October 23, 2017

Expanding the Territory

Now that I have returned to Purdue, I am back to experiencing some of my past habits and activities as a faculty member. In my previous entry, “Crossing Paths,” I mentioned my trip to North Dakota for the Space Grant meeting; last week, the travel was to Austin, Texas for the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) meeting. After being in Washington for a full year, it was both refreshing and curiously strange to be back at an academic conference. More than anything else, I was able to enjoy re-connecting with colleagues and collaborators and others in a community that I have been an active part for over 25 years, rather than the valuable (but disconcerting) experience of learning a new environment and new norms in an unfamiliar context.

A year away from something so immersive as one’s primary research community does permit a new experience and view upon one’s return. It is not just that my presentations took on a slightly different tone due to the experience of writing for diplomats; I was thinking about the presentations differently, colored by my growing understanding of what it is to speak on policy topics. I was very glad to see GROUPER alumnae and hear of their successes; I enjoyed watching the current students present well and receive appreciative comments from the audience. That was much more satisfying in many ways than actually being the one presenting all of the papers. It’s an interesting expansion of perception and shift in perspective on the territory (dare I say legacy?) of one’s career. Interestingly, I could also hear it differently this time, aided by the alternative experience of last year. Where has the influence gone, and how has it traveled from its headwaters? Does the river notice its impact on the stones as it flows?

I recognize that some of what I missed while in Washington was the regular opportunity to work with and mentor people whose personal and professional trajectories could be increased. What I could begin to notice in Austin was how much influence my past efforts have had on others, even when I didn’t realize previously that what I was doing would affect them in a lasting way. In retrospect, it’s not surprising, but at the time, I found myself at a loss for words when I was introduced to a promising student by someone who had already been positively influenced by their interactions with me. I wasn’t actively recruiting new students… but I would be pleased to have such exciting and passionate people to help explore new projects and possibilities.

Another area of recognition during the past two months since I returned from Washington was the change in context to describe the applications of our work in the lab. Yes, it’s easy to excite other space folks about the NASA research on Mars exploration analog projects; pilots often don’t need to be convinced about the value of our aviation weather information studies. But policy impacts? Can’t we just leave that to others? As I have learned, the answer is “no”. The connections won’t be evident to all, as we’ve already learned from the story of Cassandra and “postcards”. What is the broader context of connections, within and beyond the communities that already sense the value of what we do?

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised about this, but nonetheless, it has taken me a while to process this change in thinking due to my experience in Washington. My conversations while in Austin did not just cover the next steps for the HFES, but next steps for national science and technology policy. The research discussions were not just posed in the context of a single principal investigator grant to a directed funding agency call… but possibilities to address broader elements of engineering’s role in society. What justification would you provide to say that your research was worth funding to people who weren’t specialists in your area, or even in STEM research in general? (Oh. This is exactly what is being proposed in the U.S. Senate.)

I happen to like GROUPER’s statement of why we exist… however, I’m biased, and I already know what it means to talk about “human processes of information flow, knowledge sharing, and task coordination”. But what is that good for? A very similar question was asked by, and of, the National Academy of Engineering (now renamed as part of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, or NASEM) to explain the role of engineering research and technology development to address 14 “global Grand Challenges” facing society in the 21^st Century. Speakers at the Global Grand Challenges Summit (GGCS) in Washington in July asked members of the audience to think about how their work might address any of the Grand Challenges: in essence, a call to consider expanding one’s territory of impact. And when I brought that question to the lab, an interesting insight emerged.

GROUPER research addresses seven of the 14 Grand Challenges.

Five of these are pretty obvious: PERCH research on brain injury recovery and personalized medicine for chronic care directly touches on “Personalized Learning,” “Reverse-Engineer the Brain,” and “Advance Health Informatics”. CORAL and SHARK work on secure supply chains and network operations center teams hits on “Secure Cyberspace”. These projects, together with our STINGRAY work on spaceflight operations, provide examples of “Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery,” particularly discovery conducted by interdisciplinary teams of humans. In addition, there are two more areas that benefit by GROUPER’s ability to capitalize on connections. It’s not just the individualized brain trajectories and chronic care models, but the discussion of Systems Engineering to support improved information architectures for non-text references, that helps address the push to “Engineer Better Medicines.” Improved information architectures, improved network operations and event responses, and better cognitive framing for addressing uncertainty in event prediction and response all assist in the effort to “Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure”.

That’s a very big territory. There’s more to do, not less. Who else wants to go explore and map such beautiful frontiers?

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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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April 16, 2014

Excellence in April

After Madness, comes Anticipation. In the sports world, April is a period of eager awaiting: as baseball teams take to the field, and professional football and basketball leagues highlight their drafts of college athletes, while colleges engage in “signing day” expectations and celebrations. Winter sports crown their champions. Hopes are fulfilled, or dashed. While academics are seen as a very different world than athletics, I really don’t see it that way. In fact, graduate research programs have their own version of “signing day,” when offers of graduate fellowships are committed, and prospective students choose their new institution, advisor, and advanced degree emphasis. I am the Chair of our Graduate Committee, and I am highly sensitive to this process, from multiple perspectives. Over 400 students applied to Purdue Industrial Engineering for the Fall 2014 semester. Just over 100 have received the “happy letter,” indicating an acceptance of the application and an invitation to become part of the Purdue Rethink IE experience. Even fewer receive a “happier letter,” which includes an offer of fellowship support. Those are extremely challenging and competitive, and represent some of our expectations of who can be an outstanding contributor—not simply within the School of IE, but at the level of the College of Engineering or the University as a whole (where many of these fellowships are decided and awarded).

Every Spring, we in the lab discuss the culture of the lab, and what we need to do and think and be to maintain a focus on excellence, innovation, and productivity. Several years ago, I initiated a model of “360 recruiting,” where existing members of the lab are involved with the visits of prospective students who are invited by the School of IE to spend time on the Purdue campus and explore their options at an outstanding “full-service” IE program. I don’t commit lab funds to anyone right away, for two reasons (both due to experience). Some students find, after arrival, that our projects and my advising style may not work for them. Others may be searching for a project, but in fact are searching for financial support. Neither one of those types of students can effectively contribute or be well suited to the lab, and that lack of effective matching can hurt the overall productivity of the lab. While that first reason is strategic and philosophical, the second reason is more practical. GROUPER supports student professional development, not just research output. The students are not just workers in a research machine. Thus, we might not have funding for the project that a particular student wants to do when s/he first arrives… or they may not know which project they want to pursue. As of Spring 2014, there are six PhD students in GROUPER—not one is working on the specific project they identified in their application, or thought about during their first semester on campus. Four are working over the summer at internships in industry and government. These internships, rather than “interfering” with the research, provide additional opportunities for students to explore areas of professional and research growth, and identify areas they may want to work after graduation (or not—finding out you don’t want to work somewhere is also a successful outcome of an internship).

Nonetheless, GROUPER feels like an elite team. We try to “draft” well, and we try to develop and promote and sustain excellence in our performance. I was very pleased to learn that two of our “hopefuls” were offered Purdue Doctoral Fellowships for Fall 2014. I’m ecstatic to have received acceptances of both offers, meaning that our next set of GROUPERs can continue a history of diversity and excellence in doctoral development. Current members of the lab are also recognized awardees. Today, I get to celebrate Omar Eldardiry’s Outstanding Service Scholarship, due in large part to his excellent work as a teaching assistant and instructor (including his support for me with the senior capstone design project course last fall). And of course, I cannot finish this entry without once again celebrating one of our “First Team All-Americans”: Michelle (Shelly) Jahn, who was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. This makes two consecutive years that a member of GROUPER has been awarded a fellowship through the NSF GRFP. (Last year, the winner was undergraduate GROUPER Natalie Benda, who is working in Patient Safety and will be attending the University at Buffalo for her PhD.)

Excellence in research and student professional development. This is an ongoing source of tremendous pride, and the heart of a continuing commitment to improve how people get, share, and use information well.

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February 17, 2014

Timing is Everything

Although it doesn’t always feel like it here in the lab, things are actually going very well. The work calendar is quite full, and the project to-do lists continue to grow—not just in the number of items, but in the number of projects which require to-do items. Three different Institutional Review Board (IRB) applications, with three different students. Four research projects active, with two or three more coming on line. The “March Madness” travel schedule I had last year is even worse: the lab has now officially declared it “Winter Madness” (from January 24 until March 14, there is only one week where I am not in an airport on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday of that weekend—and on March 21-24, I will be driving back from Chicago on Friday, and flying again on Monday).

Last Thursday, though, I was able to appreciate what some good timing could achieve. A day earlier, I had escaped from the ice and snow storm that paralyzed the Southeast US: leaving out of western Virginia early Wednesday morning, on a rebooked flight through Detroit (all flights through Atlanta had been cancelled as of Monday evening). I was only a few hours later arriving home than originally scheduled, even with delays and flight diversions (let’s hear it for multiple daily nonstops from Detroit to Indianapolis!). Thursday was bright, clear, and even relatively “warm” (about 5F that morning, with a high temperature of approximately 30F) for a drive down to Bloomington, IN for a research meeting. That research meeting was in support of one of our new grants, a project with the Purdue Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) to look at sensemaking, distributed expertise, and information presentation in cyberinfrastructure network operations centers. The meeting was unexpectedly effective in highlighting both people to talk to and additional directions for the research to pursue. A positive attitude to go down on the one nice day where my schedule permitted the trip was better than putting the trip off for later (given “Winter Madness” and the frequency of airspace-paralyzing storms, I am not thrilled about trying to create new one-day visits anytime before April). At the end of the day, I even received one more treat derived from an awareness of good timing. As I left the office, the nearly full moon was visible to the east, while the International Space Station was a fast-moving evening star traveling from northwest to northeast. (No, I don’t have the orbital tracks memorized, but there are NASA websites and software apps for that.) Yeah, that was some good timing.

Timing is a fairly popular subject of GROUPER research, even if there’s only been a couple of blog entries highlighting time pressure (and only one on time perception). But the topic is never far from our mind. In our direct research investigations, we talk about the sense of time pressure as the ratio of time required to complete a task to the time available to complete it (T_R / T_A), with time pressure increasing as you run out of time to finish faster than you run out of task to complete. We worry about the challenge of the age and “freshness” of data when making decisions about the current state of a dynamic world (and what you need to do based on that state). We consider how experts trade other resources for time, including the decision to create an interim solution (“safe mode”) to stabilize a degrading system to allow for more time to consider a better, more stable recovery and repair. But how does that play out in the lab’s daily activities, other than a posting an ongoing (and continuing growing) list of deadlines?

Fortunately, we have been working on a set of very promising solutions (processes, really). As I go through my travel schedule, the students get a strong sense of the “windows of opportunity” (time periods of available work capacity) where I can respond to a task request or help them make progress towards an external deadline. A few months ago, I described some of my thought process in working in a distributed way on these tasks; I think in terms of a set of scaled answers to the student’s question. In essence, my thought process and general formulation goes like this:

Student: Dr. C., I need you to do xyz by time T_D.

(If (T_D – Now) is under 12 hours, I tend to get really upset. Don’t do that.)

BSC: What do I need in order to do xyz?

Student: You need A, B, and Q.

(If I don’t have A, B, or Q, and the student doesn’t provide it at the time of the request, I tend to get really upset, Don’t do that.)

Then I usually try to provide one of a set of answers, ranging from:

NO.
Not by T_D; the best I can do is T_alt.
I can do xyz’ by T_D.
I can do that, but can’t start until T_S.
Yes, working
DONE.

What I didn’t expect was how providing this type of information to the students could actually change the style of interactions in lab. It’s not that I declared some specific required email format, or that I would refuse to read emails that did not conform to that format. But, within a week or two, I started noticing emails with subject lines including the words:

ACTION REQUIRED / REQUESTED, or

INFORMATION ONLY.

The body of the emails would specify details like:

Estimated time to complete: xxx

Date / time needed: dd mmm yy hh:mm

So, rather than simply complying with a command, the students now understand my motivations, and my constraints, and my strategies for organizing my time. I also pointed out that I try to set aside windows of time in advance for everyone—not just in the weekly 1:1 meetings (which, I confess, is much harder to achieve during the Winter Madness travel), but when I expect tasks towards external deadlines. Knowing in advance how much time to set aside helps me with schedules, and allows for slipping in new tasks on an emergency or opportunistic basis. It’s all part of a goal of “Better Information Now” that we have worked with in our projects with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the United Space Alliance. Sometimes, it works very well, and sometimes it still needs adjustment and improvement. But at least, we’re making progress.

It’s about time.

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August 2, 2013

Finishing with the Start in Mind

Hmm, Caldwell, that’s not how the Stephen Covey Habit goes. Yeah, I know…

It’s not that the summer has parboiled my brain — I’ve had several pleasant vacations and focused quite actively on the concept of taking time for myself and prioritizing my own relaxation and recovery. And in fact, we talk a lot in the lab about the excitement of connections and possibilities that come from having a bold imagination. However, the steps involved with getting from being a brand new grad student to a freshly minted PhD combine a bit of imagination (beginning with the end in mind) with a lot of perseverance (focusing on the next step). It’s great to have a great goal and imagine all sorts of wonderful outcomes… but as the Taoist Lao Tzu said, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, with a focus on the ground immediately below one’s feet.

As a systems engineer, I also think of the world as a set of nested feedback control systems. This weekend, I am getting ready to complete the graduation ceremony with placing the doctoral hood on my new PhD GROUPER alumna Marissa Vallette. The joy of the weekend also has me thinking very intently about how Marissa arrived into the lab. In our exit interview a few weeks ago, that initial meeting was the source of a very rich conversation. Every student is different, with a unique mix of strengths and weaknesses (“opportunities for additional development”). Marissa is one of the ones who, by all accounts, is likely to want to organize your files, keep track of the calendar, and ask several times exactly what is meant by that correction in paragraph 5 on page 73. (This is by no means a complaint. Sometimes, when you’re working on a dissertation, that’s exactly what you need to focus on. And I am indebted to Marissa for taking on the role of organizing the GROUPER lab calendar and several of our lab documents for two years.) And, please recall, GROUPER works on a somewhat unusual recruitment and selection model: existing members of the lab are strongly engaged in interviewing and providing feedback on potential new members.

I am amused when people ask Marissa how she started in GROUPER. One version of the answer is that BSC passed the interview. Yes, she started with a list of questions for me (reproduced with permission from MAV):

On average, how many years does it take to graduate an M.S. and/or Ph.D. student?
How many M.S. and/or Ph.D. students have you graduated?
How many M.S. and/or Ph.D. students do you currently advise?
Are you tenured?
How do you incorporate your background (e.g., research, industry experience) to industrial engineering?
What other commitments do you have both on- and off-campus?
What is your advising style? For instance, is it guided or un-guided?
What is your availability? For instance, how quickly do you respond to e-mails? How frequently would I be able to meet with you one-on-one?
Aside from departmental requirements, what is your philosophy on selecting a committee (for an M.S. and/or Ph.D. defense)?
How do you run your research lab?
What are your/the lab’s current research interests?
What are your/the lab’s current research projects?
What, if any, are the requirements/expectations of your graduate students? For instance, do you require them to publish journal papers and/or attend conferences? Are there lab meetings?
What funding opportunities are available both inside and outside your research lab?

Overall, not a bad set of questions, and if you are a student who considers themselves in need of a bit more “active involvement” from their advisor, you really want to get answers to these questions. I admit that I would have had trouble answering these questions as a brand new faculty member—both because I wouldn’t have had positive answers to many of the questions, and because I wouldn’t have been able to articulate my philosophy as well then. But, as Marissa said, it was good that a) I did have answers to these questions, and b) that I didn’t mind her asking them. I certainly want to have a good fit and ongoing relationship with my students, and it is definitely not the case that my students are all reproductions of me. I want that sort of interaction, and a mutual agreement on goals and priorities, because it is that sort of agreement that helps manage the rough patches of the graduate experience.

In retrospect, she’s not even the first (or last) member of GROUPER to have interviewed me with such questions. For the new crops of students about to start their graduate careers in the next few weeks, I would recommend that they come up with their own list of questions, for themselves and for a potential advisor. In the long run, my grad students can be seen as “colleagues displaced in time” (a phrase I adopted some years ago to reflect my desire to have a strong professional relationship with GROUPERs as they continue on in their careers). In the short term, I have an exceptionally powerful and controlling role and responsibility for their progress and completion. That’s not boastful egotism. That is a recognition of the way academia works in a doctoral-granting research program. In all of the research conferences I’ve attended, one of the most frequent questions asked (sometimes just after “Where’d you go to grad school?” but sometimes even before that) is “Who was your advisor?” Those relationships are vital, and can easily make the difference in your life for decades after you leave that grad lab for the last time. So, I am quite pleased that I was able to have this time, on this graduation weekend, to reflect on lessons I got to learn with a brand new doctoral student and her questions at the beginning of her GROUPER program.

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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.

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February 11, 2013

Updating Documentation

Now that there are a few new members of the lab, it’s time to pay attention once more to making explicit some of our expectations and shared experiences. It’s interesting to watch, and to test, how stories or catch phrases easily become part of a local culture… only to be met by blank stares when a new person experiences it.

“What’s the best dissertation?” “The one *you* can do in a reasonable amount of time.”

“Is that a title of a song on the album?”

” Delta Pain” (which is a title of a song on the album)

All of these represent elements of tacit knowledge, in that they are shared and understood by people who were in the lab when the event occurred, or maybe in an individual meeting with me, and have learned to experience and internalize the informal lessons of the lab in a particular way. That’s great for an individual mentoring interaction, but not really good for organizing the productivity of getting a population of students to finish high quality thesis and dissertation documents. Thus, we have to do some of these things with more explicit intent, and a more focused and determined documentation of elements of the lab’s culture.

Since the beginning of the Spring 2013 semester, we’ve been working on this in the creation and updating of four distinct documents: A Master’s Thesis outline; a Dissertation prelim outline (oh, even that’s tacit, or at least implicit: the proposal document written in order to describe one’s dissertation so that one can be advanced to candidacy); a Doctoral Dissertation outline… and most recently, a semester-by-semester timeline for progress towards degree completion. These seem to be very helpful for students, and help to summarize and integrate and transmit my experience in a fairly efficient way. And why not? I’ve supervised over 30 MS theses and 12 PhD dissertations, and sat on committees for another 25 or more graduate documents. Most students, on the other hand, only do this once. (I did have one of my students complete a second MS with me after finishing a first one elsewhere; no GROUPERs have ever tried to do multiple PhD dissertations.) Rather than make everything trial and error, or suggest that there is no pattern that leads to increased probability of success, some people (among those are many engineers) would like to have a sense of the path, the rule, the “game plan” of how this graduate experience is supposed to play out.

Does this mean that there is a fixed and rigid procedure that everyone must follow? Of course not, for several reasons. One is that GROUPERs are different people, with different skills. They don’t want to work in the same stream, or using the same data collection or analysis tools, or ask the same sorts of questions. Fortunately, I’ve worked in a bunch of areas, so my tolerance for procedure variability is fairly high–I can advise a variety of dissertations, because I have done a variety of projects in different areas and methodologies. (Some people may think of this concept as akin to Ashby’s discussion of “Requisite Variety”; no strict quantification here is implied.) So, the level of consistency is not at the detailed level of “you must design a three-level, two-dimensional Analysis of Variance studying the influence of…” Everyone is expected to be able to answer, “Why would anyone want to read this thesis / dissertation?” or “Why do we care about the question, or the work you did to answer it?”

It may also be relevant that one of the recent dissertations now making its way to conclusion is specifically addressing the question of procedure reliability and complexity. A very often-repeated task, with few new or challenging elements, can have a standard procedure that is rarely, if ever, inappropriate for completing the task as designed. If you’re developing a brand new task that has never been tried before, it’s highly unlikely that you can write a perfect procedure on exactly how to do it. Most procedures are somewhere in between, even if we assume the procedure is always right. At what level should we expect a new procedure to capture all of the experience that we gain in the development of a new system?

As time goes on, all of these documents will need to be updated–not necessarily because we were wrong, but because our knowledge evolves. (OK, I was explicitly wrong on this item. I forgot to include a version of the well-known advice: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Then tell them. Then tell them what you told them.” In other words, the last section of the introduction chapter should include an outline of the organization of the remainder of the thesis / dissertation.) Even the working of the updating process is a helpful way of sharing the experiences and telling the stories of the lab. And when we’re done, current and future generations of GROUPERs can know that I won’t get upset if they haven’t taken 15 credits or completed their plan of study or research proposal by the end of their first semester in the program. Really.

I know, you’re wanting the links to these documents. They’re still under construction. Check back when they’re done and posted.

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August 30, 2012

Summer Drives

Welcome back.

I don’t know if I have gotten used to it yet, even as I begin my 12^th year on the Purdue campus. Tomorrow is August 31, and we’re now finishing our second week of classes. (My daughter, who is at the University of Wisconsin (where I was faculty before here), starts a week from today. Just that difference in mentality regarding when the “Fall” semester starts seems to have a significant effect on cognitive, emotional, and social patterns of awareness and activity. (In fact, this idea was one of the contributing elements at the foundation of our research on information alignment and information clutch factors affecting task coordination in organizations.) The ramp up of demand may or may not match your increase in readiness for that demand, and if you’re not careful, that could cause falling into a task deficit “hole” that is extremely hard to climb out of later in the busy semester. (Ah, yes, that would be my undergraduate controls course, talking about feedback systems and response dynamics to input functions.)

Every once in a while, my mind takes one of these enjoyable side trips, and it can lead to interesting research insights. Members of the lab sometimes go along with me on these trips, which often involve discussions of mathematical definitions and relationships, as well as empirical or analytical planning and research designs. For instance… let’s talk about what dispersion means, and how it applies to production systems. Hey, does digital signal processing help us manipulate the timing and synchronization of entire files, rather than simple waveforms? Can we link student advising questions to convolution functions that describe knowledge transfer?

A real advantage of the beginning of this academic year is that most of GROUPER is back intact. Almost everyone was gone at some point: Natalie was in Germany (at Alcoa); Omar was in Egypt (finishing a Master’s at Alexandria and getting married); Jeremi was in Washington (at NSF); Kelly was in Cincinnati (at P&G) Jake was in San Diego (at SPAWAR); Liang even got to return to Xi’an China to see her family. We’ve graduated two students since the Spring Equinox. Jeff Onken defended his dissertation (although he was already working at Northrup Grumman) and completed a final presentation to his committee. Melvis Chafac completed her Hong Kong-based Master’s research writeups, and was off to MIT a few weeks ago after campus and conference presentations. Now, we’re back in lab meetings, telling stories and sharing / renewing the culture of the lab. (“Good idea / Bad idea” seems to be the best description of these culture shaping stories.) Even though there’s no one new, the reasons for the stories still exist.

Things get much busier after this week. I’ve taken on new responsibilities, both on campus and in the larger community. (Yes, we’ll tell you; however, I’d like to wait for the official updates.) I think I won’t be going much of anywhere this weekend—football season starts, but we’re also awaiting the arrival of a guest named Isaac. Not great weather for a drive… unless of course you’re talking about a series of running plays from the Purdue offense.

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March 7, 2012

Stream Management

“Hire the best people, and then get out of their way.” — Arnold O. Beckman

While I was an undergraduate, I frequently heard variations of this management philosophy; as an independent-minded student, often working by myself on projects, the mindset was very appealing. However, as a major professor and lab director, things are not always that easy.

Recent updates of the lab webpage have focused on further elaborations of the range of projects (“streams”) that GROUPERs are involved and productive. Instead of just listing the two primary research application areas (healthcare and spaceflight), we’ve now elaborated all three application areas (including STEM education), as well as the three more general methodological / theoretical considerations (communication effectiveness when resources are constrained; the effects of delays and information asynchrony on performance; and processes of knowledge sharing in teams and communities). Why all of the additions? Not just to sound more impressive and recruit more students (with seven grad students, two undergrads, and a 50% administrative appointment, it’s not clear that a much bigger lab is needed or wanted). With the new population of students (see the “Restocking GROUPER” entry), it is almost inevitable that the interests of this collection in 2012 would “load” on the streams differently than the lab circa 2004 or 2008. They even change their allegiance to a particular stream as their understanding of their topic (and their understanding of how the streams are organized) evolves through their development as students and scholars.

So, how does one remain sensitive and aware of these issues? One problem, of course, is that you don’t know what someone doesn’t know, or that you didn’t agree on basic elements, until implicit expectations aren’t met, or unquestioned assumptions aren’t grasped. This seems to show up most frequently, and with the greatest sense of immediacy, when students are in the midst of a critical written milestone (a thesis proposal or dissertation preliminary document, or a thesis or dissertation draft in preparation for a final defense). And with that, I again recognize the challenges of managing a diverse lab that works on novel and bleeding edge problems or approaches. There really isn’t a good way to give someone a past completed thesis and say, “Read this, and do exactly the same sort of thing with the same format, and you’ll be fine.”

In some cases, even that might not be sufficient. After 22 years, a dozen dissertations chaired (and another 20-30 as a committee member), and over 30 theses chaired, it’s easy for me to have the different pictures in my head. Research methods questions? I just go back to my psychology background. Systems engineering definitions? Yes, the style of that is covered, all the way back to my sophomore Unified Engineering experience. But what if your writing style was formed and honed by those with backgrounds in mathematical optimization, or physics, or political science, or software simulation? I’ve experienced all of these from GROUPER students in the past two years… and they’re not the same. Good luck with putting them all into the same box, or worse yet, into a blender and hoping that something palatable comes out. (Suddenly, I cannot help but think about the old “Bass-O-Matic” Saturday Night Live skit.) Yes, it would be much more straightforward to have a single stream and project focus, with all of the students having very similar backgrounds. However, I confess that I wouldn’t enjoy it as much.

There is a balance between being too far away, and being too close. Each person, and each group, needs its own balance. So, I’m looking for dynamically stable equilibria in academic research management and educational personal / professional development. Last academic year, I spent a fair amount of my time working with two students both trying to finish their dissertations at the same time. This year, the challenge has been a dissertation, a thesis, and dissertation prelim document, in addition to other research projects. I keep insisting on being directly involved in each project, and each document, and each student—to the extent that I felt guilty and nervous when I mentioned during a lab meeting that I would be gone for a few weeks and unable to keep to the weekly schedules. With this level of commitment, I can be both overwhelmed and concerned when I am not there every moment—exactly the opposite of Beckman’s admonitions. And yet, when I expressed worry that the GROUPERs would be left vulnerable and exposed in the “dangerous jungle and forest” of graduate student life, the response was one of the most rewarding and valuable validations I’ve received in a number of years:

“We’re not in the forest. We’re in the Lab.”

That’s also a philosophy I can live with.

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Tag: lab culture

GROUPER research addresses seven of the 14 Grand Challenges.