Summarizing 5 Recent(ish) Publications using only the Top 1000 words in the English Language
I’ve always been fascinated by simple, concise ways to communicate academic research. There are some great examples out there: Philip Guo creates tweet-sized explanations of each of his papers and Randall Munroe’s book Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words explains complex topics using only the top 1000 words in the English language.
Here’s my crack at summarizing 5 recent(ish) publications under the same constraint — explanations using only the ten hundred most used words!
Towards Understanding Differential Privacy: When Do People Trust Randomized Response Technique? (CHI 2017)
Brooke Bullek, Stephanie Garboski, Darakhshan J. Mir, Evan M. Peck
Lots of people try to keep your stuff on your computer safe, like your pictures or writing. That stuff is yours and no one else should own it. But the way that people keep it safe is hard to understand. To find out what people really think, we tried to show it to them in a way that they might understand. Some people think that the way we keep stuff safe isn’t really safe at all!
HindSight: Encouraging Exploration through Direct encoding of Personal Interaction History (InfoVis 2016)
Mi Feng, Cheng Deng, Evan M. Peck, Lane Harrison
We like to explain the world using pictures of numbers. These pictures help our brains understand lots of numbers at the same time. But when people use number pictures, sometimes they get bored or don’t look at all of the interesting numbers in the picture. We found out that if you change the color of numbers that people have already looked at, it helps them remember where they visited. It also lets them see where they haven’t visited too. This simple change sometimes makes people look at more numbers, and usually makes people look at different numbers!
Sightline: Building on the Web’s Visualization Ecosystem (CHI 2017 Late-Breaking Work)
Jordan Sechler, Lane Harrison, Evan M. Peck
Many people have made lots of great number pictures that help us understand the world. But even if there are many good ones, its hard for us to find them. We made something that looks for number pictures that people have made, and puts them all in the same place. It helps you sort through them and look at them. It also remembers which number pictures you’ve already seen. If we want people to understand the world, it’s important to think about helping us find the number pictures that are already out there.
Learn Piano with BACh: An Adaptive Learning Interface that Adjusts Task Difficulty based on Brain State (CHI 2016)
Beste Yuksel, Kurt Oleson, Lane Harrison, Evan M. Peck, Remco Chang, Robert J.K. Jacob
Think about learning music. Usually, people start with an easy part. After they learn the easy part, they change to harder and harder parts. What if your computer figured out the best possible time for you to change to harder parts? We had a computer listen to people’s brains to understand how they were learning. Then, when the computer thought someone had learned the part they were working on, it would change to a harder part. It turns out that people liked this brain-listening computer and it actually helped them learn better too! Can we use brain-listening computers to help people learn other things?
Improving Bayesian Reasoning: The Effects of Phrasing, Visualization, and Spatial Ability (InfoVis 2015)
Alvitta Ottley, Evan M. Peck, Lane Harrison, Daniel Afergan, Caroline Ziemkiewicz, Holly A. Taylor
Sometimes, when people go to the doctor, they have to decide on a plan to get better. The problem is that most plans aren’t just good or just bad. Most plans are sometimes good and sometimes bad. The numbers behind these “sometimes good, sometimes bad” plans are really hard for people to think about. When you ask them questions about it, they usually don’t understand. We tried different kinds of number pictures to help people think about these problems. Some worked better than others. Here’s something interesting: we found out that people who are good at moving things in their head also turn out to be good at understanding these problems.
