I am a PhD student at the Information Science Program of Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, USA. My degree major is Information Systems and my minors are Human Computer Interaction and Cognitive Science. I completed a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Physics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. I was born in Zaire, am of Polish ancestry, and have lived almost half my life in New Zealand.

I am currently focusing on the problem of Personal Information Management (PIM). The question here is how to design a system that helps people solve a common, but complex problem - that of staying organized. Such a system has to deal with many messy sources of information - emails, contact lists, schedules, project plans, to-do lists, photos, collections of articles to be read, etc. Often these items are spread across multiple computers (home, office) and portable devices (palm, cell phone) often with inconsistent versions being present on the various devices. I feel keeping this mess organized could be made simpler by constructing the right kinds of PIM tools, based on the ideas of concept translation introduced below.

I program well in C, Objective-C, Java and Python. I'm not too bad at C++, Pascal and assembly (for embedded devices) either. I speak English and Polish natively. I come from a strong technical background due to my undergraduate work, and this will be very important in implementing prototype PIM systems.

In previous semesters, I have performed some research on the storage and analysis of a decade's worth of historical web crawls collected by archive.org, which are now being transferred for analysis to Cornell as part of the WebLab project.

My main hobby is electronic music. I am a member of Cornell's Electronic Music Collective. I also work part time and watch many films at the Cornell Cinema.

Why are computers so annoying to use? Why can't I just tell a computer "send pictures of last weekend's trip to New York to my family." Why are things like the knowledge navigator (video) still so ridiculously far away from reality?

I think the key problem in human-computer interaction is a sort of conceptual barrier. Computers "think" about concepts like bits, files, formats, programs, compression, encryption, IP addresses. Humans think in terms like photos, friends, messages, obligations, problems, plans, lists, dreams. Tension arises in that the two kinds of concepts do not usually map onto each other easily or naturally.

When I send photos to my family today, I have to first translate everything into the computer's concepts. Photos are files. Files have names and reside in folders, which reside on a disk. I have to remember which folder the photos are in. I then have to select, resize and recompress the photos to be able to send them via email. I need to create a new email message, attach the recompressed photos (what folder were they saved in?), find my family's email addresses, send the message and wait to make sure it succeeds. For an experienced user, this translation process may be a nuisance, but for a novice it can easily be an insurmountable barrier. In either case, couldn't the computer be just a little bit friendlier?

It is obvious that computers and humans are different, but does this justify the difference in the kinds of concepts that each use? How much thought, from a human user point of view, really went into deciding that photos should be stored as files in folders? It may make sense from a technical and historical view point, but it is not clear that it is the best representation to use. Why, indeed, is it that this is the only representation of photos on computer systems today? Would not storing photos as entries on a calendar, or a map, or a time line of one's love life make just as much, if not more, sense? Why is it that the computer's concepts "win" - why do humans have to do the bulk of the work in translating their problem into the computer's terms? Couldn't the computer start taking on a bit more of this job?

I want to develop a better conceptual medium, a sort of middle ground, where communication with the computer would be more natural. I am not yet interested in areas like natural language processing (NLP - making a computer understand human speech or written language) - to me this represents the other end of the spectrum, in that it forces the computer to do ALL the conceptual translation. I think that a happy compromise can be reached, whereby neither the human nor the computer is unacceptably burdened with this translation task. And, as technologies like NLP improve, this compromise may shift further and further in the human direction, maybe one day leading to truly intelligent machines.

• Arms, W., Aya, S., Dmitriev, P., Kot, B., Mitchell, R., Walle, L.,
  A Research Library based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive.
  D-Lib Magazine, February 2006. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february06/arms/02arms.html.
• Wuensche, B., Kot, B., Gits, A., Amor, R., Hosking, J., and Grundy, J. 2005.
  A Framework for Game Engine Based Visualisations. [PDF]
  In Proceedings of Image and Vision Computing New Zealand, University of Otago, Dunedin, 28 - 29 Nov, 2005
• Kot, B., Wuensche, B., Grundy, J., and Hosking, J. 2005.
  Information visualisation utilising 3D computer game engines case study: a source code comprehension tool. [PDF]
  In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI New Zealand Chapter's international Conference on Computer-Human interaction: Making CHI Natural (Auckland, New Zealand, July 07 - 08, 2005). CHINZ '05, vol. 94. ACM Press, New York, NY, 53-60.

• Kot, B. 2005 Information Visualisation utilising 3D Computer Game Engines Case Study: A source code comprehension tool. [HTML] Faculty of Science Summer Scholarship Project, University of Auckland, New Zealand
• Kot, B. 2004 Implementation of a Traits Tool using Pounamu Property Sheet Extensions. [PDF] Computer Science 380 Undergraduate Project, University of Auckland, New Zealand
• Kot, B. 2004 Design and Implementation of Pounamu Property Sheet Extensions. [PDF] Computer Science Summer Scholarship Project, University of Auckland, New Zealand

• In Fall 2007 I was (again) the TA for CS430: Information Retrieval
• In Summer 2007 I TA'd for The Digital World and You, a 3-week summer camp course for high school students, an introduction to computer and information science.
• In Summer 2007 I worked at Additune, a local Ithaca start-up. My duties involved algorithm design and optimization, server programming and database administration.
• In Spring 2007 I am the TA for CS501: Software Engineering.
• In Fall 2006 I worked as an RA on the WebLab project, so I was not TA-ing.
• In Summer 2006 I held an internship at wordsmyth, a local Ithaca business. My duties involved creating educational vocabulary-based computer games and animations in Macromedia Flash.
• In Spring 2006 I was the TA for CS431: Web Information Systems.
• In Fall 2005 I was the TA for CS430: Information Retrieval

Blazej Kot
Cornell Information Science
301 College Avenue
Ithaca, NY 14850-4623
USA

work tel. (607) 255 5925 (InfoSci front desk)

Office: Graduate Student Office, Cornell Information Science, 301 College Ave
Office extension: 54654

e-mail: bjk45@cornell.edu

You can find some of my photos here . Photos from trips, around Ithaca or wherever. Email me if you would like any in a higher resolution.