The rise of parallel chat in online meetings: how can we make the most of it?

By Advait Sarkar and Sean Rintel. Originally published on the Microsoft Research Blog. “I’ll put a link to that doc in the chat” “Sorry, my internet is terrible, I’ll put my question in the chat” “That GIF from Amy in the chat is hilarious” If these phrases sound familiar to you, you’re not alone – …

Tell, don’t show: how to teach AI

Should we teach good behaviour to Artificial Intelligence (AI) through our feedback, or should we try and tell it a set of rules explaining what good behaviour is? Both approaches have advantages and limitations, but when we tested them in a complex scenario, one of them emerged the winner. If AI is the future, how …

People reluctant to use self-driving cars, survey shows

Autonomous vehicles are going to save us from traffic, emissions, and inefficient models of car ownership. But while songs of praise for self-driving cars are regularly sung in Silicon Valley, does the public really want them? That’s what my student Charlie Hewitt, and collaborators Ioannis Politis and Theocharis Amanatidis set out to study. We decided …

Ask people to order things, not score them

Ever graded an essay? Given scores to interview candidates? Given a rating to an item on Amazon? Liked a video on YouTube? We’re constantly asked to rate or score things on absolute scales. It’s convenient: you only have to look at each thing once to give it a score, and once you’ve got a set …

Human language isn’t the best way to chat with Siri or Alexa, probably

The year is 2019. Voice-controlled digital assistants are great at simple commands such as “set a timer…” and “what’s the weather?”, but frustratingly little else. Human language seems to be an ideal interface for computer systems; it is infinitely flexible and the user already knows how to use it! But there are drawbacks. Computer systems …

Talking to a bot might help with depression, but you won’t enjoy the conversation

Mental illness is a significant contributor to the global health burden. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) provided by a trained therapist is effective. But CBT is not an option for many people who cannot travel long distances, or take the time away from work, or simply cannot afford to visit a therapist. To provide more scalable …

Research through design, and the role of theory in Human-Computer Interaction

Every day, designers create the world around us: every website you've visited, book or magazine you've read, every app you've used on your phone, every chair you've sat on, almost everything around you has been consciously designed by someone. Since this activity is so important, an area of academia known as design research is concerned …

Setwise Comparison: a faster, more consistent way to make judgements

I originally wrote this post in 2016 for the Sparrho blog. Have you ever wondered whether doctors are consistent in their judgements? In some cases, they really aren’t. When asked to rate videos of patients with multiple sclerosis (a disease that causes impaired movement) on a numeric scale from 0 being completely healthy to 4 …

The 4 Drive Backup Solution for Mere Mortals

In this post I describe a minimal, yet comprehensive personal backup solution. It is relatively easy to implement, using only the built-in features of your operating system, and is quite cheap as it requires only 4 hard drives (and can be accomplished with even fewer). Despite being extremely simple, it has the characteristics of a complete backup system …

Why you can’t accept the null hypothesis

In this post I'd like to describe an issue that is almost never addressed in statistics courses, but should be, because it causes a lot of mistaken inferences. It is an issue so pervasive that I routinely see papers published in refereed journals that make this mistake. So if you can't bother to read through the rest of …