Writing

I've never liked writing. I like science, math, and technical things, love problem solving. But writing...it doesn't come natural and takes forever to finish a good paper. I guess the problem stems from the fact that I am somewhat of a perfectionist and want the words to be perfect. I'm doing this blog partially to try and get over my misgivings concerning writing and hopefully down the path I'll become a better writer. At work we've been finishing up a couple papers to submit to the HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) conference this year. While I think the paper's are well written, they sure took time and could use more time.

While doing my school work I really struggled to write, in fact I had some professors give me back my paper and say "I'm not accepting this." That was pretty tough, but I learned that I could make a decent story, it just takes a really long time. I'm working to get faster! Now don't get me wrong, I've gotten much better at writing and have been an author on numerous conference and journal papers in the last little bit. Its just that writing is hard.

For those of you going into a science field...Don't think you can ignore writing and hope it will just go away with a techie job. Writing is the key to opening the doors and getting people to believe in your ideas. So, spend time writing even if it is just in a personal journal. It'll pay off big time.

Introduction

I'm Curtis Nielsen, I work with a robotics group at the Idaho National Laboratory. I would say my job is to play with cool technology and try to get it working with robots. By trade I am a computer scientist, I received my degrees at BYU-Provo under the direction of Mike Goodrich. Most of my work focuses on making robots easier to use by developing interfaces that present the right amount of information that enable decision making, but not too much information that would require the operator to sift through the visualization, rather we try to make the relevant data immediately perceptible. In general, my interests are related to usability and improving the way things are used especially computers and applications. I really enjoy writing software especially when it is beautiful to both the user and the developer. For the user it is intuitive and easy to use, for the developer it is easy to update and extend. For more information about the type of robotics work we do see www.inl.gov/adaptiverobotics.