digital curry

I'm quite excited ! I'm going to be at the i conference 2006 at the University of Michigan. I'm looking forward to two exciting days of (surprise surprise) information flow :)! i conference is organized by the ischools project - the naming of which I'm sure has nothing to do with an ipod as suggested elsewhere! . I'm sure the people who thought of it had better things to do than name an important movement after an ipod ! The iconference started with presentation by John Wilkin and C. Perry Willett of the University of Michigan Library on the Google Book Search Project . A brief overview of their talk is at the SI 504 class blog. Apart from the host of interesting points disucssed on the class blog here are a couple that I think will be fascinating to look at: 1. from the interface design point of view - browsing scanned books in the current manner (clicking next on a link to go to the next page is primitive and in my opinion a poor translation of the hyperli...

Today, I attended a talk by Jonathon Grudin - well half a talk actually, I had to head off to class halfway through the talk, but the talk was pretty interesting. Having had a couple of his readings as course readings ( groupware, is hci homeless? ) it was interesting to see what he had to say in person. I liked the way in which he put spoke of the history of hci from a very practical point of view; He spoke quite a bit about how the research fields in hci have evolved based on technological innovations. At the very beginning he asked all the people in the room where they stood in relation to technology shaping human behaviour and living: The four categories were 1. hard determinism - firm believer that tech determines the way we live 2. soft determinism 3. co-determinism 4. no determinism He saw himself somewhere 1.5 :) . Prof. Judy Olson - 1 :), Prof McQuaid 3 with two hands up !!! I, like the majority was 3. Also, he said most of the places he asked this question there was one bra...

There was an annoucement today about Pandora coming to Michigan for a presentation. I'd never heard of pandora but inquisitive as I am decided to give their website a look. I loved my first interaction with the website. Pandora is based on the music genome project (http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml) and is the third largest online radio broadcaster. What was interesting to me was that the site didn't clobber you with information, didnt ask you to decide the genre or some other attribute of music and doesn't innundate you with choices of search results for your query. It simply sets up a station for you to listen to based on its "recommender system". I'm not really sure what they base their recommendations on. Also there is a nice balance between people who want to learn more about artists/music and people who just want to listen to some songs through their feature called backstage. I'm going to return to the site more often, apart from going for their prese...

Unbelivably, I'm writing in again today ! It's been a long weekend. Long because there were so many things to finish over the weekend - and i've almost managed to cram them all in. I've finally been able to integrate Google Map into the RideNow project ride display !!!! The long time was primarily because working twenty hours a day at another place I didnt really get any time to work on it through the week. So I was mostly working on it some late nights and at the weekends! Nevertheless, I'm so relieved its done - because it involved getting my feet wet with GMap and AJAX by looking at code of a significant level of complexity :). But then somehow I think I learn better that way ;) Weekends have become more like a time to catch up on work for the week. There used to be similar times at IIT too but that was more because I wouldn't have worked through the week. Here, after slogging through the week, i've to work at weekends to try to catch up with the remainin...

I'm writing in after a huge break - but with a new resolve to write in more regulary (deja vu ?)! Its been quite a while since I landed here at the University of Michigan and i've been meaning to blog about such a lot of things ! Lest you begin attributing it to my laziness - let me absolve myself of it now - this time its not laziness :) - well not totally ! Life here is really hectic. For the past one week each day i've been sleeping at 3:00 am in the morning and getting back to class at 9:00 ! The coursework is pretty hectic itself but on top of that i'm working twenty hours a week. Not that i'm complaining though! It's kind of fun to go through all this. Not exactly FUN but fun nevertheless. Oh! another thing I intend to do is start writing more 'academic' stuff on the blog. If nothing else it'll help me keep notes ! To end the post on a interesting note - i'll be at the i-conference 2006 at the end of this week! Go blue !