当人机互动时刻到来（二）At the human-computer interface (2)

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当人机互动时刻到来（二）At the human-computer interface (2)

Steve Grimwade 
This is potentially the tension at the heart of your work maybe or maybe not?Maybe it's a tension you ignore, but I always thought that one of the greatesttensions at a university was that between pure and applied learning andresearch. I was going to talk about how shooting for the moon gave usTeflon-coated kitchenware, but I've since realised that actually didn't happen.Sure the NASA space program gave us plenty of spin-offs, but since 1958,American law stipulated   that NASA'sresearch and discoveries should benefit the general public and I'm wonderingwhen did applied research begin to push pure research out? 

Ben Shneiderman 
Bravo, wow. That's a pretty strong statement.

Steve Grimwade 
Has it, may be the question? 

Ben Shneiderman 
Well, that's right. So you've brought me exactly to the battle I'm fighting nowof promoting exactly that fresh way of thinking because you're right that goingback 70 years, the model of how what academics do is work in their labs, ontheir own ideas and then somehow that basic research finds applications andgoes to market. That was the legend of what it was supposed to do. 

But, over the last decades, manypeople began to notice this isn't really working. I've joined that groupbecause I saw what happened to my own work where working on real problems gotme better basic research. We know that that's historically what happened formany important inventions; Louis Pasteur, the famous case of he worked onfermentation of wine that went bad and spoilage of milk and what does he get?He gets the germ theory of disease, he fixes the milk supply, he fixes the wineand he gets vaccinations and big scientific breakthroughs.

So often, they say thatnecessity is the mother of invention, but necessity is also the mother ofdiscovery and the discovery of basic things, of basic research ideas, oftencomes by working on a real problem. So my story these days is to convinceuniversities, and students, and researchers, to change their way of thinking toget to work on something real. Get out of the lab, get out of the campus, gotalk to people in business, go talk to people in government andnon-governmental organisations, find the right kind of partners, find the rightkind of problems, work on those and then go for the twin win. Applied and basiccombined; ABC. That's the tile of my book; The New ABCs of Research.



Steve Grimwade 
Well, we segued into that very nicely without any effort at all. We didn't wantto, we didn't even need to, but yet…

Ben Shneiderman 
So, I talk about the twin win is the goal. The twin win is you publish paperswith theories in respected scientific journals and you get a validated solutionthat's ready to travel, ready to be implemented. So that's where I think thesweet spot is and I'm trying - working with a group of about 20 universities inNorth America to try to bring about a shift of attention because I think you'reright, your suggestion and your question suggests that the academic style ofthe past was to work in the lab on your own ideas, be blue sky and becuriosity-driven for as long as you want and that no longer cuts it with me.

I mean, good things may come,but if I were giving advice, as I do for young people, as I'm going to do latertoday at the University of Melbourne, I'm going to tell them, find yourselfpartners and people with real problems. I mean, academics are smart people,they just don't always know how to choose the right problems. By working withsomeone who has a real problem that they care about, whose solution could bringbenefits, the researchers start higher up on the pyramid. You get to somewherestronger sooner.

I've been collecting evidence onthis and just in the last few weeks, here is the evidence that I think isreally sweet that for the papers that are just done by academics, you get acertain number of citations of people who notice your work, but the papers thatare academics with somebody in business and government, you get twice as manycitations; more people notice. Citation counts are one of the ways that wemeasure the importance and the impact of an idea.

Steve Grimwade 
Well, there's the word; impact. I guess that's leading the charge of this. Iguess I'm not an academic, I'm just a member of the general public. I am awarethat people like Einstein gave us pure research and it wasn't applied at all,so I wonder what's the place of pure research still? Is there a place for it? 

Ben Shneiderman 
Sure, I think there are going to be people who will have ideas that they wantto pursue and that may work out and we should listen to some of it, but I thinkwe want to shift or swing the pendulum a little over. Einstein is often pushedback at me as a "what about Einstein?" Well, you remember Einsteinwas a patent examiner. He was a very practical guy, he did a lot of other workbesides these esoteric things, the general and special theories of relativity,but he was also guided by his very practical thinking and his experience fromworking in as a patent examiner.

So I think there's a real goodblend. Having the exposure to the real world problems will make you a betterresearcher, whether you choose to go down the road of pure research about somephenomena that's not been explored; those may pay off, but I'm saying if youchoose something which has a natural path towards making a difference, towardshaving an impact, you're more likely to get that basic research breakthrough.



Steve Grimwade 
Let's move to collaboration and Jeremy Singer wrote of your work thatscientists, engineers and designers must transcend academic disciplines to worktogether, blending their experience and skills to tackle these major21st-century challenges. I guess my question first is what's at the heart ofcollaboration? What do you need to do to be a successful collaborator?

Ben Shneiderman 
There's a lot of parts to it. Collaborations often fail. But, when they win,they win big. So if you want to win big, you do better if you collaborate. Theevidence is really strong on that one; that teams of people do much better thanindividuals. It's not just more people, it's better work, better thinkingbecause when you're in a team and you have to explain what you want to do tothe person you're working with, you've got to be clear about it. You've got toshape your ideas better and that's one thing that helps. The pushback you getis another positive thing.

I have a wonderful 30-yearcollaboration with Catherine Plaisant. She's been a close collaborator for allthese years and our times together are not quiet. We have strong differences,but when she differs, I listen because I know she's got something wise to sayand I'd better pay attention. So keeping your mind open to what others say isimportant.

Now, you touched on an importantissue about the collaboration bringing different skills to bear and that'simportant too. But it's not just going across disciplines that makes you awinner. What makes you a winner is working on a real problem. So we as computerscientists and working with my students, but we've done projects for people inthe Department of Biology, in economics and sociology, even English literature,in transportation and working on their problems gave us fresh challenges and wewind up making breakthroughs and publishing papers in the computer scienceworld and we get to work with them and publish papers in their journals. I lovedoing that and just seeing how the work we do gets to solve other people'sproblems makes me very happy.



Steve Grimwade 
See, you've got to open to the unexpected a lot of the time.

Ben Shneiderman  
That's true. I think so. You want to move forward a little bit, take a lookaround, figure out what's going on and pay attention to the unexpected, yes.



Steve Grimwade 
So that non-linear pathway's got to be a difficult one to open yourself up to.You've got to probably bring a mindset to be able to do that. What's themindset you've brought to it? 

Ben Shneiderman 
Sure, I think exploration is fun. Getting out on the trail when you're notquite sure what's around the next bend, is a pretty good time. I like doingthat. You have to know you may fail, you may come up against a roadblock andhave to turn back and backtrack a little while to get further up the hill, sofinding those things and understanding that is important. So I'm careful abouttrying different things and saying I'll give it a day, or a week, and if itdoesn't go, onto the next thing, I've learnt something and move on. There aretimes you get into failures or dead ends, but I think we sort of make a littleprogress and that takes is to a new clearing in the forest and then we can seethe next step forward, the next path up the hill.

Steve Grimwade 
Sounds like you invented agile methodology as well, but when we think about theact, or methodology, or design of collaboration, how has it changed over thelast few decades? Has it changed?

Ben Shneiderman 
Absolutely, I think the evidence is nice and clear about that. Fifty years agoonly half the papers published in the literature were collaborations. They wereusually single author, that was the general style and now 90 per cent of thepapers are teamwork papers. Even there are teamwork papers with more than athousand authors. There are some papers with a list of authors which is longerthan the paper itself. So those are rare beasts, but that is happening.

So the capacity to collaboratehas grown dramatically. I think particularly the World Wide Web and Internetand social connectivity, so we find more collaborations, but the collaborationsare more effective. The tools of Skype and video communication, of shareddocuments, of sharing data sets, of sending email to a group of people, allthose things have accelerated the processes of research, raised theexpectations of what we can do, gets us further along; it's quite dramatic.

Forty years ago, the typicalscientist read 175 research papers per year. Now, they read more than 400 ayear. The way they get them is very different from 40 years ago, they got sixor seven paper journals mailed to their office which they flipped through andthat was most of what they knew about and now very few people get paperjournals any more. They get notified of advances by email, by listserves, by somebodysending them a note, by a YouTube video, by blogs, by Wikipedia, so the socialmedia have transformed it and there's new strategies.

So what you're saying is, and Ithink very right, that researchers need to learn these new strategies. Theyneed to learn how to get information, they need to learn how to ask for help,they need to learn how to tell the stories of their successes and partialsuccesses, so I ask my colleagues to spend an hour a month making a video,writing a blog, writing something that gets their stuff out there and ways thatthey didn't in the past.

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