First, I wanted to give readers a heads up that I’ll be in Seattle this Friday and Saturday. I’ll spend Friday afternoon at the University of Washington, meeting with some of their outstanding computer science doctoral students. My schedule filled up with unexpected haste! But if you’re on campus and urgently want [...]

This is the season of annual reviews, at least at LinkedIn. Performance reviews can be daunting for both employees and managers — at least everywhere that I’ve worked. Not only are we as human beings terrible at delivering feedback, but we also receive bad advice as managers. For example, many of us have learned the [...]

Information Scent In the early 1990s, PARC researchers Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card developed the theory of information scent (more generally, information foraging) to evaluate user interfaces in terms of how well users can predict which paths will lead them to useful information. Like many HCIR researchers and practitioners, I’ve found this model to be [...]

The Fifth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR 2011), held on October 20th at Google’s main campus in Mountain View, California, was a resounding success. We has almost a hundred people, presenting a wide array of papers, posters, and challenge entries. You can read my summary of the event in an earlier blog post: “HCIR 2011: We [...]

I’ve posted slides and summaries for all ten CIKM 2011 Industry Event presentations: Stephen Robertson (Microsoft Research): Why Recall Matters John Giannandrea (Google): Freebase – A Rosetta Stone for Entities Jeff Hammerbacher (Cloudera): Experiences Evolving a New Analytical Platform: What Works and What’s Missing Khalid Al-Kofahi (Thomson Reuters): Combining Advanced Technology and Human Expertise in [...]