Could a software update change your identity?

In 2020, Microsoft Excel introduced a new function: LAMBDA. Software updates are frequent, and often go unnoticed. But sometimes, a software update brings something somewhat surprising: a shift in the identity of the user. The Lambda update shifts the identities of spreadsheet users and communities, and reinvigorates longstanding debates about whether spreadsheet use ought to …

Enough with ‘human-AI collaboration’

Describing our interaction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems as ‘collaboration’ is well-intentioned, but flawed. Not only is it misleading, but it also takes away the credit of AI ‘labour’ from the humans behind it, and erases and obscures an often exploitative arrangement between AI producers and consumers. In this article, I explore how the AI …

Product design and the myth of faster horses

Product design often encounters a tension between solving observable customer needs (reactive design), and inventing novel experiences without concrete basis in current customer behaviour, but which designers believe will be valuable (proactive design). Both reactive and proactive design can produce successful results. However, the practical question remains: given that most product design teams have finite …

Coding in natural language: let’s start small

The idea of writing a computer program by writing English (or another natural human language) is attractive because it might make coding easier and faster. This article tells the story of my encounter with natural language programming as a graduate student, and the small working system I built. I discuss the idea of context limiting: …

What if charts could control your data?

We typically think of charts as the end result of data analysis. To create a chart in Excel, you must first select some data. To produce a chart in Python or R using charting libraries, you must provide an array, data table or data frame. When William Playfair was inventing the line and bar charts …

The fundamental value of the metaverse is sensory misdirection, not replication

The “metaverse” is the collective marketing term for a set of virtual reality media experiences. It is accessed using headsets such as the Oculus Quest, Valve Index, and HTC vive. It is often presented in marketing materials as newly enabling the digital replication of physical space, despite the fact that this has always been possible …

Revealing the hidden guesswork of spreadsheet comprehension

This article is based on the following publication [PDF]: Sruti Srinivasa Ragavan, Advait Sarkar, and Andrew D Gordon. 2021. Spreadsheet Comprehension: Guesswork, Giving Up and Going Back to the Author. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 181, 1–21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445634 …

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 – …

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 …

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 …