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>> Mary Czerwinski: It is my pleasure today to have James Landay here speaking
with us. James is the Short-Dooley Professor of Computer Science and
Engineering at the University of Washington, but we've known James for a long
time. He's spent a couple years at MSR Asia with us and he's really gotten the
dynamics around design usability and built the Dub network of HCI folks, and
he's been responsible for basically HCI at UW since he came. So it's a
pleasure having him, and I turn it over to you.
>> James Landay: Think you, Mary. Yes, it's a pleasure to be here. I know
lots of folks in the audience and maybe that's the only people I can get out
there these days. Though I hear there's always people in the ether sphere out
there watching live.
So I'm James Landay, otherwise known as Lu Jin Ming, and as Mary said, I lived
in China for the last two and a half years, visiting Microsoft Research Asia,
as well as Tsinghua, and traveling around the country and really trying to help
in some ways build an HCI and design culture in Beijing. And in China to some
extent, like I think we've done fairly successfully here in the Seattle area.
And living there was a really important experience for me both culturally and
for my research and for my family and for my view of the world and how our work
fits within it. And being in Beijing or in China right now, you feel like part
of something big going on in the history of the world. You know, with the
politics and the economy and everything going on.
But you also see that, when you're in China, that it's a culture and a country
with a long history, a 5,000-year history, and that the lot of the history and
historical idioms and stories actually shape the culture and how people think.
And you'll be amazed at how often you'll hear these idioms, even within the
Microsoft context, you know, the head of the lab, Hom, will often be talking
and he'll have to switch into Chinese to kind of say one of these idioms that,
you know, everyone then understands.
So I'm going to actually start my talk with a little story here. So this is a
famous cultural artifact in China. This is a bronze galloping horse. It's
actually now the symbol for tourism China, and it comes from the Tan dynasty.
It's about 2,000 years old, though it was only uncovered in 1969 in the west of
China.
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And it shows this powerful horse that, in the history, the thought was the
horses in the west of China were so fast that they literally flew. And so this
horse is actually flying, and it's hard to tell here but it's actually stepping
on a swallow that's flying in the air, and the swallow looks up in horror.
And this sculpture actually baffled the experts who studied it for several
year, because given the technology of the day 2,000 years ago, these experts
couldn't figure out how it was sculpted to maintain its balance. Three of the
hooves are in the air and the only one that's touching is the swallow that's on
the ground.
Now, I actually tried to find a nice replica of this in China on tow bow, which
is like the eBay in China, as well as the antique markets and other kind of
swap meet places in Beijing, and I found that you could find two types of
replicas, and they're both kind of hacks in some way. They're either like this
one, where you can see the swallow is much larger to scale than it should be
relative to the horse, and it also has a base under that. And also the horse
is very, very symmetrical and regular in how it's made. Whereas if you see the
real one, it's pretty kind of wild in how it is and looks much more lively.
And then there's another kind that looks a bit more like that, except it has a
big hole right under here and you could put your finger up there and put some
weights in as necessary. So you can pass this around.
So to me, the reason I show you this is I believe that this sculpture, in some
ways, represents balance, and it represents a plans between the art and
technology of the day. The art and design of this powerful, lively horse, and
the technology to figure out a way to calculate the exact center of mass of
this so that it wouldn't topple over. Or they simply casted hundreds of them
until they got it right.
And I think trying to find the right balance between art and technology is one
of the keys to producing useful and desirable technologies of the future. And
I think, you know, for many of us working in computer technology, we need to
find this balance, this balance between technology and design, between
human-centered approaches and computer science approaches.
And I think even particularly in human computer interaction, we need to find a
balance between careful, controlled experiments of existing systems and
technologies that many people in the field do, but we also need to be building
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new far-out things that haven't yet been imagined in trying new systems that we
might not yet be able to tell how well they work.
So I think for many of the problems facing the world, my time in China also led
me to believe that we need to find a balance between different cultures. So
between east and west and between different ways of seeing the world, a more,
in some ways, family centered view in the east or more individualistic in the
west. And I want to use this theme of balance to talk about three research
areas that I think are really key to the future of the world and what I think
should be the future of a lot of our research.
So one is, as a society, we need to find a balance between ourselves and our
environment and our surroundings. So, for example, here you can see Lake Mead,
expected to drop below its intake pipes in the next five years. That was
February of 2009. You can see from the image how low the water level was. And
these are the intake pipes that it's going down below. And, in fact, 36 U.S.
states are expected to have severe water shortages in the next five years.
Now, when I first saw that, I was like, you know, don't build a city in the
desert. But we see a lot of states have this problem. Similarly, a thing I
didn't really know until I lived in China is that northern China historically
faces this same thing for hundreds of years. And, in fact, in 2010, there were
literally taking snow from the mountains and melting it, not waiting for it to
melt, melting it to get fresh water to meet Beijing's water demand. And,
nervous, by United Nations estimates, they have like a severe water shortage,
you know, Beijing is like a factor of ten below whatever that rating is.
And as you may know or may not know, in China, they're literally moving a whole
major river or piece of river across from the south where there's excess water
to the north, where it's dry.
And that project actually has caused much more displacement and environmental
concerns than the three gorges dam, which was kind of the biggest engineering
project of that sort.
This is a basic human need, water. Everyone needs it. So one research
question for me is how might we better use the water we have. How can we
affect this, and how might we affect this by looking at both technology and
design together as a way to approach this in a human-centered way.
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So one possible solution some of you I think are familiar with, this is part of
using a technology developed by Schwetak Patel at UW, along with my colleague
James Fogarty and John Froehlich, who is a graduate student working with me and
Schwetak. John's now a faculty member at Maryland. And they built this thing
called HydroSense, and I think Schwetak's probably been here many times
talking. He practically lived here last summer, it seemed.
And here's the key idea of HydroSense. You can kind of see your water network
in a home, and we see the hot and sold set of pipes as almost an information
network. Whenever you turn on one of these valves in the home, information is
transmitted. The pipes transmit info. And in this case, we can -- they
transmit a pressure wave that if you measure it, we can tell what's going on.
So we can see these waves here. At the top, you'll see this is a faucet open
and then a faucet closed. So there's the faucet open, you see the wave and you
see the close.
The key thing to understand is they look different. Similarly, if we look at
the toilet open or the tub open, they look different. And using some simple
machine learning, we can essentially do greater than 90% accuracy on being able
to tell which valve in a home is open. If you put two of these sensors that
are very inexpensive because you can just screw it on to a hose bib or under
your kitchen sink or even on your hot water tank, with two of these, one on the
hot and cold, you can get greater than 97% accuracy about what type of valve is
open. And it depends what level of accuracy you want to know the exact valve
or the type of valve or which room.
But we can do very well. That's the basic technology and, in fact, you'll be
able to buy this this fall from Belkin. They did a startup that was acquired
by Belkin and it's going to be at Home Depot any day now.
So for me, from the more human centered side of it is what might we do with a
technology like that that would maybe change behavior. So one of the things
John and I had worked on were ambient displays that we would hope to achieve
behavior change. John actually designed many of these and we've done a variety
of studies of them trying to figure out which ones would be the most impactful.
I'm just going to give you a few of these here that are more vibrant to give
you an idea.
For example, this is an aquatic ecosystem where you kind of gamify the water
savings. So imagine this was on a display in your kitchen or another high
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traffic room in the home. And let's say your family meets their water saving
goal and you have this fish. And if you meet this goal, Frank meets his mate.
And if you keep reaching the goal, maybe they have little fish children or
maybe the plants get richer or you get to add a little water wheel. I don't
know. Whatever. Maybe it's also touch so you might play with it and have some
interaction. That's one design.
This other design here, that you'll see next, is called rain flow. And the
idea here was again an ambient display. This time it has up at the top news
headlines, the weather, the date, and the time. So you're glancing at it on a
regular basis in your kitchen, let's say, and this is sped up over time. We're
seeing certain goals or these numbers for the water use and we're seeing how
we're doing over time. This one's also interactive. You might touch it.
Let's say you go over your goal there on the toilet, and maybe it turns red and
overflows.
Now, in this case, we're trying to use what we would say is a more activity
oriented feedback to give you an idea where you're using your water, hoping to
change your behavior.
Now, the next step for this kind of research really is to do a real controlled
deployment for several months to see, do you actually get the behavior change
you desire. And this is kind of where we finished up and then John took off to
Maryland to become a professor. So, you know, there's future work to go on
here. In fact, you really have to do that work.
Maybe this is too fun when you go over and it's like hey, let's go flush the
toilet another ten times so you really have to get to the next step of
deploying it and doing controlled study to figure out whether this works for
you. And that's really the next stage for that research.
Some of the work that we did in China was actually trying to understand culture
and the differences in these feedback systems, particularly in this case for
behavior change and environmental work. When I arrived in Beijing, I think, a
couple months after I was there, there was a researcher from Japan who was
giving a talk about behavior change and feedback. He didn't know who I was and
I was sitting in there, and he said these people in the U.S. at Intel and UW,
they have all these things and it all has positive feedback and everybody knows
in Asia, you need negative feedback. You know, he went through all this and I
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said, you know, do you have some proof of that?
deployments? No, but everyone knows it.
Have you done some
And we actually looked through the literature. I thought, oh, this sounds like
to me, this is a research question, you know. Let's do some research. We
really couldn't find much in the cross-cultural research about whether there
was impact here. We knew from western psychology research reasons why you'd
want positive feedback, not to lose people who would just simply abandon your
system.
And so actually we've done the first steps on a study of this. In this case,
various self-report type study where we had 180 participants, both from China
and the U.S., come into a website where they had to do kind of a carbon
calculator about their usage in their home and their life and then we
manipulated the results in some ways and manipulated the feedback. Later, they
had to make pledges of what they would do to change their life and then they'd
come back and self-report on how that change had occurred..
And the results that we've got showed, actually, that the negative feedback led
to a statistically significant larger self-reported change by the Chinese
population. And in the American population, it was the positive feedback, but
we didn't have a statistical difference in that case.
So again, the real way to test this, to do a really controlled study with a
real deployment where we can actually measure ground truth and see what
happens. At least this gives us a little more indication that hey, everyone
knows that. To think that this type of result might hold. And if we're thing
about designing systems for a global population that we're talking about
behavior change or health or other type of things, we need to kind of consider
factors like this that might be different culturally and think about how we
would design for it.
So when I think about these problems and I want to think about them further
out, let's say five or ten years or even longer, I wanted to think about what
would be an audacious goal in this area, you know. How do we /TKPWHRET to
trying to do research that really tries to change the world instead of, you
know, get me my next paper into this conference. What should we orient our
work around.
And so for this area, for me, an audacious goal would say, could we cut a
family's water and energy use by 50%? You might say, that's easy. Give me a
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million dollars or whatever it takes and I'll build you a home that's fairly
self-contained in terms of its energy and water. But let's say inexpensively,
let's say something like $5,000, what would it take?
Now, I think there is a combination of things here, things that we can control
and some that are harder to control. So maybe policy and infrastructure that
might occur in a city is something that we would want to encourage
conservation. But also, we can think of new technologies that might help us be
more efficient in our homes, in our use. And some folks here have done work
like that, you know, to predict when to turn on your heating system when you're
not around, et cetera. And some could be about using technology together with
design for behavior change that might affect people's behavior.
Because we found often that people would like to change in some of these areas,
whether it's in environmental use or in health or saving money, but they have a
hard time actually sticking with what their goals are. And so some of our
research has been how to help there.
Now, related to the environment, I think, is another problem that I think
behavior is really at the heart of it. So what you see here is a map from the
Center For Disease Control, and what we see are states color coded for their
body mass index. So if the body max index is greater than 30 and then the
color shows what percentage of the population. Greater than 30 means
clinically obese.
So we see in 1990, every state that we had data for, the gray ones we had no
data, are less than 10% and there's a lot of them, they're 10 to 15 percent.
And what's interesting, you know, in fact this is probably when I met Peter,
this is when I went to graduate school in 1990. Ever since then, as we roll
forward through the Clinton years, you know, Bush years, we start to see the
United States really turning orange. And the last set of data is right here,
and we can now see there's 12 states with over 30 percent of their population
clinically obese. 24 states that are in the 25, 30 percent range, and the
remaining 14 states are 20 to 25 percent.
I think many of us know about this, but to me it didn't really hit until I saw
how recent that was. You know, just kind of over a 20-year period it went from
where, yeah, it kind of seems okay to wow that's really bad. Some people have
asked is this just the aging population? It's not, actually. If you look at
numbers for children, you'll see very similar trends. And obesity leads to
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many other big problems in health, and so I think health is really the second
key area where we can focus our research and have impact.
Another thing I didn't really know is about China. I didn't really expect
China to have a problem with obesity. I mean, a third of the population or a
large number, several hundred million people still way below what we would
consider poverty. They don't have excess food. But this statistic reported
more than 7 percent of Chinese children are obese, second only to U.S. this
comes from the China national task force on childhood obesity, which I think I
would take with a grain of salt to know whether that number is true.
But the fact is there is an ongoing problem and this was actually from a
newspaper a weight loss camp in Shanghai with kind of a military theme to it.
And so again, I think these are problems about balance. About both exercise
and eating right. And I think we need a balance of technologies that take
advantages, psychological models of behavior change as well as interesting
technologies to help us get at some of these problems.
In addition, obesity, aging is another important issue, I think, with respect
to our health. Many people know that the North American population is aging
rapidly. So we see here by 2030, North America population of persons aged 65
or over will increase from 13 percent to 20 percent. Many of you are familiar
with that. We've already seen that occurring in Japan and northern Europe, and
this is one of the big problems occurring in Japan with our economy, et cetera,
is this.
What I didn't know, again, until I was listen in China was that China actually
is facing almost the same exact problem only about five years later, by 2035,
seniors will comprise 20 percent of China's population. We talk about the
healthcare crisis in America where people are uninsured as well as just this,
you know, increasing cost that grow at a rate that we're not going to be able
to afford. China has a problem of access, where a lot of people don't have
healthcare, but they're also running into some of the same issues, even when
they do have it. This is due to the one child policy, which still exists with
some kind of small changes in the rural areas and certain cities trying things.
But it's still in place.
Even if it was changed, right tomorrow, we'd still be facing this abrupt issue.
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So when I was managing the Intel research lab, we really felt like
technologies, like machine learning and activity inference, were a great
opportunity to have impact in healthcare. We did this both for fitness, with
the Ubfit system that Sunny Consolvo did for her Ph.D. at UW and at Intel and
with a lot of the elder care work that [indiscernible], who you guys have
happily hired here at Microsoft, did leading a large effort on how we might see
the future of elder care with new technologies and design.
And again, I think one of the really keys to this work was trying to balance
technology and design together. So the idea here was how could we allow these
elders to stay in their homes longer and have a better quality of life and also
decrease the cost. We're talking about people who are starting to decline both
physically and mentally.
And the idea in this area is can you monitor these activities of daily living.
So basically, the things that people do, like eating, taking medication,
getting exercise, bathing. And be able to have a better idea what's going on
both for their family and their care-givers to decide what kind of services
they might require or when they need intervention and be able to do it more
cost effectively.
Again, I see this as kind of a ten-year vision. This vision was if we had RFID
tags on all the objects and you had a bracelet with an RFID reader as you
touched objects, we could use machine learning to know what task you were
doing. For example here, let's say we were making tea or something like this.
So that was kind of the basic technology that was fairly far out. But even
with this kind of far-out vision, it led to some other novel technologies that
really spun off of this. For example, in his first week on the job, Josh
Smith, who is now faculty member at UW, had this idea of, hey, could we make an
RFID tag that itself, powered by the RF information, could do sensing,
computation and communication and not have that risk [indiscernible] so that
we'll just know the objects are moving and they'll transmit it to an RFID
reader.
Eventually, this led to this more sophisticated version here, the wisp chip or
it's an RFID tag. A small board, smaller than a quarter with an antenna. But
you can imagine that being done on a silicon chip and embedded in objects or in
very small tags, like standard RFID. Again, that was a far-out research goal
but still led to nearer term technologies along the way of trying to achieve
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it.
I still think we're going to get to the point of elder care systems that have
this technology. It's just always going to take a lot longer than we as
researchers believe.
Now, that was technology. From the design side, Sonny Consalvo worked on the
idea of how do we use that information, specifically how do we use that
information for the family who's trying to manage the care of the elder.
So, in fact, this is another ambient display. It's a picture of the elder with
these icons that go around it that represented whether the elder had eaten
their breakfast, lunch and dinner. Whether they'd taken their morning,
afternoon and evening pills, whether they'd gotten social interaction or
exercise. And the idea was as these people started to age, the relationship
with their adult children really changed.
Instead of it being about the things going on in life, their adult children
would call up and say hey, mom did you take your pills? Mom, did you eat?
Mom, did you take a shower? Hey, mom, have you left the house? They would
almost start to treat their parent like a child, and we might say, well, that
seems kind of normal. But it actually was a really negative for the life
quality of those elders. It really changed things in a way that was
qualitatively worse for them.
And we actually deployed this system before Mattai got any of his very
sophisticated machine learning or other technology working by doing a wizard of
Oz study where we actually deployed this in the homes of the family as well as
the elder, and then we used the best known technology we had to make it work,
which was we had a grad student call the elder four times a day and say hey,
did you take your pills and they'd type it into a database.
But to the family, it appeared like the system was really working. And, you
know, there were issues about privacy and other things that we dealt with in
this design. The biggest issue I think the families had at the end of this
three-week or so deployment was when can we buy that? We want that, okay. And
that's what you want to hear.
So that's one way of combining the two. Combining, you know, some of these
interests in the environment and in health, we had previously done the Ubfit
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system that tried to encourage people in maintaining their exercise activity.
In China, one of the last projects I was working on, and I'm still working on
with some students spread out over the world was we did some field work in
China to try to understand what would it be like for a health kind of fitness
system in China, and we did some other field work about, hey, what about a
system that tracked how green you were and gave you feedback.
And I always suspected that kind of system really wouldn't work even in the
U.S., even though we built a prototype and we published a paper. The problem
is who's going to run it. Green people are going to run it. People are
already committed to being green.
You're really not going to move the needle a lot. You're preaching to the
converted. And in China, it was even worse. Even someone who wanted to be
green for social reasons doesn't want to show their friends or colleagues that,
hey, they're saving water, because they might think I'm doing that because I
need to save the money. It actually had impact on social structure and the
hierarchy and where you were.
Now, for younger generation, we're starting to see some change of that. But
that was definitely a problem. And one of the interesting things that came out
of our interviews is people said, hey, if that had more to do with my health,
then I would see running it.
Which gave us the idea of thinking about more of a holistic view of wellness
and thinking about your physical health, your mental health, and your
environmental health together in one application where you're trying to kind of
manage those and see how they help manage each other.
So we created this application called who is Zuki. And the idea is that you
kind of check in to these activities that you do with respect to your physical
activity and your environmental activity, and eventually you would just do
these automatically through activity inference. But for this, we were doing it
manually.
And idea is there's this character, Zuki, and you just don't even know who is
this Zuki guy. But by reaching your goals for the week, you kind of start to
move Zuki through this story. So in this case, if you do enough of this stuff,
you'll get him across this water barrier and eventually, maybe you need to
climb a wall or go over a mountain.
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And one of the reasons we designed that was that in our earlier systems, we had
these nice ambient displays, like a flower garden grows or a tree blooms or we
had an arctic polar scene where it becomes healthy as you're more green. And
people really liked it. We just thought it was a little scene. But people
called it a story and they say oh, people at work wants to know what's my polar
bear doing today.
It became part of a social understanding of what was going on and encouraged
people to be engaged. But after you did it for two or three weeks, you kind of
knew what was going to happen and when it was over.
So with this, we were trying to say, can we design a story with a little longer
arc, where we might keep someone engaged for four, six or eight weeks and then
maybe you start to subscribe to stories that you don't know what happens on the
internet from, maybe, users can design them and cause longer term engagement,
because I think that's one of the problems with a lot of these systems. We can
design them. We can deploy them for three weeks. We can get a UB comp paper
and go hey, success.
But really, what we're trying to do is cause real behavior change over really
extended periods for kind of stuff. You need six months or a year. How do you
design to cause that longer term engagement. So again, we haven't deployed
this yet. It's still just a prototype. But again, the next stage on that
would be to deploy that and see what happens.
>>:
Tamagotchi.
>> James Landay: Yeah, Tamagotchi, [indiscernible], we've thought about those.
Another thing that was really interesting for me in China was just the
observation of how much more active older people are relative to the United
States.
When I think of elders in the United States exercising at most, I can think,
you know, they're taking a walk, walking their dog or going to the store. In
China, in any open space, you will see that open space taken over by people out
there doing Chinese dance and, in fact, there was a new mall that went up near
my apartment in Beijing and I was watching the construction for two years. It
wasn't one of these pop-up malls. It actually took quite a while.
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The day after the construction fences went down, there were people out there,
like, in this picture, this is from Shanghai, out with a boom box dancing that
evening, you though. It was immediately, hey, we have new space. We're taking
it.
And the other one that is interesting is this outdoor gym equipment. This is
where I think about policy and what you require when people build things. In
every little neighborhood in Beijing, Shanghai and I don't know, every other
city, there are these outdoor, essentially outdoor Nautilus equipment, and
there are people on there all the time, and, in fact, I notice it's often older
people who are out there and they're lifting the stuff and doing it, really
keeping it active.
And for me, that, you know, kind of leads to a second audacious goal. What
would it take to increase people's physical activity by 100%? Can we get
people to double what they do? Again, maybe some infrastructure, like saying
hey, if you build a complex, a business or apartment complex, you got to put
this in.
But also, thinking about technologies that sense your daily activities and
design and how we give you feedback to help you reach our goals.
Maybe another way of putting that is could we reduce BMIs to 1990 levels, at
least this goal for Americans? What would it take to get back to where we
were? You know, again, it's a combination of policy, you know, maybe we should
not subsidize corn, a lot of other things. But there's other things that
people have control of themselves that we can help them in terms of reaching
these goals and get back to having no state with more than 10 percent to 15
percent obesity.
>>:
Do we know what the underlying cause is of obesity?
>> James Landay: I mean, there's lots of theories. I don't think it's a known
thing where we can say, oh, it's kids staying home playing video games. I
mean, we can see a lot of newer cities that are built with even more of a car
culture. People commute times and distances have gone up during that whole
period. And if we see where people have moved in the United States, if you
think of the southwest, Georgia, Atlanta, those are all places that are not
very walking friendly.
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That's one theory that a lot of people talk about. There's people that study
this, and I don't know the definitive answer. I think it's a combination of
these things. So less activity, less healthful eating combined. Tom?
>>:
[inaudible] with connect, study the effect?
>> James Landay: I think I saw one early study of it that showed no positive
impact on that, but I think it's kind of early to really know. Anyone else
have that definitive? I thought I saw that, maybe six months ago.
So, you know, maybe that's a first thing. Maybe the games that they've done
first are ones where you have less movement. I don't know.
So at the same time, maybe if we had much more physical activity we might
actually have the impact on mental health. There's a lot of ties here, and I
have a professional in to NSF with folks at Cornell and Dartmouth where we're
actually looking at schizophrenic patients where, in fact, for their mental
health if we could just keep them more regular on some of these daily
activities, it leads to less outbreaks of their schizophrenic episodes and when
they have the episodes, they're less severe.
So it doesn't necessarily cure the problem, but it makes it less impactful, and
I think with depression and other things there's ties that we could look at.
The real third area of importance that I think we need to solve, or at least be
working on, is education. China has shown the world it can produce anything,
right? It's become the factory of the world, including in some ways highly
educated kids.
So, you know, two years ago, kids in Shanghai essentially beat the world on
these international Pisa exams, which, you know, was a real wakeup call. It
came out right as the Chinese presidents with visiting the United States, and
even in spite of that, you know, really strong result, there's many in China
who actually wonder whether the system of education leads to a conformity and
efficiency rather than creating kids who are innovative and creative and are
going to solve problems of tomorrow.
And so to me, that shows a lack of balance in some ways. You need to
understand the basics and have really good knowledge and N science and math and
even reading English, I believe they did better than the westerners on these
15
exams.
But we also need the other side. And the United States' education, I think, is
out of balance in the opposite direction. So here you see from the broad
foundation, 68 percent of U.S. eighth graders can't read at grade level and
most will never catch up. No one's going to claim American kids aren't
creative or innovative, but they're poor at the basics.
So again, kind of a balance out of whack.
I think the sense of crisis and the lack of balance is illustrated by what I
call the tiger mother phenomena. So this was Amy Chua's book, which was
excerpted in the Wall Street Journal at that same time in December of 2010,
when the Chinese president was visiting the United States and the Pisa test
came out and they put this really controversial piece of her book in the Wall
Street Journal, where essentially she said, you know, Chinese parenting and
education with a militant, non-tolerant style is vastly superior to the western
model that coddles children. And it caused a lot of controversy.
Now, if you actually read the book, a lot of it's tongue in cheek and sarcastic
and it's actually quite entertaining and she's an incredible speaker. I saw
her here in Seattle in January.
And what's funny is her book became a major phenomenon in China too. This is
the Chinese cover. And see the difference? On the American cover, we have a
very Chinese-like chop. And in the Chinese edition, she's in front of an
American flag, and the subtitle is literally something like being a Yale
American mom. And some of the reaction was in China, was we need to be softer
on our kids like that tiger mom.
Because actually in China, they have this guy, the wolf dad, who literally beat
his kids with a stick if they ever got anything less than a top score on their
exams or ever talked back to them. And he's proud to note that three of his
four children have now graduated from Peking university, which is like the
Harvard of China, and the fourth is in high school and he -- I wouldn't want to
be that kid if he doesn't make it. He's in trouble.
But this actually says to me that in some ways both societies see themselves as
a little out of balance in the opposite direction.
16
So we actually did a little educational
Beijing. This is a really crucial area
think, are proposing radical new things
they're minor tweaks on existing models
that's important to be doing.
research in this area at Microsoft in
to our future. So many people, I
that we're seeing now or some might say
but are done at large scale. I think
I think we can also be looking at new different solutions of thinking about
when and where you might learn.
So this is a project called Ubilingual that Darren Edge is working on in
Beijing. He works with Desney there, and I worked with him on some of the
earlier ideas here. And our idea was how do we start to learn things
throughout our lives in between spaces and in between times?
So one of the ideas was for us, scratching our own itch, how do you learn
Chinese? It's really hard. That's why I had to keep staying at MSRA, and I
think you might need to send me back.
But let's say you had this Bluetooth head set in your ear and as you go about
your day, it's asking you to do things. So we're waiting at a restaurant for
me because I'm always late and it says how do you say can I see a menu? And
then you just think in your head what the answer is. And so this gentleman
says this in his head, and then he waits to hear the answer, and he says, oh, I
got it wrong. I always kind of confuse menu and check, because they seem
similar.
And he then uses this muscle sensing arm band that Desney and Scott developed
to self-grade himself. And that's kind of a vision of how, based on your
context of where you're at, let's say he's in the restaurant or if he's at a
train station, he's learning about travel. We're trying to learn in the
context and use this in between space. That's one little idea. I had a video,
but I'll skip that. I would encourage you to get it off of hopefully the MSRA
website or somewhere to watch that envisionment of that.
But what would kind of an audacious goal in the education realm be? To me,
this is the harder one for me to say what is success in education. You know,
could we help kids perform in science and writing within, I don't know, ten
percent of those top world performers, whether you're a kid from rural China or
inner city Chicago? What would it take to help get someone there who doesn't
have the same means and resources?
17
On the other hand, is that just going
taking a test? This quote attributed
claim it's not. But whatever, I like
the urgency of doing. Knowing is not
not enough. We must do.
to create more people who are good at
to da Vinci, though on Wikipedia some
it. It says I have been impressed with
enough. We must apply. Being willing is
This says to me that in some ways you need to know the basics.
learn the fundamentals. But you got to use it. You have to do
You need to build. You need to create and that's how you truly
think we need to have an educational system that is balance the
two.
You need to
things with it.
learn. And I
between these
So how might we help kids increase their creative activities in school and
daily life? Again, a mushy goal that I don't know how to state in a
quantitative way with the others, but it's an area to work in.
One idea we've been working on just very recently at UW with a student working
with me, Lydia Chilton and talking with Dan Weld about this, imagine Annie, who
lives in rural Wisconsin, she loves to read. She has interest in science but
finds school boring. You know, many of us know that.
She's fallen behind because she's been out sick with a rare disease. This
smart primer that she has there might be the ultimate learning tool for her.
She engages in a story that lasts for years and grows with her. She's a
character in the story and she needs to learn things and do tasks and do
experiments and move on in the story.
And she also learns from others who have their own smart primers who are her
peers or are older than her and work with her.
Now, this vision comes directly out of Neal Stevenson's diamond age. It came
out in 1995, I think. I was a graduate student and I had a lot of friends who
all thought this was a really interesting story. And at the time, I think we
thought to really build this, you needed perfect AI to build this kind of
tutor. I actually think today, we're much closer to being able to implement
this type of vision just with a different way.
The hardware, I think, is really the easy thing. Whatever your favorite tablet
computer is, whether it's, you know, what Microsoft has coming out soon or
18
whoever's, is the basic thing. But we can think of cognitive models of
learners, ala the CMU cognitive modeling stuff that's come out of Ken Cottinger
and Carnegie Learning.
We can think of combining that with even existing content from things like Khan
Academy or MIT and Stanford and all these startups putting content online. And
we can start to think about how do you personalize this based on the user.
But I think the important parts of this is how do we use crowd sourcing and the
crowd to actually create problems that are good practice problems that are
relevant to the person? And how do we create that social community where you
have these peers that maybe you're self-grading with or working with that move
you along.
And for me, actually, the really hard research question is, how do you create
something that would be a story or a game or something engaging that you might
use for years.
So in this story, she uses, I forget, something like ten years. We can't even
think of usually you're going to use this thing for a few months. How do I
create something that would engage you for that period of time.
>>: Why is this vision portrayed as something that's for a student that's been
out of school and is behind?
>> James Landay: That's just a story. I think one of the issues is I think if
you are highly motivated to get an education, the current system serves you
well. And if you don't have the money, these new things like Khan Academy and
Course Era, et cetera, they'll serve you well.
I think there's this other segment of people who don't fit the existing way we
think of education and they're not served. And so for me, that is, what is a
different way of getting at them. Now, that's not to say that those people who
are motivated and stuff wouldn't also find this captivating, but to me it was
-- and I see it in one of my own kids, tell you the truth, where he's smart,
but he doesn't fit at all with the school's want to have him do. What would be
a different way. That maybe would captivate him.
I don't know. At one point in my life, I was like, you know, why should we
have science fiction authors kind of give us the vision for what we should
19
build. But they've done a lot better job in some ways than computer scientists
sometimes of envisioning the future, and I think this is a pretty compelling
me.
So for me we thought it was impossible. Now we think we can actually do it.
Again, I think it's kind of a ten-year vision to create such a thing of at
least the power described in that book. But we're trying to take the early
steps on what would it take.
Some people think the hard parts are the AI parts. I actually think the hard
part is the design part. How do I get you engaged and keep you engaged. I
think that's a problem. But to me, that's a far-out, audacious goal. How do
we get there. I don't know yet.
So just to bring some of these things together, I think to succeed in these
areas, environment, health, education, we kind of need a new way of looking at
design. I call this global design. So we want to be fun, social, creative,
more human. But we need to look far out and imagine, you know, what happens
ten years in the future? What happens when we have 100,000 times the
computation we have today right on our body? What will that mean? What will
that enable?
And I think with this global design, we have really these three tenets. One is
can we be global in skill type. So can we have design and technologists really
work together in a tighter symbiosis. This isn't really succeeded most places
that have tried it. And the one that I think the most that tried to some
extent is the media lab. But I think it is something that's important. And
we've been exploring that at UW for a few years of how do we take some of the
ideas from the creative studio of design and take that with the analytical view
of computing in HCI and try to create hybrid methodologies and tools that let
us get there. And it's something we want to teach further and take further.
So how do you fuse these cultures together, and I think a lot of how to create
a place where you can do these things is about creating the culture. It's not
about, oh, you picked the right problem by going after the environment or going
after education. In some ways, it's creating a culture where people are meant
to think big, to try far-out things, to risk, to fail, and get all of the usual
things we expect on the way in a research organization, which is produce
research results and publish them. But just change the mindset from hey, how
do I get that next paper or how do I get that next NSF grant.
20
We're trying to change the world and work on this. I think it's a subtle
shift, but it's a shift that I think changes the style of things that people
will attack. And I worry that a lot of the field has become very incremental
and near-term.
So a second part of this is to simply, beyond skill
to see how do we leverage diverse culture? How can
cultures or even misunderstand different cultures?
because you didn't understand what the other person
cultural view was different and leads to a new view
idea.
types and disciplines, is
we understand different
Sometimes, new ideas come
was saying and their
of how you might get some
So I wouldn't have thought of that issue in terms of the people in China
saying, I don't want somebody to know I'm green, because then they'll think I'm
poor. That led to some new thinking on how might that be a different kind of
idea that would make sense for those people that might make sense for others.
We've seen it even in cross-disciplinary design. So, for example, when we were
doing that early WISP work at Intel, I had a meeting with Josh Smith and he was
explaining some part of how the protocol worked and then I said oh, you mean
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He said no, that's not it, but that's a good
idea. We should patent that.
Part of it was I didn't understand it and I had my own kind of view of how
things worked. That actually led to a new idea. So for anyone who's worked in
an interdisciplinary or cross-cultural context, it's really annoying at times.
It can be really hard because you don't understand why these people don't
understand your language, your terms, your ways of doing. Yet at the same
time, as you work through it over time, you start to see some of the fruits of
that.
And a lot of the people I see here are people who have figured out how to work
across that.
And then to me, I think the hardest one is this one I brought up a bit in the
education, but this is true in the environmental one too. And I think this is
going to be true of a lot of the applications that people are starting to think
of. How do you design something that's meant for more life-long engagement or
several years rather than shorter terms?
21
How do we do that? We don't have much knowledge. Much of what we've done in
HCI has been about, hey, we design for these tasks. You're using excel, and
you need to do this budget. Come in to our lab, we'll watch you behind glass
and we'll use all this great stuff we stole from this cognitive psychologist or
that we invented when we were trying to figure out how the mind worked and
we'll do verbal protocols or whatever and learn from it.
But, you know, how do you do that when I want to see how you learn something
over years, like Chinese? That doesn't really work in that kind of
environmental. So how do we design for that, how do we invalidate it?
So what I highlighted in my abstract for
trying to attack these problems in a new
the rise of China and how we should fear
evil Communism is going to take over the
things.
this talk was a radical proposal about
way. Many people read about China and
this, and, you know, how, you know,
world, et cetera, all these kind of
And I don't really believe that we're truly in competition, the U.S. and
Europe, with Asia. But instead, that we live in one world, and many of these
problems are these shared problems that will only be solved actually by
collaboration, getting better together and succeeding together and that's the
way we all can win.
So I want to say how do we move beyond simple small collaborations and make
true impact and do something, you know, significant? So my proposal has been,
let's create a new research institute within universities that will be
multidisciplinary. In this case, start out between U.S. and Asia and get it
known as the place for risk-taking, for breaking the mold, for inventing the
future, and tackling these types of problems.
And how do we create such a place? And this is a place where we'd take
advantage of the balance between design and technology, between academia and
industry, between eastern and western culture and push the boundaries. We do
this in both research and education, initially with two sites, with maybe some
satellites where you have some onesies you collaborate with.
But initially, we've been talking with Tsinghua University, which many people
like to call the MIT of China. It's, you know, one of the top engineering
schools there. It's not, I would say, in the top of the world yet, but we need
to look at where is it going to be in ten years? Where is it going to be in 20
22
years? It's an important place, and at UW, we're actually, I like to say, the
shortest flight to Asia, you know, from the continental U.S. so we can put it
in Alaska and Hawaii and maybe shorten that a little, but there we are.
The key is to get a cross-flow of people between these places. So we want to
have people coming back and forth. If you're faculty and associated with this
institute, the expectation was every five years, you're going to go spend a
year over there. It's not a sabbatical where you're traveling around, though
that happened to me. But you're actually doing a lot of work and understanding
the other people in the culture.
And if you're doing a masters degree, maybe you spend a year in China and then
a year in the U.S. Depending on which side you're on, you go the other way. A
Ph.D., maybe a couple of years. I think you only get to know the people, the
culture, the practices by working together physically and then later, you can
do remote work that works better.
So imagine, you know, that in the fore ground, this is my lab in Seattle, and
behind this glass wall is not a wall at all, but that's a lab in Beijing. But
let's say we connected our two labs in this way. And technologically, we know
how to do this. There's people building these things in North Carolina and
other places and Microsoft even had this nice envisionment of this with these
kids in a classroom in Sidney and Mumbai and this very well-known office labs
video dubbed 2019, where we have some ambient awareness of the other people or
a shared white board and videos from 6,000 miles away.
I think the real key to making such a thing like this succeed, again, besides
creating the culture, is hiring really great students and faculty. That's one
of the most important things we do. And you want to find this balance between
these people who are more design oriented and more technologically oriented.
They don't necessarily have to be people who are experts in I'm doing green,
that's what my life's been. You want people who are just smart and creative,
and you want to make sure that you start with a way of accounting for people's
output that doesn't favor really one academic style.
So what tends to happen in these places is you combine these designers and you
combine them with engineers or scientists, and you end up just counting what
the engineers and scientists count, which is, you know, research papers,
typically, because it's easy.
23
And, in fact that's not what designers do. They create artifacts. And, in
fact, I think you want to have this to be more of a place about creation,
doing, creating artifacts, deploying, scaling these things and make sure that
one culture does not push outer the other culture.
You need to mentor the students and faculty properly. The type of people, I
think, you want in an organization like this is a balance really between design
and computing and I take this broadly also, architecture and planning and art.
Art's not the same thing, but they often use some of the similar tools that are
useful in this.
And when I think of computing, I also think of things like EE and ME and
physics, people who build things. And we also want to understand people. So
psychology, sociology, ethnography, business policy, behavioral, economics.
But I think the majority of the people you want are the people in the top and
the bottom, these makers with some onesies of these people in the middle. I
think, you know, a good social science theory could drive the work of five or
ten engineers for a while.
The funding is always kind of the interesting part about such a thing. People
say, well, how -- that sounds great. How do you get the money for that? And I
don't have an uncle who is a billionaire. But, you know, one idea is that you
have these consortias that have an open IP model where companies join and say,
yeah, Microsoft really wants to be part of greening the future, this idea of
working on that area for several years and will sign up for three to five
years, half a million dollars a year or something like this.
This model's worked fairly well for Berkeley, you know. Everyone who knows
that Randy Katz, Dave Patterson Mafia has done this very well. A lot of
companies like it in that it gives them a place to collaborate with people that
they normally couldn't collaborate with. But the IP story moves some places
think, oh, we need the IP because Apple's going to sue us so maybe some of
these consortiums have an IP model where there's IP and maybe you have
different models departmenting on what you're in and be flexible about it.
Another way to fund this is obviously through large NSF centers and things like
this as you grow to that scale. Asian governments, I think, are going to be
particularly interested in something that leads to a more of a creative,
24
educated work force. And then finally, the end game for one of these things is
you want to find that Chinese billionaire and that American billionaire. It's
good to get one of each to really endow such an institute as you kind of move
to scale. And I'll show you a short plan of that.
Now, you might say why? Why do you want to do this? Given all the cultural
and structural barriers to collaboration, anyone who's worked with China or
tried to work with Tsinghua, which is almost an offshoot of the government
there in Beijing, it's difficult. So why collaborate?
Well, I think there's many reasons to collaborate. The most important being
trying to solve these important problems. But there's even some just more
practical reasons. One is the energy. So anyone who's been to Beijing, who's
experienced the Microsoft lab in Asia or been to Tsinghua has really seen and
felt just the energy of the place, the energy is there. There's a sense of
destiny in terms of where people see the country going economically,
technologically and politically, and this permeates everything.
Science and engineering government support has gone up 20 percent per year for
almost ten years in China. Now, you need to take those numbers with a grain of
salt. Some of it is not what we would consider research, you know. Some of it
is very much industrial support for companies. But you can just see it from
the stories if you talk to faculty there. There are certain grants where you
have to have a certain number of people on them from other institutions and
often they can't find anyone because never one's already met their maximum that
they can be on. So the money is going well. You can tap into that.
Also, more importantly, I think China has now got a culture of making things.
It's this culture of we can create things. For example, if you had an idea for
a new cell phone that looked in a totally different way or used some new
technology, you could actually have it built, have 100 of them built in 30
days, and they'll even do some of the industrial design for you in
[indiscernible], and you can say oh, yeah, I want a cell phone shaped like a
ball, and I'm just going to do it for a sensor network and do a deployment.
You could just build that inexpensively. And that's just going to go down
faster.
From a research perspective that can really change what kind of things you
would think to design or deploy.
25
Now, from the Chinese side, and I think this is important for American
companies and education too, is the idea that design or good design pays. So
China, you know, has obviously got a lot of good publicity, though recent bad
publicity for making iPhones and iPads and things like this.
These products are a roaring success. I don't even know what the number is. I
think Apple's sold 50 million of these, 15 million in the first year. Yet for
every one of these devices that's made in China and sold for 500 to $1,000,
depending whether you trick it out like mine or not, only 3 percent of that
remains in China. The rest goes to the creator of the device.
So it says made in China on the back, but only seven dollars of the $500 iPhone
stays in China. Somewhere between $25 and $50 goes to Korea. 25 to 50 dollars
goes to Japan. Apple gets over $200 of that. So in China, they understand
that they got to move up this food chain and be able to create the products of
the future, and you need to be able to educate people to think like that.
That goes pretty much against how the Chinese educational system is set up.
From an American's perspective and obviously Microsoft is very aware of this,
is just the market size. So 1.3 billion people with, you know, maybe a third
of that, a quarter of that starting to look like what we'd consider middle
class. It's still a lot poorer than we consider middle class. But they're
striving for the things we think of as middle class. A home, a car,
electronics, this life style.
Over 900 million mobiles. This is a year old so it's probably way out of date,
over 500 million people on the internet and just growing. I mean, the scale is
huge.
And you can't just fly in there and suddenly understand that market. The
number of stories of cultural mistakes that people have made, I had one in
here, I took it out, about Coca-Cola, which is a famous brand in China. But
the first ten years in China, their sales were anemic. And they didn't
understand it until they found out that the Chinese name for Coca-Cola was
something like -- no, it was something like something eating wax. I forget
what kind of animal.
And then, you know, they changed the name.
history.
They had a contest and the rest is
26
That's just the simplest example of not understanding culture. You might say
that happened in the 1930s. BMW had a similar thing just in the last ten
years. It happens over and over. And those are just things on the surface.
What does it take to really understand culture?
And having this diversity, I think, is what really leads to many new ideas.
And I experienced that in diversity at every stop that I've been on my career,
you know, whether it was at CMU or at Berkeley or at Intel and UW and now in
China, where you get more and more out of the richness of people coming from
different backgrounds. I think it unleashes creativity.
One example of kind of this cross-cultural success is the bird's nest stadium,
you know. I think everyone in the world now knows this stadium was really a
collaboration between European architects and project architects and artists,
Chinese artists and a Chinese architecture firm.
And it really has this interesting combination of eastern and western design
elements, including this kind of Chinese ceramic idea is what the outer design
of it is. And it's led to something that's just really creative and different.
So the final couple of slides I have here is how do you pull this off? This
seems like a big thing. I showed you the money thing is a big thing. Well, we
started really first by integrating designers and computer scientists in some
ways at our work of the Intel lab where we had people of different backgrounds.
And then that led to some of the things that we did at UW with Dub.
For those who don't know Dub, it's this interdisciplinary institute for HCI and
design at UW, where we have people from computer science, design, the
information school and a department called human centered design and
engineering and we work together in many ways across these different
disciplines to work in HCI.
We co-advise students. We write grants together. We have a weekly seminar
series. We teach in each other's classes. We host receptions at major
conferences.
And this was all organized without any staff or any centralized funds, you
know. In fact, I think I've been paying for lunch for eight years. But it
took us from when I arrived at UW eight and a half years ago, nobody in the
27
world would have said that is a top ten place in human computer interaction.
Today, I think if you ask the experts in the field, they would put us in the
top three without question. And we did that really without any formal
structure. And I think with more structure and funding, we could do a lot
more. We're starting a professional masters program that goes across HCI and
design, across these things. It's called masters in HCI plus D, and that's
going to start to offer more structure and I think money to help support it.
And, you know, it goes across these main departments and even some other
departments that are small their have onesies and twosies, and there's lots of
those. There's other 40 faculty involved, over 100 graduate students. I think
one of the really keys to the success where I really couldn't have done this
elsewhere is kind of the industrial involvement.
So especially the Microsoft involvement and the Intel involvement when we had
the research lab here in Seattle, really allowed us to expand the footprint of
what we could do and have people who we collaborated with closely or
occasionally taught classes or even, you know, co-advised students that allowed
us to do a lot more. I think this is the kind of thing we want to do on this
next level with world lab.
So the key to me is doing this in phases. So the first phase is really
research and educational exchanges. And then next, you start to have some
formal MS programs. So let's say we have our now MS program. Maybe there's an
optional year for people who want to go off to China for a second year. And
Tsinghua has a new joint computer science design master program. Maybe those
students do a similar thing.
So at that point, you're kind of paying for faculty who are in existing
departments to essentially teach classes. You buy them out, but maybe you
start to then get faculty positions either through the university or endowed
and start something like a Ph.D. program. Then finally, you think about
permanent space or a building.
So there's these phases that you might imagine over a five to ten year period
of moving up, and really we're right here at the beginning. This is just
starting, and so the idea is this summer, is to have what I call the world lab
summer institute. We'll have ten top students from Tsinghua, junior graduate
students, senior undergraduates come over and mix with ten UW students for a
28
seven-week real intensive boot camp where they have lectures in HCI design and
entrepreneurship, projects that they work in cross-disciplinary and
cross-cultural teams, and then we also have like a tour every week where they
come out and see the Microsoft home or they go out or Google or go to adobe and
see what's going on here in the Puget Sound. So this is something that we're
trying to start this summer.
And so I want to just leave you with this.
This is a famous Chinese idiom.
[speaking Chinese]
I found this mistranslated all over the internet, but hopefully I've got this
right now. It literally means kind of something like this. Ten years to grow
a tree, a hundred years to educate people. And what I think it really says is
that nurturing and educating human talent is really key to prosperity and we
really need to think big about how we might do this in the future to make a
change.
And so that's what I wanted to present to you. I think we can solve some of
the key problems facing humanity, but we have to have a global effort, and I
think a big advantage to us is to have MSR here and be part of this effort.
It's been really key to what we've done with Dub, and I think they would be a
great partner both here in Redmond as well as in Beijing to help us bring this
off.
And I look forward to your questions and comments and really help in how we
create this vision and start inventing the future today. Do we have time for
questions?
>> Mary Czerwinski:
>>:
We have time.
Have you ever done live collaboration across a nine-hour time zone gap?
>> James Landay: Well, I lived in Beijing for two and a half years, and how
many grad students did I have, Scott, when I started? Probably seven. Maybe
they all left because of it. I think they all graduated, actually.
But yeah, it's hard. I mean, it requires you to change your schedule and be
flexible, sometimes early in the morning, sometimes at night. My students are
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very familiar with the taxicab call on my way to work. I didn't show this
slide. Let me see if I can bring this up since I had it hidden. It's going to
mess -- so actually, let's say we had three places, Beijing, Paris and Seattle.
Like where do you want to go in the world?
So you know, when you see it's 9:00 a.m. in Beijing, it's kind of the middle of
the night in Paris, but it's about 5:00 p.m. in Seattle so you can imagine one
or two hours of people collaborating, maybe students a little later.
When it becomes 3:00 p.m. in Beijing, you got 9:00 a.m. in Paris. And probably
too late except for some of my grad students in Seattle. And then finally,
when you've ghost 7:00 p.m. in Paris, you actually have some overlap. Anyone
who's lived in Paris knows they go to dinner really late. So you might
actually get some overlap.
So, I mean, it's hard, but there is a couple hours a day between these places
where you could get something going and start to have some collaboration. But
I agree, it's hard.
New York's actually harder, you know. Actually the west coast makes this
easier for Beijing in some ways. Tom?
>>: Your comment about pacific rim made me think of [indiscernible]. That's
been very successful bringing scientists together not so much in the way you
describe, but I think the Seattle area would be like a fantastic area for such
-- I mean, maybe it will be part of this institute, but if you wanted to draw
sort of people ->> James Landay:
Especially in the summer.
>>: Especially in the summer, but [indiscernible] times of the year and people
go there anyway.
>> James Landay:
It's broader too in terms of what it's trying to cover.
>>: I just was reaching out to think like something like where scientists come
all around the world and I think we've got everything we need here. So I think
the timing is very good and I think there's a huge, a huge amount of just
opportunity.
30
>> James Landay: So I appreciate you suggesting that. Because our early
thought that I had early on when I showed this to some people, it's not in the
talk, but it's still been bubbling in my head, is how do you tie this kind of
thing to almost something like Ted in terms of capturing some of the content
and spreading it out there.
And the other thing was when I was talking to Ed Lazski and Hank Levy about it,
they said, you know, we've always had this MSR/UW summer program and it's just
never been kind of as big of an interesting thing as it could be.
And this is kind of one of the things that, you know, this [indiscernible]
style or you made me think of a series of these over the summer.
>>: It's like 24/7.
It's full.
I mean, they take off Christmas, and that's about it.
>>:
One of the things that makes it work is it's far away from everything.
>>:
We can achieve that very easily.
>> James Landay: They put you on an island.
[Multiple people speaking].
>> James Landay:
That's a good suggestion, I appreciate that.
>>: So Stanford has an E-program connecting with Tsinghua.
with --
How do they work
>> James Landay: I don't know about that particular program. I know
Stanford's just recently opened a center at Peking university in terms of they
actually even built a building on the campus.
So I don't know about the Stanford MBA one. I do know there's a bunch of these
MBA ones that are joint. In fact, my wife just did one with Rutgers in
Beijing. She graduated. Often, they kind of have a Chinese sponsor and then
they kind of do their own thing there. And they don't feel like they're fully
integrated into the Chinese university.
Now, I don't know about the Stanford one, because Stanford has done a better
job that I know some of the people at Stanford, actually in the HCI community
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are pretty involved with the Peking university center. But I don't -- I'll
look into that one, but I don't know about it. If you know anything more I'd
be glad to hear that context.
>>: When I was at CMU, I had a lot of ambitions, but also frustrations in
getting designers and social scientists and computer scientists to interact. I
think designers and computer scientists was sort of the easy part. You know,
designers, as you said, are makers. And I think computer scientists are
problem solvers. And so you can sometimes get those people pointed in the
right direction and have common ground.
But top social scientists, people like Richard Florida and others, they were -the application of their research, which was basically to gain expertise in
terminology and text automization was towards being pundits, which is very far
away from problem solving and very far away from making, unless you call
writing books making.
And so does it strike you as very ambitious to try to get all three kinds of
[indiscernible] together?
>> James Landay: Well, I think it's already ambitious with designers and
computer scientists, because I think it's actually harder than people perceive
and the track record there is not good. But I think one of the keys is when
you start something new, to start the ground rules in a good way. How you
create that initial culture and how you create the initial incentive systems to
cause people to have the behavior you want is really important. In fact,
that's why I was saying in some ways, it's more important to think about that
than the actually domains you would do the research in. To get that right is I
think what leads to the other part.
When I say those social scientists, though, I don't think you go after people
who are purely in the social science and away from the technology. I'm talking
about the people who have those skills, but they've also got at least one foot
in. So, you know, I'm talking about who would we consider in MSR.
You know, even Dana Boyd, she understands the technology because, you know,
she's got an undergraduate degree in computer science and a masters in media
arts and sciences and she has a Ph.D. in information science, even though she
does stuff that uses skills from sociology, most sociologists wouldn't think of
her as a standard sociologist. So in some ways, these are people that are
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hybrids already in that they work in the field.
They may have been trained classically, Mary, you know, or the Olsons. These
are people in the field that have been trained but they're working much more in
the inter-disciplinary field already and there's lots more new people like
that. Now that we have the information schools and HCI institutes and these
places, there really are people who are kind of getting trained in this kind of
more a hybrid culture. Even the media lab, people have different backgrounds.
So you're less likely, I think, to go to someone who's been purely trained in
one of these traditional schools of thought that might be harder. Now, there
might be some who can cross. It's funny, as I actually follow Richard Florida,
he used to be at CMU. And yeah, he's a pundit, but he's much more when I talk
about these policy issues, you know, that's the kind of thing that he would
contribute. But yeah, nothing that someone like that's going to do is going to
inform you, maybe, of what to make, right. So it's too far.
>>: You talked about some of the problems of incentivizing people for the
long-term. The systems and how hard it is to get [indiscernible] people spend
two years on them and some people spend three months and get the next paper.
Students need that to get into places. This doesn't really kind of talk about
that at all.
>> James Landay: It doesn't talk about that. Obviously, I've thought about
that a lot. You can channel Jonathan Gruden wherever you need for this. But
I've talked to Peter and Jeanette Wing and maybe the people I think at the
senior levels of computer science and maybe I'm not there yet, hopefully, have
talked about how they see the culture has gone away from doing these audacious
big things and doing these incremental things.
Some of it is just you're getting old and you get jaded. But some of it is
real. I mean, if you even look at what is the CV got to look like for you to
even interview somebody in this research lab versus when Rick started it, it
looks very different. And it actually probably looks like what we would think
of to give that person tenure when Rick started this lab.
And it can't be that that's the same -- that people are 15 times more
productive.
>>:
[inaudible].
33
>> James Landay: That's it. You solved it. So, I mean, there are some issues
about we as a community to say what are we counting? What do we say success
is? When I say we start the incentive system, I think we need to be thinking
more about creation and the artifacts and the artifact you've created and
deployed and people use as something you really get credit for.
Now, if you build this inside a university, yeah, you're going to have to get
some buy-in not just for your unit. What's the next unit up for the tenure
cases. What's the next unit up. When you're creating something new, that's
the chance to negotiate this. After you have something, good luck trying to
get them to change the rules. But as part of, hey, this Chinese billionaire is
giving me $100 million to create this center and this is how we want to do it.
Or at a time like now when the economy is horrible and things are getting cut,
those are the times when the universities are ready to rethink the rules. Like
when they see Sebastian throne overturning the university, that's the best time
to do something creative, because that's when they're nervous and saying hey,
how are we going to do something different.
So you have to get that built in from the start, what it should be. Now, I
have that model of what it is. I'm not sure that's exactly what it is. I
actually think if you do research in this way, you'll still produce papers in
these other things that students need to succeed. I'm more concerned with the
internal model, because I often have seen these people, here's the classic guy.
I can't think of his name. I think it's like Zodel Meyer, who did his Ph.D. at
Stanford a few years ago.
He had like one or two paper, but he wrote an operator system that was really
cool and he had his whole talk, all the tools, everything was his operating
system and he's now a professor at MIT. He really had like one or two papers.
That's kind of the type of thing you want to reach again, somebody who reaches
big and does it big.
That's not to say everyone should do that. We need the other type of people
too. I just think it's gotten a little out of balance that it's all a lot
about studying small changes or other things people have created, rather than
being about creating things. And people who want to create stuff have been
pushed out. They go wait, why should I work two years and not get even one
paper. You set that incentive system, and they're not stupid. They change.
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You have to do it. Now, there's other things universities could do. Some of
us have talked about this. This is the thing for CRA or somebody like that.
If the university said hey, you know when you apply for a job at MIT or at
Stanford, Berkeley, CMU and UW, the top five places in computer science, we are
going to have you only tell us about three papers that you've written. That's
all we want to know. Don't tell us anything. If you've done more, great.
That's cool. We don't want to know about it. This is all we're going to
evaluate you on. Don't talk about anything else in your talk.
And if those universities also said hey, when I hire you and you come up for
tenure, you have these five things you can tell us about, and that's it. If
just those schools even colluded in that way, and I don't know if the justice
department would take them out for that, even if they just did that, it would
change the culture overnight.
Because you would be like, no, I'm not sending that to KAI, it's not right yet.
You know, we need to do more. But right now, the fact is we talk about impact,
and we talk about no, we want to know what's the best work. But what do people
in the end do? They count number of papers and, you know, they have a filter
of, okay, that's top tier and that's not. You guys have a list of what you
consider top tier conferences.
I know at Intel we had a list and the fights were often what was on that list.
But, you know, we can say that's not the main criteria, but it is a criteria,
and people do it because it's easy. And so that kind of culture is hard to
change. But like I said, researchers are optimizers. You change the culture,
like for example you say we think tech transfer is now more important, if you
reward that, and make it clear in your review process, God damn, you will be
amazed how many people are suddenly doing tech transfer. I'm not saying that's
the right thing for a research lab to do. But you need to make those goals
very clear and transparent to everyone to know what you want and you have to
follow through by rewarding it, whether it's resources or promotions or
whatever. And God, overnight, your work force does what you're trying to do.
But the key is figuring out what it is you want to achieve and what are those
incentives. So, I mean, that's part of designing this. I haven't figured it
all out. It's new, it's, you know, in process. If you have suggestions, I'd
love fo hear them.
35
>>: Your goals are really exciting and I think it's exciting [indiscernible].
What do you think is kind of the role of the university and the research and
what's the role of the industry and the startups? Some things are just maybe
just not the right thing do in an academic setting because of the culture, lots
of things there is harder.
So that's just one part. The second thing is in terms of creation, so lots of
people are thinking about the issues that you're talking about, right, there's
a lot of interesting energy and lots of resources going. And I'm almost
thinking about where does one thing about reallocation of resources instead of
saying, you know, at least in a company, you know, I would think that a
different way of instead of saying I need $200 million more, you know, a
hundred coming from the American billionaire and the Chinese billionaire, how
do you incentivize people to restructure and reallocate?
It's not that we don't have enough engineering students and design students and
policy students and sociology students. If you really believe that the way to
make a difference is a different way, can you reorient?
>> James Landay: So in terms of the first question, I see the role of the
university is doing these risky, far-out things that are actually too risky for
a startup, because you'll be too early and not have a market yet and maybe are
not appropriate for companies where often they're looking to their next set of
products and it's too far out.
Now, that's not to say ->>: [inaudible] there's a risk in a sense of you're going to market with the
risk. The other is we don't know the knowledge. But certainly a knowledge ->> James Landay: Yeah, so me, some of it is risk of pure failure, because
you're just wrong. It was not the right thing. It fails. That risk, you
know, gets taken in startups. But I would say not as big. A startup has to do
something that has a pretty high probability of succeeding. Now, lots of them
don't. But in a university, I think the key is to take risks. Again, part of
this incremental culture, I feel, is people not taking risks because they're
trying to get that thing that they can get in six months. That's not taking a
risk.
So that's the role that I think universities have played in the past.
I think
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they still play it, but I don't think we're playing it as much as we can. If
we start just competing, doing stuff that's so near-term to product that we're
competing with startups, we can't compete. There are so many of them. Why
would we be any better.
So to me, again, having a far-out view of where this might be in bigger risks
technologically and things that aren't ready yet, in some ways maybe we don't
even solve the problem as much as show where the good prospecting should be for
the people who are going to come next.
I mean, you can look at Bill's talks where he talks about whatever is going to
be big, you know, in ten years was already invented ten years ago. In some
ways, yes, it takes a lot of this along the way.
I think the universities should be in that ten-plus vision out. Now, some
people think that's too far. But even things that people think are closer are
further than they actually think. The trade-off between the industrial large
companies and the startups, that I have less feel for, you know. I think a
good company would be doing a lot of the things that the startups are doing.
And some do. The bigger issue often has to do with patience.
When they do these new things, having the patience to let it develop, they
suddenly go hey, it's not a $200 million business after two years. Cut.
>>: Part of where I was going was there's tremendous learning from being in
the market, being in the field, and the cycle that you get in a real
environment versus in an academic structure or some other thing. There's a
different kind of knowledge to be shared, which I think will be needed to solve
the kinds of problems ->> James Landay: I actually think they're actually very related too. That we
want, actually, academics that are getting closer to the market and trying
things and getting that knowledge. It's just we don't have a lot of them to
depend on and you have to get the check for it by next quarter or you guys are
gone.
I think there's some differences, and I haven't even thought about like how do
we embed startups with this. And some people go, oh, if you're thinking ten
years out, it precludes startups. Actually don't think that. I think if you
have that far-out vision, that's a vision we're trying for.
37
But just like that WISP, there's all these things that are going to drop off
along that road that are going to lead to kind of entrepreneurial things along
the way. So there will be kind of again more of a mix of a long-term/shorter
term, but still your vision, you're trying for those big goals. I think just
kind of orients and energizes the organization around what we're trying to
achieve.
We're here for a reason and it's more than just make a buck.
important.
So that's
In terms of the lots of people working in these areas and how to incentivize
and reallocate resources, I don't know. I don't know what that is, as much as
hey if we do stuff that's really exciting, we're going to attract people to
want to come do this. So in some ways, it seems like a copout answer, but I
think you want to become this place that's known as the place to do this, and
you reallocate by attracting the best and brightest to do that.
And then you reallocate resources because other people see how well you've
done, and they want to copy you. And, you know, so that's in some ways.
>>: Do you think the Tsinghua side, that the long-term view would be as
enthusiastically comprised as the U.S. side?
>> James Landay: I think, I mean, when I talk to my colleagues at Tsinghua, I
think they embrace this idea. They find it scary in that how are you going to
get from here to here? That seems really big. And for other people I tell
this too, it's scary too. How do you get from here to here? And that's why
I've tried to break it up into what I think are logical stages where you do
something small, you get some wins, you get some good publicity and other ways
of showing people what you've accomplished and then you ratchet up the ask and
you ratchet up the deliverables to the next level and you keep kind of
expanding what you can do.
When you start to think of it that way, it becomes a much more logical thing.
I think if ten years ago, you know, I came and had a meeting with Mary and said
hey, I'm thinking of moving from Berkeley to UW, and this is what we're going
to be. We're going to have 100 students, we're going to have 40 faculty.
We're going to be, you know, the top two or three places in HCI, I think most
people probably would have said, I don't really believe that.
38
But we did it in small steps and we kept ratcheting up what we tried, and over
time, now you look back and you go, we're not even sure how we got here.
Because you don't plan every bit of those steps. You actually create the
culture that is going to do something that you want, and then it starts to
become a machine and feeds on itself.
And I think we want to try to do the same thing. Now, this one's harder. It's
harder because you're trying to do it across the world. You're trying to do it
with another country. You're trying to do it with another culture. You're
trying to do it with another political system. It is harder.
But I said, yeah, if it was easy, somebody would have done it already, okay?
Fine. Some things that are worth doing are hard. If you don't try to attack
it, you can't do it. So starting with the small ones, the summer institute,
we'll see how that goes.
I'm sure we're going to have all kinds of failures, all kinds of problems. But
I think the key is actually, especially for the Chinese side, is teaching
people that failure's okay and that we need to make risky things, try risky
things. And students work the best at this. They haven't yet learned
necessarily not to fail.
Now, in Chinese culture, I think it's a little harder, but this kind of
institute, these kind of problems, these kind of design by creation, you fail
all the time. Because you create something that just doesn't work. So it
forces you to keep trying and doing and so that's, you know, what I want to do.
>> Mary Czerwinski:
>> James Landay:
We should wrap it up.
Okay.
Thank you.