Jason Hong's Confabulations

http://bulletin.sigchi.org/conf/reflections_uist_2005/

Interactive Java applet that lets you add and remove things from various kinds of trees, including AA trees, AVL trees, binary search trees, etc. Pretty nice, good for learning how they work. http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~howell/viewer/viewer.html

A high-level summary article describing how the GUI was developed. http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/ofmiceandmenus Over three decades of work by diverse engineers and researchers intent on learning how best to interact with a computer come together in the windows and icons used today

This looks interesting... Automatic Design Pattern Detection Dirk Heuzeroth, University of Karlsruhe Thomas Holl, University of Karlsruhe Gustav Hogstrom, University of Växjö Welf Lowe, University of Växjö Full Article Text: Download PDF of full text Buy this article Get full text from IEEE Xplore DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/WPC.2003.1199193 Abstract We detect design patterns in legacy code combining static and dynamic analyses. The analyses do not depend on coding or naming conventions. We classify potential pattern instances according to the evidence our analyses provide. We discuss our approach for the Observer, Composite, Mediator, Chain of Responsibility and Visitor Patterns. Our Java analysis tool analyzes Java programs. We evaluate our approach by applying the tool on itself and on the Java Swing Set Example using the Swing library.

I've always thought it would be fun to compile a list of famous rejected research papers, ones that later turned out to be highly influential. For example, in My Life as a Quant , the author tells the story of how the famous Black-Scholes paper (which describes how options should be priced) was rejected several times. The work eventually led to a Nobel Prize in economics. (Yes, I know, there technically is no Nobel Prize in economics). Then there's George Akerlof 's work on asymmetric information . I don't recall exactly, but I think the reviewers thought it was too simplistic. It also led to a Nobel Prize in econ. And then there's Tim Berners-Lee 's original paper on the World Wide Web. He describes his experiences in his book Weaving the Web . I think it was submitted to a hypertext conference, but was accepted only as a demo. I'm guessing reviewers didn't see much novelty in the work, which probably was correct from a research perspective.

Cute game for kids to teach them about the dangers of spam, viruses, chat rooms, etc. The intro is particularly funny. Link

A person in a class I taught in China this summer tells me that there are some new UI books recently translated into Chinese. BOOK: About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design CHINESE VERSION: http://www.china-pub.com/computers/common/info.asp?id=24368 Another very good book: BOOK: Emotional Design CHINESE VERSION: http://www.china-pub.com/computers/common/info.asp?id=24367

http://www.upassoc.org/worldusabilityday/ "Why doesn't this work better? Why can't they make this easier?” World Usability Day, November 3, 2005, is for all the people who've ever asked questions like these. This worldwide series of events, organized by The Usability Professionals' Association, will promote awareness of the benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design, Earth Day style. The 36 hours of World Usability Day starts with a breakfast in New Zealand and ends at around 10 pm on the west coast of the United States with the opening reception at the DUX 2005 conference.

The spring course schedules are now posted and I wanted to bring to everyone's attention a new course that Jason Hong, Mike Reiter, and Lorrie Cranor will be teaching this spring: 17-750/5-899A Usable Privacy and Security. This will be a 9 unit course offered T/Th 9-10:20am. Here's the description... There is growing recognition that technology alone will not provide all of the solutions to security and privacy problems. Human factors play an important role in these areas, and it is important for security and privacy experts to have an understanding of how people will interact with the systems they develop. This course is designed to introduce students to a variety of usability and user interface problems related to privacy and security and to give them experience in designing studies aimed at helping to evaluate usability issues in security and privacy systems. The course is suitable both for students interested in privacy and security who would like to learn more about usabil