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Showing posts with the label hci

Grudin at SI

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...

recommending music ?

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...