This past weekend, I read one of Matt Might’s recent posts, and, as it always happens, was immediately inspired to Seize the Day, Suck Out the Marrow of Life, and so on, but in the largely sedentary manner common to computer scientists. So, that very day, Michael and I spent all day making a lightweight photo management web app! Fun. Related: I finally got a reasonable computer to work on at home, a 17.3” Toshiba laptop that is almost literally twice the size and speed of my previous PC and barely fits into my backpack and oh golly do I love it.

Though I’ve really taken to this whole writing a blog post about my shenanigans every quarter of grad school thing, I’ve been pretty busy after the Fall quarter ended. First, I worked toward a research paper that I then submitted last Friday, so the fall term felt finished a whole week into the following quarter. And then actual busy-ness of the second quarter rolled around, so I’ve been putting off writing one of these.

So, anyway, Fall quarter. Lots of stuff!

• Science and the Public: took an incredible UW seminar about communicating science to the public, culminating in an upcoming talk at Town Hall Seattle in March, 2012 right after someone whose book I was halfway through reading when I found out about the scheduling, so wow. Also, I attended a really great talk about open science.
• Conferences: Grace Hopper Celebration, in Portland, (thank you, Google Anita Borg scholarship!) and UIST, in Santa Barbara.
• Outreach: went to a high school for CSEdWeek toward the end of the quarter
• Reading: read a bunch of books on my new Kindle Fire (yay! now I can carry my reading material!) and made serious progress on a novel I’m pretty excited about

Also, I took the Algorithms class and made great progress on my research (resulting in the aforementioned paper). To top it all off, my fabulous parents came up for a week during the break to visit Seattle-land for their first time! A tremendous time was had by all and I will be posting some resulting recommendations for Impressing People While Cold and Damp.

All these activities have been really challenging, especially the ones that involved talking in front of people. But it was also my most fun and productive quarter, so I’ve decided to go and challenge the crap out of myself this quarter by doing more talks, working on several research projects at once, and all the while taking the Programming Language class wherein I shall learn to wield the mighty OCaml, a language beloved, or at least really liked, by my ranting role model Steve Yegge.

Because I have now officially convinced myself that the way to feel happy and accomplished is to do at least one thing, every day, that scares you.

A few of my favorite parts are below (emphasis mine), but you can check out the full original Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) lyrics.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t.

Dance. Even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

Last spring, I took a class where my group studied a few introductory Russian classrooms to inform the potential for technology in the language-learning classroom. A few weeks ago, we pushed forward and submitted our findings to CHI2012.

Data and final write-up from the qualitative study

During the summer, I worked with Srini Bangalore through an internships at AT&T Research Labs on a system that made the output of machine translation interactive (read more about the project…). I will continue to work on this project, as an AT&T Labs Fellow.

Click to read about the details of my summer project at AT&T...

It was definitely a change of pace to get into the mire of programming and working with machine translation toolkits to put the system together. For the coming quarter, I am working on implementing some feedback mechanisms to learn from, and improve, the interaction editing process.

From a talk at the end of the summer: "This diagram? Yeah, it's the thing I made."

Nevertheless, my interest in how to engage students learning foreign languages using technology is closely bound to my motivations behind working on interactive machine translation. I am increasingly excited about the potential of collaboratively interacting with complicated, foreign text as a way of exploring the intertwined nature of language and culture. If prior work has shown that visually-supported interaction enables people who don’t speak a language to translate it into a language they know well, can I explore the benefits of this process for those users who are not expert translators?

Travel

Besides working on a fantastically interesting topic all summer, I also went places. First of all, I was in Madison, New Jersey for the AT&T internship. I stayed at a dorm in a local university, so in addition to meeting lots of fantastic people, I got to relive the glories of undergrad past.

I also went to NYC a few times; the most awesome visit was to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when there was an Alexander McQueen special exhibit going on. The exhibit itself was huge and really well put together, and it really helped that Alexander McQueen is one of my favorite contemporary artists. I also went to the Guggenheim when they had a whole lot more of Kandinsky than I’d ever seen in one place, and it was mind-blowing. It was particularly fun to go to the museums with my awesome parents who drove down from Pittsburgh and whom I hadn’t seen for a while.

Because of winning the Anita Borg Memorial scholarship, I went to San Francisco for a few days for the Google Scholars’ Retreat, which was a fantastic opportunity to meet a ton of brilliant people, attend inspiring talks, and bathe in the glory of the majestic Googleplex.

What’s Next?

The coming, Fall quarter, I am taking an algorithms class as well as a seminar on communicating science to the public, which I am incredibly excited about. The seminar will culminate in open-to-the-public lectures Winter of 2012. Of course, I will also continue to research interactive machine translation.

This part quarter, I gave my first conference talk, did a lot of work on a qualitative study of foreign language-learning classrooms, and got ready to head off the AT&T for the summer as part of my fellowship there.

First Conference Talk

This was indeed an eventful quarter. First, I gave my very first talk at a conference. It was CHI2011, a major Human-Computer Interaction conference, and I presented work on how people with chronic Lyme disease navigate conflicting and uncertain information online (general summary; in the press).

The conference was in Vancouver, BC, which was fun. Michael, who also attended and was a student volunteer, and I went to Stanley Park and the aquarium before leaving. The weather was gorgeous on the last day, so it was a lot of fun. I hope to post some pictures one of these days.

On the weirder side of things, I got carded by another customer at a bar. By the time this person from another table joined ours, we had had some beer, and were feeling jolly. The other customer was rather jolly as well, and proceeded to insist that I looked 15 years old, and it’s doesn’t even matter, they just gotta know.

Research, etc.

Throughout last quarter, I continued to work on my previous research, which now involves a more general toolkit for prototyping web search interfaces augmented with visualizations or learned properties. Additionally, I worked on a high school outreach “roadshow,” to spread the joy of Computer Science. There was much planning and we did go to one high school and present there. That was loads of fun, and I can only hope to keep doing it!

The rest of the quarter was dedicated to a very intense Qualitative Research Methods course, during which my team observed and interviewed students in introductory foreign-language courses. This was both classwork and part of my research now; I had been wanting to do some qualitative study before delving into technology design. This class, taught by Charlotte Lee here at the UW, was fabulous, since it guided us through a much bigger project that I could have possibly been able to pull of on my own.

We ended up producing a behemoth of a deliverable:

Those are all double-sided. Our data - typed-up observation fieldnotes and interview transcripts - totals just over 500 pages. That's excluding coding, memos, analysis notes, and the final paper!

On the basis of this analysis and data, we constructed a grounded theory (^.^) of factors that influence students social behaviors in a foreign-language classroom. This fruit of our labor was handed in yesterday, which leads to this wonderful feeling I have: that the quarter is over!

AT&T Research Summer Internship

Now (since June 6th) I am interning at AT&T Research as part my AT&T Labs Research Fellowship and working with Srinivas Bangalore on creating an interactive machine translation system, tentatively dubbed Choice Words, that presents users with options that can feed back into the translation model. I’m really excited about it, and the first few days seem promising, knock on wood. I’m still recovering from the rapid transition from Busy in Seattle, WA to Busy in Florham Park, NJ, but I hope to see me some sights, and generally enjoy the lovely summer, soon.