Daniel Russell
Google
Sensemaking III: What people do NOW to search-for and organize complex information.

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Sensemaking is the practice of searching-for, collecting and organizing information in order to understand and make sense of some complex domain. What do people do NOW in the Age of Google when engaged in sensemaking behavior? In some ways, it's the same as when intelligence analysts gathered notes in shoeboxes, but in many ways the diversity, freshness and depth of information available online has transformed sensemaking behaviors. The ability of some people to take advantage of the information and tools available for sensemaking is leading to a disparity between those who can take advantage, and those who cannot. This talk is partly observational (what do people do) and partly advocacy (how you can do it too) and summarizes the past 20 years of sensemaking research.

Daniel Russell is the Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness in Mountain View. He earned his PhD in computer science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence until he realized that magnifying and understanding human intelligence was his real passion. Twenty years ago he foreswore AI in favor of HI, and enjoys teaching, learning, running and music, preferably all in one day. He has worked at Xerox PARC before it was PARC.com, and was in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple where he wrote the first 100 web pages for www.Apple.com using SimpleText. He has also worked at IBM as a third-line manager for the HCI lab at Almaden, and for two years at a startup developing tablet computers before there was an iPad.