Jen Mankoff (Carnegie Mellon University)

Rethinking the Role of Feedback in Encouraging Energy Saving

I will present an overview of the StepGreen project, which is focused on motivating individuals to reduce energy use. I will discuss approaches to energy feedback and some of the empirical work we have done to guide the design of feedback displays. Our work, which began in 2006, has explored social feedback, sensed vs self reported behavior, and feedback in low-income communities. I end by touching on the question of what sort of impact work of this sort should have, and demonstrate through a discussion recent work with landlords and tenants in low income communities, residents of bangalore, India, and automated techniques how a broader perspective may influence where and how we choose to apply IT. I conclude by suggesting that we develop a new set of metrics for judging IT for sustainability, and a new set of perspectives on what role IT may need to play going forward.

Anind Dey (Carnegie Mellon University)

Smart Phone or SmartPhone?

Commodity smart phones have made the visions of ubiquitous computing common place. We call these phones "smart phones" simply because they have a mobile operating system, not because they are smart. In fact, they are pretty dumb. They know nothing about their users, despite the fact that they spend hours a day with them. The Ubicomp lab at Carnegie Mellon University has been using these phones to collect a wide variety of data to enable a wide variety of context-aware user experiences, focusing on experiences that require a truly "smart" phone. In this talk, I will providean overview of our projects, including collections of driving information to predict where a driver is going next, collections of communication and movement information from dual-income families to provide support for family scheduling and plan prediction, collections of battery usage information to identify opportune times for large data transfers and processing tasks, and collections of phone interactions to support a wide variety of tasks.  I will also discuss a number of assumptions we make about phone usage that are wrong and will dramatically impact the way we design mobile smart phone applications. In doing so, I will discuss some of the many opportunities and challenges involved in using phones to support everyday human activities, and what it will take to create a truly "smart" phone.

David Coyle (University of Bristol)

Designing to support mental health and emotional wellbeing

In recent years mental health difficulties have overtaken cardiovascular conditions as the leading cause of disability in developed countries. In this talk I will consider the role that the HCI and related communities can play in helping to address this challenge. The discussion will be ground in a description of several recent intervention support systems, including gaming, mobile and online support systems. I will consider particular theoretical approaches to mental health interventions, but will also consider the role that mental and emotional support can play in health interventions more generally.

Gloria Mark (University of California, Irvine)

Multi-tasking in the Digital Information Age: Tasks, Information, and Interaction Contexts

Multi-tasking is a way of life for information workers.  In this talk I will present a set of empirical results from fieldwork observations and experiments which detail the extent to which information workers multitask with digital data and will discuss how multi-tasking impacts various aspects of collaboration and communication in the workplace. Multi-tasking changes with collocation, gender, and interruptions. I will report how people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a cost of experiencing higher stress. I will also report on a recent study where we cut off email of people in an organization for one week to understand how email affects multitiasking. We found that without email in the workplace, people multitasked less and experienced lower stress. These results challenge the traditional way that most IT is designed to organize information, i.e. in terms of distinct tasks. Instead, I will discuss how IT should support information organization in a way consistent with how most people were found to organize their work, which is in terms of working spheres, thematically connected units of work. I will also discuss how the results present opportunities for new social and technical solutions to support multi-tasking in the workplace.

13:00 - 16:00 

Paul Tennent (University of Nottingham)

Workshop - Physiological sensors workshop

The aim of this section will to be explore the types of available biosensors and methods of presentation of the data generated by those sensors. We will begin with a short talk, accompanied by live biodata from a speaker's assistant. The talk will be presented using the vicarious biodata visualisation system, and collected form a number of separate sensors. Part of the talk will involve an interactive game, with the audience attempting to decipher the biodata for a specific secret event. After the presentation we will provide an opportunity for people to explore the practicalities of the hardware in more detail, including trying it for themselves and the data produced. A consensus will select a task(s) for a rigged person to perform while the live biodata is displayed, including looking at the difference and assessing the quality of processed biodata such as the emotiv (EEG headset) "affective suite", compared to more "raw" data.Then the data from the performed task may be explored as a group. Ultimately the aim is to give a feel for the practicalities of collecting and handling biodata, as well as to demonstrate the open source vicarious platform for early adopters.