“Dog!” exclaimed the 6 year old boy at the whiteboard proudly, while carefully drawing the Chinese character “犬”. There was a round of applause in the psychiatrist’s child practice, as the learning disabled child completed the exercise without a mistake. Having developed the serious game he used for preparation, I was immensely proud. While I realized at that point that I had created a fun way for children to study basic phoneme–grapheme associations, I was not aware of the entire discipline behind designing software for humans. I have since completed my computer science bachelor, soaking up every class on human computer interaction, information visualization and user interfaces my study programs offer in the process. Thus I now know many of the theories, rules, and models created to formalize this process. But seeing a design’s success, seeing it help users accomplish what they could not accomplish before—that is still my biggest motivation.
At TUM, I was drawn to courses such as Software Engineering, 2D User Interface Design, and a Mobile Applications Programming Lab in which I collaborated on the above-mentioned serious game “weMakeWords”. The resulting game was presented at our project partner’s child psychology practice, multiple fairs, and finally published in a paper, which I presented during OOPSLA at SPLASH in Portland. [Demmel2011]
The project brought me into contact with the Chair for Applied Software Engineering, where I became a tutor for the seminar. I later led a self-contained 2 ECTS seminar on the topic with a friend, and have since held this seminar professionally, for example at Germany's second-largest bank, Commerzbank AG. During my bachelor I was also admitted to CDTM, an entrepreneurial master level honors degree in technology management. I spent many sleepless nights on the d.school inspired courses, such as Sketching With Hardware, Managing Product Development, and Design Thinking.
Since TUM didn’t have a compelling offering of thesis topics in HCI, I applied for an opportunity as a Visiting Student Researcher at the research group of Professor Scott R. Klemmer, whom I had known from his Coursera HCI MOOC. My work with him, Prof. Michael Bernstein and Nicolas Kokkalis was split on a crowdsourced email & task manager, EmailValet [Kokkalis2013], and my own bachelor thesis project, Myriad, a web app for conversational remixing in email. Myriad aims at producing personalized email communication on a comparable level to manually composed messages, even at large scales, while reducing user effort. I based my bachelor thesis on Myriad, which was awarded the best possible grade and was featured as one of ten theses statewide by ENB. I’m hoping to publish the work with the Stanford research group at a UI or CSCW conference in 2015.
Stanford’s HCI group’s current research includes exciting work relevant to mine, ranging from refinements to the management of crowd workers [Retelny2014] to codifying emergent practices [Fast2014]. The latter paper leads me to a concrete research idea: currently Myriad assistants pick from a set of user created templates. An extension could allow normalized templates to be reused, such as, for example, a polite rejection, or a statement of regret. A text formality analysis [e.g. PCA based, Sigley1997] might then enable tailoring the formality of the reply to the sender’s.
I will specialize in HCI, and put additional focus on classes such as Prof. Forssell’s “Technology for Learners” to get a better theoretical background for topics I have already worked in. I will also take additional fundamental courses, for example in Software Theory, CS242 Programming Languages. I’m confident I will find a good balance between a solid foundation, applied topics, and research projects.
During my exchange semester I got to know Stanford both as an inspiring community and as an excellent university. I was and still am wowed by the quality of education and the amount of attention I received from my professors, the motivating and challenging weekly department meetings, and the unique combination of location, alumni networks and renowned speakers—no lecture in graph theory stuck with me as much as Donald Knuth’s musings on Chordal Graphs.
I like solving challenging problems; the kind of problems that have not been solved before, that might not even appear to be problems at first sight. The kind of problems one learns to solve at research universities. I get excited thinking about the real-life problems I will be able to tackle with these skills; be it at my next startup or in industrial R&D.
I have the work experience, the motivation, and the entrepreneurial spirit; but I’m lacking the graduate level computer science expertise. I believe Stanford’s Computer Science graduate program would be the best place for me to gain that.
Ruth Barbara Demmel, Barbara Köhler, Stephan Krusche, and Ludwig Schubert. 2011. The serious game: wemakewords. In Proceedings of the 10th SIGPLAN symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming and software (Onward! 2011). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 109-110. DOI=10.1145/2048237.2048253 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2048237.2048253
Nicolas Kokkalis, Thomas Köhn, Carl Pfeiffer, Dima Chornyi, Michael S. Bernstein, and Scott R. Klemmer. 2013. EmailValet: managing email overload through private, accountable crowdsourcing. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1291-1300. DOI=10.1145/2441776.2441922 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2441776.2441922
Daniela Retelny, Sébastien Robaszkiewicz, Alexandra To, Walter S. Lasecki, Jay Patel, Negar Rahmati, Tulsee Doshi, Melissa Valentine, and Michael S. Bernstein. 2014. Expert crowdsourcing with flash teams. In Proceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 75-85. DOI=10.1145/2642918.2647409 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2642918.2647409
Ethan Fast, Daniel Steffee, Lucy Wang, Joel R. Brandt, and Michael S. Bernstein. 2014. Emergent, crowd-scale programming practice in the IDE. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2491-2500. DOI=10.1145/2556288.2556998 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2556288.2556998
Robert J. Sigley, 1997. Text Categories and Where You Can Stick Them: A Crude Formality Index, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Volume 2, Issue 2, 1997 , pages 199 –237DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.2.2.04sig