IMSA Exploratorium Trip

Last week IMSA (The Information Management Student's Association) organized a trip to the Exploratorium. If you haven't gone, you should go it's pretty sweet. We reserved the Tactile Dome and crawled around in the dark, and played with various cool things.

To the left you can see an awesome pic of some ice crystals forming in water.

I liked a lot of the magnet exhibits as well.

And ... the giant bubbles are always a favorite, although this time there didn't seem to be enough soap in the concoction so the bubbles broke too easily. Ah well.

Overall, a successful field trip.

Orientation day Fall 2008

Wow, what a great first day! The orientation the iSchool provided was great. You know the day will go well when it starts with free food and coffee, always important that elixir of caffeination. That, coupled with seeing some familiar faces from the open house, plus a lot of new people to meet and get to know started the day with a high level of energy and anticipation. The pictures they took of us all were very helpful. Going through the list of 10ers on the intranet and putting names to the new faces helps a lot.

The Dean's welcome was perfect, short and to the point: A sincere welcome to the iSchool and Berkeley.

Next up was the group photo. The photographer had all 40 of us on the stairs, arranged by height. It really was amusing, if rather cozy. 'You, turn this way, you up on your tiptoes, you in the front, yes, you who are already the shortest, make yourselves even shorter. Everyone get very close to your neighbor.' We'd not yet had class, but already they were prepping us for Information Organization and Retrieval.

For once the team building exercise was a lot of fun. I've been working in the corporate world for a while now and these are usually not a lot of fun. Either you get team mates who are too cynical to give a sincere effort or the people running the exercise don't know what they are doing. Not this time! I had a great team and we all got into building the tallest tower we could with corks and toothpicks (tied for tallest at 79 inches, thank you very much). Our bridge of hot glue and popsicle-sticks did not fare as well however. Congratulations to team 2 for defeating the machine.

So, to avoid being too wordy, the rest of the day was full of great and helpful information. Panels on careers (the MOT cert is a good thing and one former iSchooler is looking to hire), career services (Meg, Shirley and Lety are amazingly helpful), student affairs (get your MIMS t-shirt), and computing services (remember, treat your IT support kindly and your time here will pass more smoothly).

I had a great first day. My favorite part happened around 3:30-4:00 when we first years found our way to the lounge and started going over our first day impressions (all good) and met and asked hundreds of questions of the second years in the lounge. Everyone was kind, welcoming, and very helpful. It continued as we moved on to drinks and fried food (my favorite flavor, fried!) at Raleigh's. It really set a wonderful tone for my time here at the iSchool.

What I have been doing over the summer.

So after a busy and anxious Spring semester, I landed a couple of projects that I found interesting and very varied in scope. During the month of June, I worked on a research paper with Dr. Anke Schwittay of the Rios Institute (www.riosinstitute.org). We analyzed the corporate culture of Dow Chemical (specifically their Information Services Division) and made some recommendations on how they can improve productivity, morale, and performance. This culminated in a paper that was submitted to Dow on July 6th. Concurrently, I accepted a position with the XMDR Project (www.xmdr.org). This is a joint effort between the UC Berkeley Water Resources Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, EPA, the National Cancer Institute, and a number of other environmental agencies. The XMDR project is an attempt to develop an ontology in the form of an ISO 11179 standard that these agencies will be able to use to interact with each other and exchange terminology and documents among one another. I am working on a prototype terminology search engine that will enable researchers and users to search terms and display intelligent results from these multiple data sources and terminologies. I have also been offered a freelance web design project by the Rios Institute to develop a site for a network of ICTD organizations in the Bay Area. This is tentatively going to be called the iGuide and I will be using a MySQL backed site and use Drupal to develop the site. Overall, the summer has been fairly busy, but I am learning lots of new technologies that I would have not thought I would use. Currently, I am learning Skos (Simple Knowledge Organization System) for the XMDR project to produce RDF graphs from raw datasets. I have had to learn Ant and Subversion scripts, and become very familiar with the command line interface. This is an important part of my growth here at the iSchool. I will be continuing as a Graduate Student Researcher with the XMDR project in the Fall.

Welcome New iSchool Admits!

Congratulations to all the newly admitted students! We tried to cram as much UC Berkeley into one day, and boy, was it fun! A little bit of barbeque and scavenger hunt never hurt anyone, and the showcase of iSchool projects showed of a real broad sample of the great work being done here in South.

Thanks to all of those who worked their tails off to make this a smooth day!

New Year, New Classes, New Project!

So I have been meaning to do this for a while, but I just have not had the time. I am enrolled in a whopping 18 units this semester and we'll see if I am alive at the end of the semester! Actually, all the classes that I am taking are really interesting and I don't want to drop any of them! In addition to the 2 required classes (i203-Social and Organizational Issues of Information, and i205- Information Law and Policy), I am also taking i213-User Interface Design, i247- Information Visualization and Presentation, i290-20- Interface Aesthetics, i290-2- Technologies for Creative Thinking and Learning. I am also working hard on a project that my partner (and fellow iSchooler Pierre Tchetgen) launched called WordSoundLife.org. It is a social networking system for students, teachers and mentors. We are attempting to develop a totally organic learning system from the ground up. As you can imagine, I do have my hands full this semester. However, I always have a few spare moments to help Meg and Shirley out by showing any new students or prospectives around South Hall and our programs. If you see me in the hallways of our beloved South Hall, fell free to say Hi!

ooo, shinies!

Thanks to all the iSchool staff who make South Hall so beautiful!

Why I love my TUI class

I took Tangible User Interfaces because it fit with my schedule, but I expected very little of it - and I could not have been more mistaken! It is more inspiring than the best art classes I've taken. I find myself looking at objects in my house and thinking about how and why one might attach sensors, motors, music, and lights - really changing how one interacts with the world and the information available in the environment. My research focus (information architecture) hasn't changed, but my understanding and respect for designers has increased dramatically, and the way I look at computation has been transformed.

Of course, I have to finish my other homework (calculating system downtime, defending project management decisions) before I get to go back to building my rocket/potty-training robot for TUI...