Author Archives: Lana Yarosh

About Lana Yarosh

Svetlana “Lana” Yarosh is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Department at University of Minnesota. Her research in HCI focuses on embodied interaction in social computing systems. Lana is currently most proud of being one of the inaugural recipients of the NSF CRII award, of her best papers at CHI 2013 and CSWC 2014, and of receiving the Fran Allen IBM Fellowship. Lana has two Bachelors of Science from University of Maryland (in Computer Science and Psychology), a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Institute of Technology, and two years of industry research experience with AT&T Labs Research.

Designing Technology for Major Life Events Workshop

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High emotional impact and the value of the journey are two big aspects of designing tech for major life events.

High emotional impact and the value of the journey are two big aspects of designing tech for major life events.

While at CHI, I got the wonderful opportunity to help organize the workshop on Designing Technology for Major Life Events along with Mike Massimi, Madeline Smith, and Jofish Kaye. We had a great group of HCI researchers with a diverse range of topics: gender transition, becoming a parent, dealing with a major diagnosis, bereavement, and more. My own interest in the topic grew from my experience designing technology for divorce and technology for recovery from addiction. In one of the breakout groups, we discussed the challenges of designing technology in this space and some of the ways we’ve dealt with these challenges in our work. In this post, I want to highlight a few of these:

Building Tech is Risky. Building a system requires the designer to commit to specific choices and it’s easy to find something that wasn’t adequately considered after the fact. In tech for major life events, this challenge can be exacerbated because the consequences of a failed design might have big emotional repercussions (e.g., tech messing up some aspect of a wedding). Sometimes, it is a big question of whether we even should try to bring tech into a given context.

Ethics of Limited Access. Building technology to support a major life event may mean excluding those without the financial means, skills, motivation, language, etc. to use the provided intervention. Additionally, we frequently stop supporting a prototype technology at the end of the study which can be really problematic if it was providing ongoing benefits to the participants. Again, because of the high stakes involved, issues of ethics of access to technology may be exacerbated when designing for major life events.

Tension Between Building Your Own and Leveraging Existing. Many systems we build require some critical mass of adoption before they are really useful. This is particularly important with tech for major life events because there may be relatively few people facing a particular relevant context at any point in time. One of the ways to deal with this is to piggyback on existing systems (e.g., building a Facebook app instead of a new SNS), but this may cause problems when the underlying technology makes changes outside of the researcher’s control (e.g., privacy policies change, APIs stop being supported, etc.).

Asking the Right Questions about the System You Built. The final challenge is understanding what kinds of questions to ask during the system evaluation. On one hand, it is important to go into the evaluation with some understanding of what it would mean for the system to be successful and the claims you hope to make about its use. On the other hand, it is valuable to be open to seeing and measuring unintended side effects and appropriations of the technology.

I think my two major take-aways from this discussion were a greater appreciation of how difficult it is to actually build something helpful in this space and the insight that many of these problems can be partially addressed by getting away for the type of study that focuses on evaluating a single system design using a small number of metrics. The risks of committing to a specific design solution can be mitigated by providing multiple versions of the intervention, either to be tested side-by-side or to let participants play around until they decide which solution is a better option for them. The ethics of access can be ameliorated by providing low-tech and no-tech means of achieving the same goals that your high-tech approach may support (e.g., Robin Brewer built a system to let the elderly check email using their landline phones). Planning for multiple solutions when building using others’ APIs can lead to a much more stable final system (e.g., the ShareTable we could easily switch from the Skype API to the TokBox API for the face-to-face video). And lastly, the problem of figuring out what to ask during and after a system deployment can be addressed by combining quantitative methods that measure specific predicted changes with qualitative methods of interviewing and observation that are more open to on-the-fly redirection during the course of the study. Overall, diversity of offered solutions, flexibility under the hood of your systems, and diversity of methods used in the evaluation lead to a stronger study and understanding of the target space.

Reflecting on the Academic Job Hunt

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I have accepted an offer and I will start in August as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota! I am back to blogging (aiming for every other week). This week, I will be reflecting on the job process for all those who are thinking about going on the market soon. So, here are four insights:

  1. The job hunt takes a lot of time. This may be obvious, but it’s not to be underestimated. I tracked my time: 40 hours spent writing my general materials and preparing the job talk, 2 hours spent preparing each application (21 places, so more than 40 hours total), additional 30 hours on preparing and doing phone interviews and general follow-ups to application, and each on-site took an average of 40 hours when accounting for preparation, travel, actual meetings, and general logistics (so, my 8 on-sites took me a total of 320 hours!). Most of the prep happened in October and November, most of the followups in December, and the on-sites were in February and March. In those 5 months, the job hunt was basically an additional half-time job, on top of my actual full-time job (thank the powers that be for AT&T’s generous vacation package!).
  2. I’d rather be myself and not get the job than get it while pretending to be someone else. You may know me: I’m loud, I’m in-your-face, I have a weird sense of humor, and no fashion sense at all. If those things are not a good fit for a place, then I’d rather find that out by not getting an offer than come tenure time. So, I made the explicit decision to act as I would and hoped for the best.
  3. It’s better to identify than compare. One of my friends who did this whole thing two years ago (the wonderful Sarita) advised me early in the process to not look at where other people were getting interviews. I also figured out that when I began comparing myself to others, I only made myself envious, insecure, and miserable. Lots of my friends were also on the market and I made the explicit decision to be happy for them and look for ways to share happiness and provide support, instead of stalking their Google scholar pages. By making this decision, other people who are on the market became a wonderful source of insight and support instead of a source of stress.
  4. Have fun! Yes, it’s ultra stressful. And all the travel gets exhausting. But, it’s also incredibly fun to be traveling to new places, getting wined and dined, sharing my research, and hearing about all the awesome research at the places I visit! There’s something magical about getting the opportunity to imagine my life at each school! Holding on to that feeling made the whole process a lot less stressful and a lot more beautiful.

One of the things that my Ph.D. lab does really well is sharing resources like everybody’s application packages, job talks, etc. I think others may be able to benefit from this sort of an archive, so for what it’s worth, here are all of my materials: research statement, teaching statement, cover letter template, and video of job talk. Though do take these with some caution, I don’t actually know how good they are: I didn’t get all the interviews/offers and the ones I did get may have had more to do with my letters of recommendation than anything I wrote (I am forever indebted to Gregory, Amy, and Tara!!!). But, I did get 6 offers from the 8 places I interviewed (and more importantly, I got the offer that was perfect for me!), so at the very least, these were not terrible deal breakers. I hope that some of this can be helpful to others who are about to undergo this process!

Reflecting on the Year and Going on the Job Market

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Early in August, I celebrated my first anniversary at AT&T and I reflected on the year. I made a list of ten events and activities that I found most fulfilling and fun during this year. In no particular order, these were:

  • Mentoring my summer intern (Tom Jenkins): coming up with a scoped project, working to understand the space, and advising on the direction of the project and study design
  • All of the STEM advocacy work I’ve done, including the invention workshop for the “Take Your Child to Work Day,” speaking to women at the “Girls Who Code” Camp, blogging for HuffPost on STEM stuff, etc.
  • Giving back to the academic community by serving on committees, including being short papers chair for IDC (that short paper madness was MAD!!) and serving on the CSCW PC for the first time.
  • Working in interdisciplinary teams on new patents for AT&T and having more than 5 of them pursued by the company (I was the primary lead on 3 of those).
  • Seeing a Masters student I advised at Georgia Tech (Sanika Mokashi), present her work as a first author at IDC and knowing that I had a big role in helping her shape and carry out this research.
  • Having my first single-author publication at CHI and getting an honorable mention award for it. Presenting the work at CHI, I felt that the community really appreciated my contribution.
  • Finding that other researchers are actually starting to use the questionnaire I developed in the course of my thesis work, even before its official publication (slated to appear at CSCW). That made me feel really useful to others.
  • Blogging and getting feedback from friends and colleagues on early ideas and reflections like this one. Having 3 posts hit over 1000 views: 1, 2, and 3.
  • The three workshops I participated in this year: Diverse Families @ CHI, Enhancing Children’s Voices @ IDC, and DSST, and all of the follow-up work and new research that’s coming out of the collaborations forged there.
  • Working with the OCAD University’s Suz Stein and my department to understand new research directions for AT&T through future-casting design techniques. Following up on these ideas to flesh out and sketch concrete scenarios, that eventually led to patents, projects, prototypes, etc.

It’s definitely been a fun year with lots of excitement! Unfortunately, I’m coming to realize that the recent organizational changes at AT&T Labs Research might make it harder for me to do the aspects of the work that I enjoy most. Also, it became clear that the things I enjoyed most about this year are much easier to pursue in academia than in industry (except maybe collaborating on department-wide project and developing patents). I love working with students, publishing, going to conferences, collaborating with researchers from other institutions, and doing service to the community. I am allowed to do all these things at AT&T, but it is becoming harder and harder to carve out time for them under the new organizational structure — researchers are expected to dedicate a lot more of their effort to projects vetted by the company’s strategy division.

This reflection has led me to the decision to go on the academic job market this year. I want to be clear that I am not making this decision because AT&T has not been a fun place to work. I love my colleagues and my manager, the culture of collaboration and willingness to help both in and outside of my department, and the potential for having my ideas influence real products. But, I think at this point in life, my passions are taking me in a different direction.

I’m open to any institution that will allow me to pursue the things I love most: working with students, investigating interesting problems, and publishing my work. And yes, I do understand that there are other parts to the job as well, like grant writing, teaching, and serving on committees — I think that I would enjoy all these parts as well. If you think I may be a good fit for your department, let me know! I’d love to check it out and learn more about it. Here’s my 140-character Tweesume: I am “an HCI researcher, investigating technologies for enhancing social relationships in the contexts of family, health, and personal growth.” I linked an example paper in each context (though, many more are available on my publications page).