Photo of me on a good day		Kellogg S. Booth Professor Emeritus, Department of Computer Science a.k.a. the Rev. Prof. Dr. Dr. Kellogg S. Booth BS (mathematics), Caltech (1968) MA (computer science), UC Berkeley (1970) DMph (metaphysics)1, Universal Life Church (1974) add to your shopping cart PhD (computer science), UC Berkeley (1975) CONTENTS Contact Information Biographical Information Teaching Activities    I am retired and thus no longer involved with teaching in any way.    Read this instead of contacting me about the unmdergraduate CPSC 491 UBC/MDM Practicum course. Research Activities    I am retired and thus no longer involved with research supervision in any way.    Read this instead of contacting me about undergraduate internships    Read this instead of contacting me about admission to a graduate program    Read this instead of contacting me about postdoctoral positions Pick Hits Errata for my research publications. FEATURED QUOTE A number of people have gotten mad at me for coining the term "cybercrud," which I define as "putting things over on people using computers." But as long as it goes on we'll need the word. At every corner of our society, people are issuing pronouncements and making other people do things and saying it's because of the computer. The function of cybercrud is thus to confuse, intimidate or pressure. We have all got to get wise to this if it is going to be curtailed. -- Ted Nelson in his must-read book from 1974, Computer Lib (page 8).     more favorite quotes... MAILING ADDRESS Department of Computer Science 201-2366 Main Mall The University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC  V6T 1Z4 CANADA    UBC OFFICE Room X461 ICICS/CS Building 2366 Main Mall (directions) 604-822-3061 (reception) 604-822-5485 (fax) ELECTRONIC e-mail: ksbooth@cs.ubc.ca Web: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~ksbooth (you are here now) Web: https://www.cs.ubc.ca/people/kellogg-booth ERDÖS NUMBER 2 (the same as my Knuth number). I do not have a Bacon number, so my Erdös-Bacon number is not defined. Contact me with a cash offer to co-author a paper with you if you desire an Erdös number of 3. RÉSUMÉ CV (pdf)  |  Google Scholar  |  ACM DL (free access to my ACM papers) ORCID  |  Pedigree (my oldest known academic ancestor is Nathaniel Bowditch) The cornerstone of UBC's faculty retention plan is its CV format. -- Dinesh Pai	Now   Then   Way Back
Official diploma attesting to my first doctoral degree, from the Universal Life Church
Hitting the spot! -- photo taken Summer of 1948 near Aliso Creek in Laguna Beach, CA
69 years and counting -- photo taken Summer of 2015 at Seton Lake, BC

Biographical Information

Kellogg S. Booth is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at The University of British Columbia and a former Adjunct Faculty Member at the Centre for Digital Media. He is the former Director (1990-2002) of MAGIC, the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre at the University of British Columbia, and the former Scientific Director (2009-2015) of GRAND, the Graphics, Animation and New Media NCE, a former Canada-wide network of centres of excellence in digital media. He served as a Board Member and Secretary for the Computer Science Canada / Informatique Canada from 2017-2019. He has worked in the fields of computer graphics and human-computer interaction since 1968. Prior to UBC, he was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo (1977-1990), and before that a staff member at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1968-1976). Research interests include human-computer interaction, user interface design, collaboration technology, visualization, computer graphics, and analysis of algorithms. He has been involved in a number of interdisciplinary research projects at UBC and elsewhere over the past five decades.

• CS-Can | Info-Can Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021
• Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at UBC since 2017
• Adjunct Faculty Centre for Digital Media from 2017-2020
• Active participant in HCI@UBC and the Designing for People (DFP) initiative at UBC since 2015
• Distinguished member of the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) since 2010
• Scientific Director for the Graphics, Animation and New Media (GRAND), a Network of Centres of Excellence from December 2009 through June 2015
• Member of the Multimodal User Experience Lab (MUX) at UBC since 2005
• Fellow of the British Columbia Advanced Systems Institute from 1992 to 2004
• Member of the Institute for Computing, Information & Cognitive Systems (ICICS) at UBC since 1990
• Founding Director of the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC) at UBC from 1990 to 2002
• Member of the Imager Laboratory for Graphics, Visualization, & Human-Computer Interaction (Imager) at UBC since 1990
• Founding Co-director of the Computer Graphics Lab at the University of Waterloo from 1981 to 1990

(Alternate biographical information is available here.)

Teaching Activities

I am retired, so I do not have regular undergraduate or graduate teaching duties.

Thirty years ago my thoughts on being a university professor teaching computer graphics were included in the ACM SIGGRAPH Career Handbook (pages 58-60). I still feel the same about teaching even though I am no longer involved.

Research Activities

How to Find the Best Research Topics Every Time (It's Genius!)
Funding agencies hate when you do this (but they can't stop you)

I am retired, so I no longer have regular research or student supervision activities.

Almost all of my recent research has been in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) including the following:

• Collaboration technology
• Educational technology
• Structured annotation techniques for co-authored documents
• Selected areas of interactive computer graphics and virtual and augmented reality

A list of previous dissertation/thesis topics that I have supervised in the past will give a snapshot of the range of my interests. I am not currently starting any new reseaerch initiatives or projects. My research is limited to finishing existing projects for which I have funding. (I am retired!)

Selected research initiatives in which I have been involved include the following²:

• Much of my recent research has been related to GRAND (2010-2015), the former Graphics, Animation and New Media network of centres of excellence. GRAND promoted highly cross-disciplinary digital media reserach and knowledge mobilization across Canada.
• The IDEASS (2011-2015), is part of a multi-year collaboration looking at various aspects of the built environment that focuses on how digital media technology can enhance our ability to plan, construct, and manage the urban landscape.
• NECTAR (2004-2009) was a research network funded by NSERC that focused on collaborative technology. Much of my research over the past five years was centred on NECTAR projects and most of the graduate students I supervised were affiliated with NECTAR. I am still actively working on a number of projects related to collaboration technology, especially tools for supporting collaboration on large, wall-sized displays and tabletop displays. Students interested in research opportunities in this area should contact me.
• The Enhanced Virtual Hand Laboratory (1995-2003) was a multi-year interdisciplinary research project at Simon Fraser University that examined a number of aspects of augments and virtual reality, as well as hand-based interaction techniques. I still have on-going interest in applying the results of that research, and more recent work in the field, to analyze and extend current interaction techniques, especially for table top and wall-mounted displays for collaborative systems where augmented reality techniques are employed to integrate physical objects with virtual objects.

A fairly complete list of my publications and summary of research activity is contained in my CV. There is also a list of some of my publications that are available (for free) in the ACM DL. This list is updated periodically. For a more complete list, you can look at my ACM DL home page.

Pick Hits

These are some links² that I have found interesting or fun, but some (such as the first three) have serious content.

Stuff I think every computer scientist should read
• I. D. Hill (1972). Wouldn't it be nice if we could write computer programs in English -- or would it? Honeywell Computer Journal 6(2):76-83. This is a marvelous paper, but it doesn't seem to be available on-line anywhwere (contact me if you want to find a copy). It was originally published in the Computer Bulletin 16(6):306-312 in June, 1972. It was re-printed by Honeywell.
• Richard A. De Millo, Richard J. Lipton, and Alan J. Perlis (1979). Social processes and proofs of theorems and programs. Commun. ACM, 22(5):271-280 (May).
• Roy Levin and David D. Redell (1983). How to write a systems paper. ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 17(3):35-40 (July).
• Software bloat is real, and coming to a neighborhood near you.
• Normally I am not a big fan of claims made by the AI community, but this new anti-theft system looks like it might really work! (Link currently broken, perhaps because of embarrassment.)

Stuff about digital media (graphics, visualization, HCI, etc.)
• If you don't think this teapot demo is funny, you are not old enough to appreciate the history of computer graphics.
• If you are not sure whether you want to buy a new display monitor, you may want to just update your current monitor to full color by downloading the Squant plug-in instead.

Less serious stuff
• Do you ever get tired of those meaningless management-speak terms? Here is an Action Item comic strip (circa 2000'ish) that has it all! This has been in my list for years, but only in 2020 did I follow the link at the bottom of the comic to see Neil McAllister's more serious web pages, including writers' tips. There is a more recent ‘unpacking’ of management-speak in the The Atlantic that ‘drills down’ in an ‘impactful’ way.
• On the World Wide Web there are all kinds of situations in which an Error 404 can occur, such as this.
• Pick a card, any card! (Thanks to Ron Rensink for showing me this.)
• This is the best T-shirt I've seen so far.
• Here's the real truth behind all of that bizarre spam e-mail you get with the weird characters inserted into normal words and seemingly meaningless literary text embedded in what appear to be advertisements.
• Although many people thought that Dan Savage's favorite anti-shrimp website was just a joke, recent events in the Gulf of Mexico have proven this to be hardly a laughing matter.
• There are powerful Demotivators (R) you will enjoy, including some new topical T-shirts related to the recent Gulf of Mexico crisis.
• When all else fails, call the Internet Help Desk for a good time.
• Lest we forget how blessed we are to live in Canada, think about how simple our food security problem is compared to the rest of North America.

Really serious stuff
• The Oxford comma and the apostrophe are two things you need to beware of. There can be serious consequencs of comma or apostrophe misuse. Check out the Guidelines related to academic writing on my web page for students who are interested in working with me, and more about commas if you aren't convinced they are important.

Favorite Quotes

• : “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?”
  -- Henry Ford II, CEO of Ford Motor Company, while viewing cutting-edge, automated machines at a state-of-the-art Ford engine plant in Cleveland OH

• “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars??”
  -- Walter Reuther, President of the UAW

• Advised that taking a deep breath after the cyanide pellets were dropped would make her death easier, she replied “How the hell would you know?”
  -- Barbara Graham

• I don't know the percentage of the Internet that's valid, do you?
  -- Hunter S. Thompson

• This paper is reasonably well written, and you would think the authors would know how to spell “Fitts' law”, given that they used this paradigm for evaluating their work. The term is spelt "Fitts's Law" several times in the paper.
  -- comment by R4³ (expert) in a review of a paper that my co-authors and I submitted to UIST 2015 (see previous link about the apostrophe)

• The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
  -- Plutarch

• In Academia, the “haves” argue over space, the “have-nots” over curriculum.
  -- Anonymous

• If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
  -- Lord Rutherford

• I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.
  -- Bjarne Stroustrup

• Any problem in computing can be solved by adding another level of indirection.
  -- David Wheeler, according to Roger Needham, according to Butler Lampson et al.

• There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
  -- Leon Bambrick, according to Tim Bray who credits my former Caltech classmate Phil Karlton for the original two-item list.

• On my income tax 1040 it says 'Check this box if you are blind.' I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.
  -- Tom Lehrer

• Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
  -- Tom Lehrer (more and and even more from him)

• When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.
  -- Clarence Darrow

• The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
  -- P. J. O'Rourke

• Age and guile beat youth, innocence, and a bad haircut.
  -- P. J. O'Rourke

• Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
  -- P. J. O'Rourke

• Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
  -- P. J. O'Rourke

• I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.
  -- Lawrence Peter Berra

• Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
  -- Lawrence Peter Berra

• In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
  -- Lawrence Peter Berra

• Surely if God had meant us to do yoga, he would have put our heads behind our knees.
  -- Rod Stewart

• Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house.
  -- Rod Stewart

• There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
  -- Frank Zappa

• Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.
  -- unattributed

• You know in many countries like North Korea or Iran a citizen does not have access to information like this.
  -- Country Joe McDonald commenting on his secret FBI file that he obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

• This is my absolute go to stuffing recipe! It is just like my grandmother's and is an absolute classic! Just to preface I do not eat organ meat but I have used the giblets that come with the turkey (yes heart, liver, etc.) to flavor the turkey stock and it has been a BIG hit with my very large family who has been eating gran's stuffing for decades! I dice the giblets, sauté in olive oil to brown, salt, add the turkey stock, simmer for 10 minutes and strain everything out.
  -- In a comment on a recipe for turkey stuffing
  Prions are very hearty proteins. They can be frozen for extended periods of time and still remain infectious. To destroy a prion it must be denatured to the point that it can no longer cause normal proteins to misfold. Sustained heat for several hours at extremely high temperatures (900°F and above) will reliably destroy a prion.
  -- In an article about prion diseases

• Fifty-nine years ago these photographs were part of a study for "The problem we all live with" that appeared in Look magazine, January 14, 1964. -- Norman Rockwell (1894-1978). More about Rockwell and this image appears in a 2020 Vox article that includes a passing reference to “Officer Obie” and here is more or less the original image. A trivia tidbit about how some Border Patrol and Bureau of Prison officers were deputized by RFK to serve as federal marshals protecting civil rights activists during the 1960s appears in a 2020 Politico article. In the run-up to American Thanksgiving 2021, the Washington Post had more to say about Rockwell and this painting. The dust cover art for Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird shows Vonnegut sitting on a bed wearing a toque with the poster in the background on the wall.
  
  

Footnotes

¹ Comedian Steve Martin said that he once read that earning your second million dollars was a lot easier than earning your first million dollars, so he decided he would earn his second million first and then maybe not bother with the first million if it was going to be harder. I figured that probably applied to doctorates as well, so I got my second doctorate (in Metaphysics) first, from the Universal Life Church, by sending them $20. It didn't make my first doctorate that I got second, from Berkeley, any easier. (A nice summary of computer science at Berkeley was written by me doctoral advisor, Richard Karp.)

² Links go stale over time, so there is no guarantee that all of the links on this page still work. If you see any that are broken, please let me know and I will try to fix them.

³ Papers submitted to conferences or journals usually are sent to multiple experts in the field, each of whom writes an anonymous review. Often the reviewers are referred to by the editor as R1, R2, R3, etc. It often seems that the best reviews come first and then the more negative reviews follow. This video is a parody of many authors' experiences of getting positive reviews from R1 and R2 but then seeing a very negative review from R3.

Credits

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