Using Context to Deliver Useful Information to People
As Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, once said, Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant
.
On September 19th, I will be presenting a seminar to the NSW branch of CHISIG - the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia – about our research in CSIRO that focuses on controlling the flow of information to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time in the right form.
Our research approaches the problem by using knowledge about users and their interaction to tailor the information that is gathered and to present it appropriately. The context information that is captured and reasoned about can include user preferences and characteristics, as well as details of a user’s current task, their previous history of interaction and their environment. This context can determine which information should be retrieved, and how that content should be aggregated, organised, and presented, in order to best support the user.
My presentation will cover work that builds on concepts and techniques from a variety of different fields, including: natural language generation, information extraction, information retrieval, discourse analysis, user modelling, task analysis and HCI, so if any of those topics spark interest (and you happen to be in Sydney) you might consider coming along to PTG Global on Tuesday 19th.
Invention versus Innovation
I work in a research organisation where the word innovation
is thrown around with gay abandon, especially by management folks. We’re under constant pressure to be inventing and innovating, though the two words are often used interchangeably But, how should we judge when innovation has occurred? What about invention? What’s the difference?
In the midst of their recent article on “Innovation as Language Action” in CACM, Peter Denning and Robert Dunham propose an answer that I find both simple and compelling: innovation occurs where we observe that a group or community has adopted a new practice. Invention is something different – it means to create something new, but it does not require that anyone accept or adopt it.
I should also point out that Denning and Dunham’s article is interesting for many other reasons than the distinction it draws between innovation and invention. In particular, their work takes inspiration from the earlier work of Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores (whose ideas are very influential in my own research), in looking at the specific skills and steps involved in taking new technology inventions into the broader market from a language-action perspective.
Innovation as the adoption of new practices seems nicely consistent with the ideas of Peter Drucker, who himself linked innovation to the adoption of new practices back in the 1950s. Of course, another definitional question that then arises is: what exactly is meant by practice
? Denning and Dunham suggest that practice
refers to habits, routines, and other forms of embodied recurrent actions taken without conscious thought, and to me this seems largely to capture the concept.
But is Denning and Dunham’s definition of innovation widely accepted?
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