Summary

George Carlin once famously talked about 'stuff'… "That's all I want, that's all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know? I can see it on your table, everybody's got a little place for their stuff. This is my stuff, that's your stuff, that'll be his stuff over there. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house". But now our 'stuff' is digital and there's more of it than ever. It comes in the form of photos, music, presentations, tweets, web pages, email, documents and data in an endless variety of other forms. How can we organize our stuff? Find it? Browse it? Make sense of it? Show it to other people? We explore a variety of projects, from photo collection organizers to assisted clustering systems, all with interfaces inspired by principles of information visualization, and find some common techniques for dealing with our digital 'stuff'.

Biography

Steven M. Drucker is a Principal Researcher and manager of the Visual User Experience group at Microsoft Research (MSR) focusing on human computer interaction for dealing with large amounts of information. He is also an affiliate professor at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department. In the past he has been a Principal Scientist in the LiveLabs Research Group at Microsoft where he headed the Information Experiences Group working on user interaction and information visualization for web based projects; a Lead Researcher in the Next Media Research Group examining how the addition of user interaction transforms conventional media; and Lead Researcher in the Virtual Worlds Group creating a platform for multi-user virtual environments. Before coming to Microsoft, he received his Ph.D. from the Computer Graphics and Animation Group at the MIT Media Lab in May 1994. His thesis research was on intelligent camera control interfaces for graphical environments. Dr. Drucker graduated Magna Cum Laude with Honors in Neurosciences from Brown University where he also worked with the Brown Graphics Group and went on to complete his masters at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT doing research in robot learning. He has demonstrated his work on stage with Bill Gates at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES); shipped software on the web for gathering and acting on information collected on the web; was written up in the New York Times; filed over 108 patents; and published papers on technologies as diverse as exploratory search, information visualization, multi-user environments, online social interaction, hypermedia research, human and robot perceptual capabilities, robot learning, parallel computer graphics, spectator oriented gaming, and human interfaces for camera control.

Steven M. Drucker's Website