Steven Drucker: Dealing With Your Digital Stuff: From Personal Collections to Information Visualization

Friday, October 11, 2013 - 1:00pm
Location: 
32 G449 Patil/Kiva
Speaker: 
Dr. Steven Drucker
Biography: 
Dr. Steven M. Drucker is a Principal Researcher and manager of the VUE group in VIBE at Microsoft Research (MSR) focusing on human computer interaction for dealing with large amounts of information. He is also an affiliate professor at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department. In the past he has been a Principal Scientist in the LiveLabs Research Group at Microsoft where he headed the Information Experiences Group working on user interaction and information visualization for web based projects; a Lead Researcher in the Next Media Research Group examining how the addition of user interaction transforms conventional media; and Lead Researcher in the Virtual Worlds Group creating a platform for multi-user virtual environments.

George Carlin once famously talked about 'stuff'...
That's all I want, that's all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know? I can see it on your table; everybody's got a little place for their stuff. This is my stuff, that's your stuff, that'll be his stuff over there. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house.
But now our 'stuff' is digital and there's more of it than ever. It comes in the form of photos, music, presentations, tweets, web pages, email, documents and data in an endless variety of other forms. How can we organize our stuff? Find it? Browse it? Make sense of it? Show it to other people? We explore a variety of projects, from photo collection organizers to assisted clustering systems, all with interfaces inspired by principles of information visualization, and find some common techniques for dealing with our digital 'stuff'.