Kerry Rodden

October 2003: Moved to California. Now at Google. Really enjoying it. Too busy to update web pages :-)

I was previously at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, working as a consultant to the Integrated Systems group, in collaboration with Alan Blackwell of Crucible and Rachel Jones of Instrata.

Alan Blackwell and I also worked together to produce a new electronic edition of Ivan Sutherland's 1963 PhD thesis on Sketchpad.

But you are probably here for one of my papers? The two major ones from my thesis are Does Organisation by Similarity Assist Image Browsing? from ACM CHI 2001, and How Do People Manage Their Digital Photographs? from ACM CHI 2003.

PhD research

I did my PhD at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and submitted my thesis, Evaluating Similarity-Based Visualisations as Interfaces for Image Browsing, in October 2001. The work combined elements of human-computer interaction, information retrieval, image retrieval, and information visualisation.

I carried out experiments considering whether arranging a set of images on the screen according to their mutual "similarity" (so that images which are alike are placed close to each other) is helpful to the user when browsing the set. Below you can see two different layouts of a set of 100 images of Kenya: on the left, they are arranged according to visual similarity, and on the right, for comparison, they are placed in a default ordering.

The main experiment (described in a paper at CHI 2001) used graphic design students as the participants, with a task involving selecting photographs from a set to illustrate a given piece of text.

There are many ways in which "similarity" can be defined; I used measurements based on low-level visual properties (such as colour and texture), and on textual captions. To construct the arrangements, I used multidimensional scaling software developed as part of Wojciech Basalaj's research.

I am also interested in how people will organise and browse their personal photographs when use of digital cameras becomes more widespread, and conducted a six-month field study (in collaboration with AT&T Laboratories Cambridge) where the participants were given digital cameras and copies of AT&T's Shoebox software. I analysed usage logs, and interviewed the participants at the beginning and end of the study. This work was the subject of a paper at CHI 2003.

Find out more details by looking at my full list of papers.

Earlier work

In the summer of 1997 I worked with Matthew Chalmers as an intern at UBS Ubilab in Zürich, Switzerland. We developed a system to record users' paths through the Web, using a form of collaborative filtering to recommend resources via sharing of paths. A paper about this work was presented at WWW7, and the system was featured in the book Digital Information Graphics by Matt Woolman.

See also...

Full list of publications
More stuff about me

Email me

I'm sure you can figure out the address: it's (my first name) at (my last name), dot org.