Talks, Old and New

Thanks to an invitation from Hitesh, I recently got the chance to revisit my old stomping ground at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Well, I say “old” – in the intervening 7 years, they’ve moved to a rather splendid new building at the other end of Cambridge, just next to the station. (And improved the coffee too, not that it wasn’t pretty good to start with!)

Anyway, this was a pleasant chance to catch up with some old colleagues, meet some new ones, and even speak to my most recently graduated Ph.D. student, Dr Ewa Luger – and who’d’ve thought that I’d ever end up supervising someone coming from the discipline of Political Science too!

The ostensible reason was to talk about the Homework project – a talk I’ve given a few times now – and to lead from that into discussing some of my current agenda, around Human-Data Interaction and User-Centred Systems. It seemed to go pretty well – a few questions, and some lively discussion over lunch followed.

Happily, the fine folk at MSRC recorded it and have made it available, so if you’re really interested, you can take a look – direct your browser of choice to Interacting with Infrastructure: Home Networking and Beyond.

I have to say, when I checked that link in the course of writing this, one thing that did come as something of a surprise was to notice that a talk I didn’t remember giving – it was 8 years ago to be fair! – is also available. So if you’ve a burning desire to find out about Measuring and Monitoring Microsoft’s Enterprise Network, it turns out you can do that too. The past haunts us they say. In my case, it seems that the haunting has happened already, and turned my hair mostly white in the process… :)