JJ Cadiz

Carnegie Mellon Alumnus and now Program Manager on Bill Gates' technology assistance team at Microsoft

In an interview conducted via email with the School of Computer Science's Director of Alumni Relations Tina M. Carr, JJ Cadiz (MHCI'01) reflects upon his experiences at Carnegie Mellon and his current work as a Program Manager on Bill Gates' technology assistance team at Microsoft.

SCS: What attracted you to Carnegie Mellon?

JJC: I was really impressed by CMU's reputation for world class research and its specific focus on human computer interaction (HCI) as a primary field of study. Other schools had HCI as a specialty attached to computer science programs or information science programs, but only CMU had its own HCI Institute and degree program.

SCS: What was your favorite class and why?

JJC: My favorite class was the capstone HCI project course where I worked on a team of 7 people to develop a product concept for a sponsor. In my case, our sponsor was Interval Research, and our goal was to develop a novel product concept for teenagers that utilized Bluetooth technology.

The work itself was great because we were given a good amount of freedom to apply everything we had learned over the past two years to an interesting problem. However, I think what made the class so much fun was the people I got to work with. Everyone on my team was great. It was the kind of team that I looked forward to working with every day.

SCS: Who was your favorite professor and why?

JJC: Dr. Bob Kraut was my favorite professor because of everything he taught me about the social impacts of technology and how to study the effects of technology. Prior to coming to CMU I concentrated primarily on developing cool ideas without much regard for the effects of those ideas or the needs that people have.

I also liked Dr. Kraut because he held his students to high standards. He was also a great racquetball partner :-)

SCS: What was the best thing about living in Pittsburgh?

JJC: Because I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, there were two things that really stuck in my mind about Pittsburgh life: the incredible thunderstorms and the vivid colors of the leaves in the fall. The thunderstorms and leaves in Oregon and Washington are pretty unimpressive compared to what I experienced in Pittsburgh.

SCS: What opportunities do you feel you had at Carnegie Mellon that you wouldn't have had at another university?

JJC: At CMU, I felt that I had the opportunity to learn from the best researchers in the world in a variety of fields. It was great to have classes taught by such talented computer scientists, social psychologists, and designers.

SCS: How do you think Carnegie Mellon helped prepare you to meet your professional challenges?

JJC: I think the CMU experience that prepared me the most for my professional challenges was the constant exposure to students and professors in other fields. In my current job, I interact with a wide variety of people--people who have different academic backgrounds, different areas of expertise, and different ways of approaching problems. At CMU, I got to work on teams with all kinds of different people (physicists, visual designers, interaction designers, cognitive psychologists, etc.) so it was a great experience to learn about how different types of people approach problems and how to speak the language of different academic fields.

SCS: What do you believe has been your greatest achievement?

JJC: I'm the most proud of the fact that despite being insanely busy over the
past several years, I've always found the time to commit to a significant volunteer activity. At CMU, I volunteered as a tutor for the Role Models program run by Elaine Atkinson. Here in Washington, I'm in my third year as the head coach of a high school speech and debate team. I had a lot of people help me get to where I am, so I feel that
no matter how crazy my schedule is, I always need to take some time to help others realize their potential.

SCS: What advice would you have for incoming students in the field of computer science who were worried about the difficulty of their program?

JJC: Two things--first, be prepared to work very hard. I have yet to encounter an obstacle so great that it couldn't be overcome with lots of focused, dedicated work. Second, all that hard work is worth it in the end. I have no regrets about all the time I spent at school.

SCS: The advances in the field of computer science have lead to a digital revolution. We've seen the birth of the personal computer, the fruition of Moore's law, the rise of the Internet, to name a few. What do you think we'll see next?

JJC: What I hope we'll see next is a revolution in how people spend their leisure time. Research has found that Americans spend an average of 3 to 4 hours every day watching television, and television watching is one of the least gratifying experiences that people do (it's even been found to be less gratifying than work!). It would be great if technology
could provide people with something as readily available and simple to use as TV, but much more fulfilling.

SCS: Describe your current position and it's roles and responsibilities.

JJC: I work as a program manager on Bill Gates' technology assistance team headed by Dr. Anoop Gupta (CS'82,'86) (also a CMU alumnus). My specific role is two-fold. First, I work on a variety of software prototypes with a pair of world-class developers. We take ideas that have promise but have yet to be proven, implement them, and deploy them. We then refine the prototype based on customer feedback until everybody is convinced that the idea should become a product, or we've found that idea isn't ready for prime time and shouldn't become a product yet.

Second, I provide support for Anoop in his role as Bill's technology assistant. For example, I do lots of technology demonstrations to Microsoft's senior executives to educate them about emerging fields. I also organize the material for Bill's Think Weeks when he takes a week off to read various papers from around the company and think about long-term strategic issues.

SCS: What research projects are you currently working on or completed recently (e.g. describe your work on the Information Awareness Interface. What is it? Why is it important? What impact has this project made or will make in the field?

JJC: The main research project I just completed was called "Sideshow." Its goal was to design an interface for the Windows desktop that could help people stay aware of all the important information in their world without being overwhelming or distracting. We wanted to provide a single place where people could see an overview of things like their
e-mail inbox, calendar, shared files for their team, traffic status for their commute home, local weather, etc.

We designed Sideshow as a bar that is always visible on one edge of your screen. It's filled with tiny summaries of information, and if something looks interesting, you can hover your mouse over the summary to get more information. The bar is completely customizable and extensible so with a little programming, you can place summaries on the bar of specific information that you want to track. For example, if you're a software developer, you can use Sideshow to keep track of all the bug reports that are assigned to you.

My team designed Sideshow and then released it within Microsoft to see if people liked the concept. Eventually, about 13,000 employees installed Sideshow and about 7,000 were using it on a regular basis. The product groups were convinced that it was a great concept, and Sideshow's ideas now appear in MSN 8 as a feature called the "Dashboard." It's my hope that Sideshow will also appear in other products in the future.

A paper about Sideshow is available at
http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?msr_tr_id=MSR-TR-2002-87

One interesting thing is that my work in the area of information awareness started at CMU when I was a member of a DARPA-funded research team led by Drs. Bob Kraut and Bill Scherlis. When I was on that team, I did a prototype that wasn't very successful, but I was able to use a lot of the lessons from that experience when it came to designing Sideshow.