyclists can go? Well, cyclists do, and they know better than anybody else."