The Visiting Future-ists described their work in helping to innovate for the future information environment, and discussed the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. They also engaged the audience in brainstorming aimed at identifying information-related issues that can best be addressed through interdisciplinary research.

The Visiting Future-ists were:

• Dan Russell, Google’s “director of user happiness,” who leads efforts to improve the effectiveness of web searching; he was the keynote speaker at our campus-wide Future of Information Forum held last November;
• Mary Czerwinski, who manages the research on human-computer interaction at Microsoft and focuses on information visualization, group awareness and lifelogging;
• Abdur Chowdhury, former chief scientist at Twitter, who has been working toward improving the ability to separate “signal” from “noise” in the explosion of information on the Web.

Patrick O’Shea, Vice President for Research, opened the program.