Colloquia

We have regular HCI vistors as part of the Departmental Colloquia. Please refer there for upcoming and past visitors. Notable past visitors include: Paul Cairns, David Bainbridge, Roderick Murray-Smith, m.c. schraefel, Enrico Rukzio, Yvonne Rogers, and Mounia Lalmas.

Reading Group

The FITLab holds a regular reading group, designed to encourage the discussion of broad related HCI work, across the interests of the whole group.

• When: Tuesdays at 12:30pm
• Where: FIT Lab Coffee Room (off FIT Lab, Level 5)
• Bring: Lunch!
• Signup: to the email list to be kept informed.

Upcoming

Past

[41] - 24 May 2011 - led by Tim Crawford
    Emotional HCI by

[40] - 17 May 2011 - led by Abigail Cauchi
    TBA by

[39] - 05 April 2011 - led by Yukang Guo
    Localising Speech, Footsteps and Other Sounds using Resource-Constrained Devices by Yukang Guo and Mike Hazas
While a number of acoustic localisation systems have been pro- posed over the last few decades, these have typically either relied on expensive dedicated microphone arrays and workstation-class processing, or have been developed to detect a very specific type of sound in a particular scenario. However, as people live and work indoors, they generate a wide variety of sounds as they interact and move about. These human-generated sounds can be used to infer the positions of people, without requiring them to wear trackable tags. In this paper, we take a practical yet general approach to local- ising a number of human-generated sounds. Drawing from signal processing literature, we identify methods for resource-constrained devices in a sensor network to detect, classify and locate acoustic events such as speech, footsteps and objects being placed onto ta- bles. We evaluate the classification and time-of-arrival estimation algorithms using a data set of human-generated sounds we captured with sensor nodes in a controlled setting. We show that despite the variety and complexity of the sounds, their localisation is feasi- ble for sensor networks, with typical accuracies of a half metre or better. We specifically discuss the processing and networking con- siderations, and explore the performance trade-offs which can be made to further conserve resources.

[38] - 22 March 2011 - led by Jon Hurlock
    Understanding Temporal Query Dynamics by Kulkami, Teevan, Svore and Dumais
Web search is strongly influenced by time. The queries people issue change over time, with some queries occasionally spiking in popularity (e.g., earthquake) and others remaining relatively constant (e.g., youtube). The documents indexed by the search engine also change, with some documents always being about a particular query (e.g., the Wikipedia page on earthquakes is about the query earthquake) and others being about the query only at a particular point in time (e.g., the New York Times is only about earthquakes following a major seismic activity). The relationship between documents and queries can also change as people's intent changes (e.g., people sought different content for the query earthquake before the Haitian earthquake than they did after). In this paper, we explore how queries, their associated documents, and the query intent change over the course of 10 weeks by analyzing query log data, a daily Web crawl, and periodic human relevance judgments. We identify several interesting features by which changes to query popularity can be classified, and show that presence of these features, when accompanied by changes in result content, can be a good indicator of change in query intent.

[37] - 15 March 2011 - led by Dan Craggs
    PS3 Epic Fail by
Dan Craggs is going to lead us on a discussion of the design decisions regarding the PS3 and its security failures.

[36] - 22 February 2011 - led by Karen Li
    Computerised Provider Order Entry Implementation: No Association With Increased Mortality Rates in an Intensive Care Unit by Del Beccaro, Jeffries, and Eisenberg
Karen is going to present a paper direct from the medical field that focuses on the introduction of technology into the ICU. There is a prior paper too: Paper I: Unexpected Increased Mortality After Implementation of a Commercially Sold Computerised Physician Order Entry System Details can be found at: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/116/6/1506 Karen will also tell us a little about herself and her background too.

[35] - 01 February 2011 - led by Andy Gimblett
    Threshold Devices: Looking Out From The Home by Gaver and many more
Threshold devices present information gathered from the home's surroundings to give new views on the domestic situation. We built two prototypes of different threshold devices and studied them in field trials with participant households. The Local Barometer displays online text and images related to the home's locality depending on the local wind conditions to give an impression of the sociocultural surroundings. The Plane Tracker tracks aircraft passing overhead and imagines their flights onscreen to resource an understanding of the home's global links. Our studies indicated that the experiences they provided were compelling, that participants could and did interpret the devices in various ways, that their form designs were appropriate for domestic environments, that using ready-made information contributed to the richness of the experiences, and that situating the information they provided with respect to the home and its locality was important for the ways people engaged with them.

[34] - 14 December 2010 - led by Andy Gimblett
    Threshold Devices: Looking Out From The Home by Gaver and many more
Threshold devices present information gathered from the home's surroundings to give new views on the domestic situation. We built two prototypes of different threshold devices and studied them in field trials with participant households. The Local Barometer displays online text and images related to the home's locality depending on the local wind conditions to give an impression of the sociocultural surroundings. The Plane Tracker tracks aircraft passing overhead and imagines their flights onscreen to resource an understanding of the home's global links. Our studies indicated that the experiences they provided were compelling, that participants could and did interpret the devices in various ways, that their form designs were appropriate for domestic environments, that using ready-made information contributed to the richness of the experiences, and that situating the information they provided with respect to the home and its locality was important for the ways people engaged with them.

[33] - 23 November 2010 - led by Jon Hurlock
    Questions are Content: A Taxonomy of Questions in a Microblogging Environment by Miles Efron and Megan Winget
Microblogging services such as twitter.com have become popular venues for informal information interactions. An important aspect of these interaction is question asking. In this paper we report results from an analysis of a large sample of data from Twitter. Our analysis focused on the characteristics and strategies that people bring to asking questions in microblogs. In particular, based on our analysis, we propose a taxonomy of questions asked in microblogs.We find that microblog authors express questions to accomplish a wide variety of social and informational tasks. Some microblog questions seek immediate answers, while others accrue information over time. Our overarching finding is that question asking in microblogs is strongly tied to peoples’ naturalistic interactions, and that the act of asking questions in Twitter is not analogous to information seeking in more traditional information retrieval environments.

[32] - 09 November 2010 - led by Elina Vartiainen
    Improving the User Experience of a Mobile Photo Gallery by Supporting Social Interaction by Elina Vartiainen
Today, image gallery applications on mobile devices tend to be stand-alone and offline. For people who want to share photos with others, many add-on tools have been developed to connect the gallery applications to Internet services to enable photo-sharing. The authors argue that photo-centric social interaction is best supported when the gallery application is fully integrated with an Internet service. In this case, no additional tools are needed and the user’s image content is fully synchronized with the service. They designed and implemented a service-integrated mobile gallery application with a corresponding Internet service. Moreover, they conducted a field study with 10 participants to compare our application with a state-of-the-art gallery application combined with an add-on photo-sharing tool. Their application was preferred by most participants and it was especially appreciated because of the user experience. Above all, the results show that social activity increased amongst the participants while using our application.

[31] - 03 November 2010 - led by Max Wilson
    Trust in Social Q&A: The Impact of Text and Photo Cues of Expertise by Jennifer Golbeck and Kenneth R. Fleischmann
Users increasingly rely on social Q&A sites to answer questions that are important to their everyday lives. Social Q&A differs significantly from library-based reference services in that there is no guarantee that the individuals answering questions have relevant expertise or are relying on authoritative sources. This raises an important research question: what factors influence users’ trust in social Q&A? This paper seeks to determine the role that text and photo cues of expertise have on users’ trust in answers in social Q&A. The results of an experiment with 241 subjects indicate that expertise cues in text lead to significantly higher trust among both experts and non-experts. However, expertise cues in photos increase trust among non-experts but do not increase trust among experts. These results indicate that both the expertise of the user and the expertise cues provided in the answer affect user trust in social Q&A.

[30] - 20 October 2010 - led by Newbies
    Welcome new FITLabbers! by
The new members of the FITLab will give a nice simple 5-10 minute overview of what they worked on in the past, and what they'll be doing in their new role.

[29] - 20 July 2010 - led by Rich Byrne
    PETRA Redux by Various
Rich Byrne recaps the recent conference on Persuasive Technologies, including some insight into the key papers that may be related to our lab's work.

[28] - 06 July 2010 - led by Andy Gimblett
    EICS Redux by Various
Andy is giving an overview of the recent conference, including some insight into his best paper, and any other secondary work that was interesting.

[27] - 15 June 2010 - led by Nataliya Green
    The creativity support index by Erin Carroll and Celine Latulipe
This paper is about a draft survey tool called the Creativity Support Index (CSI). The CSI is designed specifically for evaluating creativity support tools, based on concepts and theories from creativity research. The paper was presented as a Work In Progress at CHI2009.

[26] - 08 June 2010 - led by Abi Cauchi
    LensMouse: augmenting the mouse with an interactive touch display by Yang, X., Mak, E., McCallum, D., Irani, P., Cao, X., and Izadi, S
We introduce LensMouse, a novel device that embeds a touch-screen display -- or tangible 'lens' -- onto a mouse. Users interact with the display of the mouse using direct touch, whilst also performing regular cursor-based mouse interactions. We demonstrate some of the unique capabili-ties of such a device, in particular for interacting with auxil-iary windows, such as toolbars, palettes, pop-ups and dia-log-boxes. By migrating these windows onto LensMouse, challenges such as screen real-estate use and window man-agement can be alleviated. In a controlled experiment, we evaluate the effectiveness of LensMouse in reducing cursor movements for interacting with auxiliary windows. We also consider the concerns involving the view separation that results from introducing such a display-based device. Our results reveal that overall users are more effective with LenseMouse than with auxiliary application windows that are managed either in single or dual-monitor setups. We conclude by presenting other application scenarios that LensMouse could support

[25] - 01 June 2010 - led by Tim Crawford
    eality-Based Interaction: A framework for post-WIMP interfaces by Jacob, R. J., Girouard, A., Hirshfield, L. M., Horn, M. S., Shaer, O., Solovey, E. T., and Zigelbaum, J.
Tim is going to provide an overview of his recent readings and research, to introduce his ideas as he begins his PhD. He's going to end with the paper above, but cover a small range of papers during the talk.

[24] - 25 May 2010 - led by Max Wilson
    Using fNIRS Brain Sensing in Realistic HCI Settings: Experiments and Guidelines by E.T. Solovey, A. Girouard, K. Chauncey, L.M. Hirshfield, A. Sassaroli, F. Zheng, S. Fantini , and R.J.K. Jacob
Because functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) eases many of the restrictions of other brain sensors, it has potential to open up new possibilities for HCI research. From our experience using fNIRS technology for HCI, we identify several considerations and provide guidelines for using fNIRS in realistic HCI laboratory settings. We empirically examine whether typical human behavior (e.g. head and facial movement) or computer interaction (e.g. keyboard and mouse usage) interfere with brain measurement using fNIRS. Based on the results of our study, we establish which physical behaviors inherent in computer usage interfere with accurate fNIRS sensing of cognitive state information, which can be corrected in data analysis, and which are acceptable. With these findings, we hope to facilitate further adoption of fNIRS brain sensing technology in HCI research.

[23] - 11 May 2010 - led by Jon Hurlock
    The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine by Damon Horowitz, Sepandar Kamvar
We present Aardvark, a social search engine. With Aardvark, users ask a question, either by instant message, email, web input, text message, or voice. Aardvark then routes the question to the person in the user’s extended social network most likely to be able to answer that question. As compared to a traditional web search engine, where the challenge lies in finding the right {\it document} to satisfy a user’s information need, the challenge in a social search engine like Aardvark lies in finding the right {\it person} to satisfy a user’s information need. Further, while trust in a traditional search engine is based on authority, in a social search engine like Aardvark, trust is based on intimacy. We describe how these considerations inform the architecture, algorithms, and user interface of Aardvark, and how they are reflected in the behavior of Aardvark users.

[22] - 04 May 2010 - led by Dan Craggs
    Multi-Touch Authentication on Tabletops by Kim, D., Dunphy, P., Briggs, P., Hook, J., Nicholson, J., Nicholson, J., and Olivier, P.
The introduction of tabletop interfaces has given rise to the need for the development of secure and usable authentication techniques that are appropriate for the co-located collaborative settings for which they have been designed. Most commonly, user authentication is based on something you know, but this is a particular problem for tabletop interfaces, as they are particularly vulnerable to shoulder surfing given their remit to foster co-located collaboration. In other words, tabletop users would typically authenticate in full view of a number of observers. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a number of novel tabletop authentication schemes that exploit the features of multi-touch interaction in order to inhibit shoulder surfing. In our pilot work with users, and in our formal user-evaluation, one authentication scheme - Pressure-Grid - stood out, significantly enhancing shoulder surfing resistance when participants used it to enter both PINs and graphical passwords.

[21] - 27 April 2010 - led by Max Wilson
    Using fNIRS Brain Sensing in Realistic HCI Settings: Experiments and Guidelines by E.T. Solovey, A. Girouard, K. Chauncey, L.M. Hirshfield, A. Sassaroli, F. Zheng, S. Fantini , and R.J.K. Jacob
Because functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) eases many of the restrictions of other brain sensors, it has potential to open up new possibilities for HCI research. From our experience using fNIRS technology for HCI, we identify several considerations and provide guidelines for using fNIRS in realistic HCI laboratory settings. We empirically examine whether typical human behavior (e.g. head and facial movement) or computer interaction (e.g. keyboard and mouse usage) interfere with brain measurement using fNIRS. Based on the results of our study, we establish which physical behaviors inherent in computer usage interfere with accurate fNIRS sensing of cognitive state information, which can be corrected in data analysis, and which are acceptable. With these findings, we hope to facilitate further adoption of fNIRS brain sensing technology in HCI research.

[20] - 20 April 2010 - led by Dan Craggs
    TBA by TBA
TBA

[19] - 30 March 2010 - led by Richard Snow
    Run to the Hills! Ubiquitous Computing Meltdown by Huuskonen, P
We have seen the future of ubiquitous computing, and it's gloomy. While the various technologies keep advancing at a breakneck pace, and half of human race are already carrying computing systems with them, the goal of transparently integrating all those devices and networks to usable ubiquitous systems seems to be receding further away every day. We are seeing around us major shortcomings in terms of usability, interoperability, and security, and expect that the situation in integrated systems will only get worse. The next decade will bring wonderful advances in individual devices, services and technologies, but the overall picture is not as rosy. In this chapter, we discuss the drivers of this undesirable development, while also observing some signs of more positive trends.

[18] - 15 December 2009 - led by Robin Green
    Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation by Simon Buckingham Shum
Students, researchers and professional analysts lack effective tools to make personal and collective sense of problems while working in distributed teams. Central to this work is the process of sharing - and contesting - interpretations via different forms of argument. How does the "Web 2.0" paradigm challenge us to deliver useful, usable tools for online argumentation? This paper reviews the current state of the art in Web Argumentation, describes key features of the Web 2.0 orientation, and identifies some of the tensions that must be negotiated in bringing these worlds together. It then describes how these design principles are interpreted in Cohere, a web tool for social bookmarking, idea-linking, and argument visualization.

[17] - 08 December 2009 - led by Nataliya
    Tell: supporting retrospective storytelling with digital photos by Landry, Brian M. and Guzdial, Mark
i-Tell is a digital narrative composition tool. The authors employ a design process based on providing supports intended to help novice storytellers engage in the composition process like experts. the software is available here: http://home.cc.gatech.edu/blandry/5 A follow-up of this work has been published in CHI 2009 called "Designing for Personal Reflection: The Role of Reflection in Photo-based Communication". My talk however will be focused on the paper published in 2006.

[16] - 01 December 2009 - led by Richard Snow
    A Spotlight on Security and Privacy Risks with Future Household Robots: Attacks and Lessons by Denning, T., Matuszek, C., Koscher, K., Smith, J. R., and Kohno, T.
A Ubicomp2009 paper from uDub (University of Washington) - Abstract: Future homes will be populated with large numbers of robots with diverse functionalities, ranging from chore robots to elder care robots to entertainment robots. While household robots will offer numerous benefits, they also have the potential to introduce new security and privacy vulnerabilities into the home. Our research consists of three parts. First, to serve as a foundation for our study, we experimentally analyze three of today's household robots for security and privacy vulnerabilities: the WowWee Rovio, the Erector Spykee, and the WowWee RoboSapien V2. Second, we synthesize the results of our experimental analyses and identify key lessons and challenges for securing future household robots. Finally, we use our experiments and lessons learned to construct a set of design questions aimed at facilitating the future development of household robots that are secure and preserve their users' privacy.

[15] - 10 November 2009 - led by Dan Craggs
    DynaSpot: speed-dependent area cursor by O Chapuis, JB Labrune, E Pietriga
From CHI2009 this year: We present DynaSpot, a new technique for acquiring targets based on the area cursor. DynaSpot couples the cursor's activation area with its speed, behaving like a point cursor at low speed or when motionless. This technique minimizes visual distraction and allows pointing anywhere in empty space without requiring an explicit mode switch, thus enabling users to perform common interactions such as region selections seamlessly. The results of our controlled experiments show that the performance of DynaSpot can be modeled by Fitts' law, and that DynaSpot significantly outperforms the point cursor and achieves, in most conditions, the same level of performance as one of the most promising techniques to date, the Bubble cursor.

[14] - 03 November 2009 - led by Max/Simon/More?
    Conference Reports by Gene Golovchinsky
Since Max'll be back from HCIR'09 and SWUI'09, and Simon has been to MobileHCI'09 and more, we'll have a chat about interesting things we saw at the events. The reading, here, is on some great advice for PhD students regarding paper writing, travel, conferences, etc.

[13] - 27 October 2009 - led by Richard Byrne
    Flowers or a Robot Army? Encouraging Awareness & Activity with Personal, Mobile Displays by Consolvo, S., Klasnja, P., McDonald, D. W., Avrahami, D., Froehlich, J., LeGrand, L., Libby, R., Mosher, K., and Landay, J. A.
Personal, mobile displays, such as those on mobile phones, are ubiquitous, yet for the most part, underutilized. We present results from a field experiment that investigated the effectiveness of these displays as a means for improving awareness of daily life (in our case, self-monitoring of physical activity). Twenty-eight participants in three experimental conditions used our UbiFit system for a period of three months in their day-to-day lives over the winter holiday season. Our results show, for example, that participants who had an awareness display were able to maintain their physical activity level (even during the holidays), while the level of physical activity for participants who did not have an awareness display dropped significantly. We discuss our results and their general implications for the use of everyday mobile devices as awareness displays.

[12] - 20 October 2009 - led by Max Wilson
    Discovery Is Never By Chance: Designing for (Un)Serendipity by André, P., schraefel, m. c., Teevan, J. and Dumais, S. T.
With the likes of Jaime Teevan and Su Dumais at Microsoft Research, my old colleagues have continued some work on serendipity. Here they have formalised the notion of serendipity in detail to discuss how it can be applied usefully to interaction design. It's being presented at ACM Creativity and Cognition conference in california later this month.

[11] - 11 August 2009 - led by Chitra Acharaya
    Patient safety, potential adverse drug events, and medical device design: a human factors engineering approach by Laura Lin, Kim Vicente and D. John Doyle
Adverse drug events are the single leading threat to patient safety. Human factors engineering has been repeatedly proposed, but largely untested, as the key to improving patient safety. The value of this approach was investigated in the context of a commercially available patient-controlled analgesia device that has been linked with several alleged patient injuries and deaths. Several reports have stated that errors in programming drug concentration were made during these adverse drug events. A simulation of the commercially available interface was compared experimentally with a simulated prototype of a new interface designed according to a human factors process. Professional nurses, averaging over 5 years of clinical experience with the commercially available interface and only minimal experience with the new interface, programmed both interfaces. The new interface eliminated drug concentration errors, whereas the simulated commercially available interface did not. Also, the new interface led to significantly fewer total errors and faster performance. These findings may have broad implications for the design, regulation, and procurement of biomedical devices, products, or systems that improve patient safety in clinical settings.

[10] - 21 July 2009 - led by Fernando Loizides
    Continuous Lifelong Capture of Personal Experience with EyeTap by Steve Mann
It describes a way to continually log information from a participants eye. It was presented in an international workshop about capture, archival, and retrieval of personal experiences. I [Fernando] believe it is a good marriage between user studies (which seem to be a theme in the lab lately) and also a good subject for debate due to ethical reasons. I [max] agree! It looks like a long document, but more than half of it is pictures!

[9] - 14 July 2009 - led by Chris Elsmore
    Sabbath day home automation: its like mixing technology and religion by Allison Woodruff, Sally Augustin, Brooke Foucault
Home automation is often only installed in the homes of the very tech savvy, and although now fairly affordable for most families, does not enjoy a very wide user base. This paper identifies how Orthodox Jewish families' use such technology for religious purposes, their relationship with it and the implications for the broader population.

[8] - 07 July 2009 - led by Jen Pearson
    A Scrollbar-based Visualization for Document Navigation by Donald Byrd
Information retrieval is the process of searching through a set of documents and relevant information within them. The majority of searching on the web is conducted via ‘best-match’ systems or search engines such as Google, and returns an ordered list of documents based on the keywords entered. This paper focuses on several visualisations for the process of document triage; i.e. the practice of determining the merit of a set of retrieved relevant documents.

[7] - 30 June 2009 - led by Min Chen
    Genesis Machines -- The New Science of Biocomputing by Martyn Amos
The link above is to a short introduction to Amos' book on the current focus and challenges in BioScience informatics. For additional reviews of the book, see: this and that.

[6] - 23 June 2009 - led by Patrick Oladimeji
    Pathetic Fallacy of RDF by David Karger and m.c. schraefel
This position paper strongly criticises the use of BFGs (Big fat graphs) as a visualisation structure for RDF (Resource Description Framework) data. The paper also suggests that in general, graphs are not necessarily an appropriate visualisation structure simply because the underlying data is /could be represented using the graph data structure (ie. nodes and edges). The discussion on the 23rd June will try to argue against this paper by emphasising the benefits of graph visualisation by using appropriate graph layout techniques and by exploiting the power of interactivity in visualisation.

[5] - 16 June 2009 - led by Andy Gimblett
    SwingStates: Adding State Machines to the Swing Toolkit by Caroline Appert and Michel Beaudouin-Lafon

State machines neatly describe event-driven systems, but GUIs -- a particular class of event-driven system -- tend to be implemented via workarounds such as callbacks and event listeners, with the result that component behaviour is often widely distributed within code, and overcomplicated. SwingStates is a library which extends the Java Swing UI toolkit with state machines for defining component behaviour in a well-structured, localised and composable manner. The library is freely available (swingstates) and has been used by the authors in a Master's level class in which students implemented advanced graphical interaction techniques from HCI literature, with excellent results.

[4] - 09 June 2009 - led by Simon Robinson
    A Mobile Application Framework for the Geospatial Web by Rainer Simon and Peter Frohlich
There is a huge amount of information about the places around us: current; historical; times/dates; pictures. Mobile access to this data is often difficult where it is most relevant - at the location it relates to. This paper presents a potential solution: a framework for building spatially-aware mobile applications. Using movement sensors and 3D models of urban terrain, mobile devices can be used as physical pointers to help users explore their surroundings to find geo-tagged data. The paper illustrates this concept with a mobile Wikipedia article finder, showing how the concept could be used to find live information in real time.

[3] - 02 June 2009 - led by Tom Owen
    Faster Document Navigation with Space-Filling Thumbnails by Andy Cockburn, Carl Gutwin, Jason Alexander
Scrollbars are the predominant way in which documents are currently browsed, despite this method typically being slow and difficult. A new system is described in this paper as an alternative approach to document browsing; Space-Filling Thumbnails (SFT) replaces scroll-based document movement with two views: a single-page view, and a matrix-layout thumbnail view that shows all pages at once in miniature. In order to navigate to a page a user simply clicks on the desired page from the miniature pages which then changes the view to a full page view. The paper tests this method against various other methods of document browsing and indicates that SFT is a beneficial approach.

[2] - 26 May 2009 - led by Max L. Wilson
    Exploring Websites through Contextual Facets by Medynskiy, Dontcheva, and Drucker
While traditionally most e-commerce websites, like ebay and amazon, provide different filters to the side of search results to narrow by category or price, this paper flips the idea on its head, by allowing users to jump from result to result using the listed attributes. so if you are looking at a specific result of a camera, for example, and it says it is 6megapixel and you want 8, then you change it right there (rather than going back to the results) and it changes you to the nearest most similar camera but with 8. By providing a result-to-result interaction, rather than a filter-result-pages interaction, it brings up a lot of interesting questions about orientation and the way we explore information online.

[1] - 18 May 2009 - led by Simon Robinson
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