In this video, Abowd provides an excellent overview of being an applied computer scientist. The talk combines Abowd’s research interests with his personal quest that ubiquitous computing elements “weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” [1]. So, what is an “applied computer scientist”? One definition provided by Abowd is someone who is not constrained by a single research agenda, but rather takes all manner of information technologies and applies them to problems that one cares about and where one thinks he or she may be able to affect the most change. That is certainly a reasonable definition.

Abowd makes a valid point that researchers oftentimes fixate on problems that have a high computing contribution as well as a high domain contribution (in health, finance, transportation, and so on). They want to solve such problems in two to three years, typical of a grant time frame. Instead, Abowd advises that researchers follow a long-term path that satisfies the constraints of having a sizable domain contribution coupled with a nontrivial computing contribution. Abowd’s personal trajectory has allowed him to solve applied problems that proved to be breakthroughs over a period of time.

Abowd subsequently goes into two real-life examples: wellness and autism. In the first example, he studied how to use technology to address pediatric chronic asthma. To target the teenagers with asthma, the study used cellphone short message service (SMS) since most teenagers ubiquitously use cellphones. Allowing for a control group, the study showed that targeted teenagers who were sent one message a day (alternating between a query and information) showed 96 percent improvement in lung capacity. While this was a sizable domain contribution, it was not considered an important computing contribution, and Abowd’s papers to relevant computing conferences were rejected. To further the computing contribution, he focused on how to engage adults who are busy and not disposed to responding to SMS messages. He noticed that most clinical surveys are intrusive, asking to set aside time to fill out questions. Instead, he devised novel methods to have adults respond to questions by interacting with their cellphones without being intrusive. Example: to unlock the cellphone, drag a picture that matches current emotions to the bottom of the phone.

The second example is more personal to Abowd: his son was diagnosed with mild autism in the early 2000s. Abowd was struck by how he was unable to see the changes in his son despite ubiquitous video recordings during that time of the progression of autism. He subsequently used this episode as a lesson in appreciating problem-driven approaches to applications one cares about. Over the last 12 to 13 years, Abowd has applied technology to successfully execute research projects on early (remote) screening and diagnoses of autism, visual analytics for understanding evidence, and direct interventions through interactive multimedia applications and social media.

In summary, this video is a valuable resource for researchers--experienced as well as those starting out --and practitioners on what it means to be an applied computer scientist.