Monat: April 2010

Talk at the University of New Hampshire, Durham

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Andrew Kun invited me to give a talk at the Univeristy of New Hampshire in Durham on my way back from CHI. The talk was on „Embedding Interaction – Human Computer Interaction in the Real World“. In the afternoon I got to see interesting projects in the automotive domain as well as an application on a multi-touch table. At CHI we ran a SIG on Automotive User Interfaces [1].

Seeing the implementation of Project54 live was very exciting. I came across the project first at Pervasive 2005 in Munich [2]. This project is an interesting example of how fast research can become deployed on a large scale.

Andrew chairs together with Susanne Boll the 2nd Int. Conf. on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications – check out the call for papers on http://auto-ui.org/! (deadline 2nd of July 2010)

PS: if you ever stay in Durham – here is my favorite hotel: Three Chimneys Inn Durham.

[1] Schmidt, A., Dey, A. K., Kun, A. L., and Spiessl, W. 2010. Automotive user interfaces: human computer interaction in the car. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI EA ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 3177-3180. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1753949

[2] Laslo Turner and Andrew L. Kun, “Evaluating the Project54 speech user interface,” Third International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Adjunct Proceedings), Munich, Germany, May 8-13, 2005

Our Paper and Note at CHI 2010

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Over the last year we looked more closely into the potential of eye-gaze for implicit interaction. Gazemarks is an approach where the users‘ gaze is continuously monitored and when leaving a screen or display the last active gaze area is determined and store [1]. When the user looks back at this display this region is highlighted. By this the time for attention switching between displays was in our study reduced from about 2000ms to about 700ms. See the slides or paper for details. This could make the difference that we enable people to safely read in the car… but before this more studies are needed 🙂

Together with Nokia Research Center in Finland we looked at how we can convey the basic message of an incoming SMS already with the notification tone [2]. Try the Emodetector application for yourself or see the previous post.

[1] Kern, D., Marshall, P., and Schmidt, A. 2010. Gazemarks: gaze-based visual placeholders to ease attention switching. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 2093-2102. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753646

[2] Sahami Shirazi, A., Sarjanoja, A., Alt, F., Schmidt, A., and Hkkilä, J. 2010. Understanding the impact of abstracted audio preview of SMS. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 1735-1738. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753585

PS: the social event was at the aquarium in Atlanta – amazing creatures! Again supprised how well the N95 camera works even under difficult light conditions…

Work in Progress at CHI 2010

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It seems we have a lot of work in progress 🙂 and CHI is a great place to get feedback an talk to people about it.

Florian Alt and others from the summer school in Haifa pushed one of the ideas the developed there further. It is about interactions and technologies to motivate a more thoughtful handling of trash in urban areas [1].

Tanja Döring and Bastian Pfleging developed with Chris Kray in Nottingham the idea of tangible devices that have a functional core and a passive shell [2]. By this we image that future tangible products can be created by designers and developers with no need for the production of electronics. As a side effect this approach could make consumer electronics more sustainable – even if you like often new gadgets.

Together with people from DFKI Saarbrücken we explored the potential of a multi-touch steering wheel [3]. What gestures would you do to switch on your radio? How to interact with the navigation system? Such questions are empirically explored and presented in this paper.

How many people have a phone? How many people have a PC? It very clear more people have a phone than a PC and in particular in the non-industrial part of the world for many people the only computing technology available is the phone. We think there are ways to efficiently develop software using a phone for the phone. In the paper we explored a paper and computer vision based approach for software development on the phone [4].

Elba did field studies in Panama to assess the access of phones as educational tool to children [5]. She compared different parts of the country and did interviews with teachers.

[1] Reif, I., Alt, F., Hincapié Ramos, J., Poteriaykina, K., and Wagner, J. 2010. Cleanly: trashducation urban system. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI EA ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 3511-3516. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754010

[2] Doering, T., Pfleging, B., Kray, C., and Schmidt, A. 2010. Design by physical composition for complex tangible user interfaces. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI EA ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 3541-3546. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754015

[3] Pfeiffer, M., Kern, D., Schöning, J., Döring, T., Krüger, A., and Schmidt, A. 2010. A multi-touch enabled steering wheel: exploring the design space. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI EA ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 3355-3360. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1753984

[4] Pfleging, B., Valderrama Bahamondez, E. d., Schmidt, A., Hermes, M., and Nolte, J. 2010. MobiDev: a mobile development kit for combined paper-based and in-situ programming on the mobile phone. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI EA ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 3733-3738. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754047

[5] Valderrama Bahamóndez, E. d. and Schmidt, A. 2010. A survey to assess the potential of mobile phones as a learning platform for panama. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI EA ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 3667-3672. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754036

CHI 2010 – My Random Pick of the Day

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Harrison, C., Tan, D., and Morris, D. 2010. Skinput: appropriating the body as an input surface. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 453-462. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753394

Kramer, A. D. 2010. An unobtrusive behavioral model of „gross national happiness“. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 287-290. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753369

Brandt, J., Dontcheva, M., Weskamp, M., and Klemmer, S. R. 2010. Example-centric programming: integrating web search into the development environment. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 513-522. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753402

Sheng, S., Holbrook, M., Kumaraguru, P., Cranor, L. F., and Downs, J. 2010. Who falls for phish?: a demographic analysis of phishing susceptibility and effectiveness of interventions. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 373-382. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753383

EmoDetector App is online – Hear The Feeling of SMS

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EmoDetector, by University of Duisburg-Essen and Nokia Research Center, is an application that provides auditory cues in addition to the notification tone upon receiving an SMS based on a real-time analysis of a message’s contents, see [1].The application responds currently to the following characters sets:

  • 🙂 or 🙂
  • 🙁 or 🙁
  • 😉 or 😉
  • ok (case insensitive)
  • ?

There is a version for Nokia Series 60 phones and for Android, see the download site. Have a look at the http://www.emodetector.tom-lab.de/ website for more information.

[1] Sahami Shirazi, A., Sarjanoja, A., Alt, F., Schmidt, A.,Häkkilä, J.: Understanding the Impact of Abstracted Audio Preview of SMS. In Proceeding of CHI 2010, April 10-15, Atlanta, GA, USA

CHI 2010 – Opening and Keynote

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2343 attendees came to CHI 2010 this year to Atlanta. Participants are from 43 countries and the colored map suggested that a good number came from Germany. Outside it really feels like spring 🙂

Overall CHI 2010 received 2220 submission across 13 categories of which 699 were accepted. In the paper and nodes categories there were 1345 submissions of which 302 were accepted (22% acceptance rate).

Genevieve Bell from Intel is a cultural anthropologist and she presented the CHI opening keynote with the title: „Messy Futures: culture, technology and research“. She is a great story teller and showed exemplarily the value of ethnography and anthropology research. One very graphical example was the picture of what are the real consumers – typically not living in a perfect environment, but rather living clutter and mess …

A further issue she briefly addressed was the demographic shifts and urbanization (soon three quarter of people will live in cities). This followed on to an argument for designing for the real people and for their real needs (in contrast to the idea of designing for women by „shrinking and pinking it“).

Genevieve Bell discussed critical domains that drive technology: politics, religion, sex, and sports. She argued that CHI and Ubicomp has not really looked at these topics – or at least they did not publish it in CHI 😉 Here examples were quite entertaining and fun to listen to the keynote – but it created little controversy.

Zeitgeist, GNOME Activity Journal etc. – Workshop at CHI

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On Saturday there was a workshop on monitoring, logging and reflecting. Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One’s Life. In the workshop we discussed technologies and concepts for monitoring and using personal information. I started out with asking the question who knows what about you? The list is quickly growing (e.g. telecom provider, travel agent, super market, bank, mail provider, facebook, etc.) and so is the set of information they know about you. And it becomes clear that these entities keep a better record about an individual that the individuals themselves. Hence our central suggestion is that the user who is the one who could have easy access to all this information should make more of it and benefit from this information, for more see the paper [1] and the slides from the talk.

Zeitgeist Magic from Seif Lotfy on Vimeo.

There is more information about the workshop and the topic in general:

My pick of the contributions is the Dunbar email mining system from Stanford.

PS: CHI is good for your health 🙂

[1] Thorsten Prante, Jens Sauer, Seif Lotfy, Albrecht Schmidt. Personal Experience Trace: Orienting Oneself in One’s Activities and Experiences. CHI 2010 workshop on Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One’s Life.

Full Paper and Work in Progress at Percom 2010

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Together with Matthias Kranz and Carl Fisher we had a full paper at Percom 2010 – and I had the honor to present it [1]. The paper reports work that explored using the existing DECT (the wireless phone standard) infrastructure (available especially in Europe) as basic technology for localization. We compared DECT and Wifi and it is interesting that in most places you see more DECT based stations than Wifi. Overall it is a really interesting alternative to WLAN location.

From the joint work with Docomo-Eurolabs in Munich in the project AmbiVis we presented a work in progress poster. In the project we look at different options for visualizing context information – especially in ambient ways [2]. As display technologies we employed the Nabaztag and a digital picture frame.

[1] Matthias Kranz, Carl Fischer, Albrecht Schmidt: A Comparative Study of DECT and WLAN Signals for Indoor Localization. In: 8th Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (Percom 2010). IEEE Mannheim 2010, S. 235-243.

[2] Florian Alt, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Andreas Kaiser, Ken Pfeuffer, Emre Gürkan, Albrecht Schmidt, Paul Holleis, Matthias Wagner: Exploring Ambient Visualizations of Context Information (Work in Progress). In: WIP, Proceedings of the Eighth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, PerCom 2010. IEEE, Mannheim, Germany 2010