4 ms·

I think often of this jab by Rodney Brooks on my home field of human-robot interaction [1]: "A group of people who have never used a computer are recruited for

I think often of this jab by Rodney Brooks on my home field of human-robot interaction [1]: "A group of people who have never used a computer are recruited for an experiment, using variations of Unix commands to manipulate files from a command line interface. The users have never heard of computer files before and they don’t in any sense have the utility of files internalized. The experiment is to determine whether something the experimenters have called utility versus expressiveness is more highly valued. One set of users is taught commands like “rm,” “mkdir,” and “cat,” etc., while another is taught “delete,” “new_directory,” and “type_out,” etc. They are asked to do some housekeeping tasks on a file system. Their speed and accuracy is measured, and they fill in a questionnaire about how hard and how intuitive the task was. The paper itself about these experiments touts “statistically significant results,” with lots of p-values, etc. No HCI academics bother to invent windows, icons, a mouse, and so on. Such work is viewed as too informal and unscientific." I just finished my PhD and these lines were in my head since they were published. Between an advisor who would only greenlight plans if they immediately led to a paper and an embarrassing amount of impractical "safe" research that only makes for good tweets or headlines, I've given up hope on anything meaningful coming out of the Ivory Towers. The robot revolution will not be peer reviewed. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3209540 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3209540

SkyMarshal 4y ago
There's an interesting tension in academia between the need to publish regularly, the fact that deep research often needs longer work periods before achieving impactful results, and the fact that sometimes quantity of output produces better net results. I wonder if this could be alleviated by incentivizing the publishing of papers on work with no statistically significant results, as has been discussed here and elsewhere. That might increase quantity of output, while building a useful database of what not to spend time on.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  I would like to see peer-to-peer discussion incentivized. To an extent it is with poster sessions counting for external value. But I think this could be improved by counting more informal discussions and personal communications.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
As a youngster I got the idea that truly novel experimentation should be conducted alongside the most predictable incremental progress, in a unified way so that an overall structural approach which allows this would be an ideal thing to build. Even if it takes decades. Which is how long research labs take anyway. Maybe this means something. Talk about HCI. Coming from a guy back in 1982 who thought pointing & clicking was pretty cool. Almost a decade before the mouse was widely recognized, the trackball/firing-button was in use industrially to select graphic items. At one of the control rooms of the most automated marine chemical installations at the time, they had consoles that looked like NASA Mission Control during the moon mission. Tied into their mainframes. And wired into their tank farms, pipelines, and ship docks. Well a somewhat humble oil company can have more money to spend on this kind of thing than NASA sometimes. The oversize CRTs would have the sharp monochrome graphics showing little pictures of the available tanks on the left and available docks on the right. In between, connecting them, was the pipeline maze. Scattered across the pipelines were the little markers representing the control valves, which physically controlled where the product was going to go. They were like a little blank spot in the pipeline, just big enough so a cursor could go there and select it with a click so it would no longer be blank. Using a big console-mounted trackball like would appear years later on the Atari Millipede arcade game. And that would end up opening the valve so the product would flow through that segment. Until they had an unbroken line from tank to dock. When your ship was coming in, you would co-ordinate the exact dock and tanks that were going to be involved, and after review the graphic layout would be executed physically in the field before measurement & testing could be directed for that vessel. So I went home to my Atari computer, unplugged the Centipede cartridge and popped in the BASIC. Kept the home trackball with the regulation cueball plugged into a joystick port. Mocked up the console GUI in color since this is what really set new things like home Ataris apart from earlier plain-text machines, so besides basic graphics I got accustomed to pointing & clicking at home using my own code. No Mouse. Statically like I had seen. Really just one more step away from people intuitively pointing & clicking for targeting in Missile Command, which was the other main Atari game using the trackball. I read a number of Atari books and experimented quite a bit and I could see that the truly fast games were really a product of deeper experience in things that I did not possess; immersion in the emerging microprocessor ecosystem, and very long hours of progress, which I could not compare to as a hobbyist. I wanted to make an accurate navigational Google-map type framework where the graphics would be first-person 3-D as you drove along realistic freeways. You would certainly want a racing mode, so that would be a bit of GTA style landmark navigation either way. Obvious idea, but that was really too much for me and my equipment. Instead I did a much simpler slow-action logic game called Master Mind where you deduce the color pattern that the opposing player (or computer) has secretly encoded. You simply dragged & dropped the colors into position, and the computer answered. So I was dragging & dropping quite a few years before most of the world had a mouse to point & click with in DOS. Heck, before most of them even had DOS. But it was really just one day's HCI work. What else are you going to do with the equipment? You're going to have to experiment for yourself. It's good not to be hampered by all the traditional academic obstacles. I think nothing beats returns on inventions which have already been accomplished compared to research yet to be done, but the wisest investments are in the balanced performance of both. They go together so well.

SkyMarshal 4y ago

There's an interesting tension in academia between the need to publish regularly, the fact that deep research often needs longer work periods before achieving impactful results, and the fact that sometimes quantity of output produces better net results. I wonder if this could be alleviated by incentivizing the publishing of papers on work with no statistically significant results, as has been discussed here and elsewhere. That might increase quantity of output, while building a useful database of what not to spend time on.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
I would like to see peer-to-peer discussion incentivized. To an extent it is with poster sessions counting for external value. But I think this could be improved by counting more informal discussions and personal communications.

fuzzfactor 4y ago

As a youngster I got the idea that truly novel experimentation should be conducted alongside the most predictable incremental progress, in a unified way so that an overall structural approach which allows this would be an ideal thing to build. Even if it takes decades. Which is how long research labs take anyway. Maybe this means something. Talk about HCI. Coming from a guy back in 1982 who thought pointing & clicking was pretty cool. Almost a decade before the mouse was widely recognized, the trackball/firing-button was in use industrially to select graphic items. At one of the control rooms of the most automated marine chemical installations at the time, they had consoles that looked like NASA Mission Control during the moon mission. Tied into their mainframes. And wired into their tank farms, pipelines, and ship docks. Well a somewhat humble oil company can have more money to spend on this kind of thing than NASA sometimes. The oversize CRTs would have the sharp monochrome graphics showing little pictures of the available tanks on the left and available docks on the right. In between, connecting them, was the pipeline maze. Scattered across the pipelines were the little markers representing the control valves, which physically controlled where the product was going to go. They were like a little blank spot in the pipeline, just big enough so a cursor could go there and select it with a click so it would no longer be blank. Using a big console-mounted trackball like would appear years later on the Atari Millipede arcade game. And that would end up opening the valve so the product would flow through that segment. Until they had an unbroken line from tank to dock. When your ship was coming in, you would co-ordinate the exact dock and tanks that were going to be involved, and after review the graphic layout would be executed physically in the field before measurement & testing could be directed for that vessel. So I went home to my Atari computer, unplugged the Centipede cartridge and popped in the BASIC. Kept the home trackball with the regulation cueball plugged into a joystick port. Mocked up the console GUI in color since this is what really set new things like home Ataris apart from earlier plain-text machines, so besides basic graphics I got accustomed to pointing & clicking at home using my own code. No Mouse. Statically like I had seen. Really just one more step away from people intuitively pointing & clicking for targeting in Missile Command, which was the other main Atari game using the trackball. I read a number of Atari books and experimented quite a bit and I could see that the truly fast games were really a product of deeper experience in things that I did not possess; immersion in the emerging microprocessor ecosystem, and very long hours of progress, which I could not compare to as a hobbyist. I wanted to make an accurate navigational Google-map type framework where the graphics would be first-person 3-D as you drove along realistic freeways. You would certainly want a racing mode, so that would be a bit of GTA style landmark navigation either way. Obvious idea, but that was really too much for me and my equipment. Instead I did a much simpler slow-action logic game called Master Mind where you deduce the color pattern that the opposing player (or computer) has secretly encoded. You simply dragged & dropped the colors into position, and the computer answered. So I was dragging & dropping quite a few years before most of the world had a mouse to point & click with in DOS. Heck, before most of them even had DOS. But it was really just one day's HCI work. What else are you going to do with the equipment? You're going to have to experiment for yourself. It's good not to be hampered by all the traditional academic obstacles. I think nothing beats returns on inventions which have already been accomplished compared to research yet to be done, but the wisest investments are in the balanced performance of both. They go together so well.