Some believe that when trying to solve problems, it's important to restate both the problem and the motivation-- what's the problem here? is this a problem? why is this a problem to begin with? and so on...

Well, what about The News? Most 'crisis of The News' articles have focused on the broad fear: "On-no! How will we find out about what's going on if there are no reporters". The news organizations could stand to better restate not only the problem they face, but the motivations for why they exist in the first place. Rather than asking how will The News and reporting work online-- asking a more broad question about reporting in general-- "why would one person want to know what happened to another person?". Perhaps by exploring the many answers to this question we can find creative solutions for the relevance of modern high-quality reporting and news organizations on the web today .

I would really love to hear other answers but mine would be 'global fairness.' In learning about how others are treated we learn how we should be treated. When we find any new information contradictory to old information we can express this violation through sympathy (perhaps vicariously through people in journalistic photos) or even react with some support be it time, financial or simply 'liking' the story to help popularize the issue. Maybe then, news organizations be more closely tied to easy arm-chair activism platforms in the case of issues like natural disasters. -- are there other examples of this?

What do you think?

Well, after writing a few statements of purpose of dubious quality (and utility). I have (mostly through the help of Christina and Max) been able to boil them down to something vaguely meaningful-- I think.

My goal is to create new interaction methods that help people better understand their lives through their own personal information. My research integrates knowledge from computer science, cognitive psychology and design to investigate ways better utilize our past experiences to encourage self-reflection and to improve an individual's ability to make informed life decisions.

I am motivated by the problem of the "interrupt-driven lifestyle'' caused by the constant demands placed on us by today's instant ubiquitous digital communications. The effects of this lifestyle--stress, disorganization, and feelings of inundation--are correlated with a lack of self-understanding suggesting a need for more informed self-reflection. Modern-day personal information technology, however, has been designed to optimize productivity rather than self-understanding and often aggravates this situation rather than improves it. In my research, I seek to change the focus of personal information management as follows: rather than helping people accomplish tasks faster, I work to help them understand how to make better decisions about which tasks are important to them and how to accomplish these more effectively.

My research project will allow people to easily access and understand their personal histories in minute detail through summaries and statistical visualizations from their activity data. Much in the same way that Google search and Wikipedia have allowed us to quickly access seemingly infinite knowledge about the world around us, my project will enable us to reference our individual past in a variety of ways. The backbone of this system is a real-world model created by bringing together information about a users friends and activities from the web, life-tracking services and personal devices. Among the many potential uses, this enables context-aware personal information retrieval-- such as gathering your notes and emails for a client meeting or quickly glancing over the past year to see how well you stuck to a new years resolution. My hope is to create systems that are so intuitive to use, adaptive and embedded in day-to-day activities that users will access them instinctively.

Does this make sense to anyone else? How might it be improved or clarified?

Since people naturally use narrative to convey past events to others, we thought that allowing Poyozo to represent captured user activity data in textual narrative form would allow this data to be more immediately meaningful and evocative. This led us devise PLAN, a notation which, like the proposed activitystrea.ms format is used to express sequences of sensed activities, but which is designed for human-consumption as well– specifically, it is designed to be easy for people to read, edit, and author. Reducing the barrier to authoring and editing captured data is important to the system because it enables users to effectively engage in a dialog with the system, fixing erroneous sensor data, supplementing activity logs with new data (sensor-unobservable) data, and deleting undesired records.

PLANs syntactically look like meeting agendas: each PLAN is an ordered sequence of consecutive events under a common “episode” (short period of time, analogous to a meeting), where each event consists of a timestamp, optional subject, action (predicate), object, and optional duration. When the subject is omitted, the user’s own self is implied; this allows entries to remain succinct and easy to read. Example PLAN sequences and full spec coming soon.

Raw captured activity logs generated by sensors often are extremely detailed and voluminous; the sheer quantity of such entries often makes reading PLANs tedious and overwhelming. For example, Poyozo captures every action performed by the user as s/he navigates the web, including querying search engines, switching tabs, and intermediate pages viewed while seeking information.

Thus instead of dumping raw activity logs as PLANs, Poyozo generates PLANs as responses to queries which can restrict and filter which events are selected in various ways. Queries can select events by subject (user performing the action), action type, or object that the action is being performed upon. Furthermore, queries can be set to include only events that take more than a certain duration, or which exceed a combined uniqueness-importance measure analogous to TF-IDF for document retrieval. For filters with thresholds, Poyozo provides a graphical slider which can be used to interactively expand or restrict returned results.

created in collaboration with Max Van Kleek

The web, personal computers and instant ubiquitous digital communications have brought unprecedented constant demands on our attention. As a result, people do not spend as much time thinking, reflecting upon situations, decisions and activities as they used to. As a consequence, people feel less organized, and often lack the situational clarity to make informed decisions. We present an ongoing project, Poyozo, designed to make self-reflection an integral part of daily personal information management activity, and to provide facilities for fostering greater self-understanding through exploration of captured personal activity logs. We describe an application that visualizes such personal activity logs using many available “life-tracking” tools, and uses visual and textual PIM metaphors to convey this information in a familiar way that is personally relevant and meaningful.

One day detail view of the Poyozo calendar in text mode(a) using PLAN to show a list of the most significant events occurring on that day, and graphs mode(b) allowing users to correlate events and activity statistics.

Poyozo uses automatically captured activity logs to promote self-understanding by contextualizing self-refection within common PIM practice, and by using visual and textual PIM metaphors to convey this information in a familiar way that is personally relevant and meaningful. Furthermore, we demonstrate that many of the various ``life-tracking'' tools available today provide a simple means of heterogeneous activity tracking without need for additional sensing or infrastructure. The ultimate goal of the system is to determine whether appropriately summarizing and presenting a user's captured activity data, can have a positive effect on his or her ability to make informed decisions, self-image, perceived quality of life.

for a more detailed explanation see our CHI2010 workshop submission here
created in collaboration with Max Van Kleek, David Karger and mc schrafel

Today, we rely increasingly on the Web for a multitude of everyday activities that run the gamut from simple queries to complex social interactions. As a result, our browsing patterns are starting to reflect the intricate and multi-faceted nature of our daily lives, but web browsers retain little of the nuanced richness of this information beyond simple “page histories” of previously visited sites. Analytics providers such as Google and Alexa regularly collect statistics of browsing activity, but such analytics are sitecentric and not clustered around individual end-users. Moreover, despite the social nature of web browsing, individuals have little awareness of what others are looking at and how often; while sites like del.icio.us facilitate social exploration, they focus on what people choose to share rather than on their actual habits.

When we created Eyebrowse, we sought to allow users to capture their web browsing activity to examine whether it could help them better understand how they and their friends use the web. Specifically, Eyebrows allowed people to examine long term patterns in their web browsing activity and facilitates sharing, comparison, and increased social awareness of browsing patterns among friends. and finally, to form a public, democratized corpus of web browsing data for the research community. So, how much are people willing to share, and how does sharing impact the web browsing experiences and habits of the individual?

After three weeks, we have over 200 users sharing selected portions of their web browsing activity. We surveyed some of them and found that public web browsing was most useful to them for seeing socially derived information in context of their own web browsing activity and for viewing other users profiles for the purposes of social awareness and information discovery. Almost all users reported social- or work-related privacy concerns and their comments indicated a fear of being misrepresented by their web browsing activity. To help cope with this we are considering implementing a ‘greylist’ that would hide specific page titles, but track overall activity and multiple whitelists, such as one for home, and one for work.


We plan to continue to grow Eyebrowse into a service that supports social browsing through collaborative filtering and other crowd-sourcing techniques, promotes self-awareness among users of both the patterns in their browsing activities, and provides researchers with useful web browsing data without violating the users’ privacy sensibilities.

Thanks to all our users and supporters! We were recently featured on infosthetics!

This post can also be found on the MIT CSAIL Haystack Blog

“Man is least in himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
- Oscar Wilde

Enter the anonymous, masked, world of 4chan. A world full of racism, gay bashing, to gays bashing gays and fathers asking for pictures of girls their daughter's age. Horrifying? Weird? Why? Fascinating! The community is creative without any named creators. Its close to transparent as you can get, and yet it still holds onto solid beliefs. The freedom to live a complete moral fiction is something niche communities have tried to achieve, but masked behind screens and keyboards, anonymous masked interaction can be taken to a whole new level. 4chan is a truly blank virtual world, with none of the rules and regulations of the former.

A real world example of masked communities: Someone on the top of a building about to jump. If the audience is a small local group, people will generally abide by social norms and encourage the person to step back. But, if the group below is so large that the individuals in the crowd are 'masked' so to speak, people will begin to yell, 'jump,' 'do it' etc. Interesting, scary, but interesting. Now, how does this translate online?

With the opportunity to ignore cultural moralities 4chan has invented its own. It is perhaps the 1st social community with enough unique characteristics to be declared the 1st online civilization. 4chan may be an amoral place but we are living in some amazing wonderful times when people have the freedom to easily redefine who the are and self organize however they please, as long as it's for the LULZ, of course.