Date: Wednesday, March 26; 3:30 - 4:30p (Please note the earlier talk time than the usual 4:00 - 5:00p slot)

Location: 301 College Ave, Seminar Rm.

Note: 3:15 - 3:30p will be our reception, in the Snap Lab of 301 College Ave, to accommodate the changed talk time..

Abstract:

Why is it that in the vast pool of existing information management applications and web sites, we often can't find the one that lets us collect the information we need and arrange it the way we want to? It's because each of us has different information management needs, habits, and preferences, and there aren't enough application developers and web site engineers to meet them all. I will argue that the way past this problem is to give end users much more control---over the shape of their information and over the shape of their information management tools. Drawing on several exemplary tools developed in our group, I will describe and demonstrate what I consider to be the key elements of such an approach:

* Instead of partitioning data over disconnected applications and web sites, use a single unified data model, RDF, that is flexible enough to contain and connect whatever a user cares about.

* Give end users tools to edit (not program) their own interfaces for interacting with that information on the desktop and on the web.

Throughout, we avoid the temptation to invent complicated new things for computers to do with information. Instead, we focus on how computers prevent people from doing simple things with their information, and what we can do to change that. With the right tools to take care of the easy stuff for them, we can empower people to direct their intelligence to the complex, domain-specific parts of their information management activities that are worthy of human attention.

Bio:

David R. Karger is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.  He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1994 and has since contributed to many areas of computer science, publishing in
algorithms, machine learning, information retrieval, personal information management, networking, peer to peer systems, coding theory, and human-computer interaction.  Karger was the recipient of the 1994 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the 1997 Tucker Prize, a 1997 Packard Foundation Fellowship, and the 2002 NAS award for Initiatives in Research.

A general interest has been to make it easier for people to create, find, organize, manipulate, and share information.  His Haystack group researches tools that get out of the way, flexing and personalizing their representations and interfaces to reflect the needs of their users.  He also helps lead MIT's SIMILE project, a collaboration with MIT Libraries and the World Wide Web consorium developing Semantic-Web tools to improve the management and retrieval of information at the institutional level.

For more information, please contact David Williamson

[schedule]

3-24-2008 Sarah