As per my previous post, I had a great time at the O’Reilly Strata Conference. It was a delight to participate in such a fantastic gathering of folks who work with big data. For those who missed my session, I’ve attached the slides that Claire and I presented. Some of the slides don’t make sense without [...]

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I spent the last three days at the O’Reilly Strata Conference, an assembly of two thousand over 2500 people focused on data science and its applications. While I’m wary of industry conferences from attending vendor-fests in my past life in the enterprise software world, Strata is an exceptionally good conference. The speakers were a who’s who of data [...]

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My excursion to Seattle was delightful, and I thought I’d share some details with readers. I spent most of Friday at the University of Washington, meeting with graduating PhD students.  I’ve always known that UW is a top school, but I was particularly impressed with this batch. I was pleasantly surprised to see folks like [...]

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      First, I wanted to give readers a heads up that I’ll be in Seattle this Friday and Saturday. I’ll spend Friday afternoon at the University of Washington, meeting with some of their outstanding computer science doctoral students. My schedule filled up with unexpected haste! But if you’re on campus and urgently want [...]

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As regular readers know, I have a deep affection for Carnegie Mellon University, where I did my graduate work. I’m happy to announce that two of my colleagues (both fellow CMU PhDs) will be giving talks at CMU in a couple of weeks, and I hope that some of you will have the opportunities to [...]

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This is the season of annual reviews, at least at LinkedIn. Performance reviews can be daunting for both employees and managers — at least everywhere that I’ve worked. Not only are we as human beings terrible at delivering feedback, but we also receive bad advice as managers. For example, many of us have learned the [...]

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Let me preface this post by saying that this is my personal blog, and that my opinions here are not necessarily those of my employer. With that out of the way, I love the premise of Hitch.me: a dating site for professionals based on LinkedIn. I won’t confirm or deny the number of my colleagues [...]

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Information Scent In the early 1990s, PARC researchers Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card developed the theory of information scent (more generally, information foraging) to evaluate user interfaces in terms of how well users can predict which paths will lead them to useful information. Like many HCIR researchers and practitioners, I’ve found this model to be [...]

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Every year brings its own adventures, but for me 2011 will be a tough act to follow. A year ago, I’d just started working at LinkedIn, and my biggest concern was selling our apartment in Brooklyn so that my family could join me in California. Little did I imagine that my new manager, who had just recruited me [...]

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The Fifth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR 2011), held on October 20th at Google’s main campus in Mountain View, California, was a resounding success. We has almost a hundred people, presenting a wide array of papers, posters, and challenge entries. You can read my summary of the event in an earlier blog post: “HCIR 2011: We [...]

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