Moore’s Law, Amdahl’s Law, and the Skinny Human Pipe

1 Feb 2010

A research colloquium with Randolph Bias of the UT Austin School of Information.

Friday, February 26
11:45 AM - 1:15 PM
UTA 5.522, the University of Texas at Austin

Technology, such as wheels and levers and, more recently, airplanes and backhoes, have extended personkind's physical capabilities. Likewise cognitive technologies, such as arithmetic and writing and, more recently, computers and telephony, have extended our cognitive capabilities. The ever-accelerating advance of cognitive technologies, as represented by Moore's Law, has led to amazing increases in the types and speed of tasks we can perform. However, this increase has conspired with the glacial, evolutionary advance of human perceptual/cognitive systems to make us humans the skinny pipe through which information must be squeezed in almost any hybrid human-machine system. Professor Bias will compare a half-century of human-information processing data with Moore's Law data, will help the audience to the obvious conclusion that usability is THE most important thing in the (information systems) world, and will offer an update on the iSchool's Information eXperience (IX) Lab as an example of how the field of information studies should be reacting to this state of affairs.