I am extremely excited to announce that I will be joining the Computer Science Department at the University of New Mexico as an assistant professor. Yes, Professor Patrick. After six years at Carnegie Mellon I will be moving on, still in academia, but for the first time in ever, not as a student.

There is plenty more to say and show, why I chose UNM, how much I really will miss Pittsburgh, how helpful everyone here at CMU and around the world has been to me as I decided what to do next, what I will be teaching in the fall, what my next steps are with research, how great my apartment is going to be, but before all that … I need to go finish my dissertation.

So, I am going to go get on that and I will see you in Albuquerque.

PopCity put up a question and answer with Hilary Robinson, the Dean of the College of Fine Arts (CFA) here at Carnegie Mellon. I know her through the Design Review committee and some other GSA stuff – think she’s great and she has some interesting answers about the way she thinks, the way she lives, and Pittsburgh.

What’s the best thing anyone ever said about you?
About a year ago, the wife of a colleague said, ‘There’s a great sense of calm about you, it’s something that gives me great comfort and confidence’ and in similar vein, on Sunday night someone said to me that there was a sense of serenity in my home. If people sense that about me, and about the environments I make, it is wonderful. I don’t recognize it about myself, but similar things have been said to me a few times so I believe it, and am immensely grateful for that quality.

Link

Earlier this month Google announced a series of “focused research awards” to twelve projects across the country. One of their focus areas was privacy and Lorrie, my advisor, was awarded one of them. For more about it and Lorrie talking about the award check out this NYTimes blog

So thanks Google, I am excited to turn your money into research that helps us continue to better understand privacy in this digital era.

Love,
Patrick

This had such a There Will Be Blood feel.

It could have been terrible, but it was actually a good time.

This past Saturday, myself, Janice, and Amelia from CMU GSA headed up to Eden Hall Farm the newest acquisition of Chatham University. There we met up with Byron & Emily from Pitt, and Julie, Patrick, Dan, Tiffany, David, and Doug from Chatham. We had a good afternoon, grilled food, ate food, discussed grad studenty things. I am looking forward to working more with Pitt & Chatham, I think the last year has been good and I hope the collaborations continue. I believe Julie, Chatham’s new GSA president, is right in that continuing to improve the graduate student relationships within the city of Pittsburgh, will help keep young educated professionals in the city. Or, we can hope.

As for the Eden Hall Farm house, itself, you should check out the pictures (click photo above to see the whole set) was really great, I look forward to having more events there. It reminded me of my days back at RIT, and our LEAD retreats. The industrial kitchen, the large lodge type house. The only thing that didn’t quite fit was the right-out-of-There-Will-Be-Blood bowling alley in the basement. Which was amazing, and functional, and we bowled a little — though setting up the pins after every frame gets really tiresome. But there is just this right out of the past, creepy movie-set feel to the whole place, which in my mind makes it the perfect place to take graduate student leaders.

So much to post. Friday was fun. The cathedral is lit these days as part of the Pittsburgh Festival of Lights. I took some photos. Danny posted one. We also wandered around CMU at night, which was nice. We scared a guy who was making a bunkbed. We printed a poster for Marissa. Then we played Dr. Mario. End of Friday, more soon.

Click here to zoom in and actually see this thing.

You need to click on this to see the full size image.

A bit ago I put together a script (details on how to do this in a later post) to keep track of the number of e-mails in my inbox. I keep e-mails in my inbox in Mail.app until I have resolved them (responded, read a paper, performed an action, etc.) keeping them as a bit of a to-do list.

I am really interested right now in passive or ambient indicators. This is an application. Especially because I believe that the amount of e-mail in my inbox is a good indicator of my current busyness, or generally how hectic I am at any given time. I plan to make this a bit better, put it up on the web as more of a sparkline, and also probably a more abstracted level of busyness. I am thinking the scale will be something like:

• 0-20 emails — So Relaxed That This Can Never Happen
• 20-50 emails — Doing Good, Time To Find More Work
• 50-110 emails — Average Busyness Insues, If It Can Wait, Let It Wait
• 110-200 emails — Very Hectic. Too Much To Do. Don’t Expect To See Patrick.
• >200 emails — Might Be Dead, Might Wish He Was.

(Note this idea was borrowed from Dave Shea’s Stress-O-Meter on his contact page at BrightCreative. However his functions differently, it is a constantly increasing counter, that he resets when he has free time, the more he remembers to reset it, the less he has to do, is the model behind it.)

This semester I am TAing Privacy Policy, Law & Technology taught by Lorrie Cranor (my advisor). If you have some free time or are looking for a class to take and you want to explore the depths of privacy law, the philosophical roots of privacy, and the way technology can and should shape privacy in the information age, then I expect to see you this afternoon.

Sidenote: I am really excited to be TAing, it has been a while (haven’t done this since City as Text with Jessica) and since I basically love teaching, it has been way too long. I will likely post more about this as interesting things come up, the semester progresses, and the students start working on – hopefully impressive – projects.

The Symposium on Usable Privacy & Security which is hosted by the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy & Security Lab, which I am a member of and which my advisor Lorrie is the director of, is occurring right now.

This year we are also currently hosting our own blog, documenting the sessions, discussions, and events at the conference. It can be viewed here so you can go take a look at how I have been spending my week. Tomorrow I will put up the poster we presented, till then you will have to live with the blog and some photos here.

Each year the IEEE holds VisWeek 2008, a series of three co-located conferences: Visualization, InfoVis, and VAST (Visual Analytics in Science & Technology), this year in Columbus, Ohio; October 19th – 24th. Also each year all three of these conferences host visualization conferences, which I of course always think about entering but then never actually do.

Except this year. This past spring Peter Landwehr started up a reading group on Large Scale Visualizations, which slowly shifted – I expect mostly because of me, to a group more on information visualization generally, and at some point we decided to form a group to create an entry for the VAST contest (more on this later). And at the same time as that progressed I convinced Danny that he wanted to spend some time on the InfoVis contest.

The InfoVis contest this year (details here,) focused around over a year’s worth of data from the Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab. They released all this data to the public to allow them to mine and visualize whatever they so chose; and the dataset was also chosen for the 2008 contest.

Danny and I eventually got ourselves together and over the last few weeks put together the following poster. (For a higher resolution version, see my portfolio which has been updated additionally this exists on flickr. )

I expect this is a very different direction than most of the people who entered the contest went in, which may or may not be good, and I have no idea how it will be judged. Either way though, for the amount of time we had, I am quite satisfied with our solution. They contest pages infer they are looking for stories from the data and I think as an overall story, to someone who has never seen this dataset, or worked with sensor data before, it is a nice introduction.

The poster and all of its charts and tables were created in some combination of Apple’s iWork suite and Processing ( processing.org ), the data was mined and refined using some Python and mostly Java.

Now though, the information visualization time of the year is over and it is time to get back to real work. Cell phones and privacy and student organization websites and swappable policy interfaces and paper reading and user testing and rule specification interfaces and other secret and exciting things.

Yes, seriously – as I posted here just over a month ago, John McCain came to Carnegie Mellon to give some important speech on the economy and I was part of the student group that got to meet him. Here is an awkwardly fish-eyed picture which seems to be taken from ground level. From left to right:

• Adi – CMU (student) Vice President
• Eileen – AB Chair
• Sara – CMU Economics
• John McCain – Just a guy.
• Me – Grad Student President
• Ben – Token Republican
• Sean – CMU (student) President

So … enjoy that.

Update: Yes, I wear jeans to meet John McCain, it’s cool.