Alex Quinn
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Alex Quinn
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Within the realm of human-computer interaction (HCI), I am especially interested in digital libraries, distributed human computation (e.g. ESP Game, Peekaboom, reCAPTCHA), online trust (esp. conflicting needs for anonymity and accountability), and personal information management. I have not yet settled on a thesis topic.
More information about all of my projects can be found in my CV.
The ICDL is a collection of children's books made available for reading on the web. The books come from many different countries around the world and are written in many different languages. I am working with Ben Bederson, Chang Hu, and Takeshi Arisaka on methods to make the books in the library easier to read, easier to translate, and easier to hear for blind users.
An extension to the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Lets you see cookies that are coming into your computer in real time so you can be more aware of how they are affecting your privacy. With this awareness, you can make more informed decisions about how to set your cookie preferences in your browser and which sites you might want to avoid algotether. This was part of research in informed consent online with Batya Friedman. The CookiePanel extension has homes at Mozdev and Mozilla.org. (Note: The extension is current out of sync with the latest version of Firefox.)
For my senior project at the University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering, I devised a novel paradigm for computer programming by end-users. In interrogative programming, the computer asks a series of closed-ended questions to the user in order to extract a specification of what kind of program the user wants to create. I created a prototype in Python, conducted two sets of usability tests, and presented a short conference paper (@IEEE ) at the 2002 IEEE Symposia on Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC). I also wrote an senior thesis about it. I was advised by Professor Steve Tanimoto.
Whenever my cage is left unlocked (which happens quite frequently), my favorite things to do outside of work are playing jazz on the piano, hearing jazz (among other things), hiking, bicycling, cooking, studying Japanese language, celebrating ice cream (and eating excessive quantities thereof), taking excessive pictures, and adding excessive links to my home page.
I lived in Japan from July 2004 to August 2006. I made a web site with all my photos and stories about what I'm doing in Japan. There is a journal that I updated fairly frequently, except for the last few months.
In May/June 2003, I took a trip to Japan. I spent 22 days in 14 cities, visiting with friends, both new and old. I made a web site about it in English and Japanese.
Learn to read kanji in an efficient way. Use this program every day to learn the readings and meanings of Japanese characters. There are a lot of kanji flashcard programs around, but this one is the only one I know of that combines an aggressive learning method with lots of examples and a laser focus on just learning to read kanji.
Search and locate songs from any of about 100 fake books. A fake book is a music book that lists only the melody and chord changes for each tune. They are commonly used by jazz musicians because they don't include unnecessary details and they tend to contain many hundreds of songs in a single book. My lists includes all of the common fake books, including all of the New and old Real Books. There are over twenty-seven thousand song entries in this database.
Last updated March 19, 2008
