Like so many things from my college experience, I never realized how amazing this was until years later.
Rather than taking a “usual” internship at a government agency or consulting company for the summer, I instead chose to stay on campus for the summer, and in addition to a lot of relaxing, worked at two amazing labs at UMD. One was the Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks, where I got to play around with awesome gadgets like motion tracking cameras and sensor networks. The other position, which I kept throughout the following school year, was as a researcher in the Human Computer Interaction Lab. I was tasked with working on an Java interface (using Swing) for the MALACH project, which, in a nutshell, was to allow people to browse and view a massive amount of transcripts of recordings of Holocaust victims. The recordings originated from the Shoah foundation, whose mission is to record and store all memories of survivors of the Holocaust (side note: my grandmother volunteered as one of the interviewers). So I spent the summer working under Ryen White, who now works at Microsoft Research.
As we were presented with developing an entirely new interface, we had a number of challenges. We came up with some pretty cool solutions. One thing I came up with was an interface element nicknamed PygmyBrowse. PygmyBrowse is a rather simple and easy method of bi-directional navigation of infinitely complex trees in a compact environment. I thought nothing of it at the time, but the professors around me disagreed, and suggested I pursue it further. After spending a good chunk of the semester holding user trials (in between running one of the largest student groups on campus, being actively involved in my computer, and oh yeah… double major), we ended up with an academic paper, with yours truly as the primary author. Which ended up getting accepted to a major human-computer interaction conference. Whiiich I didn’t attend, because there was one or another extra-curricular event going on (kicking myself 3 years later).
If I dig up the Java source code for it, I’ll release it.
You can download the PDF of my paper here, or view it on Scribd.
Quick note to say that PygmyBrowse is a very cool idea, and I’ve enjoyed playing with some simple implementations. When I get the chance I’d like to add some more functionality, such as ‘expand ahead’ browsing. So much to do, so little time…
Roderic – Thanks so much! It’s so cool to see people actually using it.