Doctor of Philosophy
I'm planning to get my Ph.D. here at UCSC, in Software Engineering. I was hoping to do something in the area of Human Computer Interaction, specifically for computer graphics and animation software.... I would love to make software and work on problems for the entertainment industry. This means modeling and animating the natural world and the plants and creatures in it. As it turned out, none of the professors in my department right now do explicit research in Human Computer Interaction. The software I had in mind is very complex, and Software Engineering studies the building and maintaining of complex software, so that seemed to be a good fit.
After moving to Software Engineering, I discovered Doug Engelbart's "Unfinished Revolution". The goals Engelbart has pursued during his career meshed well with a side project I had a few years ago. After talking with my new advisor, Jim Whitehead, the side project became my Ph.D. project, Whisper, which was unfortunately too ambitious and had to be severely constrained. So after 3 years, the area of research for my Ph.D. has finally been narrowed down to examining different methods of encouraging people to be (more) proactive about sharing useful information with friends, colleagues, coworkers, and so on.