Augmenting Intellect
Professor Michael Terry
February 6, 2007
Talk Overview
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Who I am
Research interests
Time lapse detour
Overview of Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
Augmenting human intellect
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History
Challenges
Ill-defined problems
Interface-level support
Open problems
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Talk Protocol
• You should be actively asking questions…
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Who I Am
• One of your professors specializing in Human
Computer Interaction (HCI)
– Ed Lank and Bill Cowan also specialize in this area
• More about HCI at Waterloo
– http://hci.uwaterloo.ca
• Have taught CS 349 (User Interfaces) and CS 489
(Human Computer Interaction)
– CS 349 teaches mechanics of constructing interactive
applications
– CS 489 teaches process of discovering what to build and
whether design is useful, usable
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Research Interests
• Computational support for creative practices
– Contextualized and realized within open source software
• Novel time lapse visualization techniques
• Both include elements of information visualization
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Time for that Detour…
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Time Lapse: Scales of Time
• Normally perceive world sequentially
– Second-by-second, minute-by-minute
• Continuous barrage of stimuli to filter
• Easy to miss long-term trends and events
– Example: Patterns of clapping
• Visualizations can help us discover these trends and
events
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Time Maps
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Time Maps
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Time Maps
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Current Work: News Images
• Goals
– Collapse days, months of news images into single,
comprehensible visualization
– Enable viewer to “feel” flow of news over time
– Identify patterns, trends, biases not easily discovered
otherwise
• Challenges
– No constants between images, like traditional time lapse
• Undergrad URAs:
– Ilya Grigorik
– Tom Ayre
– Ray Kuo
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Credit: Ilya Grigorik
BBC News
Yahoo News
Credit: Ilya Grigorik
Credit: Tom Ayre
Credit: Tom Ayre
Credit: Tom Ayre
Switching Gears…
• Overview of HCI
– Types of problems investigated
– Goals of HCI
• Augmenting intellect
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Historical roots
Challenges
Ill-defined problems
Interface-level support
Open problems
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What is HCI?
HCI!
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HCI’s Concerns
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What to build?
For whom?
In what form?
What should be the language of interaction?
How well does it meet its goals?
What are the local and global impact of the
choices made?
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Example: Remote Communication
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HCI is Interdisciplinary
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Computer scientists
Psychologists
Anthropologists
Industrial designers
Graphic designers
Electrical engineers
Artists
• Has implications in academia and industry…
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Goals of HCI
• Make computational artifacts that are “useful, usable,
used” (Dix, Finlay, Abowd, Beale 2004)
Useful: Tool accomplishes what is required
Usable: Performs task “easily and naturally”
Used: People want to use it
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More Goals of HCI
• Safe and forgiving
– Mission critical systems, such as air traffic control, airplane
cockpits, power plants, weapons systems…
• Universally accessible
– Computers can compensate for physical and cognitive
impairments
• Quick to learn to use
– And to remember how it should be used…
• Efficient
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Avoid Imprecision!
• People often cite “easy to use” and “usable” as
laudable goals of interface design
• But how can we measure “easy to use” or “usable”?
• Terms mean many things to many different people
– Not directly measurable
• Saying a system is “easy to use” or “usable” does not
tell us why users perceive it to be that way
– This makes it difficult to replicate successes and avoid similar
mistakes
• These points will be important later…
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Be Specific and Prioritize
• Efficiency, learnability, desirability, cognitive load,
physical exertion are all worthwhile measures for
considering a system’s design…
• But first concern should always be usefulness of
system
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Why HCI?
• Why should we be concerned with HCI?
• Isn’t it enough to practice the Darwinian evolution of
user interfaces?
– Survival of the fittest?
– Recombination of the best features into new interactive
systems?
(Insert your own Mac OS X / Vista joke here…)
• Computation has the potential to be one of the most
significant complements to our human intellect…
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“There is a growing mountain of research. But there is
increased evidence that we are being bogged down
today as specialization extends. The investigator is
staggered by the findings and conclusions of
thousands of other workers — conclusions which he
cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as
they appear.”
When was this statement made?
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Vannevar Bush
• Headed “Office of Scientific
Research and Development” in
US
– Manhattan project, other WWII
science efforts
– Oversaw 6000 scientists
• 1945 article in The Atlantic
inspires computer scientists to
present day
• Goal was to augment human
intellect
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Vannevar Bush
• “A memex is a device in which
an individual stores all his
books, records, and
communications… It is an
enlarged intimate supplement
to his memory.”
• Proposes associative links
between content
• Dual display setup!
• Direct annotation of stored
content
• Proposes direct connection to
nervous system
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Douglas Engelbart
“By ‘augmenting human intellect’ we mean
increasing the capability of a man to approach
a complex problem situation, to gain
comprehension to suit his particular needs, and
to derive solutions to problems…
[We seek] more-rapid comprehension, better
comprehension, the possibility of gaining a
useful degree of comprehension in a situation
that previously was too complex, speedier
solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of
finding solutions to problems that before
seemed insoluble…”
Augmenting Human Intellect, 1962 SRI Report
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Douglas Engelbart
• Creates the mouse,
chording keyboard
• Demonstrates concepts
such as copy/paste,
computer-supported
collaborative work in a
1968 live demo
• “Eats own dog food” as
method of assessment
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Beyond the Knowledge Worker
• Ivan Sutherland’s
Sketchpad (1963)
– Light pen
– Direct manipulation
– Early “WYSIWYG”
• Expands computer
domain to include artists,
draftsmen, and more
• Language of interface
moves substantially closer
to task domains
– How and why?
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Sketchpad Video
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“…[Sketchpad] was a model for totally new ways of
operating computers; by changing something on the
display screen, it was possible, via Sketchpad, to
change something in the computer’s memory.”
- Howard Rheingold in Tools for Thought
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Significance of Early Work
• Early work recast digital data in higher-level
representations that facilitate its:
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Comprehension
Creation
Manipulation
Access
• Consider Sketchpad…
• Higher-level representations make use of higher-level
cognitive capabilities (e.g., innate perceptual skills)
• Fast forward to today…
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Today…
• Computers can fit on:
– Desktop
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Today…
• Computers can fit on:
– Desktop
– In our hands
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Today…
• Computers can fit on:
– Desktop
– In our hands
– On our wrists
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Today…
Thad Starner
On our glasses…
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Today…
Pioneer’s
Embedded
Display
MIT’s Stitched
Number Pad
In our clothes
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Today…
• Hard disks can store lifetimes of memories
– See “MyLifeBits” by Gordon Bell at MS
– 1 terabyte to hold our 20th century lives?
• Search engines put volumes of information at our fingertips
– When is the last time you used a card catalog?
• Computation is cheap
– $100’s for basic computational machinery, ~$1/GB for storage
• CPUs can process billions and billions of instructions every
second
• Computation can be packaged in forms both large and small
• But…
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It’s not enough to have faster,
more capable machines…
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Source: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20061115/
wii_PS3_061115/20061115?hub=Specials&pr=0
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How can we fruitfully
and reliably augment
human intellect with all of
this computational power?
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Your Answers…?
• How can computation augment human intellect?
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