The next time you get a good answer from a web search, you can thank Susan Dumais ’75.

Beginning with landmark research in the 1980s, Dumais has made fundamental contributions to how we find, use and make sense of information on the Internet and in our computers.

For her achievements, Dumais was recently named the 2014-15 Athena Lecturer by the Association for Computing Machinery鈥檚 Council on Women in Computing.

Susan Dumais ’75 of Microsoft Research is the 2014-15 Athena Lecturer.

“Her sustained contributions have shaped the thinking and direction of human-computer interaction and information retrieval,” said Mary Jane Irwin, who heads the Athena Lecture awards committee.

The Athena award celebrates female researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.

The author of more than 200 articles on information science, human-computer interaction and cognitive science, Dumais is a and deputy managing director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond, Wash.

A native of Lewiston who grew up on Nichols Street near campus, Dumais was a magna cum laude mathematics and psychology major at 乐播传媒.

As a student, she did research with Drake Bradley, the Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of Psychology, co-authoring a research article on that appeared in the journal Nature.

Being published as a student? “Pretty awesome,” she recalls. The pair also explored ways to use computer software to improve the teaching of statistics.

“She was one of the best students I ever had,” says Bradley, a comment echoed by Robert Moyer, professor emeritus of psychology, who says that Dumais “was one of the very best researchers I ever worked with 鈥� student or otherwise.”

Dumais headed to Indiana University for doctoral work, but didn’t leave 乐播传媒 behind.

In 1979, she teamed with Moyer and a University of Michigan researcher to publish the article “Semantic association effects in a mental comparison task,” in the journal Memory & Cognition.

The researchers measured how long it took subjects to say which item in a pair was larger, such as flea or dog, needle or boat, penguin or iceberg.

Subjects were able to judge the size of semantically related terms (such as dog and flea) more quickly than unrelated terms (needle and boat).

To be sure, the researchers’ conclusions went deeper than that, but the thrust of Dumais’ work 鈥� modeling how human memory works 鈥� was a leaping-off point for a career exploring how humans can better communicate with their machines.

(Fun 乐播传媒 connection: At Indiana, Dumais met a “fantastic teacher doing research in biopsychology” who joined the 乐播传媒 faculty the next year. That professor was John Kelsey, who retired in 2012 after a great career at 乐播传媒.)

Ph.D. in hand from Indiana, Dumais was on her way. After looking at how humans retrieve information from our own memories, she began looking at how we retrieve information from external sources, such as computers.

In the 1980s, Dumais was researcher at Bell Labs when she exploring “the vocabulary problem,” the fact that computer users always had to key in the exact, correct word to get what they wanted from their machine.

Reading like a manifesto for the information age, the paper explained the problem:

Many functions of most large [computer] systems depend on users typing in the right words. New or intermittent users often use the wrong words and fail to get the actions or information they want. This is the vocabulary problem. It is a troublesome impediment….In what follows we report evidence on the extent of the vocabulary problem and propose both a diagnosis and a cure. The fundamental observation is that people use a surprisingly great variety of words to refer to the same thing.

From that observation came a solution, , published three years later in the journal of the with Dumais as a co-author.

Today, in terms of how we find stuff on the Internet, whether cute kittens or Red Sox highlights, LSI acts as an indexing and retrieval method. It helps our search experience by deciding if words that share similar contexts also share a similar meaning, and thus should be elevated as a search result.

“For example,” Dumais says, “LSI would find that the words ‘physician’ and ‘doctor’ are similar not because they co-occur together but because they occur with many of the same words, such as ‘nurse,’ ‘patient,’ or ‘hospital.'”

Essentially, she adds, “LSI induces the similarity among words by looking at the company they keep.”

Dumais鈥� most recent research at Microsoft analyzes how web content changes over time, how people revisit web pages, and how searching can be improved by

By context, she means “who is asking, what task they are trying to accomplish, and what documents are of interest.”

That means you get your own search results. “So if I, Susan Dumais, search for SIGIR, I probably mean the ‘Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval’ and not the ‘Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.'”

In a good sense, Dumais sees no end to the work ahead.

The ability to search for information, she says, will support an “ever-increasing range of information, services and communications.鈥�

Hank Howie '81

Boston Globe tech blogger Scott Kirsner reports that game development veteran Hank Howie ’81 is the new chief operating officer of Boston game development studio Disruptor Beam.

Howie is the former head of Blue Fang Games (creator of the top selling Zoo Tycoon game) and, more recently, the co-founder of Beach Cooler Games, which produced the mobile game Universal Movie Tycoon.

Disruptor Beam is currently working on an online game tied to the hit HBO series Game of Thrones.

The app, known as , recently won the $20,000 grand prize in the XBRL Challenge, a contest to build an application using SEC filing data, which is formatted to the XBRL standard (“eXtensible Business Reporting Language).”

Calcbench is truly a “handy-dandy calculator,” Rosenbaum writes.

Pranav Ghai ’93, co-founder of Calcbench.

By typing a company’s ticker symbol into the browser-based calculator, a user sees a firm’s SEC filing information. When a user clicks on any number, the calculator displays changes over time in various financial categories, such as inventory or accounts payable. A user can also compare those results between companies.

“The quickest and easiest way to work with SEC filing data.”

Last year, Ghai and Rapp gave their 140-character description of Calcbench to Calcbench is “a free online platform to retrieve, analyze and share public financial data. The quickest and easiest way to work with SEC filing data.”

Rapp tells CFO.com that he and Ghai believe that the tool could give CFOs “a clearer view of how their filings will look to the investor community, as well as enabling them to more easily benchmark suppliers or partners.

Alex Rapp ’93, co-founder of Calcbench.

The startup is based at Dogpatch Labs, a venture-funded incubator for tech startups with labs in Cambridge, Mass., and New York City, as well as Palo Alto, Calif., and Dublin.

Ghai, based in New York, and Rapp, in Cambridge, have access to the labs in both cities (“though Alex uses it MUCH more than I do,” Ghai says) and they use Skype too.

Communications technology has been key. “We probably couldn’t have done this [startup] as efficiently five or ten years ago,” Ghai says.

Their both 乐播传媒 math majors. Ghai, the team’s systems and quantitative expert, earned a master’s degree in applied mathematics from New York University and has extensive experience in the financial services field as an analyst and consultant.

Rapp, the strategist, earned an M.B.A. at Boston University. He has executed a number of analysis and innovation projects in the technology, communications and mobile/wireless fields and is the founder of FilmBoston, a film and video production company.

Andrews lecturer Scott Belsky, left, speaks with audience members after his talk, including, Alexey Bobko '13, of Minsk, Belarus.

There are tragedies, and then there are tragedies.

Earthquake, tsunami and uncontained nuclear radiation in Japan.

Tornadoes ravaging the American heartland.

Losing your iPhone — wait, what?

Yes, this too is a tragedy. Or so said 41 percent of Stanford University students polled in a on smartphone use.

That statistic came out during a Nov. 8 address by Scott Belsky, an expert on technology and creative work who helped 乐播传媒 kick off a campus-wide experiment in going unplugged.

With our time and consciousness increasingly ruled by electronic media, the Nov. 8-15 initiative Present Tense: Being Here and Now in a Nonstop World encourages a break from the little screen and a re-engagement with the spiritual self.

Belsky, in the college’s annual Bertha May Bell Andrews Lecture, described the psychic toll taken by constant connectivity — and offered a few suggestions for reclaiming inner peace.

Scott Belsky discusses the importance of reflective thought amidst the information onslaught in the annual Andrews Lecture on Nov. 8.

Multifaith Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace welcomed about 100 people to the 乐播传媒 Chapel for the event. Among them were Cindy Andrews ’74 and Kristy Andrews ’12, members of a family whose long 乐播传媒 lineage includes Dr. Carl Andrews ’40, who established the Andrews Lecture to honor his mother in 1975.

Belsky is the author of the national best-seller Making Ideas Happen, and is founder and CEO of , a company that develops products and services for the creative industries. As someone whose work straddles the realms of high-tech and inner inspiration, he also has, he admitted, his own struggles with the tempting distractions of constant connectivity.

Belsky based his talk on the concept of “sacred space” — the conditions that are conducive to deep and reflective thought. Without such contemplation, he said, it’s difficult to bring good ideas to fruition, and easy to lose sight of what’s most important to us.

“We’re obsessed with the present tense,” he said, alluding to the 乐播传媒 initiative. “We want real-time information. The past tense is old news, the future is dreaming, but the present tense is real.”

Constant connectivity “threatens both your quality of life and your ability to make an impact on what matters most to you,” Belsky said. We cease to be present in our own lives. Instead, we’re “just hacking away at the collective inboxes all around us, just trying to stay afloat.

“In some ways we are living someone else’s to-do list.”

He said, “In our professional lives, I call this the era of reactionary workflow. In our personal lives, it’s reactionary living. . . .With endless streams of information always flowing in, we have become increasingly reactive . . . rather than being proactive with what matters most to us.”

One of Belsky’s most compelling concepts was “insecurity work” — the compulsive checking of e-mail, feeds, texts, tweets, posts and other e-stimuli in a futile effort to assure ourselves, as he put it, that everything is OK.

“We want to know that our family and friends are there for us,” that our jobs still need us, that our stocks haven’t tanked and the world hasn’t ended while we were checking Facebook.

But through this constant vigilance, he said, “we are losing interest in ourselves,” he said.
At the same time, we’re increasingly ignoring life’s serendipitous gifts of surprise, accident and coincidence. “As we become more connected and wedded to our devices, we become less open to circumstance. Quite simply, we stop noticing what’s going on around us.”

Belsky noted that he met his wife because of a chance meeting between their mothers, strangers until then, who chatted in a nail salon while their nails dried. “I have to wonder,” he said, “if these two women had had their smartphones and their iPads, would they have even started talking?”

“I encourage you to value the circumstantial, recognize how powerful it is and then mine the circumstantial more intentionally.”

Belsky’s key prescription for his audience was to build into the daily routine opportunities for deep thinking and for focus on true priorities. “Create windows of non-stimulation during your day and life, whether they are habits or rituals or both.”

In that spirit, a group of Jewish artists launched a project called the Sabbath Manifesto, through which they (as explains) have “adapted our ancestors鈥� rituals by carving out one day per week to unwind, unplug, relax, reflect, get outdoors and get with loved ones.”

In 2010 the group declared a National Day of Unplugging, and issued an Unplug Challenge, wherein celebrities disconnected themselves from the e-hive mind for 24 hours. Participants included actor Josh Radnor.

“The 21st century challenge is to keep your focus, and preserve the sanctity of mind that is required to create, and ultimately make an impact on what matters most. Imagination happens when your mind has the freedom to run rampant,” Belsky said.

Belsky also advised his listeners to “recognize the insecurity work that you do and compartmentalize it”; and to learn to rely on their own mental resources. “Nothing should resonate more than your own intuition.”

“It’s all really difficult to do,” he concluded. “But we’re all part of the future, so we really need to figure this out.”

In the years to come, he said, “I believe that focus and the ability to be present will be the greatest competitive advantage for success professionally, and certainly personally.”

Scott Belsky, CEO of a company providing products and services to creative industries, discusses the importance of reflective thought amidst the information onslaught in a lecture at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 8, at the 乐播传媒 College Chapel, 275 College St.

The public is invited to attend the 2011 Bertha May Bell Andrews Lecture at no cost. Part of an innovative series of activities at the college exploring ways to dial down the digital barrage and reconnect with the capacity for contemplation, the event is presented by the Multifaith Chaplaincy.

It is co-sponsored by 乐播传媒 Information and Library Services, the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the Learning Commons, the Communications Office, the Career Development Center and the Office of the President. For more information, please contact 207-786-8272.

Belsky’s talk, Present Tense: Being Here and Now in a Non-Stop World, will explore the disappearing opportunities for reflection and contemplation, which he refers to as “sacred space.” Such deep thought is often challenged by technology-induced opportunities and demands, leading to reactive and dependent behavior from both individuals and institutions.

“Despite the incredible power and potential of sacred spaces, they are quickly becoming extinct,” Belsky notes on the website, . “We are depriving ourselves of every opportunity for disconnection. And our imaginations suffer the consequences.”

Belsky believes that people and organizations succeed by making opportunities for creative, concentrated attention. During his 乐播传媒 residency, he will help the college reaffirm its commitment to deep thinking and understand how “reactionary workflow” works against such commitments. He’ll also offer guidance in approaching technology deliberately and productively, and in working more creatively overall.

Belsky’s visit is the centerpiece of a bold initiative that the Multifaith Chaplaincy describes as a “乐播传媒 community experiment.”

“The idea is not that these technologies are bad, but simply that we need to be more mindful about how we relate to them,” says Emily Wright-Magoon, associate multifaith chaplain.

The day after the lecture, in an experience called UnDay: A Day to Unplug and Unwind, students, staff and faculty will pledge to experiment with refraining from the technology of their choice for one full day.

The following day, a campus conversation will be held to assess how it went and what came up. Additionally, throughout the week there will be opportunities for meditation, yoga, massage, mindful eating and discussion.

Belsky has spent his professional life in technology, social media and the creative industry. He is the author of the best-selling book (Portfolio, 2010), and is the founder and CEO of Behance, a company that develops products and services for the creative industries. In 2010, he was included in Fast Company’s list of “100 Most Creative People in Business.”

Belsky is a frequent contributor on MSNBC, and has worked with such leading organizations as General Electric, Hewlett-Packard and Proctor & Gamble, as well as with the U.S. State Department and the CIA.

He attended Cornell University as an undergraduate and received his master’s in business administration from Harvard Business School.

The Andrews Lecture, a signature talk at 乐播传媒 since 1975, is a memorial to Bertha May Bell Andrews, who served on the 乐播传媒 faculty from 1913 to 1917 and established the women’s physical education program at the college. Her son, Dr. Carl B. Andrews of the 乐播传媒 class of 1940, established the lectureship.

The 乐播传媒 Fulbright recipients are: John Atchley, class of 2006, of Brooklyn, N.Y.; Jill Jakimetz, class of 2005, of Veneta, Ore.; Timothy McCall, class of 2008, of Andover, Mass.; Ross Van Horn, class of 2008, of Highland Park, N.J.; and Rebecca Westlake, class of 2007, of Goldens Bridge, N.Y..

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently listed 乐播传媒 College among the educational institutions that produced high numbers of Fulbright grant recipients this year. 乐播传媒 appears in a list of top Fulbright producers in the Oct. 19 print edition of the Chronicle.

(Although five 乐播传媒 alumni received awards for 2009-10, the list credits the college with three recipients. According to a spokeswoman for the Institute for International Education, which administers the Fulbright program, the list supplied to the Chronicle was based on an information snapshot that did not include all recipients.)

Atchley, whose work as a Fulbright Fellow was in the same issue of the Chronicle, received a Fulbright-Jawaharlal Nehru Scholarship to study India’s Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highway development project. The project is designed to connect India’s four largest cities, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai, with more than 3,000 miles of four- and six-lane expressways.

Focusing on the portion of the highway project that stretches through Uttar Pradesh and Bitar, areas known for high levels of illiteracy and poor governance, Atchley is examining the project’s success in promoting inclusive economic development.

“Measuring the impact of the GQ project in these states presents an extreme test for the idea of inclusive growth that’s promoted by the government,” Atchley says. “I plan to examine the success of this stretch of the GQ in promoting inclusive, equitable growth, and recommend new policies that can enhance these nascent efforts.”

Atchley, who says that his semester abroad in Dharamsala, Tibet, while in his junior year of 乐播传媒 influenced his decision to study India, left a job as chief of staff for Communications and Intergovernmental Affairs at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection to undertake his Fulbright-Nehru project. The Fulbright-Nehru grants are distinctive in the Fulbright program because they receive matching funds from the Indian government.

Fulbright research fellowship recipients include Jakimetz, who is undertaking environmental studies research in the Netherlands and Ireland, and Van Horn, who is studying agro-energy in rural communities in Brazil.

Westlake embarked on an English Teaching Assistantship in Madrid, Spain. After graduation from 乐播传媒, she completed a two-year placement with Teach for America, a nonprofit organization that recruits college graduates and places them in low-performing school districts. In Madrid, she works in a bilingual program with adolescent students.

鈥淭he Fulbright in Madrid allows me to gain a global perspective on urban education as well as a greater perspective on the problems that face the American public education system,鈥� says Westlake.

McCall also received an English Teaching Assistantship, and is completing his Fulbright in Germany.

Fulbright recipients come from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico and from more than 250 U.S. institutions, representing a diverse cross-section of American higher education. About 1,250 U.S. Student Program grants are awarded each year.

— Becca Chacko ’10

While 乐播传媒 has offered a three-year option for 40 years, an undergraduate education is hard to speed up, says Hansen. “I think too much in our culture is about doing things faster and simpler and easier. And what we can’t let go of in higher education is that slower is actually better when it comes to learning.”

Hansen joined Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University;聽 Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University; Robert Zemsky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a new book on education reform; and Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University and former assistant secretary of education under Lamar Alexander.

A 乐播传媒 physicist has won a grant from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement to study a phenomenon that hints at a possible basis for the next generation of computers.

Lilian Childress received a $45,000 Cottrell College Science Award for her exploration of atomic phenomena called spin systems and their characteristics in diamond.

An assistant professor of physics, Childress researches optical phenomena in atomic and solid state physics. Such phenomena are described by quantum mechanics, the natural laws that govern the behavior of particles on extremely small scales. Her particular focus is on an atomic defect in diamonds that could lead to a mechanism for quantum computing.

“Unlike classical mechanics, quantum mechanics allows the possibility of a system existing in more than one state at once,” says Childress. “Random effects play a key role because the outcome of measurements of quantum systems cannot always be predicted.”

According to Childress, quantum mechanics may have a crucial function in the computers of the future. Today’s computers, which operate according to the laws of classical mechanics, are based on the rendering of data into strings of 0s and 1s — binary digits, or “bits.”

But, she says, “as computing hardware gets smaller, the physical systems we use to store these classical bits are approaching sizes where their behavior is governed not by classical mechanics but by quantum mechanics. The rules of quantum mechanics offer a different paradigm for computation.”

According to those rules, a quantum bit — or “qubit” — can exist in an infinite number of different states that are simultaneously 0 and 1, dramatically increasing the computing power per bit. “For certain applications, a computer based on quantum mechanics could run exponentially faster than a computer based on classical mechanics,” she says.

A quantum computer has yet to be built, and there is some debate over whether such a thing is even possible. Nevertheless, scientists around the world are exploring physical systems that could potentially provide the basic hardware.

Childress is studying what she describes as “a relatively new addition to the ranks of qubit candidates” — the behavior of particles associated with a flaw in the atomic structure of certain diamonds.

Called a nitrogen vacancy, this defect occurs where two of the carbon atoms normally constituting the diamond molecule are missing, and one of them has been replaced by a nitrogen atom. Pink diamonds have many nitrogen vacancy sites, which appear as tiny bright spots fluorescing in the diamond when it is illuminated by green light.

By using light, magnetic fields and microwaves, the characteristics of the defect centers embedded in the diamond lattice can be measured. In particular, Childress is interested in what quantum physicists refer to as “spin” — subatomic behavior that adds a few mathematical complexities to the rotation we commonly associate with the word.

Harnessing the spins of particles within a nitrogen vacancy site, Childress says, could provide the basis for a rudimentary quantum computer.

Childress, who joined the 乐播传媒 faculty in 2007, received her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at Harvard University.

The second foundation established in the United States and, at the time of its founding, the first devoted to the advancement of science, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement was established in 1912.

Cottrell College Science Awards support significant research that contributes to the advancement of science and to the professional and scholarly development of faculty at undergraduate institutions. .

– Hillary Fink ’11, Office of Communications and Media Relations

“We’re in the middle of a revolution,” 乐播传媒 President Elaine Tuttle Hansen said at midday on April 30, “and it’s a hard place to see from.”

But Hansen, other members of the 乐播传媒 community and three visiting scholars spent that afternoon seeking a better view of the academy’s work amidst the tumult, amidst the creation and destruction, wrought by digital media.

That was the revolution Hansen invoked as she convened “The Teaching and Learning Shift: Diversity and Technology in the 21st Century,” her third annual symposium exploring issues of diversity at 乐播传媒.

The event examined the intersections of diversity and technology, and what they portend for academe. But if the title was “The Teaching and Learning Shift,” a different and bigger kind of shift resonated throughout: The changes in power structure, the threats and opportunities, that generational transitions in media and diversity hold out.

Take, for example, the surfeit of content on the Internet, and the potential and the dilemma it presents to faculty. If knowledge is power, who has the greatest leverage: the professor with his Great Books or the kid with the Google smarts?

Symposium organizer Leslie Hill, associate professor of politics and special assistant to the president for diversity initiatives, laid the day’s thematic groundwork in her introduction.

The event put a new spin on the old commonplace of the generation gap. It examined two new distinctions between today’s students, on the one hand,and their parents and teachers on the other. First, as diversity has become more visible and cultural boundaries more permeable, young people experience and perceive diversity quite differently from their elders.

Second, as Hill said, “today’s learners use tools unavailable, and perhaps unthinkable, to earlier generations” 鈥� a profound adaptation to technology evidenced through the afternoon by the term “digital natives,” young people whose ease with digital media is virtually innate.

The opening panel introduced the guests and concepts for consideration. , associate professor of new media at the University of Maine, offered variations on the idea that digital media can be a robust tool for empowerment and for subverting old, destructive hierarchical habits in the classroom. Examples from UMaine, such as a “” site that allows students to aggregate, tag and contextualize scholarly articles, were intriguing.

, an authority on African American film and culture and a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, introduced herself with examples of real impacts that digital media have made in the civic and political realms. The outstanding case was the Obama campaign’s skillful use of online organizing; less known was the use journalist Howard Witt made of the African American blogosphere to showcase a instance of racial injustice in Texas.

, associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, studies the interaction of information technologies and social inequalities. She challenged common wisdom about digital media users, suggesting that differences in skill among young people create a participation gap 鈥� and that those differences are driven by socio-economic background and educational attainment, among other factors.

Breakout sessions ran through the afternoon, with Blais, Everett and Hargittai making note of salient themes, concerns and suggestions for action. Three sessions explored the role of digital technology in teaching and learning, while others looked at civic engagement through digital media, and at identity and difference.

During the breakout session “Digital Media and the Arts,” faculty members praised the Web as the source of what they need most: easy and quick access to video clips of artists’ works, often through services like YouTube.

“Dance is visual, and to teach dance I must have visual materials or it doesn’t make sense to students,” said Carol Dilley, assistant professor of dance.

Take famed choreographers like Mark Morris or Bill T. Jones: Reviews of their work often use similar phrases, like “gender-bending,” Dilley told the group. “But when students see YouTube clips, they immediately see that they are nothing alike.”

But faculty also see a downside of this click-and-view aspect of teaching. Online visual content is often presented without canonical context, so even more than before, faculty have to work hard to “fill in” the missing ideas, said Dale Chapman, assistant professor of music.

The closing session was designed to distill from the ferment of the day ideas that would inform, as Hill put it, “the ongoing process of crafting the 乐播传媒 education.”

Hargittai described the breakout sessions as “incredibly rich,” and the panelists harvested a tantalizing bouquet of ideas. Among the salient findings:

鈥� Technology is often made a scapegoat for other problems. For instance, the generational divide among users is exaggerated, and, as Everett said, can create a destructive false dichotomy.

鈥� Still, the divide is real. As Everett reported, “There have to be reward structures to encourage faculty to engage with the black hole of technology.” At the same time, the current practice of hardware and technical instruction is incomplete 鈥� the missing piece being guidance in the effective pedagogical application of high-tech tools.

鈥� The faculty’s job of teaching critical discernment and evaluation is more important than ever in the digital world. “Faculty have to acknowledge students’ expertise,” Hargittai said, “but not abdicate their power.”

Blais told a story about a faculty member who was using Facebook to take a student to task about late assignments 鈥� and how the student later used the same public forum to press the professor to deliver an overdue assessment of the student’s thesis.

Blais concluded the tale, to appreciative laughter, with something a 乐播传媒 student said during the afternoon: “The power structures that permeate the academic world were not made for Facebook.”