Distributed Mentor Project: Mentoring Undergraduate Women in Computing Research Katherine Lau
Main Page Me and My Mentor Typical Week Research Project Weekly Journal Final Report Seattle
Week 3: June 25 - July 1 < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 >
=REVIEW=
SUCCESSES failures/setbacks FrUsTrAtIoNs
~ I have found a lot of articles and video lectures on interface design, groupware, collaboration, and visualization. ~ not sure of when we'll be able to obtain a copy of D. Lees master's dissertion on the information seeking behavior of medical researchers
~ still unable to obtain a UPass (I just don't have the correct documents on hand right now...) 		~ not getting information specific enough to save me time in walking, riding the bus, and waiting in line. I need to call first, and be able to speak with a live person, who can answer my questions. I don't want to interact with an automated answering service that is unable to help me!
~ too many articles to read...I'm drowning in papers. It's time to prioritize and read the most relevant documents first, and then read the other more general articles, if there is time, throughout the summer.
~HIGHLIGHTS~
WednesdayThursdayFridayMondayTuesday
1st DMP lunch. I met Janet, Vibha, and Jenny (who works down the hall from me in the iSchool at Roosevelt Commons). I listened to my first MURL lecture on creating a well-designed user interface. Some general reading, a MURL lecture on Xerox PARC's Placeless Documents System, and I found a bunch of ACM articles to read. Lots of general reading. I've read a total of 57 articles so far, ranging from a single page to 30 pages or so. I played a bit with Microsoft Visio and Macromedia Flash. 3rd iMed meeting: Meredith and Lisabeth presented interface mock-ups. I missed most of the meeting since I attended the UW CS department presentations for Microsoft interns. 2nd DMP lunch. I met Prof. Linda Shapiro from the CS department, and Ruth, a UVA lecturer and UW grad student.

I've been mainly reading this past week. I have enough information to present general interface design suggestions, and issues with collaboration. However, I have not read enough articles by Grudin and Twidale to discuss their collaborative interface ideas, so that is my goal for this week, so I can present more detailed suggestions next Wednesday.

The UW CS department presentation was brief. It truly was an overview of the department, the faculty, facilities and projects. Some interesting projects in the CS department include UrbanSim, which fellow DMP'ers Morgan and Tasha are working on, educational techology using tablet PCs, object recognition, and the animation of the wing beats of various birds in distinct flight paths. I'm interested in finding out more about research in educational technology, data management, HCI, AI, and robotics. Maybe I'll contact some students and professors while I'm here during the summer to discover what is SOOO interesting in their fields of research, so I can understand a bit of the passion they have for Computer Science.

My goals for the coming week:
~ Enjoy Independence Day!
~ Finish reading the Twidale and Grudin articles that I already have and prepare a short presentation on those ideas for next Wednesday.
~ Apply what I am learning about interface design and the search methods of medical researchers and create a paper prototype of a collaborative interface.
~ Write some *useful* code...