Sabbatical

Things we wish we’d know when planning a trip to Zürich

Welcome to Zürich ☺. If you are moving here there are a few things you might want to know, in no particular order :). This is especially geared towards folks living in ETH university housing.

Paperwork

(most of these things take around 30 mins – 60 mins once you find the right place)

  • To register, you will need to go to Kreisburo 6 first, then Berninerplatz (a stop on the 10 tram, the Kreisburo will give you an appointment there)
  • To leave, you will need to go to the migrationsamt (in the city hall, next to the fraumünster church) and register to leave
  • To get a half-pass (half off all tram and train travel) you can go to Bellevue (on the 9) and go into the office in the building that’s right at the center of the stop OR go to the main train station and go into the “travel agency” (take a ticket and be prepared to wait a bit
  • To get a monthly pass (free travel all month long) with your half pass you can go to the train station or use any of the newer (“fancy”) electronic machines (like the one at the Winkleriedstr. Tram stop). The “fancy” machines have an English button. There is no “fancy” machine at the airport, so don’t expect to renew your monthly pass at the end of a trip back and forth to Zürich

Money & Phones

  • I would get a Bank account at the post finance (in the post office, if you walk from Winkleried str Tram stop to Rigiblick Tram stop, you’ll see it on the left).
  • When you get bills, you typically get a “pink slip” – bring it with some cash to the post office, and you can pay it there.
  • The post office is closed over lunch
  • ETH pay can be picked up between 11 and 2 in the back right corner of the 2nd floor (I think) of the main ETH building
  • Sunrise pre-pay is the simplest mobile phone plan. You can “top it up” at any Co-op grocery store (just ask for, say “50 CHF on my sunrise)
  • Sunrise pre-pay charges you 1 CHF on each day that you make a call, text or use internet (up to 3 CHF per day total). You can get an add-on plan for unlimited internet if you use it a lot, for about 10 CHF a month.

Shopping

We’re not big shoppers, so this is just the basics.

  • H&M has reasonable clothing. The big Co-op and Migro stores have inexpensive clothing options too. There are also lots of sales in the “mall” under the main train station
  • There are a number of farmer’s markets worth checking out.

Things to check out that you might otherwise miss

  • Feminist Zürich: The labrynth and Feminist Tours of Zürich
  • The rooftop swimming pool & spa (“Thermalbad Zürich”)
  • Dolder ice rink 
  • Swimming in the clear cool clean lake of Zürich (‘nough said)
  • Tour the archeological ruins of Zürich (register at City Hall to get a “key to the city” and a map). Takes time to get the key, so this is really only for folks living here.
  • Lots of wonderful places to walk in the Züriberg (Look for the life-sized elephant fountain in the woods) and the Jütliberg. Enjoy them.
  • There’s lots of festivals in Zürich and Switzerland worth checking out. Basel Fasnacht in the spring, independence day parade in mid August, etc. etc. Google to find them. Don’t necessarily confine yourself to Switzerland – for example Austria has numerous “balls” in dance season (winter).

English speakers

  • The expat forums are a great place to find advice about all sorts of stuff
  • There’s some great meetup groups for childless expats – they do all sorts of sporty stuff in the mountains, if you’re into that. They tend to hold separate from the swiss
  • If you prefer to mix with the locals, try a yoga class, join an orchestra, etc. Downside is you have to speak some german and it helps if you’re working on understanding swiss german.
  • The ETH has a tandem-partner program. You can sign up to practice german and offer to help someone with English. We had great experiences with it. They also offer German classes (1x week)
  • If you have kids, the public school has an amazing program for helping them to learn german before shifting them to “regular” school. The teachers are wonderful and for my kids at least, the class worked wonders. Just register with the school system.
  • Be prepared for younger (even 1-3 grade) kids being done with school at noon two days a week or more, and having no school from 12-2. Don’t worry though, Hort will feed them a warm meal and let them play/do crafts during lunch, and as late as you need on weekdays.

Doctors

There’s an English speaking doctor’s office that has long hours at the main train station. There’s also a 24 hour pharmacy there. You should receive accident insurance through ETH, and you know better than I where you get your health insurance.

Garbage

  •  For ETH folks, you just buy regular garbage bags. For everyone else, there’s special taxed bags
  • Recycling: plastic goes inside the co-op in their wall collection unit. Metal and glass you can find bins for around the city 2-4 times a year (unsure how often) you will find a garbage bag in your mailbox for clothing and shoes. Anything else of quality, if you put it outside, someone is likely to take it.

Other

  • The climate makes gardening easy. The abundance of green space also makes foxes quite common. As a result, you can’t eat greens raw: they can leave a parasite on plants that is deadly in the rare case you catch it.
  • There is a community farm that you can help out at near the botanical gardens, if you want more than that. I’m sure there’s other options if you want an actual garden bed, but a year is short.
  • We were able to get permission to garden in the non-grassy areas of our yard.
  • We went to a Tot Shabbat service at a local liberal temple, the Jüdische Liberale Gemeinde. It’s a bit out of the way in what looks like an apartment building, but the people we met were wonderful and very welcoming. Be prepared for swiss german though :).

Have fun!

Sabbatical

Public school in Switzerland

During our time in Switzerland, the children attended public school. An important goal for us was that they would learn the language, and the public school system supported this. The school the children were assigned to was 1.5 km from our home, and we generally walked or took the bus (sometimes the children went the whole way on their own toward the end).

The athletic area and my son's school building
The athletic area and my son’s school building

My son was placed in a class for second language speakers. His class had an ever-changing group of about eight children, and two main teachers. The class curriculum was ungraded and tailored to the children, who were moved into mainstream classes as they learned german (if they were staying in Switzerland longer-term). These were all grade-school children, so in addition to main lesson, they had handwork, music, and swimming classes with other teachers, along with special times for gym, art, language and mathematics.

My daughter was placed into a Kindergarten class where a mixture of swiss german and german was spoken. Her main teacher, who had taught at a Steiner school for 22 years before switching to a public Kindergarten, was a warm hearted and loving woman who connected well with my daughter and supported her love of creative play as well as craft work.  One day a week was spent in the woods (the entire morning) playing and cooking over a campfire. Other days were spent in the classroom and back yard. One afternoon a week, my daughter had German class along with other older students who were new to German.

School included a 1.5 hour lunch break, and ended at noon two days a week for my son. My daughter was done at noon three days a week and had the same lunch break. If parents worked during those hours, children could attend “Hort” — a sort of daycare with a kitchen (hot food is an expected part of a healthy lunch). We were skeptical about Hort at first, but my son in particular grew to love the free play and delicious food it provided, and both children often came home with crafts or stories from Hort.

Some things that stood out about the childrens’ experience in school, besides the overall quality of the education, were:

  • Dedicated teachers who educated in a way we loved (the principal, one of my son’s teachers, and my daughter’s teacher all had experience with Steiner education for example, one of my son’s teachers was also trained in art therapy)
  • Very high quality facilities (the school had its own swimming pool, for example, with a moveable floor!)
  • Recorder Concert
    The Block-Flöte player at the concert

    Quality was important throughout. At the end of year picnic, there was a small concert. The school had arranged for a world-class Block-Flöte player to perform in a fairy tale retelling. The music was incredible, and the children ate up every note (and every word).

  • School in switzerland is clearly organized on the principal that education isn’t just about getting as much information into children as possible as quickly as possible. There seemed to be 1-2 short weeks (or whole weeks) free of school every month we were there. Overall, the Swiss do not seem to worry about the children spending hours learning each day. Between half days (every week) and frequent vacations, it is also set up for families with a parent who works part time or not at all.
  • The children learned German incredibly fast (I was reading and retelling portions of Harry Potter to my son all in german within six weeks).

Upshot? I can highly recommend public school as an option for visiting families in Switzerland.

..., Disability

My chronic illness and academia

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A friend happened to send an interesting article  about chronic illness and academia my way today, and it made me realize that a post on the topic is long past due.

For those of you don’t know, I have Lyme disease. I was diagnosed in October 2007 (pre-tenure), but had been ill for at least a year before that. I blog about my Lyme disease at http://gotlyme.wordpress.com (inventive title, I know :)). A special section of the blog focuses on work and illness. Lyme disease was debilitating for me, and I was on disability (part time) during part of my treatment. I am now much better, but still have relapses about once a year and bad days more often. Prior to my experiences with Lyme disease, I had a very difficult repetitive strain injury that also caused severe impairment (typing at most 30 minutes a day at first, 2 hours a few years later). This occurred at the start of my PhD and lasted into the beginning of my first faculty position.

I don’t want to go into details about those illnesses here, rather I’d like to speak about the relationship between having an invisible chronic illness and being an academic. I have had more than one person approach me asking for advice and guidance as they deal with their own illness, usually by word of mouth. Illnesses like mine (and many other chronic illnesses) are mostly invisible, and it can be difficult to find information about how to cope with them. When other academics disclose their own struggles and process (such as Elyn Saks’ article about working with schizophrenia, or Gerry Gold’s article on the social context of long term disability as an option for those who are considering leaving work because of their illness) it can be eye opening and inspiring for those of us trying to find our own way forward. Equally important is access to facts, such as the AAUP’s report on how faculty members with disabilities should be accommodated.

For me personally, one of the biggest changes I’ve had to make (and most positive) has related to my  approach to managing my time. Time management has been a theme since early in my graduate school career and I have learned never to take time for granted, how to prioritize, and when to cut back. I discuss some of the things I learned on my Lyme blog:  managing an unpredictable illness, and trying to manage a full time job on a half time schedule.

Another big challenge has been disclosure. It took a great deal of time for me to value the label “disabled” as a valid description of myself, and I have always been sensitive about it not only personally, but also with respect to my work. I never filed anything official with the university during my graduate school experience. I did not speak of my impairment during my job search until I reached the negotiation stage. I did however confront our dean at the time when I thought he wasn’t doing enough to prevent others from suffering the same preventable injury I had.  At CMU, I spoke with my department chair as soon as I had a diagnosis. However, I waited to file anything official until I desperately needed a parking permit, and one close to my building. Even then I accepted second best up until the day when I almost collapsed trying to get from that spot to my office. Finally fired up, I marched (well hobbled with my cane) straight into the deans office and demanded something better.

Although I have disclosed much of my experience at this point and freely speak of it when it seems pertinent, there is still one area that I rarely discuss: the cognitive impacts of my disability.  At my worst, I would sometimes spend more hours each week in fog and pain than out. Thanks to my very supportive husband, I would grab my computer and do essential thought-work whenever the clouds cleared and he’d take the kids so I could do so. Even so I read one journal paper (submitted before my diagnosis) in horror when the proof came back a year later. I have experienced moments in meetings with students when I could not find the words to express my thoughts; been reminded that I just said the opposite of what I meant, and experienced large black spots in my memory. These moments (though thankfully mostly behind me) were experienced as fearful signs of the possibility that I might not be able to continue as an academic. Most difficult is when they occur in public contexts, such as the difficulties I had at a talk I gave a few years back, and the program committee meeting that led to a blog post on the difficulties of re-integrating into academia after a long pause.

But what has defined the positive side of my experience, more than anything, is the support of those around me. I will never forget hearing that my advisor almost got into a fight defending the truth of my claims that I could not type. Or the day that an angry stranger mumbled about supporting the disabled as he opened a door for me when the push button failed and my hands lacked the strength (this led to my eventual acceptance of the label disabled and a related lifelong interest in assistive technology research). I have had long phone conversations with a colleague in our field who experienced chronic fatigue. I have been given a role as a collaborator when I sorely needed it. Instant Message chats galore have enabled remote and close colleagues to help me work through difficult patches and decide strategy. I have been driven home countless time by a close friend when I ended my day too weak to bike or walk, and been given writing aids (as a graduate student with RSI) and more recently teaching leaves, co-instructors, extra TA support, classes scheduled around my disability, and control over my tenure clock.

If you experience a chronic illness, I encourage you to go after the support you deserve, accept help, and seek advice. Drop me a note any time. Check out the Chronic Illness and Academia forum at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Talk to the people you trust, and get advice about when to say more. Stand up for yourself when you need it, and if people are not supportive, find other friends. Above all, know that it is possible to be both disabled and an academic, if that is the path you choose.

Sabbatical

Learning languages

I’ve mentioned before that one of my sabbatical goals was to learn a new language (Hindi). I am not fluent, but I think I came a fair way with it, and I want to comment on the role of different technologies and approaches in our successes (and failures) as a family to learn the three languages that we tackled on this trip.

One of the most useful technologies we employed was the Rosetta Stone software. The kids loved Rosetta Stone, which we started using almost as soon as the sabbatical was approved to get them familiar with Hindi. They spent about 30 minutes at a time on it at the beginning. At our peak, this happened almost daily (after we left Pittsburgh but before we were settled in India. Eventually we hired a tutor (a wonderful friend now) to come for about an hour most days instead. The kids were far more resistant to being tutored than they were to using the software, but I feel we covered much more ground in those hours. We made up all sorts of games, retold fairy tales, played shop, and generally did our best to make it child friendly.

Hindi was a relatively hard language to learn (new alphabet, different sentence structures, and so on). Once we got past the vocabulary phase,  progress was slowish. Still, by the end of the fall we could have whole conversations in Hindi as a family. The kids were not alone in learning the language: Anind and I were trying very hard to learn it as well and we tried to speak it at meals, with our Indian driver, and so on. So between the tutoring and the daily practice opportunities, they used Rosetta Stone less and less.

The Rosetta Stone was not a pure success. It required the right context to be used — enough motivation, and not too much other support. We almost never used the German Rosetta Stone I bought, and of course the kids are far more fluent (they are immersed, unlike with Hindi, and it is a much easier language for them to learn). Use of Rosetta Stone is rare at this point, and mostly me.

You get free tutoring through the online package with Rosetta Stone, along with access to online games. The games are a fun way to practice but slow. When possible, I sign up and have a session with an online tutor. It is based on the material I’m currently covering in the software. However, they only let the kids do it when there’s no other remote participants, which is sometimes hard to find at popular times in the early stages of learning a language.

As a computer scientist, I cannot help but be impressed by the software. It is dedicated to learning language through immersion, and the authors have done an excellent job of maintaining that throughout the software and the tutoring sessions. It uses speech recognition to check pronunciation, and provides multi-media support for learning. And it works, if you put the time in with it, you learn. To my mind, it’s a success as an educational tool and an interactive tool. It supposedly has a social side as well, though as a Hindi learner I was one of few and could not take advantage of it. I’d be curious to see what it’s like.

It has always seemed such a shame to me, that learning multiple languages is not a norm in the United States. During our travels we met 10 year olds who spoke 5 or 6 languages, all with fluent ease. They never needed to touch a piece of software or a tutor. The world has become so small, yet so many of us in the United States fail to give our children the gift of understanding and the mastery of complexity that comes with learning multiple languages. Most of my swiss cousins have raised children who are bi- or tri- lingual, and without the errors that plague even my immersed children.  There is no substitute for that level of early exposure.

Sabbatical

More technology?

I just came across a call to arms by Kristina Höök, “A Cry for More Tech at CHI!” in Interactions this month. I was so glad to see her writing about this and I hope the article bears fruit. She talks about the ways in which technology can inspire design — I would argue also enable design — and why alternate forms of publications should be given archival value as one way of supporting tech research (such as videos, demos, etc). Imagine if videos at CHI were valued as much as videos at SIGGRAPH!

I don’t want to say much more because I hope you go and read what she had to say, but I will note that her sentiment doesn’t just apply to CHI. How about other conferences? And a question I’ve been asking myself recently — what can I do to encourage more tech in my own research group? The answer, I’ve discovered, is to uncover what technology research means to me. That I will say more about.

As I mentioned in a recent post about my sabbatical goals, I have spent some time recently trying to reposition myself. I am and will always be driven by real-world problems, usually ones that come out of personal experience. However, if that is the sole driving force in my work, why am I not a sociologist? Or a politician? Or a anthropologist? Why don’t I run a non-profit? Why am I a computer scientist? The answer that I keep coming around to is that I like to build re-usable solutions to problems, solutions that are (ideally) bigger than the problem I started with. In addition, I believe that technology has value in part because it can solve problems in new ways, sometimes better ways, if we are innovative about how we use it, rigorous, and willing to push the boundary of what technology is capable of. So I am also driven by a wish to build systems, hard systems, systems that do things that have not been done before or create new ways of doing things. In fact, when I look back over the technical work I’ve done, after years of trying (for every job search, tenure review, and so on) I think I finally have put my finger on the unifying theme in my work.

I have always, in some way or another, built what I think of now as data-driven interfaces. I’m certainly not the first person to use this term. Nor is it confined to my area (HCI). But to me it describes one of the most important roles that technology has to play in the world. Many of the most revolutionary impacts of technology have centered around its ability to show information (think of spreadsheets and visualization tools), share information (think of everything from email to the web to facebook) and process information (think of the work in context-aware and ubiquitous computing, machine learning, and so on). And my own inspiration has been similar — my honors thesis as an undergraduate centered around exposing what was going on inside of programs; my PhD work on managing the uncertainty that arises when recognizing sensed input; my PhD students have developed/are developing tools for building ambient and peripheral displays (a form of visualization), rapidly prototyping and field testing ubicomp apps (providing essential data about what information belongs in the application in the first place), measuring and predicting which users have difficulty with an interface (a type of information processing), handling uncertain input within the user interface toolkit, and sharing information about energy use in the home. Of course when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail (and there’s many aspects of each of these projects that I left out so they would look more nail-shaped) but I do believe there’s a theme here.

Having recognized the theme, a natural question that I, as a toolkit builder, find myself asking is: What is hard about building these sorts of interfaces, especially in situations where we expect people to use the resulting applications. I think there are many unsolved problems, along the entire pipeline from deciding what data to use all the way through to acting on it in some way. Ideally, this should all be put together, in a fashion that scaffolds the process as much as possible and enables communication of constraints and other information from one end of the pipeline to other and back.

The idea of a pipeline for data-driven, interactive systems leads to a whole host of interesting questions I hope to begin answering. What should be communicated within the system? What should be communicated to the user? How does all of this change the way we construct toolkits at the input level? What about the output level? What abilities might we want to give end users with respect to data-driven interfaces? How do we help people build effective classifiers when they have not studied machine learning? How do we help people to select and integrate visualization techniques? What new sensors can we construct and what should we sense? When and how might we involve people (i.e. the crowd) in gathering, labeling, extracting features from, interpreting, even visualizing information? How do we trade this off with machines? And finally, how does the interactive nature of the end systems affect the way we should answer any of these questions?

 

Sabbatical

Sabbatical goals, revisited

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I am more than halfway through my sabbatical now, and it seems appropriate to revisit the goals I had for my sabbatical, and possibly set some new ones before it’s too late to make changes. I’m going to start with those original goals (in gray), and add comments and thoughts..

Learn about other ways of thinking through sustainability. I want to take the time to deeply explore my own beliefs about sustainability, cross-cultural understandings of sustainability, and how both relate to my chosen field. I am planning on spending at least an hour a week just thinking and writing and reading about ethical/social/planetary issues relating to sustainability. I am also planning on teaching my course on sustainability in both of my sabbatical locations. Total time commitment: 5-6 hours per week.

Outcome: So far this has been a success, although not exactly as I had imagined. I just completed a ubicomp submission with Indian co-authors based on interviews in India, and a survey deployed in India, U.S. high and U.S. low income communities. It was fascinating to explore this data, and definitely caused me to rethink the role of technology in sustainability. Related to this I also submitted a grant proposal with several other U.S. faculty intended to explore automated techniques for affecting energy use across three different continents. Much of this was made possible by collaborations developed with the wonderful folks at IBM Bangalore. I am also teaching my environmental class here in Zürich, and although that is just starting, it is interesting to see the differences here. Finally, I have been blogging about sustainability in a non-academic fashion in an attempt to explore basic beliefs and perspectives on sustainability from a radically new perspective, and recently wrote an article for Interactions based on my blog post questioning the basic assumptions underlying HCI work in sustainability.  Not sure if it adds up to an hour a week, but overall I’m happy with the progress on this topic so far.

Expand my toolbox. I want to learn more about hardware and machine learning (I’ve posted about this before on this blog). My current plan is to take a class on machine learning (I have a handy virtual one with me, or I can sign up wherever I’m at) and teach myself hardware using slides from a CMU class & hands on experimentation. I figure if I spend 2-3 hours per week on each (in parallel if possible, in series otherwise) I should make good progress on this over the year. Total time commitment: 4-6 hours per week.

Again, this has been a success. I completed the Stanford Online Machine Learning class this fall and have been leveraging what I learned in my student advising. Overall, I found the class to be enlightening but the homework a little too easy to solve without complete understanding. Still, it did help deepen my understanding of the algorithms and the methods for improving accuracy and so on.  It was highly focused on statistical techniques, and is nicely complemented by the second course I am taking (much more slowly), Carolyn Rosé’s applied machine learning. Now that one ML class is done, I am also working on my knowledge of hardware using slides of Scott Hudson’s and related materials and have gotten through several arduino projects. So not complete, but I’m pretty happy with this. Extra bonus: I can squeeze some hardware work into family time as the kids love to be included in it. 

Finish hanging projects. I have: Three projects that require analysis only and two-three projects that require writing code. I plan on doing these for the most part in series, unless I am able to recruit local talent to help with the latter two. It’s possible they won’t all get done, but I hope at least some will! Estimated time commitment: 4-6 hours per week. Start new projects that I’ve already thought about. I have two in mind. Estimated time commitment: 4-6 hours per week if done in series.

I wish I’d written down which specific projects I intended to work on! For the most part this has not been a great success. I have completed one (writing) project, and recruited students to work on others. However, recruiting students in Switzerland has not worked out well, and I’ve had varying success reaching any complete goal with students I recruited in India. There is still time to accomplish this goal, but I think that I am unlikely to get anywhere near 6. For my own sake when looking back on this six months from now, I will name the projects this time around: Futures — done; Search tools — making progress; Cosmo/viewpoint extraction — making progress; Mechanical Turk web accessibility — stagnating; Diabetes + Lyme analysis — stagnating [but I could tackle this without additional students]; Macro energy audits — stagnating; Using routines to reduce energy use — done; Lo-fi presence — making progress.

Write a large NSF proposal [already started]. Estimated time commitment: 1 hour per week through November.

Sadly petered out at the last minute, though I cannot take the blame for this. On the upside I led a group of five other PIs in writing a medium proposal (mentioned above). It was a fascinating experience in herding faculty which I’m not sure I ever want to repeat! :). 

Continue supporting students. Estimated time commitment: 3-4 hours per week of meetings, 1 hour per week of prep & planning. Meet new people, start new projects, develop new ideas. Estimated time: 4-6 hours per week.

Both successes (though you might ask my current students if they agree :P). Amazing how Skype can shorten the distance between places. I’m now holding meetings across three continents each week, a sign of the new collaborations I’ve begun. Also along the way I’ve given 7 talks and counting. But what I’m most pleased about in this arena is the opportunity that it’s given me to rethink my own research agenda and try to explore new ways of positioning myself. I have begun to realize that while I am driven by applications that matter this has in some ways obscured other things that I care about. It has also affected my ability to recruit a certain type of student — folks for whom programming and building things and solving hard technical problems is as important as the applications this enables. So I have, through public speaking engagements, been exploring a new way of presenting my work, one that emphasizes both the enabling middleware that can make possible the creation of applications that address real world problems using technology. More on this in a future post, as this is running long, but I consider the opportunity to rethink research approaches, goals, and so on to be a major benefit of sabbatical. 

So what next? Certainly, at a minimum more of the same. What I’ve been trying to do is working, and I plan to continue for the next few months. I still need to forge stronger collaborations with some swiss colleagues, and am actively working on that. I also need to step back and ask which hanging projects are worth pursuing and what the best approach to doing that is. And of course I need to keep in mind that this is my chance to rest and rejuvenate.  I will have been deeply involved in writing about 120 pages of text by the end of April, taught most of 4 classes since the start of last summer, and advised or mentored about 13 people (in one-on-ones) across two continents throughout most of the sabbatical, and learned 1.5 new foreign languages. In between, I’ve also been taking time to travel, relax, spend time with my kids, and continue fighting for my health. I plan to continue that, as I wish to arrive home not only inspired and educated but also healthy and well rested for the start of the fall semester.  

Sabbatical

Madeira

Carnegie Mellon’s HCI Institute has joint masters program with the University of Madeira, located in Funchal on the beautiful island of Madeira. We visited the program toward the start of our time in Switzerland, in mid February. The joint masters program has been running for several years, but I had never visited the Madeira campus before. Instead, I’d interacted with students during their semester in Pittsburgh (at the start of each Madeiran student’s joint degree) and with faculty who visited Pittsburgh from Madeira.

It’s no surprise that visiting Madeira gave me a different perspective on things, just another example of how local a global perspective can be. Our visit was part tourism, part work. On the tourism front, we enjoyed traditional foods in local restaurants and at the homes of a faculty host; we experienced the island’s focus on the visitor/tourist, we enjoyed a tremendous range of fruits at the local market and saw the out door social time of local residents near a downtown bar. We nearly froze swimming in the volcanic (not hot) pools and wandered through the beautiful tiered botanical gardens a cable car ride away from the main city. We learned a little bit about the history of the island, its sources of power (always interesting to energy researchers), its imported wildlife (not much was there before it was settled), its variable climate (from base to top) and raucous celebration of carnival.

Coastline … along with interesting liquers Dried fish -- a local specialty Seaside volcanic sand
Madeira photos on Flickr

On the work front, the visit was a reminder of the value of face-to-face meetings, the distance that students must feel from those of us in Pittsburgh once they return to Madeira (and vice versa), and the importance of both social and structured work time.

It was also a reminder of how many ways and in how many places the same ideas are being explored by researchers. Whether in Bangalore, India; Zürich, Switzerland; Pittsburgh, USA; or Funchal, Portugal people who care about sustainability (or surely any other research topic) are attempting to create and deploy technology in the largest way they can, and understand how it works. Each of these groups could work in isolation, but working together we can (hopefully) accomplish more, and for me personally each has resulted in a very positive outcome: collaborations as diverse as the groups that I have come to know.

Sabbatical

A different academic model

Zurich in the snow, from our apartment
Zurich in the snow, from our apartment

The next phase of our sabbatical is in Zürich, Switzerland, where we’ve been since the beginning of January. There hasn’t been much to post here because, I suppose, things feel so familiar. We have a “group” to be part of, thanks to our wonderful host, Friedemann Mattern, which makes a big difference in how integrated we are into the university community. The university setting itself is much more familiar somehow than in India, perhaps for the same reason: We had to work to ensure that our office was near that of other faculty, and actively pursue integration with the department in Hyderabad. Here, we still have to actively pursue potential collaborations, but this is facilitated by the support that Friedemann and his group have given us.

ETH is also familiar in the sense that it functions like most other universities I’ve been part of over the years, as a homing ground for students, an organizer of talks on a wide breadth of topics, a place to discuss and teach and learn. One thing that differs from american universities is the structure of the department. The model here is one person per area. For example, a friend at the University of Zürich is the only person in Human Computer Interaction in her department, and is expected to carry the entire field. Critical mass is built across all of computer science, not within sub-areas. Instead, one recruits a productive and diverse set of post docs, doctoral students, masters students, and so on who work together to make the area a success. This is the polar opposite of a place like Carnegie Mellon, where entire departments are formed around sub-fields.

One of the more interesting things about being on sabbatical is the opportunity to rethink and think through who I am as a researcher. I am frequently given the opportunity to speak about my work to a variety of audiences, and I have written a number of different talks over the year attempting to summarize my work in assistive technology, my work in sustainability, overarching themes for the technical aspects of my work, and deeper questions about the value of the projects that I have chosen to do. Along the way, I have studied machine learning (I will have to write about this, as I took the Stanford ml course last fall) and am now studying hardware in more depth, finally finished a paper on the value of futurism (or rather Futures Studies) in guiding research (an enormous stretch for me, as it is primarily what I would consider a design/thought paper) and an article for interactions questioning the focus of sustainable human computer interaction research, based on a recent blog post on the topic.

To me, the ability to see and think about new models for academia as a whole, my own research, and everything in between, is one of the most valuable things about this year away. It’s a chance to rethink, question, and consider what works, what should be done, and what will make a difference.

Sabbatical

Leaving India (the hard way!)

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It started when we realized we had far too much stuff. Even after giving away boxes and boxes of it, we still had to buy three large suitcases, at which point we had eight suitcases, a cello, a carry on suitcase, and our backpacks and briefcases, and one large picture.  Where did it all come from? Perhaps a topic for another post, but the focus today is the impact that had on our travels.

On Tuesday night, we called the airline to check that this many bags would not be a problem. We were told that  our bags would be checked through. We called back again Wednesday to check on the number of bags allowed and overage fees. At that time, we were told that in fact the tickets were not joined, and our bags would not be checked through, which would mean difficult times in the Mumbai airport. As a result, late Wednesday night (11pm and later), a day before leaving india, we found ourselves exploring shipping options. We went online and found many descriptions of the complications involved in shipping through the postal office, the cost of shipping through companies such as DSL, and so on. They all seemed very extravagant or complicated. But we had too many bags. We kept packing (hoping it would at least all fit in our suitcases) and discussed what to do for too many hours.

The next morning we heard that there might be an inexpensive boat shipment option from a neighbor. Turns out this wasn’t true, but it prompted us to ask IIIT for help, which worked out well. They arranged for someone to come and weigh our bags and we were quoted a price of around $600 for 100 kg of shipping. We decided to take it, since we were expecting to have to pay around $200 in extra luggage fees in any case to take those things. We schlepped the other six bags and the cello to the airport.

We loaded all of our things in one car and drove behind in the other. We left super early for the airport, which was a good idea. We got there at 3:15 for a 6pm flight.

When we tried to check in, we were told that Mom and kids were supposed to be on a 7am flight, which we had obviously missed. Apparently our travel agent [1] had booked us on the 6pm flight, then changed the ticket without telling us! Would we be able to get to Mumbai in time to catch our flight home? How much would it cost us? How long would it take to find out? We could see things were going to be difficult for us and the kids, so it was clearly game time!  We started working out the rules for points: -5 for asking when we would arrive, -10 for whining, +500 if we could get the bags checked through, and 55 for doing something you wouldn’t normally do. We decided on 1000 for getting on the plane (since we now needed new tickets) and -50 for quarreling, -20 for yelling at someone.

My son started us out on the right foot by earning 5 points when he allowed my daughter to be the calculator even though he had been planning on doing it, in a very polite voice.

Mom worked magic on the ticket desk, by pointing out that we had confirmed the flight and not been told we had the time wrong (and it was obvious it was the travel agent’s fault [1] and not ours) and they agreed to try to resolve the fees for a new ticket. After an about 1.5 hours wait (during which the kids behaved perfectly, even though some of their food fell on the ground and they were starving), we were given tickets on the 6pm flight for only 1500 Rs each (the change fee, no ticketing fee).

The next challenge was getting all the luggage on and checked through. We were told that the bags were too heavy, but after rearranging we managed to get by with a wink and only 1 bag that was too heavy. Point hit though — the extra 5 kg in that bag cost us $200. Also we lost 20 when one person got to the yelling point (happily, this happened only twice in our entire trip).

All bags checked, all fees paid, we headed through security, and went to buy food, only to discover that we were down to 605 Rs, only enough for one Pizza. Daddy worked magic and got two squeezed out of it by a nice teller (20 pts), and sent Kavi looking for supplementary coins for water. Lo and behold, we discovered 300 Rs more. We settled in and ate, and now are on the airplane.

Our last feat was getting the picture stowed, Mommy did it without a problem. We’re on the airplane now, with a total of 2815 points (and our entire remaining Indian bank account spent!). Even so, excellent score for level 1 :). We will level up to two when we land in Mumbai.

[2 hours later]

Mumbai was crazy mainly for the reasons that Mumbai is always crazy for international passengers – 5 security checks, a long bus ride, and so on. To make things extra fun, we added in an upset stomach (long bathroom visit required) and a request by Continental that we pay a missing fee for an extra bag (eventually they waived it after we said we’d carry the bag on and they couldn’t find it). In the end we got to our plane as they were loading passengers, i.e. with no time to spare, but not late either. Score!

The trip from Mumbai to home was 17 hours long, but uneventful. However, our day wasn’t done when we landed. Customs was complicated by the immigration officer only citing 3 passengers on our forms (we were 4), and then we had to track down our ride (the grandparents). We gave each child 500 points for making it through this last level without a melt down, and 1000 for making it through with no whining. They were, after all, exhausted. Score again!

Once we had all found each other, the kids went home, but we still had to submit paperwork for our swiss visas! On to NY city to the consulate, which opened at 8:30am. We quickly learned that we were missing important information (photos of the kids, photocopies of our passports, filled applications). After visiting 4 separate shops we managed to collect all the needed information, and get the applications submitted. If all goes smoothly, we will pick up the visas next week.

Points mean absolutely nothing after the trip, but the kids still love collecting them. And they allow us to adjust and set expectations. For example, at one point when my daughter (only 6) was clearly losing it from exhaustion, I told her that she could no longer lose points (by bad behavior), only earn them (by good behavior). With the pressure off, she rose to the occasion. Not only that, but I think it got the adults on better behavior, both by making it more fun (and thus more bearable) and by making concrete the example that needed to be set. It also helped relieve tension: For example, when an adult did begin to lose it, a ready response was “Ok, 20 points off” without escalating things. I expect this is a game we will use and re-use as long as possible :).

I’m beginning to feel home, even if for a short while. It was interesting to observe the conversations among store keepers and customers outside the visa office and think about how different things would have been back in Hyderabad (and how the same). Breakfast at a diner vs a roadside stall. Cold weather. Hopefully soon, a bathtub full of hot water (both luxuries I couldn’t have in India). For now, I’m sitting in the car minutes from home at 12pm EST. It’s 10:30pm in India, on Friday, over 32 hours after I left India.

[1] http://www.vijaywarty.com/ — NEVER USE HIM!

Jennifer Mankoff | University of Washington