After a brief tour of the facilities, I got to talk to some students (and post-docs) and their research. David Akers will be presenting work at CHI on using UNDO (as in what you see under the edit menu of your favorite programs) as a marker for the analysis and detection of usability problems. Steven Dow (post-doc at Stanford, PhD at Georgia Tech) got to tell me a bit about his studies in how prototype helps design.

Then I got to give my talk where I got a lot of interesting questions from faculty and students, but especially from faculty (Scott Klemmer, Terry Winograd, Stu Card). It was kind of imposing to talk to this audience, but I think it went well, and there was interest in my work and in some of the NECTAR students’ projects. After the talk, Andreas Paepcke had the time to show me his new Kindle, and discuss a bit about pen-based interfaces.

After the talk I could meet with some other students that I had met at UIST: Ranjitha Kumar, who is working on making web creation easier for novices and Joel Brandt who analyzes and designs for programmers information retrieval needs.

I enjoyed my visit to Stanford: people were really welcoming, the campus feels like being in southern Spain, and the weather was wonderful. Thanks Bjoern for organizing the visit!

Tomorrow I’ll get to see a bit of San Francisco.

After that it was time to head to the University of Washington and talk to Jake Wobbrock, who did not know about NECTAR (issue corrected), and he told me about his latest research, which is focused on interaction techniques and devices for people with a disability.

Although the timing for Seattle was also awful (no possibility for a talk, no students in town), all in all
it was a very interesting visit. Also, it is always nice to go back to the awesome Emerald City…

Now I’m blogging from San Francisco, where the weather is awful :(.

1. How many locations in how many days? Are you nuts?
32 days, 15 locations. Yes, I’m a bit crazy.

2. How did you land such a sweet deal?
It was Carl’s idea (my supervisor), and then I had to prepare an itinerary that was later approved by the NECTAR management. It took me a while to prepare the trip too. I just hope to do a really good job as a "NECTAR AMBASSADOR".

3. How did you get convinced to do such an awful and tiring trip?
I didn’t need convincing… I love traveling. I just miss Kate.

4. You’re gonna get some air miles, eh! ;P
Well, to keep the budget low, I had to choose the cheapest flights for each leg of the trip. This means that I’m going to collect a marginal amount in five different programs (i.e. no real benefit). Besides, I hate air miles programs. I would rather just have them charge less.

5. When you travel, do you also have a life?
Yes! But not as much as I would like… In Toronto I got to see Susana, but missed Ragu, in Calgary I got to see Mike, but missed Amanda, in Vancouver I got to see Susan, but missed Janet.

6. Can I put comments in your blog?
Yes! You can access my blog from miguelissimo.spaces.live.com and do a lot more things than from nacenta.com (e.g. comment). (OK, I don’t really get this question that often, but I had to put it somewhere…) 😉

It was great to see Joel Lanir wrapping up his PhD work on Multi-display for public presentations. Karyn Moffatt and Leah Findlater’s have been busy making menu selection faster by applying perception research. Garth Shoemaker is taking further (way further) his idea of using shadows for interaction with large displays. Finally, Russ MacKenzie and Evgeni Maksakov showed me their research on 3D, one for architects, the other one in large displays. I didn’t get to see Kirstie Hawkey‘s last work, but she actually took care of setting up the schedule. Thanks Kirstie!

After the great visit (thank you all), I finally got to spend some time with Susan, who saved me from missing my plane today (I’m now in Seattle) – Thanks again for everything!

(uff… it feels good to be up to date again)