Happy World Usability Day!

Today, November 8th, is World Usability Day, arranged annually since 2006. List of events here (although if you are interested in events near you, the map on the front page is much more usable), there’s even one here in Helsinki).

If you only know usability from real-world usability, or more likely the lack of it (good usability is unobtrusive), here are the standard definitions:

“[Usability refers to] the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” - ISO 9241-11

“Human-centered design is characterised by: the active involvement of users and a clear understanding of user and task requirements; an appropriate allocation of function between users and technology; the iteration of design solutions; multi-disciplinary design.” - ISO 13407

For more information, see The User Experience Professionals’ Association website.

Of course I’ll also take the opportunity to mention my paper titled Software Usability and Legal Informatics (draft paper on SSRN) which I will be presenting later this month at the KnowRight conference. As far as I know, there has been very little earlier scholarship on the topic in legal informatics, but pointers are most welcome. I will be pursuing this line of research further in other articles at least over the next couple of years.

[Update: presentation now available here.]

Games computers play, part n

While we wait for the next RoboCup, today's The New York Times has a story titled 'The Computer’s Next Conquest: Crosswords'. Crossword puzzles may seem like a trivial task solved quickly by brute force and a good word list without even having to look at the clues, but that depends a lot on the puzzle and a bit on the language as well. Morphology is of course not much of an issue for English, but as far as I know (and I'm by no means an expert here), neither is it usually one for Finnish, either, since the only inflections used in Finnish crosswords are typically only the singular and plural nominative and the first infinitive. Where it gets challenging are answers containing several words without indicated positions for intra-word spaces. The simplest brute force approach is to treat such an answer just as a string of random characters subject to a check for correctness afterwards. With a 15-character string and 26 characters to choose from, we get over 10^21 alternatives. Evaluating all those at a million per second would take only about five million years, and there might be two to four of them in a single puzzle... Of course, not all of the characters are unknown, but rather some characters can be determined based on orthogonal answers, which in turn limit the number of phonotactically permissible characters next to the ones already known. I suppose something like Markov chains together with some heuristics about typical patterns should do a much better job. Still, figuring out an answer like SNOISSIWNOOW might still remain a bit of a challenge.

Turing Award to Judea Pearl

Today, the Association for Computing Machinery has named Dr. Judea Pearl as the recipient of the 2011 A.M. Turing Award (ACM press release), which is widely considered as the $DYNAMITE_PRIZE of computer science. The award was given for Dr. Pearl on his work for 'Develop[ing a] Novel Framework for Reasoning under Uncertainty that Changed How Scientists Approach Real World Problems'.


I have (and have read) Pearl's two major works, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (Morgan Kaufmann 1988) and Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (Cambridge UP 2000) and cannot praise them highly enough. Especially the first one has had an enormous impact on AI (though not so much AI & law), these days the Bayesian methods presented in it are quite simply ubiquitous and indispensable. I do have my reservations about their applicability to representing uncertainty in law, but more about that at some other time. (I have read Pearl's 1988 UCLA technical report on Non-Bayesian Formalisms for Managing Uncertainty as well, after all.) For a more sympathetic take on Bayesianism in law, see eg. Law and Truth: A Theory of Evidence by Hannu Tapani Klami, Minna Gräns, and Johanna Sorvettula (The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters 2000).


(via NYT Bits)