User:JMac

Bio

John MacCormick has degrees in mathematics from the University of Cambridge and the University of Auckland, and a doctorate in computer vision from the University of Oxford. He was a research fellow at Linacre College, Oxford from 1999-2000, a research scientist at HP Labs from 2000-2003, and a computer scientist with Microsoft Research from 2003-2007. Since 2007, Dr. MacCormick has been a professor of computer science at Dickinson College. He is the author of two books (Stochastic Algorithms for Visual Tracking, and Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers), has filed over a dozen US patents on novel computer technologies, and is the author of numerous peer-reviewed academic conference and journal papers. His work spans several sub-fields of computer science, including computer vision, large-scale distributed systems, computer science education, and the public understanding of computer science.

For more details please see John MacCormick's homepage at Dickinson College.

Exercises for POSSE 2016-6 workshop

Answers to IRC exercise from "Part 1 – Walk through of IRC Conversation"

• How do people interact?

It’s a mixture of businesslike interactions, informal suggestions, and occasional humor.

• What is the pattern of communication? Is it linear or branched? Formal or informal? One-to-many, one-to-one or a mix?

It appears to be a mix of all the above.

• Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning?

I don’t see any special terms in the regular text. The meetbot lines seem to have special purposes e.g. #info #action

• Can you make any other observations?

The "actions" that get recorded are interesting, in that they basically seem to list future jobs that need to be done and assign them to specific people. In two of the cases, participants assign a jobs to themselves, but in one case Darci assigns an action to Amber -- it looks reasonably innocuous in this case, but I wonder about the general etiquette of assigning jobs to others within such a project.

• Bonus question: Why didn't Heidi and Darci's actions get picked up by the meetbot?

I don't know the answer to this. Could it have something to do with assigning an action to oneself?