Future of Information Alliance 2011 Launch Day One: Visiting Future-ists

Abstract

Presenters at the program were three “Visiting Future-ists”: Dan Russell, Google's "director of user happiness," who leads efforts to improve the effectiveness of web searching and keynote speaker at the campus-wide Future of Information Forum held in November 2010; Mary Czerwinski, who manages the research on human-computer interaction at Microsoft and focuses on information visualization, group awareness and lifelogging; and Abdur Chowdhury, former chief scientist at Twitter, who has been working toward improving the ability to separate "signal" from "noise" in the explosion of information on the Web. The Visiting Future-ists described their work in helping to innovate for the future information environment, and discussed the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. They also engaged the audience in brainstorming aimed at identifying information-related issues that can best be addressed through interdisciplinary research.