The future of cognitive tools
Psychologist Judy Fan is an expert in how physical objects facilitate learning.
In the classroom, these include pencils, pens, paper, and whiteboards. But in any learning situation, the physical world provides tools for learning and communicating, often trumping the speed and reach of today’s digital technologies. These objects are cognitive tools – physical representations of human thought, she says. They help us think, solve problems, and communicate with others better and more effectively, as she tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Judy Fan: Really advancing our theories of human cognition to scale them up to handle real world complexity. And like knowing what is true by developing theories that really work out in the world. So that's, that's one direction. And the other direction is translating insights and principles that we've been learning and will continue to gain as we go onward, and then bringing them into the kind of learning environments, like the next generation.
[00:00:31] Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. If you enjoy The Future of Everything, please hit follow in the app that you're listening to right now. This will guarantee that you never miss an episode.
[00:00:42] Today, Judy Fan from Stanford will tell us how we learn and communicate with physical items. That's paper and pencil, iPads, phones, maybe even art materials. It's the future of cognitive tools.
[00:00:57] Before we get started, a quick reminder to follow the show, to ensure that you never miss the future of anything.
[00:01:10] So when we think about learning and communication, we don't always think about the media that we're using, especially physical media. This goes way back for humans. From the first papyrus and now paper evolving into phones, iPads, all kinds of technologies that are used to help us communicate and to think about ideas.
[00:01:31] When we're taking notes in class, we don't just write down the words. There's arrows, circles, diagrams, little pictures of what the teacher was showing us on the board. And the teacher themselves are using the board in creative ways. This is not random, there are things that work and there are things that don't work. And there are experts.
[00:01:48] One of them is Judy Fan, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. She runs the Cognitive Tools Lab at Stanford, and studies how physical objects are useful for learning and communication.
[00:02:02] Judy, in your work, you concentrate on physical representations of thought. Can we start by having you explain to me what that means, and then we can figure out what you do about it.
[00:02:13] Judy Fan: Yeah, sure. Um, and thanks for having me on this show. I think it's a wonderful project. So physical representations of thought are what I've been calling cognitive tools or equivalently cognitive technologies. Or material objects. Like real physical objects that we can see and touch that we use to effectively extend our minds, help us think and solve problems and communicate what we know to other people.
[00:02:40] One example of that is writing systems, is an example of a cognitive technology. We can take thoughts that might otherwise be locked away in the privacy of our own skulls and be able to share them with the rest of the world. Even people who are really far away, you might write a letter and send it to somebody else.
[00:02:56] And they can know something of what you were thinking, even if it was months previously. Of course, we take that kind of technology now for granted, you know, when it comes to, um, really rapid telecommunications and text and video transfers that go, you know, um, that are like, allow us to transmit and share our thoughts at speeds that our forebears couldn't have imagined.
[00:03:20] Russ Altman: Right, right.
[00:03:21] Judy Fan: But I'm really thinking quite broadly about all of these technologies from the very first etchings on cave walls to the very latest in digital technologies and tools that people use in the modern world, in the twenty-first century, to share what they think with other people.
[00:03:37] Russ Altman: All right. So that's great because I love how you introduced it with writing. So this is not a new thing that is just occurring because of digital transformations. This is something that is very fundamental to the human experience going back to when humans kind of were created. So let's just spend a little time on that because I'm sure we're going to get to the modern age, but I know you've done work on like communication through drawing. Uh, obviously in some ways, writing is a communication through drawing.
[00:04:04] Judy Fan: Yeah.
[00:04:05] Russ Altman: I felt very passionate in preparing for our chat. I got very excited because about, I don't know, fifteen or twenty years ago, I stopped using PowerPoint and one hundred percent of my teaching happens at a whiteboard where the ideas get expressed in drawings and texts, and I got immediate feedback from the students that this was the way to go.
[00:04:26] And so I want to talk a little bit about the deep connection between, it seems so natural that drawing and doing things in order to communicate and to learn. So where are we in our understanding of how fundamental that is to kind of the human, uh, experience?
[00:04:41] Judy Fan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, um, that story you're sharing about classroom teaching really resonates with me. I've noticed something very similar. As someone who's a teacher who has a lot to share, um, with your students, it can be really tempting to try to cram in as much as possible about what you know what you're excited about with your students with a limited time you have in the classroom.
[00:05:06] Russ Altman: Exactly, exactly.
[00:05:07] Judy Fan: And something that, you know, I've also noticed in my own teaching is the value of slowing things down. To take the perspective of a viewer, a listener, a learner who's encountering this information for the very first time. Um, I teach introductory statistics, um, at Stanford, which I love. And, um, in many cases, you know, these, um, the application of these mathematical ideas, um, from statistics, like what is the, um, when you take an average over a data set, what are you doing? What does that mean? Why would you want to do that?
[00:05:48] I mean, many people come into the class with some intuition for why thinking about the average, um, you know, opinion on some policy might matter. Or thinking about, you know, averages of temperature over time might matter. But when we look at, um, the properties of this mathematical object and look at it from all sides, it can really help to slow it down. Right? And like, look at each piece in turn. And if you're on a whiteboard, as opposed to just quickly scrolling through.
[00:06:24] Russ Altman: Right.
[00:06:24] Judy Fan: Um, you know, a slide deck.
[00:06:25] Russ Altman: Next, next, next.
[00:06:27] Judy Fan: Right. Exactly. You can more easily unfurl the story of, like, how we arrived at this. You can tell the story of how
[00:06:37] Russ Altman: Yes.
[00:06:37] Judy Fan: Statisticians, scientists, mathematicians arrived at this idea. And I think that, like, that, um, way that humans connect with stories and narratives, it can be a lot easier when you're able to pace learning to the pace of how we talk and like the speed at which we talk.
[00:06:57] Russ Altman: I love this. And so there's so many questions. My head is exploding. But you just talked about humans, which reminded me that you have done some work on cross cultural comparison of some of these phenomenon. And can you tell me about that? Like, is this a real universal, I think you've looked at China and US and differences and similarities, um, maybe in math or other pictorial. And I know that those alphabets, for example, are extremely different.
[00:07:22] Judy Fan: Right, right.
[00:07:23] Russ Altman: So, um, what have you found in terms of the universality versus local practices?
[00:07:29] Judy Fan: Right. Oh, wow. Okay. Thank you for asking that question. I mean, um, the work that I've been really fortunate to be involved in is the product of collaboration, um, with Bria Long and Mike Frank in the psychology department here at Stanford, as well as our partners, um, in China, who really were asking this question that you're posing about universality. Um, to that point, I had focused our studies on local populations of students and other members of the general public, largely in the United States.
[00:08:05] And this was really a new opportunity for me to ask this question, uh, about how broadly shared, for example, the tendencies that people have to depict some object or some concept in visual form. And so in that work that you're alluding to, what we did was we asked kids, you know, kids of all different ages, um, some were as young as four years of age.
[00:08:33] So folks just breaking into literacy, um, not yet able to read or write, um, as, you know, and as old as nine or ten. And so these are, you know, kids who have been in school for a while. And really ask this question of like, how do they take ideas things they know about the world around them. Nothing too esoteric. But every day, familiar objects like what a house looks like or what a bicycle looks like. And how do you in a few pen strokes,
[00:09:04] Russ Altman: Right, right.
[00:09:05] Judy Fan: Communicate the essence of that concept to somebody else. And we've done this work, um, here in California, actually not too far away in San Jose, where lots of different, uh, members of the, uh, the bay area actually visit this Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose. And a lot of that work already shown us how much heterogeneity and diversity and variability there already was, even local, just right around, you know, in the neighborhood around, around Stanford. Just how different kids were acquiring this ability in different ways over time as they grew older. And this effort with our collaborators in China allowed us to ask, how similar are those developmental trajectories in this different part of the world? And how might it, how might that kind of variability express itself in this other setting?
[00:10:01] Now, um, I think something that is really important to bear in mind, these questions about universality, um, and let's say, uh, contingency, um, cultural contingency. I think are really, um, important and fundamental, and they're also really tricky to study, right? Because even when you observe some kind of difference, on average, speaking of averages, even when you observe some kind of average difference between two groups who you happen to have encountered and interacted with, um, in the context of this, uh, visual communication task, um, in these two different places. That's the beginning of the story. That's the beginning of like unraveling the mystery, not the end.
[00:10:49] And you might be tempted to think that you know what really differs between these two groups. Um, so it's true that we, uh, recruited a group of kids in China and a group of kids, in San Jose, and we, um, compared, uh, how they communicated about these familiar concepts. But there's so many other things that also differ between the kids in each group, as well as differences between the U.S. based and the, um, China based groups. Apart from the fact of their nationality and where they were growing up.
[00:11:27] Russ Altman: Yes.
[00:11:27] Judy Fan: And so I really think that, you know, while we found, okay, so here's to answer your question more directly. What we found is, um, that, you know, kids, um, you know, these four and five year olds were just entering school, breaking into literacy, um, are able to convey some aspects of what they know about the world. Visual concepts, like what a bicycle looks like, um, that ability, um, develops and improves gradually over time. Um, in other work, we'd, uh, found that while you might think that that ability to be able to more effectively convey what you know in like a simple sketch is mainly the product of maybe your, um, improving motor control skills. And that's certainly happening, almost certainly happening too.
[00:12:21] Russ Altman: Right, right.
[00:12:22] Judy Fan: Um, it also is co-developing with the ability to make sense of a kind of, um, you know, growing ability to also, um, make appropriate perceptual judgments, given what you see.
[00:12:39] Russ Altman: Is it true that they would start out looking similar as a three or four year old and diverge because of their exposure to the language that they're ultimately going to learn?
[00:12:48] Judy Fan: Oh, yeah, that's really, really fascinating. Okay, so, um, as like a, um, cognitive scientist, I find those questions incredibly fascinating and incredibly difficult to wrap our arms and minds around, okay? So I think that this is an incredibly, um, thought provoking hypothesis about the relationship and interaction between exposure to certain writing systems or graphical, systems and visual, um, styles.
[00:13:17] Russ Altman: Right.
[00:13:17] Judy Fan: That may be more prevalent in some cultures than others. Um, I want to, um, embed a shout out to, um, really, really intriguing work, um, by colleague Neil Cohn, um, at Tilburg, um, who's done this really, um, interesting work comparing, um, drawings also by school aged children in, um, parts of Japan and parts, uh, and like parts of the West. And analyzing not just average differences and how the different drawings of like faces and other kinds of objects looked, but also how much variability between different individuals growing up in those different contexts there was.
[00:13:58] Russ Altman: Right, right.
[00:13:59] Judy Fan: And what he's observed, which I find incredibly, uh, fascinating, right? Is that there seems to be less variability among the sample, in the sample of Japanese school children that he'd, um, been interacting with, and perhaps this could be related, okay? One of the hypotheses that is really juicy and very interesting is that maybe this is related to, um, a shared tradition, um, within um, manga and like kind of graphic novel tradition that has standardized a kind of, or created a kind of shared idiom, visual idiom, when it comes to how you draw faces, how you draw eyes, how you draw ears. And that exposure to that consistency manifests in the way that kids also learn to convey those same ideas. Um, I think it's really, really incredibly,
[00:14:51] Russ Altman: Yes, and that even happens fairly early, is that true? Are these in the younger kids? Or does it become more clear in the older? I'm sure it becomes more clear in the older kids. But do you see signs of it early on?
[00:15:04] Judy Fan: Sure. So, some of the signatures that you might have in mind, um, so now pivoting back to the work of, we were doing houses look very different in different places. And, um, you know, I grew up, um, so I grew up in the States. I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. I definitely knew about snow, snowmen from the calendars that were hung up in the classroom. Um, I'd read about these things and seen movies, um, where, you know, where snow is depicted. Um, but I hadn't seen much of it myself. And most of the architectural styles that I was exposed to in Phoenix, look nothing like the houses that I drew as like a third grader, right? I learned you draw the rectangle or square, then you draw the triangle on top with the chimney that pokes up real high.
[00:16:00] Russ Altman: For heating the house.
[00:16:01] Judy Fan: Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, you know, when I actually like, um, you know, traveled more extensively around the US like, um, as like a grown person, I like came to finally meet the houses that I had like imagined as a child because I had a acquired these graphical conventions. that weren't necessarily so closely tethered to my direct visual experience. And so I think something that does seem to be, right? And I think we're still really developing the analytic tools to pull this out, in a more systematic way, but when we look at the rich data that we're collecting from how children express their growing visual knowledge, it does seem that there's really early influences of these conventionalized modes of conveying what it is, like what it is to look like a house. And how drawings of houses or the sun look the way they do in our community, right? In our visual culture.
[00:17:01] Russ Altman: Yes, it's fascinating because you're describing as even you as a child, there's what you saw every day outside of your home, and then there's what you were exposed to through the cultural artifacts of books and TV and other things. And those melded to create a kind of a whole conception of house that was a hybrid.
[00:17:20] Judy Fan: Right, right. And so just, you know, if I may, you know, I think that that nexus, right, between our direct visual experiences, embedded in 3D physical environments, um, with objects that we can manipulate, interact with directly, we can ask people around us to tell us more about something, is something that is continuous with these other mediated ways of exploring the world around us.
[00:17:47] Storybooks, physical storybooks are really great examples of this kind of technology for sharing knowledge with the next generation that have been around for a long time, like, well, before YouTube and digital learning environments became more widespread and like iPads became as ubiquitous as they are in some parts of the world. The way that storybooks in which you might encounter. Like, I think I first saw a giraffe, or at least the representation of a giraffe, I mean, in one of these books, right?
[00:18:19] Or like in a Disney movie, not because I'd actually gone and seen a giraffe in real life. And somehow I think the premise of these kinds of technologies is that you can learn about the wider world through direct experience with this mediated, through these kinds of like books and other vehicles for conveying knowledge. Which is something that, you know, a lot of, um, you know, my colleagues in the broader field of psychology have done great work on. What's coming to mind is work by Melissa Preissler and Patricia Ganea, and like colleagues who have looked at, you know, what are the properties that if you're going to learn about giraffes, you really actually want to learn about giraffes. How might you depict a giraffe in a storybook in order so that somebody can understand what to look for when they're really out in the world and maybe encounter that animal.
[00:19:13] Russ Altman: It's fantastic because what, because you know, being a grandfather, I have seen that they, that children can look at a very stylized giraffe and then when you take them to the zoo, they look at the giraffe in real life and they know immediately what it is. And it actually looks very little, but the long neck, the legs and the spots, for example, are what they need to say, okay, I have ID'd a giraffe.
[00:19:39] Judy Fan: Yeah. Isn't that amazing? Because any given depiction that shows up in a storybook or a picture book is never going to capture all the views of what it, or actually capture exactly what a giraffe is going to look and feel like when you're actually at the zoo looking at one in real life, it's an abstraction. The artist, the illustrator, has distilled out what they think might be relevant for the story and the imaginative purposes for, to which they, you know, put that image right in the context of whatever story they're telling. But also those features that do relate whatever is on the page to some experience they might have in the world.
[00:20:20] And they're able to do that without actually capturing, like, you know, imagine like the other extreme where instead of these, um, highly stylized, you know, colorful, portraits of, like, meerkats and warthogs. I mean, I'm thinking of, like, when I saw The Lion King, I assumed that this is how these animals actually looked, and only later was like, wow, I can see the resemblance, but, like, the Disney renderings are not really like the actual thing.
[00:20:50] Um, and at the same time, there really is this really striking correspondence, um, even when it's stylized. So, like, how is the artist and illustrator, the natural historian and scientist making these decisions about, like, what to preserve and what to leave out? You know, given that anything that's going to land on the page is going to be a subset of everything that's available to you if you're able to go up and, like, inspect the giraffe from all sides.
[00:21:17] Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything with Russ Altman. More with Judy Fan next.
[00:21:36] Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, and I'm speaking with Professor Judy Fan from Stanford University.
[00:21:42] In the last segment, we talked about the fundamental humanity of using physical objects to learn and to communicate, from paper to modern technologies. We talked about the universality of some of these experiences, but also the local differences that are sometimes seen.
[00:21:57] In this segment, we're going to discuss the future of learning technologies and how they can incorporate these ideas to make tools on computers better. And we'll also talk about the special challenges in creating tools for creatives who are experts, know what they want, and need to use these tools at a very high level.
[00:22:15] Judy, I wanted to ask you about the future of learning technologies. We talked about, or we had a great, this conversation about like the historical and very human nature of this. But now we have iPads, you mentioned them earlier, we have computers, obviously phones. How is this impacting the, uh, principles of how we communicate and how are you approaching it in your own work?
[00:22:38] Judy Fan: Oh, yeah. Okay. This is really exciting. Um, this is really where our own work is headed, um, over the next several years. And I'm really excited that you asked about that. Um, so I think it goes in two different directions. So one direction is really thinking about how we can take the theories of human perception, learning, development, reasoning, problem solving, and bring them out into the world, right?
[00:23:03] Like, help all of what cognitive science has developed over the past several decades to design learning environments and interactive learning technologies that support human learning in all different kinds of settings. So that's one direction. You know, I think the other direction is like bringing, um, you know, so one direction is about like taking those technologies and allowing, um, them to, uh, penetrate the way that, um, learning scientists, cognitive scientists, cognitive psychologists think about human perception, learning, development, and so forth, and those processes in the context of the really complex inputs and outputs that people really face and really generate in real world environments.
[00:23:59] I think that's so important for the science that we do, the fundamental science. Really advancing our theories of human cognition to scale them up to handle real world complexity. Knowing what is true by developing theories that really work out in the world. So that's one direction. And the other direction is translating insights and principles that we've been learning and will continue to gain as we go onward, and then bringing them into the kind of learning environments for the next generation.
[00:24:29] Russ Altman: So if I'm getting you right, the first direction is kind of an internal facing, we can use these tools as psychologists and scientists to understand learning and thinking better. And then the second one is we can also take our best theories and bring them to the world to try to help people learn. Even if they're imperfect, they're better than, they're better than, uh, an uninformed set of tools.
[00:24:51] Judy Fan: So let me give you an example, okay? This is inspired by your own, uh, story about your own teaching in the classroom. Which is like transitioning from, say, a slide deck that you click through, um, as quickly as you can, um, and at the rate that you're comfortable going through the material, to activities that are hands on and participatory.
[00:25:12] Um, I teach introductory statistics, as I mentioned earlier, and a big part of the way that I, um, structure the course is around these hands-on activities. Where rather than just watching me write down equations on a whiteboard fifty feet away, um, students are really working with and manipulating data themselves at the pace at their own curiosity.
[00:25:36] And learning at the same time, how to, like, for example, like, you see a table. The table is really long. It's a data frame that you've loaded into some computational notebook. It has a thousand rows, right? And maybe fifty columns. It's so big you can't actually see the whole thing on your screen. Okay, even if you, like, zoom out as much as you can. What do you do next? You're really in the situation that analysts found themselves in, right? Over the, you know, as new technologies emerged to, well, create plots and pictures. To distill all of that information into a graphic that tells a story about what's really going on. You know, and learning to make choices about what to focus on, what to highlight out of all of those fifty columns, which might represent like different variables, like how, like, you know, how hot or cold it was any given day, depending on what state you were in. Or, you know, what month of the year that it was, um, taking each of those variables and making decisions about what to zoom in on and, um, and scrutinize further and explore and look.
[00:26:44] Those are all, um, questions that you might have, um, privately that then if you learn how to translate that curiosity, that question into a command that you can type into the console to ask the computer, your partner in this enterprise to generate a picture for you, that can bring you to the next question. And I think that really participating in that cycle is like a way of, um, you know, learning about science that I think is something that's been a dream for so many, um, science educators and scientists, is being able to convey much more convincingly to our students that science is not just a body of knowledge, right? That's static. It's really this iterative process of interacting with evidence and our questions and ideas about how things might happen. So in these, so that's really like the idea of like interactive tools that are student directed.
[00:27:44] Russ Altman: So let me go to the extreme, cause I definitely wanted to ask this before we finish, which is, these are students who are gaining, you're teaching them kind of for the first time, uh, these skills. What about super-duper creatives? What about the professionals who create things every day and that's how they make their living? Um, what about tools to support them? Because they're gonna have, I would guess, a higher bar and much less patience for things that don't let them get to the whatever they think is the point. So tell me how you approach that because I know you've done some work in that area?
[00:28:15] Judy Fan: Right, right. Oh, that's fascinating. Okay, so, um, I'm really excited about some of these collaborative efforts with, um, colleagues at, um, at Adobe Research and also at Autodesk. Um, you know, both organizations really dedicated to creating, um, design software to support creative professionals and experts.
[00:28:34] And I really, you know, what I find incredibly inspiring about interacting with them and, and talking with them to better understand what it is that they're trying to accomplish and the needs of creative professionals trying to serve, is how to develop design environments that are substantially more responsive to the intentions and goals of the creator.
[00:28:55] So, you know, something that like every creative professional eventually learns how to master their tool, like their craft and their tool. It could take years to learn how to paint or sculpt, and it can take quite a while.
[00:29:08] Russ Altman: Or use Photoshop.
[00:29:09] Judy Fan: Or use Photoshop. Exactly. And, you know, you begin to navigate the menus that are nested, um, you know, super, um, fluently. And you like forget how long it, you know, took you to acquire those skills. And there are some things that you can do in Photoshop once you become an expert that are pretty straightforward. And there are other tasks like that can be really annoying. If you had to repeatedly apply the same modification to like sixty different elements in the same design. That's really annoying to do in a graphical user interface, however beautiful and thoughtfully designed.
[00:29:47] And so something that I think is going to be part of the next generation of these design and support tools that, you know, many of us both in academia and in industry are really excited about, is design environments, um, software environments that are responsive to both what people say they want, that can be, and if people provide that input, whether in text or, um, that's spoken aloud, um, and be able to generate code that then the machine understands to take the next step forward in the design process.
[00:30:20] That can be seamlessly integrated into all of the, um, other interfaces and other forms of interaction that are already pretty mature in, in like GUIs today, um, in order to create environments that are like closer to what it's like to, collaborate with another artist or a creator. Someone who understands what you mean when you say things.
[00:30:44] Russ Altman: So I have to end, we're at the end of the time, but I have to end on this issue of like, we, I made a joke about Photoshop and you said you're working with these companies. How do you advise them to handle the fact that when somebody buys their product, they're novices and they're like those little kids who are just getting motor skills and have never drawn a house before. But the goal for them is to get them to be virtuosos.
[00:31:08] And you could imagine that there's two totally separate interfaces that you probably, as an expert, could tell them for novice, here's how you wanna do it. For an expert, it's totally different. Do they have any theory about how to transition from novice to expert, or do they just say, life is tough, and this tool is not going to make any sense to you for the first six months, but then you're going to love it? What do you tell them? What do you tell them?
[00:31:31] Judy Fan: Yeah, I mean, I think this is, like, a huge focal point, um, in our research discussions, um, on a weekly basis. Is that humans are not a monolith and they're the very same person who becomes the Photoshop expert was once a Photoshop novice and um really creating environments that are friendly and accessible to the novice are really critical for their own mission, right? To serve the kind of like creative visions of these people and also continue to be useful to experts.
[00:32:05] I think that I wouldn't say that, um, you know, our counterparts, these organizations aren't sensitive to that, but I think that, you know, theories of how people gradually acquire useful abstractions is what we've called them, um, beginning with, you know, you can kind of think of them as like the building blocks, like of, um, of like how to interact with Photoshop.
[00:32:27] You might really need to just focus on this particular operation and realize like when it's useful. But later as you become more, um, comfortable in that software environment, you might have a much more like abstract goal. Like, I'm just going to create this bicycle, this next generation bicycle, and I'm going to make it look like this, um, Jaguar.
[00:32:50] And like, I can mostly focus on my creative vision at that higher level of semantic abstraction. And then the, we'll say like the simpler kinds of operations that allow you to manipulate little geometric primitives might be second, so called second nature to you by that point. And that's a gradual process. And so we would want our environments, our software, our design software environments to help scaffold that kind of learning and gradual transformation too.
[00:33:19] Russ Altman: Thanks to Judy Fan. That was the future of cognitive tools. You've been listening to The Future of Everything and I'm Russ Altman. Thanks for tuning in.
[00:33:26] With over 250 episodes in the archives, you can spend all day listening to the future of literally everything. If you enjoyed the podcast, please consider subscribing or following it so you will receive news of the new episodes and you'll never be surprised by the future of anything. Maybe tell your friends about the podcast too. And definitely rate and review it.
[00:33:49] You can connect with me on Twitter @RBAltman or on Threads @RussBAltman. And you can follow Stanford Engineering on Twitter @StanfordENG.
