ExaCt 2007 – A Workshop as it should be

This year’s workshop on Explanation-aware Computing at AAAI-07 was by far the best workshop I ever did. Everything just fit together perfectly. All participants were proactive, positive, and productive. So, thanks to all participants and my fellow organisers! I enjoyed the workshop very much. You will find the presentations soon at the workshop homepage.

I especially like to thank both invited speakers, Doug Walton and Bruce Porter. It was great having you there. Deborah McGuinness, who presented two papers and was, unfortunately, only able to attend on the first day, already accepted my invitation to give a talk at the next ExaCt workshop in 2008 (if time permits).

Besides plans for another workshop we also talked about a tutorial for further promoting explanation research. If you are interested in the topic you might want to join the Yahoo! group on explanation research. And keep an eye on the website on-explanation.net!

[composed and posted with ecto]

Regenerate

Teaching practical courses tend to become tedious, boring, repetitive. Each summer term I teach a practical course on knowledge management. The overall task is to build an information retrieval web application using some Java framework. The last exercise was to explain the retrieval results to the user. Practical courses rank quite low on a student’s priority list, which in turn is quite visible in the extent of their implementation results. The implementations are not generally of low quality, but the results are often just enough and not inspired one bit. Most of the time the applications are plain and dull. So taking the oral exams after each of the three main exercises usually is just that: plain and dull.

Yesterday, I finished this term’s practical course together with my colleague (Thanks, Christopher!). Two students, who already stood out in other courses, delivered a very interesting and beautiful GUI for their search engine. They especially took care of providing explanations in a visually entertaining and informative way by using, e.g., different font sizes that show the degree of matching terms in query and found document. They borrowed the visual metaphor from tag cloud representations and cleverly altered it for their needs. I immediately sent them to another colleague in order to let them inspire him

They really made my day and got me motivated again for future practical courses!

[composed and posted with ecto]

Design vs. Art

For quite some time now I am an avid reader of Maeda’s SIMPLICITY blog, a constant source of inspiration. But it took me nearly as long to buy his small book on “The Laws of Simplicity”. In many ways the book does not contain anything new to me (as I had been warned of). Most of its content I already have learned over time. But—you already saw this ‘but’ coming, don’t you?—it is necessary to be reminded of those things from time to time and to take your time reflecting on those experiences and lessons learned. What strikes me most is the concentrated and fresh view, interwoven with personal believes and insights, which in the end made it so accessible and easy to relate to. It was definitely a worthwhile read!

Over the last year my private and my research life—btw, for a scientist: can there be a difference between private and research life?—gravitates towards art and design (see, for example, my actual project proposal Mnemosyne). So, John Maeda’s differentiation of art from design struck a chord in me, helping me a great deal in grasping the concepts:

“The best art makes your head spin with question. Perhaps this is the fundamental distinction between pure art and pure design. While great art makes you wonder, great design makes things clear.” (“The Laws of Simplicity”, p. 70)

As a researcher, your head most of the time spins with questions. Viewing part of one’s research as art and some the resulting systems as art work could serve as a way of channelling questions. From those pieces of art one then can work towards design, towards making things clear. This viewpoints allows for more personal freedom in approaching complicated or overwhelming research questions. Look at the problem from a (probably naïve) artistic and fun point of view. Play with the research questions! Use your right, synthesis-oriented half of your brain instead of your left, more analytic half. The ten “laws” then help channel one’s efforts.

These are, by no means, breathtakingly new insights. Research work is always about asking questions and coming up with reproducible results and valid evaluations using the right tools and approved methods. But looking at research from an art/design viewpoint makes it a tad more interesting and a bit more fun, at least for me

[composed and posted with ecto]