Life Changes | grouperlab

September 5, 2016

Back to School

The Labor Day holiday weekend is drawing to a close, and I have finished up my second week of the Fellowship. Even though the start dates of the semester and my tenure here in DC were the same, I have gotten to notice how much the routines differ between the two environments. Unlike my academic routine that can adapt and adjust based on the day of the week and the differences between class and no-class, committee and research schedules, things feel distinct here. There is a bus I catch, most days, between 8:14 and 8:40. On Wednesdays, there will usually be lunch with the other Fellows. There are Monday and Thursday morning “huddle” meetings.

However, that is not what I notice the most from the past two weeks. I admit that I have developed a particular appreciation for my manager. Each day, there is a specific new thing I have to learn. How do I send a particular type of email? What is the formatting for this kind of documentation? Who do I contact for this activity? Of course, he’s seen this all before, but it’s my first time. And it’s not like I have had 3-4 weeks of easing into the situation. I’ve already worked on international memoranda, and meetings between embassy staff and local representatives, and sat in on planning discussions with the offices of some folks whose name might appear on someone’s bumper sticker. (But notably, the importance of the office is communicated by an acronym, or even a single letter; the people whose names are used are names I don’t recognize, and even those names go with acronyms.) The most appropriate phrase for this experience is one that I learned during my first few weeks as an undergrad at MIT: “Drinking from the firehose.”

In that environment, where I’m supposed to come up to speed quickly, it seems like a luxury to have someone check in with me as many as 3-5 times per day to help me with one task or another. In truth, some of the help sessions seem a bit remedial, teaching me things I do already know. But he doesn’t know that. And more importantly, I don’t always know when something I think I know how to do isn’t exactly how this organization does it. So, I find myself learning to be more patient when being taught, and listening all the way through the lesson. I even have a guiding document for goals to achieve over the next month or so—distinct from a to-do list of tasks, and an in-process list of assignments.

One of the things that surprises me most about this firehose experience is a new-found empathy and appreciation for the situations that confront new students in the lab. We’ve been working on SoS and PoSE conceptualizations of ICT use in the SHARK and DOLPHIN and PERCH* streams for years—why are you nodding blankly at me? Of course. I’ve been doing it for years. You just got here. I just used a bunch of acronyms—shorthand for me, incomprehensible jargon for you. Even when we get to time for a thesis outline, or a prelim draft, or a set of PhD defense slides, it does take some reminders to recognize that two dozen years of practice and 75 or more iterations don’t get transmitted easily to someone who is experiencing it all new and in an intense, nervous state.

I would like to hope that this lesson comes back to Purdue with me next Fall. For a new student, or new faculty member, each new item can be part of an overwhelming onslaught of novelty and complexity. Maybe it won’t stay that way for long, but it feels like that now. In the senior capstone design course I teach, I remind the students to take the time to capture those initial moments of novelty and first attempts at processing and decision making, because it will be really hard to recall those feelings (and assumptions, and senses of confusion) again later. I can tell them that, but it was a long time since I have felt that at the level I feel it now. It’s good to be reminded of what the first few, chaotic weeks of new experience feel like.

Photo of Little Kern Golden Trout by Middleton and Liitschwager (1988), hanging in the C Street entrance lobby of the National Academies.

*Acronym decluttering:

SoS: Systems-of-Systems. or a description of complex systems engineering settings where individual components of an overarching system represent complex systems in their own right (such as individual aircraft, with pilots and co-pilots, in the airspace over Washington, DC while Marine One is traveling across town).

PoSE: Perspectives on Systems Engineering. This is a course that I developed to teach about four distinct traditions of systems engineering, ranging across systems thinking, cybernetics, component-whole relations, and project management. Only in its second iteration as a hybrid distance / on-campus course, it is one of the most subscribed courses in Engineering Professional Education (and I’m not even teaching it this semester).

ICT: Information and Communications Technology. When I first started as a faculty member, most computers had line-by-line display screens in single colors of amber or green; email and word processors and bulletin board chat groups were the most sophisticated information exchange tools available. Even with all of the changes in capability, it’s still important to recognize that the point of these technologies were, and are, for humans to communicate.

SHARK, DOLPHIN, PERCH: These are designations of project areas within the research lab, referring to knowledge sharing architectures, information flow delays, and applications to healthcare delivery improvement, respectively. Check them out at https://engineering.purdue.edu/GrouperLab/streams/.

August 18, 2016

Superposition

With a flourish and frenzy of activity, the cycle has completed itself and begun once more. This week, of course, was particularly hectic. On Tuesday, we in GROUPER were pleased to celebrate Liang’s successful defense of her dissertation (now to finish the writing!), and after a 2-hour lab meeting, I went home and got some pleasure reading in. Wednesday was a travel day, with challenges of unstable weather leading to one canceled flight, and ground stops due to ramp closures at both the start and finish of the second leg of the trip. Hours late, but with the air cooled from the rain, I finally finished the trip and got home for a good night’s sleep.

“Hold it. You were at home, then you got stuck during thunderstorms, and finished the trip, and went home? Did you not get to your destination? Was your trip canceled?”

Even as I write this entry, there is a type of surrealism about this week. I’m sitting in one of the chairs I have had for over five years, with Amber on my lap, looking at her cat tree and food and a bunch of other items I clearly recognize. The window still faces east, but the image is different: instead of an empty parking lot across the street, I see a tall tree and an office building. In other words, the shift has now occurred. Amber and I have moved to Washington, DC to start my position as a Jefferson Science Fellow. My first day is next Monday, and I have begun enjoying the exploration of the neighborhoods of McPherson Square and Thomas Circle, and picking up coffee and pastry and fruit at the White House Street Market.

Amber exploring the new window view

My world is changing significantly, and yet some things remain consistent. I am still an engineering faculty member, but I am thinking about a completely different set of issues this August compared to last August. Our lab meeting addressed a very interesting topic based on students’ recent experiences, and one that I will be considering very hard in the coming months. Academia, government, and industry are considered vastly different places, and representing wildly divergent career paths for those with PhDs. And yet, we’re taught (and have first hand experience) that a variety of people all craft their actions, decisions, and processing of information based on perceived risks, costs, and outcome benefits. There’s only one challenge. The benefits that drive most industry teams (profit—hey, I hear the new Aston Martins are really nice) don’t come into play at all for most academic or government folks, and the primary risk keeping academic folks up at night (someone already published my idea in that journal I love!) don’t seem to bother industry or government people much. A government employee may complain bitterly about the costs of having to work 5-10 hours of overtime one week; many academics and industry research folks take a 60-70 hour average work week as pretty much standard.

You may notice that the website (http://www.grouperlab.org) looks very different than a few months ago; that took us a while to work through. Elliott, our wonder-undergrad, did a pretty thorough redesign and architecture job, but what was more important was not just the scripting language or tab sequences. We went back to a very basic question: who comes to our lab’s website? Three different types of groups (yes, it’s that “use case” thing) want distinct types of information, at varying grain sizes. Even our own GROUPER alums represent different types of interaction profiles. We’ve got government employees seeing how our work can inform improvements for federal agencies. GROUPERs are also rising up the ranks in industry, and may be in a position to hire a new or recent grad (in this sense, GROUPER is definitely a distinct and valued brand). With the lab’s traditional gender mix (somewhere approaching 2/3 female), it’s not surprising that a number of alumnae list their primary function right now as “Mom”. I see no reason to hide that, or feel guilty or ashamed to highlight such life pathways. If everything is a system, and GROUPERs look at information everywhere, can’t those skills be applied to everything from medical information use for family members, to understanding the daily experiences of neurodiversity, to getting a front-row seat to the miracles of how humans develop broad processes of learning and skill development sets in ways that still challenge our most sophisticated machine learning algorithms.

Over the next few months, the GROUPER blog will be more active again, but it won’t be focusing as much just on our current lab research. We’re still researching, of course, but we have other stories to tell, and other forms of impact and effect to consider for how we get, share, and use the information we’ve been gathering and lessons we’ve been learning. Thanks for visiting us again after our quiet period. Hey, it gets busy learning how to be in multiple places at once.

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October 22, 2013

Who Do You Think You Are?

Well, sometimes you get stuck on a theme. There have been several topics that have been at the forefront of my thinking over the past month, coming largely from the experience at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) Annual Meeting in San Diego. Although there were only two current GROUPERs there, I did get to interact with a number of former students, as well as others who sought me out and seemed truly eager to interact with me during the meeting. In that light, I thought about naming this entry, “Back from Cali”. However, after reading the song lyrics, I decided that maybe I didn’t want to reference the song by Slash (even though Axl Rose, the lead singer of Guns N’ Roses, is originally from Lafayette, IN). How about “Back to Cali”? No, the LL Cool J lyrics aren’t suitable either. Even becoming snarky didn’t help. “Title of the Entry” reminded me immediately of the song by DaVinci’s Notebook. So, yes, I am aware of a song reference above. Apparently, I can’t escape it.

So, what was so important that I now have all of this music in my head? Well, it was a great room, with a wonderful view, but it wasn’t just about the view, or even the boat.

One thing I noticed frequently is that the capacity for positive effect that one may have on others should not be trivialized. I’m not always aware of this, and the meeting in San Diego was a great reminder of the power of the effect. Three former GROUPERs (and one honorary GROUPER) are now involved with the Society in positions of leadership. Sandra Garrett is on the HFES Executive Council with me; members of the Technical Program Committee for 2013 included Michelle Rogers (Workshops) and Erik Wakefield (Product Design) as well as Ron Boring (Interactive Sessions and Posters). Let me mention Erik for a moment. When I first started working with him, he was working in the College of Technology, with what seemed to be a bizarre idea—let’s have sports scores and updates that can be pushed, real time, to someone’s mobile device. Except that this was 2005-06, before iPhone and Galaxy smartphones. He got the project done, graduated, got a job, and… developed. First in one company, then another, and then another, with HFES as his primary professional affiliation. He’s a senior engineer now, and working on some cool projects. When I saw him in San Diego, I noticed the difference, and mentioned it. And I said that I was proud of how he’d developed. Apparently, that had an effect—he went out of his way to mention it in one of his status updates (check on October 1, 2013). And that’s what got me thinking. We can have an effect that we don’t recognize, until someone points it out to us.

In my previous entry, “Eaten up with Curiosity,” I mentioned how much I was affected as an adolescent by the Rudyard Kipling story about Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Well, as it turns out, the Chuck Jones Gallery was just a few blocks away from the hotel, right in the midst of the Gaslamp District. I passed the gallery nearly every day, and Thursday evening, decided that I simply had to stop by. I confess that I took along a young colleague who had been expressing the desire and enjoyment of engaging in conversation and challenge; although it’s hard (and a bit arrogant) to simply wake up one morning to say, “I think I’m going to mentor that person today,” I did truly enjoy helping and encouraging them to consider their capability and career path from a variety of perspectives. So, in any case, we stopped by the Gallery, just for me to explore what might be there. And, behold, in one of the smaller rooms of the gallery, was a picture of Rikki. Actually, a production cel. A nice piece of animation history. So, there was a bit of passion expressed, moderated by a sense that such things were still beyond me.

Detail of Rikki cel. Copyright, Chuck Jones Entertainment

Who was Rikki? Just a pet? Or the hero of an epic confrontation, sung into history? Again, this is an entry about who we think we are. Sometimes we forget, or get stuck in a past version of who we might have been at some point in the past. I tend to call that past version “the ramen-eating guy in my head”. As an undergrad (and somewhat as a grad student), I was always watching every penny; once, when I found a $20 bill on the street in a puddle, I rejoiced—that was food for a month! This was someone desperate to show he could belong, that he could do something of note in the academic environment. Thirty years later, that ramen-eating guy still shows up sometimes. I have to remind myself that’s not where I am now. I have students eager to work with me. Former students greet me, and are thrilled to show me their new business cards. Others whom I never would have guessed knew about me seem honored to meet me; they’ve heard such wonderful stories about me. How I treat them now may not seem like much, but it can have a tremendous effect on their life and future. Who knows which young and eager student will become the next leader of our field?

These are lessons that I am very pleased to learn, with importance for my life both now and into the future. I thank all those who helped me with these insights and learnings.

Excuse me. I have to open a package from San Diego. It’s a reminder never to underestimate who we are. Rikki has arrived.

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April 15, 2013

Comings and Goings

It’s been highly eventful in GROUPER over the past month, since the beginning of Purdue’s Spring Break. We’re really proud to announce that Natalie Benda, who had just submitted a blog entry to the site (“Bringing Sexy Back“), has won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. This is one of the most prestigious awards for graduate students, and highlights both her unique development and her engagement with society to influence the impact of research. Congratulations, Natalie! We certainly hope you’re back here soon!

Members of the lab defined Prof. Caldwell’s travel schedule as “March Madness,” which almost exactly matched the length (and complexity) of the NCAA Tournament. On March 1, when the women’s Big Ten and other tournaments were starting up, BSC was in Washington, DC. Since then, he visited Irvine, CA; London, UK (for the Global Grand Challenges Summit); San Diego, CA; and Shanghai, Nanjing, and Suzhou, China, before arriving in Seattle on April 8 — the day that Louisville won the men’s championship. You may hear from BSC more soon.

In addition, Prof. Caldwell was escorted through much of his China visit by LIU Linyan, who was a visiting scholar to Purdue and GROUPER from the Nanjing University of Science and Technology. Returning to Shanghai only hours after Prof. Caldwell’s arrival, Linyan (and her husband) were invaluable and gracious in hosting and translating in settings as varied as Nanjing restaurants and Tongli historical museums. We’ll miss Linyan, who also provided us with this message summarizing her experience:

It was a wonderful time since I became a member of GROUPER. Before I came to Purdue, I imaged the guys in the GROUPER, now I still can remember the day I came to this lab for the first time. Liang was the first person I met; she helped me with the registration. Then I met two guys just out of lab (I spent six month in the lab, studying, meeting , etc.), Jeremi and Omar. They were so kind and helped me a lot. In that week we had a GROUPER gather, I met all of the GROUPERs. We had Chinese food in a Chinese restaurant. I felt so warm.

During the six months I was in lab, we had GROUPER meeting nearly every two weeks in the lab, and we had personal meeting in Prof’s office. Every personal meeting, when discussed with Prof. Caldwell, you could find something new and should think more. Thank you, prof. Caldwell, the meeting, the books and paper you recommended helped me learning and getting new knowledge and enlarge my research field.

Time goes so quickly, when I recall the memory in GROUPER. I am in China now. I can remember everything so clearly like it happened yesterday. Omar took me to ITAP to modify my password and showed me how to use the scanner. In the noon, I was having lunch and listening to Jake’s music; the pin (GROUPER pin), Marissa’s birthday, G4 in Natalie’s apartment, G4 in Prof. Caldwell’s house, and the pink poster we were drawing…. I will never forget the nice experience and I will treasure the pin (GROUPER pin) forever, because I am a member of GROUPER.

Thanks, GROUPERs. Prof. Caldwell, Marissa, Liang, Jeremi, Jake, Omar, Natalie, Kelly, Mina, Siobhan.

We’re all pulling for Siobhan as she recovers from her accident last month. Things were a bit scary for a while, and remain tough. As I mentioned to her and her family, Siobhan’s caught a crab affecting her race plan. We’ll be getting back up to speed, one stroke at a time. The most important thing is that such events help us to recognize that there are more important elements to our individual and shared existence than p-values and the number of citations in a given research paper. We still emphasize the quality of our work, but even now, we can see direct impacts of what we do on individual quality of life issues–including those of our own members.

Congratulations also to Jake and Marie Viraldo, who have added to their team; Marie gave birth to Jacob Osborn last Thursday. Once again, life sometimes trumps lab. I may not want to always admit it, but having been a grad student with various intrusions of critical life events (birth of a child, life-threatening illness of a significant other, drastic shifts in research, unexpected opportunities and setbacks), I am sensitive and aware of how this is not just school, but one’s developing professional life. For those of you just embarking on it, I am sympathetic. (Not always soft or fuzzy, but sympathetic.)

Next time, perhaps a bit more about lab turnover… Jeremi finished her thesis, and Marissa will be finishing soon. There’s always more to mention, because we’re never done.

Category: Life Changes