Well, another semester has gone by… but not just any semester; it was my last semester at UC Berkeley. I’ve graduated! Again!

This time, it really all boiled down to my Master’s thesis, which is about creating a collaborative game on mobile phones for unschooled children in rural India. Quite different than what it was originally, but that’s how things go in the world of graduate school.

An earlier version of the paper was used as the final paper in a course on Human-Centered Computing, and a shortened/polished version of the paper was submitted to a conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Check out http://sybak.com for a fresh re-arranging of all the work I’ve done thus far in life.

Next stop: making big waves at Microsoft Corporation up in Redmond, WA starting October 2009.

A workshop is being held here at UC Berkeley, in the School of Information:

Google Geo Developer Workshop
Monday, Feb 9, 2009
12:30-3:30pm
110 South Hall, UC Berkeley

The description includes the promise of working on “sample projects such as making an interactive campus map, displaying your observational data in Earth, or planning optimal routes between your classrooms and favorite lunch stops.”

Hrm… can they actually guide people to make a CalMap clone in 3 hours?? I gotta see this.

My projects for the semester have been archived on the homepage:

http://sybak.com/

For each of the projects I put up:

• Physical Battleship
• Nominal Color Encoding Generator (a.k.a. Palette Assistant)
• Map of the Internet

… optimized versions have been uploaded along with their source code. To see their source code, simply load them, right-click on the Flash player area, and choose “View source”.

A lot of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) theory and user interface work was put into CalMap. In lieu of any action on the CalMap front, I thought I’d introduce another blog I have created that chronicles my coursework in HCI-related courses. Many of these courses are taught in the School of Information at UC Berkeley (a.k.a. the “iSchool”), and that is where I’ll be posting:

http://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/simontan/

Many of the posts there are required by the courses I’m taking, so you’ll see (forced) posts more often!

P.S. The downside of a blog hosted by the School of Information is that I am a lot more restricted server-wise. That is, I am not free to do things such as embed any old Flash object I want, like I can do here:

Quite possibly could serve as the inspiration for CalMap; but I swear I didn’t see this comic before!