Dan Morris and Meredith Ringel Morris · Microsoft Research
"What Medicine and HCI Can Learn from Each Other" and "Microblog Credibility Perceptions"

This talk is a two-for-the-price-of-one: Dan Morris and Meredith Ringel Morris will each be speaking about their work at Microsoft Research. Ergo you really get two abstracts.

Dan's work sits at the intersection of HCI and Medicine. That means that 50% of what he does is applying HCI methodology to clinical problems, so he can spend the other 50% of his time "borrowing" technologies from medicine and applying them to HCI. Dan's talk, therefore, will focus on (a) making medical information useful and intuitive to patients, and (b) sensors and machine learning for computer input, inspired by stuff that happens every day in the hospital. The cool-input part of the talk will have fun videos, so bring your popcorn.

Merrie will be speaking about microblog credibility perceptions. Microblogs have become an increasingly important source of information, both in the U.S. (Twitter) and in China (Weibo). However, the brevity of microblog updates, combined with increasing access of microblog content through search rather than through direct network connections, makes it challenging to assess the credibility of news relayed in this manner. In this talk, she will present experimental and survey data that compare the impact of several features of microblog updates (author's gender, name style, profile image, location, and degree of network overlap with the reader) on credibility perceptions among U.S. and Chinese audiences. These findings illustrate the complex mechanism of credibility perceptions, identifying several key differences in how users from each country critically consume microblog content. She will discuss how to incorporate these findings into the design of improved user interfaces for accessing microblogs and social search results in different cultural settings.

Dan Morris is a researcher in the Computational User Experiences group at Microsoft Research who is uncomfortable writing bios in the third person. My work at MSR has included sensors and machine learning for input systems, making medical information more useful to hospital patients, and generating musical accompaniment for vocal melodies (the "Songsmith" project). These days my two main research worlds - "sensing stuff for input" and "making medical information useful" - are finally coming together, and I'm working on sensing and machine learning for health and wellness. Before MSR, I studied neuroscience at Brown, and I developed brain-computer interfaces for research and clinical environments. My PhD work at Stanford focused on haptics and physical simulation for virtual surgery. Meredith Ringel Morris is a computer scientist in the neXus group at Microsoft Research. She is also an affiliate associate professor in the department of Computer Science & Engineering and in the Information School at the University of Washington. Dr. Morris's research area is human-computer interaction, with a particular emphasis on computer-supported cooperative work and social computing. She recently co-authored the book Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why? (Morgan & Claypool, 2010). Technology Review recognized Dr. Morris's pioneering work on collaborative information seeking by naming her one of 2008's "35 innovators under 35." Dr. Morris earned a Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from Stanford University, and an Sc.B. in computer science from Brown University.