I didn’t do a head count, but we had something like two dozen people in the room for this extremely animated SIG. We opened with a room-wide discussion about issues and barriers to interdisciplinary work, with people raising issues such as knowledge representation, coverage of literature and mentoring. We also came to a topic I had mused upon in the somewhat distant past: the meaning of words such as interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary.

With so many people in the room, we decided it was important to break off into groups in order to give people a better chance to make their voices heard. Our participants broke into three groups to continue the discussion grounded in real-world examples: we asked them to choose specific interdisciplinary projects which they felt had been successful, and discuss what factors they felt brought about that success. We closed the SIG with a discussion in which each group shared their conclusions with the whole room. As someone who was briefly involved in Equator towards the end of the project, it was neat to see that one group had chosen that as an example to focus on.

A busy SIG: three groups deep in discussion.

My only regret is that although our SIG was co-located with WebSci’13, our participants only came from CHI. I suspect this is due to a combination of WebSci’s (laudable) single-track approach with a lack of information about the SIG filtering through to the WebSci crowd. Personally, I’d have loved some cross-conference interaction — but you can’t win ‘em all. Meanwhile, this SIG had some real energy, and felt like something of a nascent community.

As I previously said, the aim was to let interested CHI attendees meet members of the SIGCHI RPI community and engage in discussions on RPI issues including the CHI format, dissemination of results, and supporting practice-based research. Elizabeth and Aaron had a fab plan, and asked the 22 participants to self-identify as either:

1. Researchers concerned that their research isn’t being used
2. Researchers who want to do relevant work but don’t know what practitioners need/want
3. Practitioners who are concerned that research isn’t relevant to their work
4. People who consider themselves a mix of researcher and practitioner.

Attendees then split into groups, where each group contained at least one representative of each attendee ‘type’. Groups spent around 45 minutes discussing what each member needs/wants from the other ‘types’ of attendee, responding to the needs/wants of other attendee ‘types’, identifying tangible actions and summarising points to bring back to the room as a whole.

This generated quite animated discussion!

I was very pleased to hear that a good 22 people came along to this SIG. We were expecting lots of familiar faces, so it was surprising as well as pleasing to hear that lots of newcomers came along. As well as connecting us with a set of potential new SIGCHI RPI members, the SIG generated various actions and outcomes. Good times.

The workshop itself is precisely about what you’d infer from the title! Social machines are intertwingled entities composed of human and automated components, and subject to both computational and social processes (think Wikipedia’s quality control mechanisms, or Galaxy Zoo). “The theory and practice of Social Machines” is one way to describe Web Science, and this workshop aims to refine our understanding of social machines.

Our paper examines the act of observing Social Machines ‘in the wild’, describing two scenarios and arguing that, in fact, we need to study a) interactions between machines and b) interactions over the lifecycle of machines. The ‘planned-ness’ of such machines (emergent properties vs pre-planned elements) is key to our understanding, as is our use of mixed methods and understanding of User Experience. You can find a PDF of the paper here.

If you’re lucky enough to be in Rio for WWW, I recommend you head to this workshop — the agenda looks fab.

Edit: the workshop is done, and here’s a copy of the slides that Dave presented:

I’ve had requests for access to the slides of my WebSci’13 presentation about the representation of different disciplines within WebSci (a brief overview of the topic is here). The slides are embedded below:

I’ll update this post on the weekend to include a link to the paper itself, and you can expect musings about WebSci’13 in general soon!

Edit: here’s that link I promised, the full paper on Web Science and the Two Hundred Cultures.

Whatever your background, I’d love to hear from you.

Perhaps you recall that last year I did some work on disciplinary representation in Web Science, demonstrating a method for gathering empirical insights into this important question. This year, I worked with colleagues at DERI to analyse a good sized data set. We ran a small expert survey to help understand the link between disciplines and terms in WebSci articles: it was very helpful, but small scale.

We’d be thrilled to get more data, and you can help! If you can possibly spare 5 minutes to head to iSurvey, we’d love to hear a tiny bit about your disciplinary background, and your opinion on the link between 19 terms and academic disciplines.

The odds are that if you read this blog, I’d appreciate your contribution! Thank you for your time.

This is a topic that has long been close to my heart, and I was particularly inspired to suggest a SIG for CHI’13 to take advantage of CHI (a radically interdisciplinary conference) being co-located with Web Science (a radically interdisciplinary conference). An ideal opportunity for dialogue!

As we remark in our abstract:

Last year at CHI’12 I attended a workshop on the use of theory in practice, which led to the formation of the SIGCHI Research-Practice Interaction community. The goals of the community are to bridge the gap between research and practice, by for example supporting practitioner-friendly dissemination of results, and serving as a conduit for feedback from practitioners to researchers. I’m very pleased to currently be the Vice-Chair of this community.

The purpose of the CHI’13 SIG is to allow interested CHI attendees to meet members of the SIGCHI RPI community, and to engage in discussions on RPI issues including the CHI format, dissemination of results, and supporting practice-based research. We’re very open to people bringing topics of their own that need attention, and we have also identified the following three questions as a starting point for discussion:

As per the subject of this post, FITMAN is about Future Internet Technologies for Manufacturing. The Future Internet (FI) is a big topic, and FITMAN falls within the EC FI-PPP programme (that’s FI Public-Private Partnership). FI-PPP aims to take an industry-driven approach to harmonise EU-scale technology platforms, not to mention the relevant policy, legal, political and regulatory frameworks. Big stuff.

FITMAN itself is about providing the FI-PPP with industry-led use cases demonstrating the use of such technologies in real-world contexts. To that end, it involves 11 trials with manufacturers, from large enterprises like Whirlpool and VW down to regional SMEs. Those trials are divided into three streams, with different focuses:

• virtual factories: global manufacturing/logistics networks, diverse collaboration models

• digital factories: cloud manufacturing, customer-centric design/manufacture

• smart factories: agile manufacturing, monitoring and instrumentation, autonomics

The goal is to test the suitability, openness and flexibility of ‘Generic Enablers’, reusable elements provided by FI-WARE (yes, another FI project!), and support EU manufacturing.

That’s a lot of very large-scale goals and programmes I’ve been talking about so far. What am I doing, precisely?

Well, our components within the project are rather analytical. There’s a lot of work to do with impact assessment, specifically socio-economic impact (although that doesn’t mean we won’t consider metrics concerning technological, environmental or political impact and sustainability). We’ll assess impact of the business cases, the later trial expansion, and the project as a whole. Among other things we’ll also be contributing business analysis, and preparation / support for Phase III expansion of the Use Cases.

FITMAN is a two-year project (relatively short for an EC project, which are often three years in length), and officially kicked off this month. I’m looking forward to delving into the details of this work over the coming months.

I’ve been getting stuck into work at the IT Innovation Centre (aka IT Innovation), an applied research centre that’s part of Electronics & Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Unlike the majority of the university, IT Innovation isn’t based on Highfield Campus (or even Avenue Campus), but instead is 3 miles up the road at Chilworth Science Park. IT Innovation do tonnes of applied research — right now, primarily (although not exclusively) EC projects — and are application agnostic, meaning we work in domains that vary from manufacturing to entertainment. Technologically, IT Innovation has some serious expertise in security, archiving and retrieval, business process modelling, and information discovery.

It’s a pretty exciting place to be. I’ve always been more drawn to applied than theoretical research, and although IT Innovation is part of the University, in certain respects it sits part-way between academia and industry. This reflects my own interests, exemplified by my co-founding the SIGCHI RPI community, which aims to bridge HCI research and practice — or looking further back, by my choosing to do an EngD rather than a PhD, and be grounded both in academia at the University of Southampton and industrial practice at IBM Hursley.

It’s my second new job in 12 months — and while I’m on that topic, I’d like to say that working with Seme4 was an absolute delight, and it was sad to say goodbye — and I hope not to be blogging any more job changes in the next while :) This particular contract is permanent, which is wonderful: after transient postdoctoral positions, it’s a pleasure to have a little more stability.

I haven’t talked about what I’m working on yet: there are at least three EU projects I’d like to talk about, so I think that’s some future blog posts sorted.

Speaking of future blog posts, a mere fortnight from now both WebSci’13 and CHI’13 will be in full swing; I have contributions at both conferences, so expect to be hearing more about those soon!