Doctoral Workshop in Seattle

This is a three-day workshop in Seattle about the NSF funded program on social computational systems (SoCS). It is actually a PI meeting, but has some sessions to give feedback to doctoral students. Amazingly, it is my first workshop in my academic life, and it has been a really good start.

It's my first time to Seattle. Long before coming to USA, I've learnt the beauty and charm of Seattle. There is nothing thrilling in this city, but its quietness is attractive enough for people to live there for a whole life.

I gave a poster presentation on the first and second day. It's about some preliminary design features to meet challenges of online geodeliberation. It was my first time doing a poster presentation, and it was really challenging. Although poster presentation is more informal than presentation, it doesn't mean it is less challenging. The real purpose of poster presentation is not really report your work, but to rise people's interest in your work, and give a vivid talk about the importance of your work and the challenges you are facing. Also people tend to move around, you need to give them a quick overview of your work, rather than go into too much detail. It may always be frustrating to restart over again as new set of people are joining, so sometimes don't hurry to talk from the very begin. Sometimes you can wait till they ask you some questions and jump directly to that point. Of course you have to keep the balance.

The workshop is a great opportunity for me as I met many professors and students (from University of Washington, MIT, harvad, Ohio State, Oregon State, Virginia Tech, etc. )who are working on social computing, which seems a very promising direction. Many are utilizing social media data (e.g. twitter data) to identify interesting patterns, using data mining techniques. Another popular topic is crowdsourcing, which takes advantage of the power of the public.

As a professor summarized, computer scientists always try to think of solutions to a problem, while social scientists devote themselves to better understanding of the problem, and we working on social computing try to bridge the gap, and always start with people, observe their current practices and identify how their behavior could be improved and facilitated, and design technology to support meet those challenges.

Finally I'd like to put a word I learnt from the workshop:

"I alone can't change the world, but I can throw a stone across water to create many ripples". 

 ― Mother Teresa