Continuing Innovation in Information Technology Workshop Report (2016) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
5 People and Computers
5 People and Computers
Pages 54-66
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 54... ...
This chapter focuses on three presentations exploring different aspects of the relationships between humans and technologies: cybersecurity, user-centered design, and social science research. In his presentation, Stefan Savage shared key challenges and trends in cyberse curity.
|
From page 55... ...
The challenge for this field has long been how to build security solutions into the entire array of quickly developing technologies and applications, from machine learning algorithms to wearable computers and personal monitors to robots and autonomous vehicles. Savage traced many of the major components of cybersecurity in use today to 30 years of federally funded academic research.
|
From page 56... ...
Others enhance safety or provide entertainment. The net result is a huge amount of digital information being created and transmitted by incredibly complicated systems; yet, most in-car computer systems are equipped with far fewer security protections than a typical personal computer.
|
From page 57... ...
Fighting Spam and Piracy Whereas cars and other computerized devices are examples of an underappreciated cybersecurity threat, industry and the general public have a much greater awareness of the problems of spam and piracy. In particular, the sale of pirated software is a particularly active problem and one that the software industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars to stem.
|
From page 58... ...
In order to undermine spammers' financial gains, Savage's team purchased more than 600 items from spam e-mails (using no government money, Savage noted, though the research was otherwise government-funded) , and followed the processing chain to determine how the spammers were receiving their money.
|
From page 59... ...
Where it used to take experienced developers weeks or months to create the user interface for a new software tool, now nearly anyone can create technology applications quickly, easily, and well, even with minimal technical skills. People and Computers 59
|
From page 60... ...
Hudson described how the first generation of developer-friendly toolkits for creat ing user-friendly interfaces emerged from exchange and interplay between academic researchers at places like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and MIT and companies such as Sun, Apple, and Microsoft. In the 1990s, three major projects led by Linton at Stanford, Myers at Carnegie Mellon, and Hudson at the University of Arizona and Georgia Tech created functional user interface design toolkits including Interviews and Fresco, Garnet and Amulet, and Artkit and subArctic, respectively.
|
From page 61... ...
One important example of early user-centered design research was Columbia University's 1997 Touring Machine project, in which researchers experimented with de ploying, in real-world situations, mobile computing contraptions that included a com puter with wireless Internet access, GPS, and a handheld display and input (Figure 5.3)
|
From page 62... ...
" User-centered design has been revolutionary for many applications and areas of computer science, including wearable computing, context-aware computing, and data visualization. A general lesson from the story of user-centered design, Hudson explained, is that rather than investing in research to develop only individual technologies, it is important to target work that has an amplifying effect across the broader field.
|
From page 63... ...
To the casual observer, it is easy to assume that wildly popular social media companies like Facebook and BuzzFeed simply stumbled upon winning formulas for connecting and engaging their users. In reality, Facebook and other social networks are built, in part, on research from the early 2000s examining the drivers of network structure, network growth, and social contagion, while BuzzFeed and other news sites build from research on the nature of social influence to tailor their articles to what readers are most likely to enjoy and share with friends, Watts explained.
|
From page 64... ...
Because the use of social networks is so widespread and users of these services are generating so much data, social science is increasingly becoming a computational science, in which researchers tap extremely large data sets for insights about people's behavior. "It's clear to us working in the field now that social science over the last decade or so is rapidly becoming a computational science," said Watts, adding that the use of high-performance computing has benefited greatly from the interplay between government-funded academic research and industry data and tools.
|
From page 65... ...
Watts, "From Small World Networks to Computational Social Science," presentation to the workshop, March 5, 2015, http://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/cstbsite/documents/webpage/cstb_160426.pdf. A more recent study, which Watts oversaw in his current position at Microsoft Research, tracked information dissemination on Twitter and attempted to quantify and categorize what makes news items "go viral" on social networks.7 Social media hold virtually limitless potential for insights into human behavior; further applications of these data, for example, include crisis mapping, the real-time gathering and analysis of social media information during a political crisis or natural disaster, and digital ethnography, the study of relationships in a digital rather than a physical space.
|
From page 66... ...
Although reluctant to make specific predictions given this inherent uncertainty, Watts said a likely key to future social science insights will be an increasing trend toward interdisciplinary work. Social science is interdisciplinary by nature, yet social scientists and computer scientists often work separately in academic departments with little overlap.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.