Smart Home User Study

I am gathering data for my PhD work and I’d really appreciate if you’d take a survey on smart homes. Initial participants have completed in the survey in five to 30 minutes. The survey will be open until Friday August 14, 2009. Please take a few minutes for the survey now:

Help me out and influence the future of aware homes! Not to overstate this project, but your participation is singly the most important thing you can do with your life so please do yourself a favor and take the survey!

If you know of anyone else who would be interested in taking part of this exciting research, please pass the link along. Here’s our official email recruitment letter:

Professor Christine Julien and PhD student Seth Holloway from The University of Texas at Austin are studying smart homes and we want to hear from you! Anyone over the age of 18 is encouraged to participate.

This purpose of this study is to discover how the general populace conceives of smart homes. We hope to gather a baseline level for research in a fundamentally new approach to interacting with smart homes. The goals of this research are to support the development of intuitive interfaces for everyone with the hope of providing vastly more efficient and effective means of interacting with the home. Your assistance will help us advance this exciting new research area!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=sHs4AQr15nT5jnRzmhJiwA_3d_3d

We expect each study to take approximately 30 minutes. Anyone over the age of 18 is encouraged to participate. Your opinion is highly valued and greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Christine Julien and Seth Holloway

Andrea’s Adventures

My lovely wife, Andrea Holloway, has started her blog in preparation for her journey to Thailand. She will be teaching English overseas under the CIEE organization.

Yesterday, Andrea received her placement information! She will be teaching at the Mahidol Wittayanusorn school located in Nakhon Pathom (55km west of Bangkok, duh). Nakhon Pathom is a little off the beaten path, but it looks lovely. We are excited!

Check out her blog for continuing updates on a young adult making a real impact in a foreign nation.

Phra Pathom Chedi

Software Engineering Genealogy

I recently discovered the Software Engineering Academic Genealogy. For those outside the ivory tower, this genealogy mirrors standard human breeding records. In the not-so-distant future I will be an indentation under Christine Julien, below Gruia-Catalin Roman. Standard genealogical terms apply in the academic version as well; for example, Christine is my academic parent.

Just as in humans, breed history can be an important determination of future success. A descendant of a well-known researcher will have high expectations to perform like their academic ancestor, but this is also a great way to position oneself for the job one desires. For example, if you want to be a professor, ensure that your advisor has graduated other students who became faculty. Unfortunately, this way of thinking favors older professors and can make it hard for new faculty to establish themselves despite their fresh ideas and tenacity. As with humans, genealogy comes with no guarantees! Individuals create their own track records. An advisor’s personality and research should play into the perspective student’s decision. Find an interesting topic and do it well!

While we’re on the subject, another fun genealogical term borrowed by scholars is “academic imbreeding” or “academic incest” which refers to the taboo practice of hiring people from the host university.

And that concludes today’s lecture. Visit me in my office hours if you have any questions. Have a nice weekend!

Holloway Trading

Interested in antiques? My parents have opened an antiques business. They are selling pieces from their impressive collection as well as providing restoration and repair services. Check them out at Holloway Trading!

One visual, all of America’s energy

As I’ve said before, I’m a sucker for effective visualizations. In this age of “energy independence” I was really taken aback by this visual: the energy generation, transmission, and consumption in the U.S. Given the complexity of the information and sheer volume of data to present, I think this visual does an excellent job. (Other interesting visuals are available on the Lawrence Livermore site here. Thanks to Drew for sharing this with me.)

U.S. Energy Generation, Transmission, and Consumption

Notice how little energy alternative sources are producing. Also, notice that we’re losing a ton of energy to transmission. In fact, if we could halve transmission losses we could eliminate all imports.

Does anything else stand out to you? More notable points than mine? Is the graphic missing data that you would like to see? Is energy independence truly achievable?

Putting humans to good use

I shared this on my Google Reader, but I’d like to more formally share Luis Von Ahn’s great talk on the recaptcha.

http://vonahn.blogspot.com/2009/06/speaking-at-library-of-congress.html

The talk covers the basics of a CAPTCHA (the hard-to-read words that verify you are human when signing up for online accounts) then discusses the recaptcha. The recaptcha pairs two random English words together so it can yield some funky phrases such as the “desert voter” shown below. (Watch the video for much better pairings!) The recaptcha uses one known word and one word that cannot be read by a machine. By distributing the otherwise unreadable word to multiple people, von Ahn is able to effortlessly digitize the written word. I respect and admire the ingenuity here. Dr. von Ahn simultaneously repels spammers and digitizes books!

Recaptcha

This work provides two great insights to me: (1) humans are still better than computers at some things and (2) harnessing intelligence in a scalable way can have dramatic results. Want to make a mint? Figure out how to harness humans’ idle/unproductive time.

Airline Seating: A 3-way optimization

Over the weekend I went to Florida for a family reunion. Overall, I had a wonderful time; the biggest inconvenience was travel. Airports and air transportation are awful. It baffles me that everyone I talk to agrees (surely this sentiment is mirrored by more than the tens of people I’ve spoken to), yet there are no improvements or innovations. I understand airplanes cost enormous amounts of money and there is a mountain of bureaucracy, but that does not placate me. On our most recent flight it occurred to me that airline seating is a 3-way optimization, yet no system mirrors the thought process. Seating is all about the location! There are three specific concerns:

• Sitting with specific people (people)
• Sitting in a specific location relative to the entire plane (location)
• Sitting in a specific location relative to the row (seat)

A fair system would allow people to rank their priorities, then the system can simultaneously satisfy the highest number of people. This may seem a little abstract so allow me to illustrate with an example; here’s my ideal:

• High Priority. People: I want to sit with Andrea Holloway
• Medium Priority. Seat: I want to sit on the aisle
• Low Priority. Location: I want to sit over the wing

Why doesn’t this simple system exist? Am I right about the three categories? How would you prioritize?

World Relgions Visual

I’m a fan of effective visuals. I’m also a fan of world religions. Boy, was I in luck whenever I received this link! It’s a rather interesting perspective on how different religions generally feel about a few hot-button issues.

World Relgions Compared

source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pseudoplacebo/2330148551/sizes/o/

Going just on these issues, could one’s beliefs align more strongly with a religion other than their own? Does your self-described religion share your beliefs on these issues? Are there more important issues to you?

Working with LaTeX: See all your citations

UPDATE

J.P. Knight left a much easier solution in the comments. If you want to see all of your citations the easy way, simply put the \nocite{*} command into your latex file as seen below.

\documentclass[11pt]{report}
\usepackage{natbib}
\bibpunct{(}{)}{;}{a}{,}{,}
\begin{document}
\bibliographystyle{apalike}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{proposal}    %% your bib file name here
\end{document}

I’m currently writing my dissertation (technically my proposal) in LaTeX (think Microsoft Word without the WYSIWYG interface). As I’m searching for citations, I am overwhelmed at the number of sources in my bibtex file. Rather than staring at the bland, perhaps bloated, syntax with curly braces, spaces, and commas, I created a little script that would let me see how the citations will look in the paper–in a nice PDF bibliography. Here, I present seeAllCitations.sh which takes in your bibtex file as an argument and creates a file with all of your potential citations. After the script completes, just “compile” the file as you normally would and open the resulting pdf/dvi.

#!/bin/sh

# Check input for one argument
if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
echo “Please input your .bib file as an argument”
echo “Example: ./seeAllCitations.sh proposal.bib”
exit 1
fi

#  Create the file
echo “Creating seeAllCitations.tex that will allow you to see all citations.”

# Create a simple tex file that will include citations
echo “\documentclass[11pt]{report}
\usepackage{cite}
\usepackage{url}
\\\begin{document}
\n
All citations from $1 shown below
\n
%% Begin citations” > seeCitations.tex

cat $1 |grep @ |sed s/^@.*{/\\\\\\cite{/ |sed s/,.*$/}\\\\\\\\/ >> seeCitations.tex

echo “%% End citations
\n
\\\bibliographystyle{abbrv}
\\\bibliography{$1}
\n
\\\end{document}” >> seeCitations.tex

# Process completed
echo “Process completed. Enjoy!”
echo “Confused about what to do next? Create the document. For example:
pdflatex seeCitations.tex
bibtex seeCitations.tex
pdflatex seeCitations.tex
open seeCitations.pdf”
exit 0

See any mistakes? Was that at all helpful? Do you have a different (read: better) method for checking your citations?

Happy 4th of July!

I hope everyone has an enjoyable Independence Day