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 …

Look, no hands! Exploring data with your eyes

Can you imagine using a computer without a mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen? Why would we even need to do that? In this article, we will learn how virtual on-screen ‘lenses’ can be controlled using eye-tracking technology, to magnify and show additional details on charts. Using your eyes to control a computer has some unexpected challenges, …

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 …

How my online gaming addiction saved my Ph.D.

Or, how I cookie-clicked my way to a doctorate in interaction design. It’s been 5 years since I finished my Ph.D. on user interfaces for machine learning. To celebrate/commiserate, I’m sharing an unusual (if I may say so myself) grad school war story, the story of how sinking hundreds of hours into pointless online games …

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 – …

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 …