Generals proposal for Bradley Rhodes

Main Area: Intelligence Augmentation (Pattie Maes)
Technical Area: Personalized Information Management (Walter Bender)
Context Area: Theories of Interface Design and Cognition (Chris Schmandt)
24-hour Exam Essays

(this file is http://www.bradleyrhodes.com/Generals/)

Areas of study

I propose three areas for this generals exam. The main area is Augmented Intelligence, the study of ways to augment or enhance a person's cognitive abilities. This area encompasses software agents technology, but also covers specific technology designed to address augmenting one's intelligence (such as wearable computing and augmented reality). The technical area is "Personalized Information Management" which covers methods of retrieving and organizing information, especially personal information. The readings in this area will draw heavily on the information retrieval literature, collaborative information filtering techniques, and techniques from specific personal information systems. The context area covers cognition and interface design. This covers the general theory of interface design, as well as the broader study of cognitive limits on perception, attention, and the processing of information that form a basis for interface design.

Rationale

My thesis work involves designing systems for augmenting intelligence, specifically in proactively helping a user organize and remember personal information. It is therefore reasonable that intelligence augmentation makes up my main area. My technical area covers methods and techniques needed to bring about this particular kind of intelligence augmentation. Specifically, it covers methods for retrieving information from a vast corpus of semi-organized personal information and methods for organizing and filtering that information for a user. Once useful personal information has been organized and retrieved, it still needs to be displayed to the user. Because I am especially interested in systems that convey information without the user's request, it is especially important that the interface does not impose too heavy a cognitive load on the user. The context area of cognition and interface design will provide general background theory that should shed light on this problem.