Bi-directional time travel and other explorations at IBM

Speaker
Bonnie John
Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

IBM’s PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System) project is funded by DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) initiative, with the grand challenge of increasing the productivity of large scale parallel programming by an order of magnitude over 2002 levels. Tasked with demonstrating this improvement, IBM is using several assessment techniques, including predictive human performance modeling with CogTool. This talk will explain why this work can be considered bi-directional time travel as well as how, over the past year, the IBM Software Productivity Group and I have made forays into predicting the usability of programming environments, websites for skilled users of screen-readers, and mobile phones for aging users.

Speaker's Bio

Bonnie E. John is a Professor in the HCI Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. A founding member of the HCII, her raison d'être is to “beat psychology into a shape that engineers can use.” To that end, she produces theories and frameworks to predict human performance on computer-based systems before they are built and embodies these in tools that UI designers and software engineers can easily learn and use in their development process.

Speaker's Website
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bej/

Host
Brad Myers