Distinguished Lecture Series: Understanding user behavior at three scales

Speaker: Daniel Russell, Google Research Scientist
UCL Contact: Steve Marchant (Visitors from outside UCL please email in advance).
Date/Time: 08 Jul 14, 17:30 - 19:00
Venue: Roberts G08LT
Further Information:

Registration essential

Abstract

How people behave is really the central question for data analytics. The way people play, the ways they interact, the kinds of behaviors they bring to the game ultimately drive how our systems perform, and what we can understand about why they do what they do. In this talk I’ll describe three different scales of collecting data about user behavior, showing how looking at behavior data at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels is a superb way to understand what people are doing in our systems, and why. Knowing this lets you not just understand what’s going on, but also how to improve the user experience for the next design cycle.

Daniel Russell

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 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 and a stone knife. He also worked at IBM and briefly at a startup that developed tablet computers before the iPad.