Clint Brown's Reflections on his Visit to the SRL

As discussed in last week's blog post, Clint Brown, the Director of Product Engineering for Esri, a company that is a leading innovator in developing geographic information systems (GIS), visited Dr. Tracy Hammond's Sketch Recognition Lab on Tuesday, November 18. Brown visited during the three-day Texas A&M University GIS Day 2014 event organized by Dr. Daniel Goldberg, Assistant Professor of Geography. 

Brown offered his thoughts on his visit to the SRL, and graciously allowed us to share them with you here! Brown found many similarities in the processes for SRL research and Esri product development. Both entities use small collaborative teams to engineer projects on the cutting edge of computer science. 

Clint Brown, Monday, December 1:

I very much enjoyed meeting the students in the lab and having each of them show their work. This reminded me of a lot of how our development teams work at Esri. At Esri, we are always searching to find for more true talent. We continually seek out clever software engineers who have what it takes to be creative, to work on teams, and who pay close attention to the user experience.

We like to work on real customer problems, very much like the ones that the students are working on in the lab. And a key aspect of that work is to imagine new kinds of experiences for software users. The best experiences are graphic and interactive and fun to use. And they do something useful, but are also cool. They are delightful in their own unique ways. That’s the vibe I picked up on in the Lab. You definitely have a talented team of very smart, creative people collaborating to solve some incredibly complex problems. And those team members are coming up with some inventive, and fun, approaches. It’s a talent that the software industry (and Esri in particular) is always looking for.

In addition, I believe that leadership and collaboration are incredibly important. Leaders who can motivate and guide designs and navigate the team through critically important creative processes are incredibly valuable. Dr. Hammond, I think, is providing strong vision and leadership. And I liked the collegial atmosphere. You work as a team.

At Esri, on our software development teams, we have similar meetings where our small project teams show their latest work to their peers and to our leadership. The process of having to introduce and explain, and ultimately -- to present your results through demonstrations is a very effective way to develop strong, robust solutions to the problems you are trying to solve. And this process needs to be repeated over the life of the project; you are iterating and evolving your designs and implementations. 

Great ideas are hard enough to create, but to implement elegant solutions for those ideas requires the genius of teams working together combined with a willingness to adapt and evolve your designs to move them forward. I really liked that about the lab. I really liked the creativity and openness of the students. I felt like feedback and collaboration is a big part of your success.

It’s fantastic to see these applied projects. I believe that add so much more depth and understanding about how new computing approaches and technology are evolving. The empirical experience that the students are gaining is incredibly valuable.

Here are a few other observations about how your work is like our product development here at Esri:

- We have small teams, and we expect each team to articulate their goals and to demonstrate their software in short iterations. We apply agile methods like Scrum.

- We expect that each new version of the software does something interesting and important to address key aspects of the overall problem for which we are trying to build solutions. We demo at each iteration and in between.

- Our work is very graphic – cartographic. In other words, maps and information layers are at the heart of our work. Your work is as well.

- The broad adoption of smart phones and tablets in the past decade is causing great disruption and is transforming computing. The designs for commercial software and apps are now incredibly graphic in nature. This is a great point of departure (compared to traditional computer science approaches) for the innovative work being done in the lab. It’s not that computer science concepts are invalid or are going away. It’s how they are being applied in this new paradigm.

- Today’s computing platforms are communications networks enabling a lot of web interaction and the use of smart devices and development tools like JavaScript, JSON, the web, CSS, iOS, Android, etc. And focused apps like you are building.

- Your projects are collaborative in nature. It’s about the work being done by and the talent and ethics of the team.

- Social coding and shared source are fundamental to how new software will be developed. This is about people collaborating and sharing great ideas and implementations that others can leverage in their own work.

So, I very much enjoyed my visit to the lab. And as an added bonus, it was in the Teague building in the same location as the “Institute” of Statistics was back in 1976 to 1978 when I was a graduate student in the Statistics program for my Masters of Science degree!

Thanks for the wonderful experience on my visit.






Jess Gantt can be contacted at jessicalgantt@gmail.com.