Though obscured by the hype, one valuable aspect of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is a backlash against such feature-laden software. For the sake of convenience, I’m going to call this idea “feature frugality”.

Feature frugality should be a critical consideration for all software developers. Why? Because every feature carries additional cost, and that cost must have some corresponding benefit for the end user.

What does an additional feature cost? Well, most obviously, they cost development time. They also cost requirements definition and QA/testing time. Then there’s time supporting users when there are inevitably bugs in the code written to implement that extra feature. Even ignoring bugs, there is additional time to adequately document how to use the extra feature and perhaps even teaching or training users.

With all that investment of time and money, the need for there to be a benefit for users should be self-evident. Keep in mind, however, that it can be valid for the end-user benefit to be indirect: e.g., a feature that (ethically) gathers metrics on user interactions might not have any direct and immediate benefit to the user of the software, but might help a company better understand how people actually use their software, and allow them to focus their development efforts on better supporting common tasks in future releases.

The bottom line is that features need to earn their place in a product. Developers and software companies need to carefully consider and be able to justify the inclusion of each and every feature in their software.

You will contribute to software engineering, R&D and commercialisation activities within our small but highly productive team carrying out leading-edge research in the area of information engineering and the development of advanced search and delivery technology. This role will have a particular focus on mobile phone and PDA technology.

A degree in Software Engineering or a related discipline is essential; an honours degree or higher qualification would be an advantage, but not essential.

We need you to demonstrate excellent programming expertise in at least Java (preferably other languages too), familiarity with Web services, and preferably have exposure to mobile phone or PDA software development platforms. The development
projects underway need you to work on both research prototypes and on commercial products. Your willingness to provide technical support, an ability to write high quality documentation, and a capacity to talk to customers are important.

Finally, you should enjoy working in teams, be honest, trustworthy, and ethical, with an ability to contribute creative ideas to our projects.

For further details, selection criteria and to apply for this position, please visit: http://recruitment.csiro.au/asp/job_details.asp?RefNo=2006/63

If you have any questions about this position, please post a comment here, or feel free to email me (Andrew.Lampert@csiro.au).

The workshop includes two invited talks from internationally-recognised researchers in multimodality: Professor Sharon Oviatt from the Oregon Health and Science University, and Professor Francis Quek from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

In the interests of information sharing, it is a condition of receipt of a travel bursary that the student should provide a poster describing their current research project.

The closing date for applications for bursaries is Friday August 26th 2005. Those interested should send an email to the HCSNet Convenor (Professor Robert Dale) at rdale at ics.mq.edu.au.

HCSNet aims to bring together researchers and students through workshops, conferences, and a variety of collaboration schemes in order to explore the boundaries of disciplines that encompass human communication. As a guide, this includes fields as diverse as psychology, computing, linguistics, engineering, philosophy and music.

Being a participant gives you access to an increasing number of funding programs (including funding for running interdisciplinary workshops and seminars) and events that are run under the auspices of the network. There’s some really good stuff coming up, including the NICTA/HCSNet MultiModel User Interaction Workshop (free registration thanks to HCSNet funding!), so join up and you’ll get the weekly HCSNet newsletter that will keep you informed …

You can find out more about our work or about the CSIRO ICT Centre here.

Interested? Check out the position description for more information about the position, and to apply.

Enrico and his team have done some very well-grounded, practical research, development and evaluation around the use of decision support and information access tools for clinicians. He gave some interesting statistics of the dimension of the problems faced in the clinical domain:

• Clinicians do not pursue answers for up to 70% of the questions that arise during routine care, partly because they are time-poor, but also because they have poor query formulation skills.
• The number of scientific articles doubles at 1 to 15 year intervals – growth is exponential.
• A new article is added to the medical literature every 26 seconds
• Clinicians have more questions than they look for answers – up to 6 per patient encounter. They only pursue answers in about a third of cases, and spend about 2 minutes searching for an answer.

Another problem is that clinicians’ knowledge decays with years since graduation, and research in learning theory suggests that it is in-context, on the job learning/training that most effectively combats this knowledge decay.

Suffice to say, there are real and growing problems in the clinical domain regarding access to and use of information for diagnosing and treating patients. Firstly, there’s a classic case of information overload, as evidenced by some of the statistics quoted above. Secondly clinicians can’t simply ignore this massive stream of new information, since their own knowledge is insufficient and decays over time. Finally, given the clinical focus, the problems are compounded by their context, where the cost of wrong information or a lack of the right information can mean the difference between life and death.

Clearly, there is a reasonable amount of evidence that suggests there is a place for in-context information access and decision support tools that can fit in with clinicians’ workflow and socio-technical environment, to give them a better ability to frame questions and retrieve evidence-based answers from a variety of authoritative medical data sources. This proposition has a neat and interesting correlation with our own work in information delivery, where we’re very concerned with providing only relevant information to the right people in a form that suits their particular task and interaction context. Enrico has done quite extensive evaluation on the effectiveness of their fairly simple, information retrieval-based decision support tools, and found that they can make a real difference to the correctness and confidence of clinical decision making.

I’m heartened by a few aspects of Enrico’s talk in particular:

• There are other people out there cares about contextual delivery of information to help people achieve their tasks
• Even some simple knowledge about users, their tasks and their information needs can provide a significant benefit over non-contextualised information retrieval and delivery
• There are people dedicating time and resources to address the inescapable (and scary!) fact that about 17% of hospital admissions result in an “adverse event”, 5% of which result in patient death. There are many indicators that suggest this is often due to poor information, and as summarised above, that we can make a significant difference by addressing the information needs of clinicians.

I’m sure I’m not alone in hoping I don’t have to be in hospital before they’ve got some of these information access and delivery problems sorted out!