Every Wednesday I get the privilege to attend HCI lunches here at Stanford where a mishmash of scholars, professors, and students meet over lunch to watch someone's presentation on research (and proceed to tear it apart). It does result in some interesting discussions - yesterday being no exception - and I thought I'd share some thoughts on this elusive idea of "serendipity".
Terri Winograd, one of the luminaries in the field, put it succinctly when he said that
serendipity is to data as intuitive is to a user interface
What is intuitive for you may not be to me, just as serendipity cannot be quantified per se as a quality of some data. In this particular context, serendipity remains one of Monica Lam's holy grails - how might one sift through the masses of data we manufacture each day and reveal the ones that are particularly "serendipitous"? Jesse
the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for
Other sources inevitably include terms like "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise". Hence the keywords there are
a) "something that is useful or creates some sense of pleasure or happiness"
We can definitely cater to b) with what we have: tf-idf, in its roughest sense, provides some measure of information quality relative to rarity. Algorithms such as LDA
In that sense I feel the approach of creating serendipity by surfacing past data is inherently problematic. I do acknowledge the fact that getting better access to our past can be interesting (and serendipitous), but it hardly a worthwhile challenge. We may choose to omit certain aspects of our past history specifically because we don't want to be reminded of them - how would a system be able to discern that fact? Is Facebook's "People You May Know" feature one that uncovers "serendipity"? Are other people better arbiters of "soulful data" than algorithms will ever be?
Let me enumerate things that make me happy especially if this is something that can be provided to me online (without my explicit, active participation):
a) finding a long-lost friendseeing videos of cats
It's clearer now why websites like Reddit and Facebook succeed, because the narrow circles of individuals we associate are likely to provide us with those happy discoveries (this, as opposed to the worries of the echo chamber
Ultimately I think any system that attempts to pursue the notion of surfacing soulful data needs to be reminded of the fact that there needs to be a clear and transparent method for communicating how that data is derived and ultimately chosen for display. Also, there is a very fine line between letting people "search" for this data and providing it at the opportune moment. Maybe that is the key question: what is the opportune moment to provide someone with information? The most basic answer to that would be: "when they are searching for it". We can definitely do better.
In short:
a) surface information that a user cannot or would rather not spend the effort to search for
Last quarter I had the opportunity to participate in one of Stanford's newest education initiatives, db-class and ai-class.
Every Wednesday I get the privilege to attend HCI lunches here at Stanford where a mishmash of scholars, professors, and students meet over lunch to watch someone's presentation on research (and proceed to tear it apart).
I had the opportunity to visit the Design With The Other 90% exhibit at the United Nations lobby today and it was a stark reminder about how so much is happening around the world that I must not to lose touch with, and I think one of the more powerful insights I gained was how so many cities around the world are making successful transitions to more efficient people transportation in ways that have so much positive ripple effects.
Haptico is a little app that I made over Christmas break that lets your phone tell you if you're headed in the right direction without having to take out the phone.
It's taken me a week to get my thoughts together about what 2012 may bring us, but here's to a ritual that I've kept up for the better part of a decade.
On January 13, 2005, I purchased chronicled.org from Globat.com, and it entered registration 3 days later.
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