Monday, July 2,
IGW HCI Panel and Introduction of the Institute
Tuesday, July 3,
Jen Mankoff Looking Past Yesterday's Tomorrow: Using Futures Studies Methods to Extend the Research Horizon
Doing research is, in part, an act of foresight. Even though it is not explicit in many projects, we especially value research that is still relevant five, ten or more years after it is completed. However, published research in the field of Ubiquitous Computing (and technology research in general) often lacks evidence of systematic thinking about the long-term impacts of current trends. When this process is not approached systematically, unconscious biases may arise. For example, trends on an exponential curve change much more rapidly than intuition predicts. As a result, research may accidentally emphasize near-term thinking. Methods that help to address these biases exist in the field of Futures Studies. Futures Studies methods can support analysis of long-term trends, support the identification of new research areas and guide design and evaluation. We survey methods for futuristic thinking and discuss their relationship to Human Computer Interaction. Using the sustainability domain an example, we present a demonstration of a Futures Studies approach - the Delphi Method. We discuss pitfalls such as hidden biases and lack of real-world complexity, show how Futures Studies can be incorporated into Human Computer Interaction and highlight future work that needs to be done such as rethinking the role of externalities in the validation process.
Tuesday, July 3,
Jen Mankoff 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.
Tuesday, July 3,
Anind Dey 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.
Tuesday, July 3,
Vassilis Kostakos From labs to cities: Mapping the social impact of ubiquitous technologies Pervasive and ubiquitous computing has come a long way in recent years, and our technologies and experimental prototypes are slowly moving out of the lab and into people's everyday lives. In this talk I will provide an overview of such research conducted by my team over the past years, and outline the main challenges that we face in the future, particularly in terms of making our technology accepted and valued by the general public.
Wednesday, July 4,
Anind Dey Understanding Cognitive Disabilities through Monitoring of Everyday Actions An individual's functional ability to carry out activities of daily living (ADLs) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) is an important indicator for changes the individual's physical and cognitive abilities. However, it is often difficult for older adults, their relatives, and their doctors to be aware of subtle changes in abilities as people age. Self-reports, caregiver-reports, and performance testing can be inaccurate due to biases from informants and testing in artificial conditions. Our project, dwellSense, explores how ubiquitous sensors embedded in the home can keep track of how well (not just how often) an elder carries out everyday activities like taking medications, using the telephone, and preparing a simple meal. To make such systems useful and usable, the vast amounts of sensor data needs to be filtered down into salient summaries based on the information needs of different stakeholders. In this talk, we describe the systems we built to monitor performance, the feedback provided to elders, and the impact on awareness of abilities and performance.
Wednesday, July 4,
David Coyle 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.
Wednesday, July 4,
Gloria Mark 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.
Wednesday, July 4,
Katarzyna Wac Methodology for evaluating experience of mobile applications used in different contexts See CHI'12 -- Course 36 Thursday, July 5,
Madeline Balaam Workshop -- Doing research in the wild Technology use has moved outside of the traditional domains of HCI research. This has posed a significant challenge to the methods and methodologies of HCI research. 'Research in the wild' has the potential to significantly contribute to our understanding of technology use and appropriation and the impact of design on and for beneficiaries. In this workshop we will explore, through hands-on in-the-wild activities, the practical and ethical implications of doing research in the wild.
Thursday, July 5,
Paul Tennent 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.