The series of iHCI conferences started two years ago – my colleague Luigina Ciolfi organised the 2007 event, hosted by the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick.
I chose to attend the IxDA industry talks this morning – and I was really impressed by the great speakers line-up! Kudos to Ben Arent for the organisation and for telling us more about the IxDA Dublin and the upcoming Design Week!
Niamh Phelan (IQ Content) spoke about Google Analytics and how to harness its power when researching usability matters. She pointed the audience to the IQContent blog for useful tips on tracking multiple domains and I was really impressed by their openness to share useful solutions.
I enjoyed the morning session a lot and I’ll do my best to convince these fantastic guys to come to Limerick and talk to the students in the near future.
The afternoon was dedicated to a tutorial on Inclusive Design for Older and Disabled Users offered by Prof.Helen Petrie from the University of York, UK. The tutorial was a real mind opener on what it means to design for and with people with various disabilities. The conclusion was that even if the needs of these groups might be very diverse, the solutions are not that diverse, and by including these concerns in the design process from the very beginning, mainstream technologies (and not only the assistive ones) could benefit a lot. Prof. Petrie mentioned quite a lot the Utopia project and the work of Alan Newell from Dundee University who is using theatre as an intermediary between users and designers.
The workshop included a practical exercise that required us to wear 3 pairs of latex gloves and glasses exemplifying various sight disabilities while trying to perform a simple task on a phone or laptop that didn’t belong to us. Here I am wearing the glasses:) (thanks to @aquigley!)
The first day ended with a social event at the Bagott Inn. More about iHCI tomorrow!
At ECSCW’07, I was running a workshop on GSD and couldn’t attend the one organised by Michael Koch and Wolfgang Prinz on Web 2.0. As this workshop took place next door from ours, I couldn’t avoid noticing the enthusiasm and the fun the participants had.
The organisers put together a wiki page and a blog was created to allow the participants to publish their own position papers and to get acquainted to the others’.
The workshop was structured in two parts: the morning was dedicated to the applications of web 2.0 tools in education, while in the afternoon we spoke about the applications of the same tools in research.
During the morning session, I was scheduled to fill the first slot. I had prepared slides, but it seemed to me that things were very relaxed and I decided to speak from my place instead, with no visuals. All I had to share were stories about tools I’ve used in both education and research, their adoption(or rejection!) by various groups, the feedback I got and what I’ve learned from these. My position paper can be accessed here. The discussion flew from there – there were a lot of interesting contributions, stories and solutions shared. Here are some of the things we spoke about:
different student groups have different needs – one size doesn’t fit all!
the use of social media tools almost always generate more work for the students, and more work for the teachers as well. But:
most of the students love the feeling of having created content that becomes public and can be seen as a meaningful contribution;
the first cohort of students using a specific tool seem to have the hardest time; once examples are out there, and a precedent was created, things seem to work better.
the introduction of social media tools tends to add more problems, as these tools are brought in to support an old paradigm.
the use of social media tools is challenging academics and students to update their own teaching/learning style.
A number of interesting questions came up – here are just a few of the ones I jotted down:
do students like social media tools?
do social media tools really support learning?
do these tools make learning more attractive?
are teaching institutions interested in supporting this adoption?
what is the impact of social media adoption on the position of the teacher? Is he still the expert, or his role is shifting more toward facilitating knowledge sharing?
The afternoon was dedicated to social software applications in research: e-science, research collaboratories. I heard a lot of interesting things about various communities using web 2.0 tools, and also about various initiatives and projects meant to facilitate collaboration at distance, serendipity and open sharing.
On Wednesday evening, I took my daughter to the O2 to see Leonard Cohen. Other mothers (in the movies) might make more expensive gifts to their daughters at graduation, like a car, or a shopping trip to NY, but I’m not in that position…so this seemed to me the perfect gift, that none of us will ever forget!
It was a fantastic night – words cannot describe the atmosphere in the O2! Cohen is a great singer, poet and human being – his generosity and spirit were overwhelming.
I remember very well that the first time I heard him singing (on a tape) – it was on New Year’s Eve ’76, and the song was Suzanne. One of our friends had emmigrated with his family to Germany, and now he was back for Christmas holidays, and he brought this tape with him. For days, “Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water” kept on playing in my head.
And then nothing, for years and years. Censorship never allowed Cohen songs to be played on the radio in Romania before 1989.
In 1998, on a trip to Germany, I bought my first Cohen CD.
I never imagined I’m going to see him live, although last year when he played in Dublin I made an attempt. The only other famous person I’ve seen live was Billy Joel in Croke Park in 2006. And it was a major disappointment – the way he treated the audience was simply outrageous. Maybe it was part of the show-his show. Cohen was a completely different experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
He sang most of his famous songs. He recited “A thousand kisses deep“. He sang a few songs I’ve never heard before as well. He spoiled us with solos of the members of his band. He was on his knees in front of us very often, but he also danced like a young man.
It was a great night that none of us will easily forget!
July 24 2009 | Events and Life and Uncategorized | Comments Off on There’s a crack, a crack in everything…
A few weeks ago, when I desperately needed a break, I decided to become a wwoofer. For a workaholic, I thought that was the most reasonable thing to do. You don’t have to stop working, but you’re doing something else, out in the nature. It turned much nicer that I thought it will be: a few hours of work a day, long walks, visiting people and gardens. I even ended up inviting my host to a concert in the famous Bantry House – the West Cork Music Festival was on! I couldn’t resist sending a picture to Twitpic, and one of my friends reacted saying that I seemed to be living the life of Reilly those days…
I had to look the expression up on the Internet. Me – living a life of a king? I was ready to react in the “poor me” style! But then I realised that in a way, it was absolutely true… I wasn’t completely free, because I still have a few duties connecting me to the university – the biggest being the conference I’ve been working on organising for almost a year now, but still… no stringent plans for the future.
I’m at the crossroads – my contract as a lecturer came to an end in March. I got work until June, with the perspective of a lecturing job that was going to be advertised during that period. But we’re in recession times – a recruitment embargo was set on all public institutions in Ireland, and the hiring process was blocked. So I guess the university gates closed for me – although some people claim there’s still hope.
For the first time in 28 years, I found myself unemployed. It was difficult to accept in the beginning – any kinds of jobs are scarce right now, but I tried to accept this lesson and find some good parts in it. I have accumulated so much during the last four years, that maybe it is time to sit down and digest. In the trepidation of academic life, deadlines are hitting you like trains, often coming from unexpected directions – so sometimes you don’t even have the time to get back on your feet, that a new task hits you and needs to be fitted in somehow.
OK. So I signed up for the dole on Tuesday. I was told I will feel ashamed and miserable. I don’t. I have worked for 28 years and I paid taxes all this time. I want to work, but wasn’t able to find something else, because I was too busy … working! For free. I’m a real addict, ain’t I?!
People ask me if I will leave Ireland, because jobs might be available elsewhere. No, I’m not planning to leave. I have the feeling that my place is here. I fit in. I am happy here. I have no complaints about the weather;) More than anything else, I love the people. And I believe there’s a future for me here.
What will I do? I don’t know yet. Knowledge management, distributed software development, social media, user studies, online facilitation, cultural mediation – I can wear many hats, and I have served many masters. Maybe I’ll have to go on my own – although I’m scared to death right now by this idea of total independence.
I am still involved in paper writing, I am the co-editor of a special issue of IST, and so on, and so forth. Does it make sense to keep working on these if they don’t mean a thing when it comes to employability? I don’t know. All I know is that my heart is still there, no matter how hard writing seems at times. And that I have a whole lot of goodies in my bag that I didn’t have the time to share until now.
At the end of April, I attended an event organised by the IBM Ireland Innovation Centre in Dublin. Together with colleagues from several other Irish universities, we listened to some excellent presentations about the IBM Academic Initiative and the ongoing projects at the Dublin Software Lab. During the break, we had the chance to network and have a look at 3 remarkable demos. The presentations are now available for download.You’ll probably have to sign up for a developerWorks account first, but it is well worth it!
This is when I first heard about INNOV8 – “an interactive, 3-D business simulator designed to teach the fundamentals of business process management and bridge the gap in understanding between business leaders and IT teams in an organization.”
I invited Joanne Stanley from the Dublin IBM Innovation Centre to give a presentation on it at 3Dcamp, and I got a positive answer yesterday. Joanne wrote that if she can’t make it to Limerick, either her or Kevin Farrar, the IBM Academic Initiative Programme Leader for the UK and Ireland, will participate remotely and give a presentation on Innov8.
A short excerpt from the press release on the latest version of Innov8:
Building on the success of the original INNOV8 in the academic community, INNOV8 v.2 will be available at no cost to businesses and academic institutions for simulations and training. The new version features puzzles and tasks that challenge players to tackle real-world challenges. INNOV8 v.2 delivers a complete redesign of the game, with a new global collaboration feature for players to work with virtual teammates to progress to the next level of the game. In addition, three new game scenarios reflect a new level of intelligence required for future, high-value job opportunities:
‘Green’ Supply Chain: Players evaluate a traditional supply chain model and are tasked with reducing a fictional company’s carbon footprint.
Efficient Traffic Flow: Players evaluate existing traffic patterns and re-route traffic based on sensors that alert the player to disruptions such as accidents and roadway congestion.
Call Center Customer Service: Using a call center environment, players develop more efficient ways to respond to customers.
Every now and then, Lero- The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre organises industry days, where researchers talk about their work with Irish practitioners. The one we had today happened in Dublin, and was hosted by Enterprise Ireland in its East Point premises in Dublin. It was organised in connection with the conference we are hosting this summer at UL – the International Conference on Global Software Engineering, for which I happen to be the local organisation chair.
(Photos by Jack Downey, the Lero Industry officer whose organisation efforts made the event possible.)
The event included 3 talks and time for networking and discussions; there were approx 30 attendees.The detailed programme can be found here.
Dr.Ita Richardson spoke about the need for extending standards like CMMI and ISO15504 to include guidelines for Global Software Development and regulated industries such as medical devices.
My talk was a reflection on the role of collaborative practices such as informal communication, socialisation and cultural mediation. I introduced the socGSD project. I spoke a bit about my field sites and the use of ethnographic methods. I shared with the audience a number of stories on things as banal as using instant messaging, Skype and social networking applications in day-to-day collaboration between distributed team members. No matter how banal they look like, a lot of managers don’t seem to understand yet their role as the glue that brings people together and allows them to create rapport. I concluded with a few recommendations, emphasizing the role of direct and frequent communication between sites, flexibility in organisational practices and cultural mediation. I got very positive feedback after the talk – several participants came to me to tell me how they resonated with the things I spoke about.
The third speaker was Vikas Sahni of Softedge Systems and it was great to hear from a practitioner how some of the things I touched upon in my talk were seen from the other side. One point where Vikas disagreed with me was cultural mediation and the role of people who can bridge different cultures. He gave the example of an Indian project manager based in Ireland who had difficulties in syncronising with his developers in India, while an Irish project manager was getting excellent results with an Indian team. In my view, this proves the danger of generalisation and of talking about “good practices”.
What works in one case can fail in another, because software is developed by people, and most problems are not connected to technology, but to people, to paraphrase Tom DeMarco. Not everyone can be a cultural mediator – it is a matter of people skills and personality. Next week, my colleague Alexander Boden will present our joint paper and poster on the topic of cultural mediation at the CHASE workshop collocated with ICSE’09 in Vancouver.
It was a wonderful sunny day, so after contemplating the idea of seeing the Bodies exhibition, I followed an impulse I had since the day I first arrived in Dublin – to get on an open bus and do the tourist tour.
I hoped off in Stephen’s Green and sat on the grass for a while, and then hopped back on. I was planning to see a film at the IFI, but because the bus got stuck in traffic, I got off in Heuston and returned to Limerick.
Thanks to Twitter again and to the serendipity it creates, I came across a talk titled “Fake Ethnography vs. Real Ethnography” by Aviva Rosenstein from the User Research Friday held in San Francisco last November.
And James Kalbach did a great job summarising it on his blog!
This is an ongoing debate: do researchers from other domains than anthropology really do ethnography? Or we should only speak about “using ethnographic methods”?
In our project, even if we did field studies during extended periods of time, we preferred to state that we used “ethnographically-informed” methods. Anyhow, Rosenstein makesthe point in the conclusion of her talk: if you are stating your possible bias, you are collecting data (instead of recording assumptions), you’re treating your informants well and you’re also observing what they actually do without relying entirely on what they say they do, if you are trying to understand things at a deeper level, look for patterns and write the whole thing down, you are doing decent research employing ethnographic methods. In the end, the measure of success is delivering some value to the organisation you’re working with!
I loved the advice she gave to researchers : mix and match, be creative and resourceful bricoleurs, make mistakes and tell the others about them, and… be brave!
The talk rang a big bell to me – it is so difficult to walk on this narrow path when there’s criticism everywhere, and so good to hear some words of encouragement!
“Here’s a clever way to do a conference: make it short (four hours), make it entertaining (fast, opinionated presentations), do it in a bar. User Research Friday, hosted by Bolt Peters in SF, has used this formula to great effect a couple of times so far, most recently on November 7, when six speakers in the design research field kept 140 of their colleagues spellbound, then stuck around for drinks.”
Really – an interesting idea!
I tried to retrieve the tweets from the event – there’s a twitter feed on the screen during the final sequences of the video, and Bolt | Peters mentions #URF08 as hashtag, but summize doesn’t seem to find anything. An application for extracting and archiving event Twitter feeds anyone?!
I went to the Limerick OpenCoffee Club this morning. I could afford this luxury, as the semester is over- no more teaching on Thursdays- and my contract ended anyhow.
We had quite a few of new attendees, and I tried to play the host. Don’t think I succeeded very well, because I was too nervous thinking of the 1000 different things I had to postpone doing for going there! But anyhow, after 10 min and 2 urgent mails sent, I managed to sink into the relaxed atmosphere…
Elaine Rogers from Seefin Coaching spoke about Time Management, and
John Gleeson from the University of Limerick (UL) spoke about Technology Transfer.
I had my laptop with me, and instead of taking notes, I felt like twittering what was going on. Read from the bottom up if you want to make any sense of it!These are all the tweets under #LOCC during those hours!
The funny part was that Ger Hartnett read my tweet about Elaine’s slide with a list of time wasters, and asked if Twitter was on the list. I presented Elaine with the comment (in almost real time), and she confessed she avoided it on purpose… because herself spends a lot of time on Twitter.
gabig58#LOCC Partner with researchers and research groups, make your skill sets known to UL, suggest interesting problems, tap into EI support about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58omg! 5 new followers in the last 20 min, just because I’m tweeting from #LOCC! Thank you! Hope my battery won’t fail me! about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC For companies looking for collaboration with universities,have a look at Innovation Vouchers and Innovation Partnerships(EI funded) about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC John Gleeson’s role at UL is to facilitate university – industry linkages and research commercialisation about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC A bit of history – the establishment of UL in 1972, a picture of the White House and one of the Living Bridge about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC if procrastination is taking up,and you spend your day on Twitter, FB,YouTube -your body is actually telling you it’s time for a break about 20 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC The mayonese jar story:you can put the golf balls in,the pebbles and the sand -but there’s always space left for a cuppa with a friend about 20 hours ago from web
And then I ran home to finish my slides for the Lero Industry Day on Monday.
In the evening, I went to an event organised by the Limerick County Enterprise Board: a talk by Brody Sweeney, the man behind O’Briens Sandwich Bars, titled “The real way to start up and stay in business”. The talk was the most inspiring event I went to lately! Brody spoke with extreme honesty about the problem he faced along the way, the sometimes unorthodox approaches he had to take, and what really counts. What really counts are people and hard work – and this struck a chord in me! We’ve heard the same thing from Patrick Collison at the OpenCoffee almost a year ago – there’s really hard work behind any successful business!
And the message we all took home was that there’s an opportunity in every apparently bad thing that’s happening to us – and the current recession is no exception! So I’ll try to get up smiling tomorrow morning, start with my best foot and see the hidden opportunities behind all this apparent doom and gloom everybody seems to be whining about!
I took the pledge initiated by Suw Charman-Anderson to write a blog post about a woman in technology on Ada Lovelace’s day a few months ago. The following day I started thinking about who would be that woman. I know a lot of remarkable women among bloggers, researchers, software engineers, entrepreneurs, freelancers – I could probably fill a good few pages with names only! And then the choice came naturally: I will honour someone who is an authority in my field of research, and at the same time a fellow country woman.
A few months after, I wrote to her about the idea of creating a collaboration platform for the Global Software Engineering community. She accepted my suggestions, but was already a few steps ahead, and the platform became reality soon after that. We stayed in touch, my group invited her to Limerick, but unfortunately she couldn’t make it- her second baby was on the way. The first time we met face to face was at the second international conference on Global Software Engineering – ICGSE’07 in Munich – but it felt like we knew each other for a long, long time.
The ICGSE series of conferences are the continuation of a series of workshops organised or co-organised by Daniela since 2002 that had the role of bringing together a pretty diverse community of academics, researchers and practitioners interested in the field. We have the honour of hosting it here in Limerick this year, and I’m involved in the organisation.
Daniela studied Computer Science in Romania, where she graduated in 1995. She went on to do a masters, and then a PhD in Computer Science/Software Engineering at the University of Calgary in Canada. She finished both her MSc and PhD in 5 years in total, a very short time (5 years is the usual time for a PhD only). Daniela got her PhD in 2001. After one year spent as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia and working with Unisys, she returned to Canada and joined the University of Victoria as an Assistant Professor. In 2007, she became an Associate Professor. She is the initiator and the head of the Software Engineering Global interAction Lab – SEGAL at UVic.
This academic year, Daniela is on sabbatical. She spent the first half in Europe and now she’s in Australia. Her husband and two kids are accompanying her. With all her hectic schedule, she was kind enough to answer to a few questions I asked in preparation for this blog post.
I wanted to know what made her choose Computer Science/Software Engineering in the first place, and what attracted her to academia. Here is her answer:
I was very good in math. I was one of the very few young girls competing in national math competitions along with my good male colleagues in middle and high school. A turning point happened in my life when I was discussing with my mom about university… it became clear that I was made to pursue impact in my life, and chose Informatics as a university major because i could apply my strong math skills in the domain of computer science. The specialization in Software Engineering was the result of further inclination for practical application — learning about software development and the challenge of translating customers’ needs into a workable product was just the right for me.Academia also came as a natural choice given my enthusiasm in teaching young minds to be good software engineers themselves. A post-doc in an industrial environment (Unisys) made me be sure that I wished to pursue an academic environment in which to teach students about and how to address the real world software problems, as well as to mentor students become researchers in Software Engineering themselves.
Next thing I wanted to know was if the fact of being a woman working in a technological domain has made any difference:
I think so. Having trained and competed with my boy classmates in math competitions, I always had to convince myself that I could do as well as anybody else. Perhaps that gave me the extra energy to do well. Later on, as a teacher, researcher, supervisor AND a mother in recent years has really been a great challenge but also an opportunity to realize how much women raise to the expectations around them, how well they figure out how to prioritize things in their lives, and how great they are BECAUSE they have this opportunity and experience.
My final question was about something that intrigued me ever since I heard about Daniela:
What is the secret of your fantastic energy? You’re involved in so many things, you have a family and kids at the same time, and you’re following your students very closely. How in the world can one cover all this?
And here is her answer:
I just love what I do :). Or perhaps I just do what I love. I have great mentors, and I listen to them. I surround myself with people that enjoy life and what they do. I take energy from positive people, and I try to empower and inspire others with same positive energy. I have become more humble every year recently, and I try to learn as much as I can from others everyday. As such, every day is a great day because the world around me is what and how I decide to see it. The students I collaborate with are a great source of energy for me themselves, teaching me how to stay sharp so I can help them become who they want to be.
Daniela was very generous sharing “her secret” with every one. We all have our ups and downs. If every one of us could remember that “every day is a great day” and it all depends on what we decide to make of it, this would be a better world!
I had in plan to go to Bizcamp Dublin ever since I heard it was going to happen. On the very morning I felt dead tired and didn’t want to get out of bed, but in the end I managed. And wasn’t sorry: the day was great value! It was worth it spending 7h on the bus just to be there!
They decided to have a fixed schedule for the day, which was available for download before the event. Usually at barcamps we have a board with post-its that can be shuffled and re-shuffled many times during the day, but I was so grateful the bizcamp Dublin organisers gave us a printed schedule to serve us as a guide during the day!
I was late in the morning, so I missed Aileen Hannan‘s talk“Practical Finances for Entrepreneurs”. Even if I had the chance to listen to her at Barcamp Cork and I’m reading her blog, I still regretted it.
I went to the Dan Barry talk “Legal issues facing start-up businesses“ – I found it excellent, to the point, full of very practical advice.
I hesitated between Niall Harbison‘s talk “Marketing and Growing Your Start-Up” (I am a real fan of Niall and a great admirer of the way he uses social media!) and Yanky Fachler‘s “Using chutzpah (balls, brass neck) to get through closed doors”. I must confess the subtitle “The emotional transition from employee to self employed” made me go to Yanky’s talk- the talk was nice and entertaining, but it didn’t do anything for me. He didn’t speak specifically about this transition, but rather shared anecdotes about how some of today’s success people started.
It was the first time I had the chance to listen to Emily Tully in person (I visited her blog though!) – her talk on “Self Promotion/ how to use PR and the media to your advantage” was excellent. She spoke about things such as having different press releases for old and new media, being honest and thinking about your audience.
During lunch everybody had the chance to meet old acquaintances and make new ones. I’ve done a brief survey regarding the interest in having a 3Dcamp at UL in June (looks like we should do it!) and interviewed this young fellow who didn’t seem at ease among so many adults. He told me all he’d like to see at Bizcamp Limerick – I hope we can live up his expectations!
The afternoon started with a panel discussion moderated impetuously byPatricia O’Sullivan : Successful Fundraising. 5 people sharedtheir experience in obtaining funds for their start-ups: Caelen King from RevaHealth.com, Niall Harbison – lookandtaste.com, Campbell Scott from IGOPeople, Keith Bohanna – dbTwang, and Ciaran Crean – MicksGarage. They were joined by two advisors from Enterprise Ireland. I wish the panel would have been given a bit more time – they all had interesting things to say, and the room was buzzing with energy.
I was tempted to join the Battle of the Biz session run by Robin Blandford after that, but I decided it’d be better to learn something about branding. Gerard Tannam‘s session “Branding Your Start-Up From The Get-Go” was probably the highlight of the whole Bizcamp for me: straight to the point, informative, practical and stimulating. I had several “eureka” moments during that talk – it was really worth it! The interesting thing was that the room was completely packed – either people have developed a nose for quality sessions, or they deserted the Battle of the Biz after it was explained to them.
I returned to the big room just in time to catch a presentation by one of the competing teams and couldn’t make much sense of the presence on stage of 5 young ladies who seemed to have been got there by accident!
I wanted to listen to Chris Byrne, but he didn’t make it up from Cork. The final session I say in was run by Jane Hogan and Sean Kirwan . Both of them spoke about how to increase your sales – a lot of enthusiasm, but to my taste they sounded a bit like the network marketing talks I used to listen to in the late 90s. If you take away the enthusiasm, there’s not much substance left!
It’s amazing how the span of attention is almost unlimited during such events! I’ve never got bored at any unconference type event – there are so many interesting people to talk to and speakers to listen to, that it is difficult to divide your time. Could we do something similar in academia? Have one day a month when anybody can volunteer to give a talk, and allow the students to go wherever they want…
In June 2005, I had just started my work on a 
