This will be a short blog post to help me get back in the habit. With any luck I will have one or two more out before the CSCW paper deadline. After that I plan on getting back to weekly posts.

The Jello Research Story Challenge

While chatting with a colleague at work about our upcoming paper I realized that our research story could be summarized, (with great oversimplification) as follows:

I want jello.
I looked for jello in the kitchen, but I did not find any.
I looked for jello in the dining room, but I did not find any.
I looked for jello in the pantry, but did not find any.
I don't think there is any jello in my house.
Broadly, I still believe jello exists.

I found this very silly, and very fun, so I thought I would try to do one for one of my past papers.

Some people have never had jello before.
Those of us in the jello community consider this a significant issue and want to help all people find their favorite types of jello.
To do that most people have thought about how to pick the first few types of jello a person who has never had jello before should try.
I wanted to know how much we knew about your favorite jellos based on different ways to guess and how many jellos you've tried.
It turns out one of the common ways to guess peoples favorite jello does really bad for people who have never had jello before.

For those who couldn't guess this was my RecSys 2014 work on evaluating recommender systems for new users. I don't think I did as clean of a job as the first jello-research-story, but its pretty good. I managed to avoid using any of the main "keywords" of the paper, and I only had one phrase that I had to jello-transliterate. I want to see more of these, therefore I am issuing a challenge:

The Challenge

1. You must re-tell the basic narrative arc (the "story") of one piece of work but make it all about jello.
2. You cannot use any of the major keywords of your work or buzzwords of your field.
3. You do not have to actually explain your work.
4. You do not have to actually identify what work you are explaining.

Jello research stories seem to be a little long to tweet reliably, but if you do put one together please put it somewhere and tweet it at me. Once you've done that find someone else to give the jello research story challenge.