tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18062195607898899592024-03-18T04:03:52.778+01:00Albrecht Schmidt - User Interface EngineeringA blog on novel user interfaces, mobile applications, pervasive and ubiquitous computing. I use the blog as a note pad ;-)Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.comBlogger576125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-17298738541758971072017-02-08T15:28:00.001+01:002017-02-15T10:01:39.224+01:00Internship Opportunity in Stuttgart <br />
The Intuity Media Lab (<a href="http://www.intuity.de/en/">http://www.intuity.de/en/</a>) is currently looking for an intern (PhD student or Master student) for the research project DAAN (<a href="http://daan.dfki.de/">http://daan.dfki.de</a>). The intern will work in close cooperation with the HCI group from Albrecht Schmidt at the University of Stuttgart (<a href="http://hcilab.org/">http://hcilab.org</a>).<br />
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The DAAN project investigates a technical platform, which supports Aging in Place especially for seniors with mental or cognitive illnesses. The supporting notification system consists of two phases. In the learning phase, the system adjusts to the respective user's behavior and daily activities. In the executive phase the systems support the seniors in their daily activities with providing courses of action and relevant information in context. The system shows the provided courses of actions unobtrusively with ambient and adaptive notifications. Therefore, the system will support multi-modal interfaces embedded in the user's home to interact with user's home devices.<br />
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The task for the intern is to build and evaluate prototypes which support older adults in their daily lives. Our main focus for such a system is a smart calendar application that supports to maintain an active life. The calendar application can be connected to various physical designs or ambient notification systems. Also, the calendar can support multiple input methods to add manually or automatically new appointments into the digital calendar.
If you are interested, please let contact us at <a href="mailto:IntuityIntern2017@hcilab.org">IntuityIntern2017@hcilab.org</a>. The internship could be between 3 and 6 months and the starting date is flexible.
Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-77771877152760358252016-11-27T22:19:00.002+01:002016-11-27T22:19:52.606+01:00A radical proposal to innovate the CHI-conference<i>In short: increase acceptance to 50% and have a mandatory discussion of at least 15 minutes per paper at the conference! </i><br />
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Around this time of the year (starting with the rebuttal phase and then again when notifications are out) we have heated discussions about the review process and quality of our main ACM SIGCHI conference. Much of the discussion can be summarized as: ACM SIGCHI is a lottery, I got the wrong reviewers, they did not carefully read my paper, and this should have been accepted and the committee is too dumb to see it. I strongly disagree with these statements (and I am probably one of the persons with the most CHI rejects over the last years), but if we as a community feel this way we have to change the process. <br />
<h4>
Why to increase the acceptance rate? </h4>
If we compare our prime venue with a lottery it would mean putting value to these publications, e.g. in hiring, would be absolutely wrong. As people in the community are really proud of their publications in CHI (and I have not seen much talk about lottery on the accepted ones) it seems that we only accept too few.<br />
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Looking through my Facebook comments and at the tweets during the rebuttal phase, many well established colleagues were surprised that their best papers did not get good reviews. So people with the highest esteem and highest peer recognition (CHI Academy, former chairs, …) are not able to know whether the paper they consider perfect gets in or not. They cannot judge the quality of their own work with regard to the CHI review process. If this is the case we are probably too selective and reject good work, hence my proposal to increase acceptance rate significantly, e.g. to 50%. The same people complaining about their paper not getting in rant at the conference about the low quality of papers and that we need to be more selective. Is this another filter bubble effect?<br />
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By increasing the acceptance rate to 50% we would make the conference predictable. It would no longer depend on the SC, ACs, 2nd ACs, and reviewers whether you get in or not. Reasonable papers would be very likely to get in. It would also decrease the value of the publication as such and would put the focus back on its content. Another positive effect I would expect is that people would not gamble by salami-slicing their work as they could be pretty sure a solid paper gets in and the value of a paper would be defined by its content and not by the fact that it is accepted. <br />
<h4>
Why enforce long discussions? </h4>
I am pretty sure what the answer to the following question to ACs would be: if you have only one trip you could do, would you go to the program committee meeting or to the actual conference? We did not ask this question in 2014 but I ask many people what value they see in the physical PC meeting. And there were very clear answers: overview of many contributions made, expert discussion of the contribution – especially the controversial ones, and getting a feel for what the community values.<br />
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In contrast, going to CHI2016, UBICOMP2016, and UIST2016 I felt that the discussions were most often not existent or even embarrassing. In our prime venues we do not discuss the results that are presented. We do not engage with why people took a certain approach, we do not discuss the implications of the work, we do not discuss alternative approaches, we do not discuss limitations, and we do not discuss what value this contribution has for the community. Such discussions happen in other fields (I recently presented at a social science event and the discussion was very challanging but insightful). We have lost the discussion culture at our conferences.<br />
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By enforcing discussions (e.g. have the AC and 2AC present at the presentation) we would learn much more from the work people present and I would expect that some people would even be more careful about what they publish. If we do not challenge the research in discussions, we keep everyone in their bubble, having no real idea how the wider community receives and sees it. My suggestion would be to have talks of 15 minutes and 15 minutes of discussion. If no discussion happens the paper cannot be published. If the discussion reveals that the paper reports on major findings or even delivers a breakthrough the authors should be encouraged to extend it for a journal. We could even imagine that people at the discussion can non-anonymously either endorse or oppose the paper in the ACM DL. <br />
<h4>
Perception of Human Computer Interaction by others</h4>
I have a few prototypical comments below that illustrate how others view the way we publish. I have not received exactly these, but some with a similar meaning from colleagues from other fields: <br />
<ul>
<li>“Interesting, you just present the work and there is no discussion? Maybe that is useful in your field as you can present more in the same time.” </li>
<li>“It’s is exciting that you follow an agile publication strategy in your field. Each web questionnaire, prototype, pre-study, and study is presented in a separate publication in your top venue. How do you keep track of this?” </li>
</ul>
<h4>
CHI as benchmark is too little</h4>
Whenever there is the discussion that we need to reform the CHI paper process people argue: this is essential in the US tenure track process and hence we cannot change it. And the solution is to create another (minor) venue that is removing some of the competition for the “serious” researchers. It seems CHI has managed to become a great benchmark for hiring and tenure, but its function as publication venue may be at risk – especially if people talk about the “CHI lottery”. As I said I disagree with this observation, but I think we should make an effort to: <br />
<ol>
<li>Make the conference a predictable publication venue (e.g. senior people in the field would be able to place their own submission reliably into one of the three categories: clear reject, borderline, clear accept) </li>
<li>Enforce discussion at the conference to avoid that researchers live in their bubble (where they and their friends believe it is good, but the community at large thinks it is not). </li>
</ol>
This may not require the radical changes I have suggested in the heading, but at least we should start to discuss it! Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-22370377179986481512016-03-16T02:15:00.001+01:002016-03-16T02:15:33.673+01:00Keynote at PerCom2016 by Bo Begole: The Dawn of Responsive Media <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9qDI5iGtF7X-GbiJljNOtr3LCAk5lBs5p3VAN3C1A41ul5Nze1saacGRo1pjNVzstKxiIrsRoa8qYCvSWsNqsrY4YIHMpPjQeN2d0wIAmOodG_oattNoFxiAH3enkL6vbHeHmNS_UEbU/s1600/IMG_4993.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9qDI5iGtF7X-GbiJljNOtr3LCAk5lBs5p3VAN3C1A41ul5Nze1saacGRo1pjNVzstKxiIrsRoa8qYCvSWsNqsrY4YIHMpPjQeN2d0wIAmOodG_oattNoFxiAH3enkL6vbHeHmNS_UEbU/s200/IMG_4993.JPG" width="200" /></a>Bo Begole is VP at Huawei is presenting a Keynote PerCom2016 on “The Dawn of Responsive Media”. He has worked in the Ubicomp domain for over 20 years. At PARC he investigated Contextual Intelligence as a logical follow-up of making context-awareness smarter and actionable. Aiming at “harvesting” the Ubicomp research at PARC he looked at business cases and business opportunities for Ubicomp, which resulted in his book “Ubiquitous Compting for Business”[1].<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSd9obluFuF_MMs7GoTsn78d18bjyKTCcm0zpsCsgo2gCaumEGXwIaVAQLdvu59WSNLG3Tq2FSQubKwm_Fbn0GBT7FPmjvC0fUfWdJlQL7ezEBeY11RkvS7IjAR8GR673GMdzCo5I982g/s1600/IMG_5004.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSd9obluFuF_MMs7GoTsn78d18bjyKTCcm0zpsCsgo2gCaumEGXwIaVAQLdvu59WSNLG3Tq2FSQubKwm_Fbn0GBT7FPmjvC0fUfWdJlQL7ezEBeY11RkvS7IjAR8GR673GMdzCo5I982g/s200/IMG_5004.JPG" width="200" /></a>At Huawei his focus is on immersion and experience. He started out with outlining how people like “lean back experience” and how this is well supported by current technology. He argues that the traditional remote control supports this still more liked than gestures and people like this form of lazy media consumption. There is also a growth in “learn forward” experience, basically requiring high intensity interaction (e.g. gesture control, body activated games) that asked the user to be active. He reasons that the space in-between may be an interesting and important for future products.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKMdzy-CrQ3kmtWVNNKVJeMIP7u01nufG7SiNi1m3oxfo7ZCANBrPfEK4jb4ORtxZtr6KuUSsUjDX9LNnYEvPIfjUNxJG36kVsiVXXiUo4myc682gj2KTwsnH_2-5XSjKDy1I3Mlqc5uA/s1600/IMG_5014.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKMdzy-CrQ3kmtWVNNKVJeMIP7u01nufG7SiNi1m3oxfo7ZCANBrPfEK4jb4ORtxZtr6KuUSsUjDX9LNnYEvPIfjUNxJG36kVsiVXXiUo4myc682gj2KTwsnH_2-5XSjKDy1I3Mlqc5uA/s200/IMG_5014.JPG" width="200" /></a>In his talk Bo looked at a short history of Ubicomp and VR and spoke on to current developments and the buzz in the industry. It seems to many that VR/AR is the next huge thing changing media consumption and media sharing fundamentally, like moving from text to images. He puts up an interesting question on whether or not a second life like world is coming back? Many of us still remember the excitement (and investments) around second life the first time round.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha_7ouk8u31Om_FSiOnlmVL57caB9ohT1Ic52Lxbvrswy3eF8wuRDk_ntxzD9R6Fqg__0POUiHEhSad1FsFtea91S7vOSx_OKfzfebJnmVAqlGu9R6wxa2SSD4XjeeWwoRlwgwRp2x81E/s1600/IMG_5013.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha_7ouk8u31Om_FSiOnlmVL57caB9ohT1Ic52Lxbvrswy3eF8wuRDk_ntxzD9R6Fqg__0POUiHEhSad1FsFtea91S7vOSx_OKfzfebJnmVAqlGu9R6wxa2SSD4XjeeWwoRlwgwRp2x81E/s200/IMG_5013.JPG" width="200" /></a>Bo is confident that games are the killer application for VR and that hence it will sell very well. Once the technology is out with the users there will be further uses. At the same time, he questions if spatial placement (like in the HoloLens concepts seen in the media) is really helping people to organize their things, activities and data or not.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB8JQOxKWTuDIijlJ50HyKO0sPkmK4e1DkbFw9YMzNP5qKVpEd5n4X_QYiRxZrGbZB-aLpijvWX7k-CypSmTo4kisIloiEB5fwY9RKh5O7cqyeqMwdYPVnyZbNG8lNpwp7ABDjzvZeTvc/s1600/IMG_5018.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB8JQOxKWTuDIijlJ50HyKO0sPkmK4e1DkbFw9YMzNP5qKVpEd5n4X_QYiRxZrGbZB-aLpijvWX7k-CypSmTo4kisIloiEB5fwY9RKh5O7cqyeqMwdYPVnyZbNG8lNpwp7ABDjzvZeTvc/s200/IMG_5018.JPG" width="200" /></a>For immersive technology in the home he sees that high resolution screen will play a major role alongside mobile technologies. MirrorSys is an example of a research project of an immersive communication system. Key aspects are live sized presentation of people and a visualization that is close to the upper bounds of human perception. His calculations for the display is to have 30000 x 24000 pixel (=720 Mega pixel) as the upper bound for perception without head movement (this is roughly a factor 10 more than we have in the lab in Stuttgart [2]). At the same time camera technology is advancing towards high spatial and temporal resolution and towards camera arrays that allow you to move around the scene. He had some impressive examples of what you can do with a camera array that simultaneously captures scenes and allows you to navigate through scenes from different angles.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnHTOCParmfHXdHWM3Xl9p5N1s5OoGIh3A6gjxGYWroyb52MBFmK8E6LHiQZ70JK9HOJSmngvhN_sm2TPBVDFOL08EZxl04tDYszO-1cEPzU473NeD4ZAagKfkNMUVnAI_7izrgCUSADY/s1600/IMG_5022.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnHTOCParmfHXdHWM3Xl9p5N1s5OoGIh3A6gjxGYWroyb52MBFmK8E6LHiQZ70JK9HOJSmngvhN_sm2TPBVDFOL08EZxl04tDYszO-1cEPzU473NeD4ZAagKfkNMUVnAI_7izrgCUSADY/s200/IMG_5022.JPG" width="200" /></a>In his view speech interaction is also gaining more importance – moving towards conversational systems with a deep language understanding. He makes the point that especially with many devices in the Internet of Things (without classical user interface) this will play a more important role.<br />
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Finally, he suggested that user engagement is a key for responsive media. So far this has been a key in presenting advertising to customers. In the future this will be central to many applications, as the systems will optimize for engagement with the user and will adapt their content and presentation to ensure that the user is and stays engaged.<br />
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The research roadmap he presents is pretty wide with a lot of open issues to be solved.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVq_iPx1e5pnCzIH2jRAFi6acLczNs6Blrg9iXEuuSibNVPUrIHMs89Xa6NAfVC2rbBdzmNa3OSHIuKtyMBiadkzhaUFFkrx_PMOhCeebSLpvXlwSJbqvX07D7iZyGhOhXnvfhpLz-UCM/s1600/IMG_5025.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVq_iPx1e5pnCzIH2jRAFi6acLczNs6Blrg9iXEuuSibNVPUrIHMs89Xa6NAfVC2rbBdzmNa3OSHIuKtyMBiadkzhaUFFkrx_PMOhCeebSLpvXlwSJbqvX07D7iZyGhOhXnvfhpLz-UCM/s320/IMG_5025.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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[1] Begole, Bo. Ubiquitous Computing for Business: Find New Markets, Create Better Businesses, and Reach Customers Around the World 24-7-365. Ft Press, 2011.<br />
[2] Power Wall at the University of Stuttgart, <a href="https://www.visus.uni-stuttgart.de/en/institute/visualisation-laboratory/technical-details.html">https://www.visus.uni-stuttgart.de/en/institute/visualisation-laboratory/technical-details.html</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmhcTv2abQ18L-sEY4flXtYZSZMjDfVlm1JxDgc5dLCU8QKs9xDfvKT8xyo8jw65gNUshHc6mgqksQ2xtEK4aKrp4jFbb3zyiyxp0dZw3sIFl-OLMvgxMANUOCVh3zzeYwR__tr1UERTk/s1600/IMG_5002.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmhcTv2abQ18L-sEY4flXtYZSZMjDfVlm1JxDgc5dLCU8QKs9xDfvKT8xyo8jw65gNUshHc6mgqksQ2xtEK4aKrp4jFbb3zyiyxp0dZw3sIFl-OLMvgxMANUOCVh3zzeYwR__tr1UERTk/s320/IMG_5002.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com124tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-25307481625115373772016-03-15T00:04:00.003+01:002016-03-15T00:41:04.792+01:00Keynote by Cecilia Mascolo at Percom2016: Technology and Experiecne in the Physcial World<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz7cBwwIahD-_v_4dTwA6qINiJtUir2nPhbDvSTsE55ks6owdZ9Uau-lEcyxJHQeZ_X3AdZIdIfcfLPtjqYnMb3XomWeRuWdi-GmaPKAJvuNFFCREyxVw9OFqEmiXlmBLKUci_ZafhlP8/s1600/IMG_4970.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz7cBwwIahD-_v_4dTwA6qINiJtUir2nPhbDvSTsE55ks6owdZ9Uau-lEcyxJHQeZ_X3AdZIdIfcfLPtjqYnMb3XomWeRuWdi-GmaPKAJvuNFFCREyxVw9OFqEmiXlmBLKUci_ZafhlP8/s200/IMG_4970.JPG" width="200" /></a>Cecilia Mascolo presents the keynote at Percom2016. Her opening statement is: “Technology must enhance and not substitute the physical experience”.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh66m3ZY63yi-9Ve5Bj3WjSVrXT9F4e0jbbwO0K51AgcqvCs1Zq7kQlw0C6fPOiZKpTDITrGKdRTfBqFh8sBc-MpTHI081sDc0TTuq02-R8h3BlCqmJYmvPYqO_XbVu7uMUuHUdMGvy0wI/s1600/IMG_4972.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh66m3ZY63yi-9Ve5Bj3WjSVrXT9F4e0jbbwO0K51AgcqvCs1Zq7kQlw0C6fPOiZKpTDITrGKdRTfBqFh8sBc-MpTHI081sDc0TTuq02-R8h3BlCqmJYmvPYqO_XbVu7uMUuHUdMGvy0wI/s200/IMG_4972.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>
Cecilia makes the point that continuous sensing with mobile devices can overcome many issue that are well known with traditional studies (especially the classical problem of psychologist studying psychology students in a dark lab).
One of here early papers (EmotionSense, see [1]) shows how we can move studies into the real world. This is not without difficulties, especially when you try to understand emotions.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHAGucBpbV2YLoksycmur3pOmQ4K5V3R2abG7caZCHAuvbLxCTCtNRzZFjqpwoolO0KqVy4AXhvisnZozxBhs-7WJnCUWAkIumXUNM1dvkH-PbVu-__c2rWNRwgyr5Bg1IWmBTplW-a7o/s1600/IMG_4975.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHAGucBpbV2YLoksycmur3pOmQ4K5V3R2abG7caZCHAuvbLxCTCtNRzZFjqpwoolO0KqVy4AXhvisnZozxBhs-7WJnCUWAkIumXUNM1dvkH-PbVu-__c2rWNRwgyr5Bg1IWmBTplW-a7o/s200/IMG_4975.JPG" width="150" /></a>Putting research apps into android market changes the game, large numbers of users become within reach. Higher numbers of participants require a clear purpose of the applications (Nielse Henze provide in [2] a nice recipe of how to do this).
Her experience is that user engagement through gamification really worked. Even if the duration of participation of individuals is limited to weeks or months this generates very useful information. A short introduction to social sensing by Cecilia can be found in [3].<br />
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Different sensors have different energy and privacy cost and also different types of contributions. Correlating the accelerometer and happiness is really interesting. Users who are more active (not just movement, “being out and about”) are happier. Clustering accelerometer data and correlating it with other high level data opens exciting questions, e.g. health. Similarly correlating happiness and location leads to more surprising results: less happy at home and work, more when out and active.
Looking at people’s personally and demographics shows that gender, age, employment, etc. has a clear correlation with activity and usage of communication.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxWX0_FdNULSbyumV_UcCOWFVZs7hOMsukE2xaUhHSy79kEEcCvi5aj50RR-qqG__rn1KrMtjfNvMv6Xo5CASr3NgWTnPRsSbFXOfuWouoDH6OLC-68ZmU3L9CgIFET9mEC3B47bWDYW8/s1600/IMG_4976.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxWX0_FdNULSbyumV_UcCOWFVZs7hOMsukE2xaUhHSy79kEEcCvi5aj50RR-qqG__rn1KrMtjfNvMv6Xo5CASr3NgWTnPRsSbFXOfuWouoDH6OLC-68ZmU3L9CgIFET9mEC3B47bWDYW8/s200/IMG_4976.JPG" width="200" /></a>Physical space matters! Using active badges they looked at how the change of physical space can impact peoples interactions [4]. The sensing approach allowed to understand how changes in physical space changes the behavior on a really fine grained level.<br />
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<b>References:</b><br />
[1] Rachuri, K. K., Musolesi, M., Mascolo, C., Rentfrow, P. J., Longworth, C., & Aucinas, A. (2010, September). EmotionSense: a mobile phones based adaptive platform for experimental social psychology research. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing (pp. 281-290). ACM. <a href="http://csce.uark.edu/~tingxiny/courses/5013sp14/reading/Rachuri2010EMP.pdf">http://csce.uark.edu/~tingxiny/courses/5013sp14/reading/Rachuri2010EMP.pdf</a><br />
[2] Henze, N., Shirazi, A. S., Schmidt, A., Pielot, M., & Michahelles, F. (2013). Empirical research through ubiquitous data collection. Computer, 46(6), 0074-76. <a href="http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2013.202">http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2013.202</a><br />
[3] Mascolo, C. (2010). The power of mobile computing in a social era. IEEE Internet Computing, 14(6), 76. <a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.466.2037&rep=rep1&type=pdf">http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.466.2037&rep=rep1&type=pdf</a><br />
[4] Brown, C., Efstratiou, C., Leontiadis, I., Quercia, D., Mascolo, C., Scott, J., & Key, P. (2014, September). The architecture of innovation: Tracking face-to-face interactions with ubicomp technologies. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (pp. 811-822). ACM. <a href="http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.6829.pdf">http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.6829.pdf </a>Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-82728493330441592002015-12-01T21:23:00.000+01:002015-12-01T21:23:06.668+01:00Experimenting with EMG <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge9Og8a18krCqcDwf9nKAUBzda_M9nwR1Oo7CpfpYUbMhlpfpXabfBLf365sECPK-fyO2O5W69yUBsRxSFA-xRX5Y0EblTkfqcqRyUppNQENbpoNPRXoC2gEuEP1PIbQ4mCgbTQIRfdsI/s1600/IMG_3522.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge9Og8a18krCqcDwf9nKAUBzda_M9nwR1Oo7CpfpYUbMhlpfpXabfBLf365sECPK-fyO2O5W69yUBsRxSFA-xRX5Y0EblTkfqcqRyUppNQENbpoNPRXoC2gEuEP1PIbQ4mCgbTQIRfdsI/s200/IMG_3522.JPG" width="150" /></a></div>
In the upcoming issue of <a href="http://interactions.acm.org/">ACM interactions magazine</a> I will talk in my column on interaction technology about the electrical interfaces to humans.
This blogpost is written to give you a preview of the article and describes a little project I did over the weekend to explore Electromyography (EMG).<br />
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It is the simplest circuit I could find and it results in a very simple and easy to make EMG. It takes less than half an hour to build and plugs into the microphone input of a computer. It uses a single operation amplifier (INA128p) and is based on the description in [1]. Builing the filter into the gain branch is quite nice ;-)<br />
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<iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LVLJQ2K1gRI/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LVLJQ2K1gRI?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
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For my Experiment I used the following components:<br />
<ul><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRPUDmuuF6owi2H8jM10SPSvNigYc6jBc3a6yHhwoHJ-jOZB-7xC_X2Mj1yhdUdxOPM_aHh432zqnepw4RdRu6xLNkJbW7IQLLJwTmQmOkuLRuf0QX9OZOKRpxuSyoIdQ3K5uSU3qiBi8/s1600/IMG_3511.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRPUDmuuF6owi2H8jM10SPSvNigYc6jBc3a6yHhwoHJ-jOZB-7xC_X2Mj1yhdUdxOPM_aHh432zqnepw4RdRu6xLNkJbW7IQLLJwTmQmOkuLRuf0QX9OZOKRpxuSyoIdQ3K5uSU3qiBi8/s200/IMG_3511.JPG" width="200" /></a>
<li>a <a href="http://www.ti.com/product/ina128">INA128p</a> (Precision, Low Power Instrumentation Amplifiers) </li>
<li>2 Capacitors (100uF, Elco) </li>
<li>a Resistor of 120 Ohm </li>
<li>3 copper pieces (e.g. 5 cent coins) as electrodes for the body </li>
<li>a 3.5mm audio connector (from broken headphones) </li>
<li>some cables and prototyping board </li>
</ul>
The <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/8t4o16irldl0kr6/eagleEMG.zip?dl=0">eagle CAD</a> file is available for <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/8t4o16irldl0kr6/eagleEMG.zip?dl=0">download</a>. <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKsqRp2MBE5bzpIgEKQ3KUYv07BaB4cv2VBji8IXTWW05ijZ8GN7qgzPEwdu7BRqVIQt6W5DYbd5bNRzh_aTs6p4NYMuZ5t0ghvBvrbC_Tl8ez4m_5JYDJWsVqBoqM9PIWJ8NQt_CSH1Y/s1600/IMG_3514.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKsqRp2MBE5bzpIgEKQ3KUYv07BaB4cv2VBji8IXTWW05ijZ8GN7qgzPEwdu7BRqVIQt6W5DYbd5bNRzh_aTs6p4NYMuZ5t0ghvBvrbC_Tl8ez4m_5JYDJWsVqBoqM9PIWJ8NQt_CSH1Y/s200/IMG_3514.JPG" width="150" /></a>Connecting it to other parts of the body made a very simple ECG – more suitable to get the heard rate that the shape of the signal.<br />
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More sophisticated circuits are available, e.g. openBCI [2] or an EMG shield for Arduino [3]. If you look more for commercial device you will find in [4] a good overview and also an introduction to emotion sensing.<br />
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[1] Bhaskar, A, Tharion, E., and Devasahayam, S.R. Computer-based inexpensive surface electromyography recording for a student laboratory. Advances in Physiology Education 31, 2 (2007), 242–243.<br />
[2] <a href="http://www.openbci.com/">http://www.openbci.com/</a><br />
[3] <a href="https://www.olimex.com/Products/Duino/Shields/SHIELD-EKG-EMG/">https://www.olimex.com/Products/Duino/Shields/SHIELD-EKG-EMG/</a> <br />
[4] Kanjo, Eiman, and Alan Chamberlain. "Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses." Personal and Ubiquitous Computing: 1-16
Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com88tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-65987776657948749792015-06-09T00:09:00.001+01:002015-06-09T00:09:40.472+01:00Security and privacy implications of memory aidsEver considered what you risk when you use pervasive computing based memory aids? Can other people twist what you remember? Imagine someone tampers with your photos you keep in the cloud - will this change what you remember? Will this alter your memory. In the European Project RECALL we investigated pervasive memory augmentation through computing technologies. In an article for IEEE Pervasive Magizine we investigated privacy and security implications if memory aids.<br />
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The full article is at the moment available for free at <a href="http://www.computer.org/web/computingnow/content?g=53319&type=article&urlTitle=security-and-privacy-implications-of-pervasive-memory-augmentation">http://www.computer.org/web/computingnow/content?g=53319&type=article&urlTitle=security-and-privacy-implications-of-pervasive-memory-augmentation</a><br />
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Davies, Nigel, Adrian Friday, Sarah Clinch, Corina Sas, Marc Langheinrich, Geoff Ward, and Albrecht Schmidt. "Security and privacy implications of pervasive memory augmentation." Pervasive Computing, IEEE 14, no. 1 (2015): 44-53.
Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-42665956482647901452015-06-01T21:25:00.000+01:002015-06-01T22:54:07.389+01:00Crowdfunding - Interviews with Amanda Williams and Khai TruongIn the next issue of the IEEE Pervasive Magazine I will publish in the column on Innovations in Ubicomp Products the article: "<b>Crowdfunding for Ubicomp Products: Interviews with Amanda Williams and Khai Truong</b>" - Here are already the full interviews. <br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Interview with Amanda Williams</span></h2>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Albrecht: </span></u></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">You had a successful kickstarter project with a
"lamp" – can you shortly describe the product (perhaps you have one
or two photos, too)? And who was on the team?</span></i>
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<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Amanda:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> Our kickstarter campaign was for a smart, programmable lamp named
Clyde. Clyde is a unique, jellyfishlike desk lamp that does both bright task
lighting and colored ambient lighting (see figure CLYDE). He comes
equipped with environmental sensors that he automatically detects and reacts
to, so whether you want him to be "touchy feely" or "afraid of
the dark", you can change his personality without programming. But if you
do want to program (or learn how) Clyde is Arduino compatible and open-source,
and we provide a number of guides and tutorials at </span><a href="http://fabule.com/clyde/"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">http://fabule.com/clyde/</span></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Our team during the crowdfunding and manufacturing process was composed
of myself, Bruno Nadeau, and Angela Gabereau. I did a lot of the interaction
design, electrical engineering, marketing, and customer engagement; Bruno
handled the design of the physical enclosure, design for manufacture, firmware,
and testing -- he spent the most time on the factory floor; Angela is an
all-round great software engineer, so she contributed to firmware development,
coding up some of our test software, and setting up the back end on our website
for ecommerce and customer support.</span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Albrecht: </span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Why did you go with crowdfunding? What were the
advantages for you over other funding approaches?</span></i>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Amanda:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span>If you're starting a company with a hardware product, your typical
startup funding options tend not to match your cost structure because they are
really optimized for software companies. If you're creating a software product,
your major expense is just developer time; in the early stages you'll have
founders working for nothing, which means your expenses are almost nil. As
little as $25-50k in seed funding from an angel or an accelerator can get a
software startup to the point where it has traction, customers, and revenue - if
the founders handle everything really well. This is virtually impossible for a
hardware startup, no matter how disciplined the founders are, because they will
have to deal with the costs of materials, manufacturing, and shipping physical
products. And certifications, which are a significant cost and a real hurdle
for people who don't have prior manufacturing experience. Costs vary depending
on the product, but I think it's pretty rare to be able to do this well for
less than $100k, and even that is a stretch for all but the easiest hardware
projects.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">So you have this chicken and egg problem. Investors (quite reasonably)
don't want to part with a ton of money until they see that your business can actually
sell a product; but it takes a lot of money to manufacture a product that you
can sell. This is where crowdfunding comes in. It can provide the money you
need to cover non-recoverable expenses, and if it goes well, it shows potential
investors that you have a market for your product.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">There are a number of risks here. Crowdfunding can help you succeed, but
it can also give you enough rope to hang yourself with. A failed campaign -- or
even a fairly lackluster success -- can actually hurt your chances of
attracting investors. It's also extremely common for first-time project
creators to underestimate their expenses. People worry a lot about their
campaign failing, but that's not the worst outcome. The worst outcome is if it
succeeds, you take on the obligation to deliver what you promised, and then you
run out of money without delivering. In my experience, I see it becoming
increasingly common for startups to start fundraising the moment their campaign
wraps up, without waiting to deliver the actual product. I think that's the
smart thing to do. It's a moment where your company and your product is all
potential: you've shown you have traction, but you haven't yet had the chance
to make any ugly manufacturing mistakes. Securing conventional funding to supplement
the crowd-funding helps insure against the possibility of running out of cash
before you deliver.</span></div>
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<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Albrecht: </span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Can you give a short overview of your timeline - from
idea, to running the kickstarter campaign, to delivering the final products?</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Amanda:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span>Our original idea evolved a lot over time. Around January-April 2012 we
were working part-time on these LED solder kits, playing around with the idea
of an electrical kit that we could build up into various different mechanical
configurations. So we made a little solder kit of PCBs with a few through-hole
components, as well a couple different laser-cut enclosure kits: one of which
would let you build a soft ambient light, the other of which would let you
build a little desklamp with an adjustible neck -- identical PCBs in both. We
brought these kits to Maker Faire in the Bay Area and to a big "Maker
Carnival" in Beijing, the first such event to be held in China. We were a
bit surprised to see how much people were drawn to the attractive enclosure design
we'd worked on, people who aren't usually that into solder kits. So we started
considering how we might make these kits more approachable to a broader
audience.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">We submitted our idea to HAXLR8R, a hardware accelerator based in
Shenzhen, and were accepted to the program. This meant that Bruno and I moved
to Shenzhen in January 2013 to spend almost four months doing intensive product
development. While we were there, we had access to fabrication techniques that
we couldn't have afforded back home. We could cheaply CNC or vacuum cast really
professional-looking prototypes, the kind of thing that you could imagine on a
store shelf. We could also prototype more sophisticated electronics much
faster. This enabled us to move away from solder kits (4 out of 5 people who wanted
to buy our product at previous maker faires didn't know how to solder) to an
Arduino-compatible board with auto-detectable sensor modules. We now had a
product with a really gentle learning curve, allowing users to customize
without any special tools at all, but still open enough for really deep
hardware or software hacking. Also, we were able to make it look really cool!</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">We ran our Kickstarter campaign from May-June 2013 and made almost
$150k, more than triple our goal. We thought we could deliver the product by
Christmas, but because of our inexperience, we underestimated how much work was
still required to design for manufacture, set up a test plan the factory could
follow, finalize and purchase everything on the bill of materials, design
supplementary materials like packaging and manuals, test for electromagnetic
compatibility, and ship to 30 different countries. During this time we had to
re-design our board because the microprocessor we were using suddenly shot up
in price. We had to do more mold revisions than anticipated, and switch
materials to a plastic that would look good when back lit by a bunch of really
bright LEDs. Since we were using several different materials in our product --
injection-molded plastic, die-cut silicone, metal gooseneck tubing,
off-the-shelf screws and nuts, and custom PCBs -- we had to work with a number
of different, but interdependent suppliers. If one supplier has a delay, the
others fall like dominoes. In hindsight, a lot of this stuff looks obvious, but
our experience wasn't really atypical for first time product creators.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">We shipped Clyde out to our backers and post-Kickstarter pre-orders in
July of 2014. One typically thinks that shipping is the finish line, but the
reality is, that's when you start seeing a lot of customer support work. It's a
computational product, so of course, you have to answer questions about set-up,
drivers (if anyone wants to plug it in to program from their computer), how the
sensors work, how to assemble, etc. Sometimes things get held up in customs,
sometimes packages go missing and need to be replaced. So that will take up a
lot of your time for a few months, and customer support is never really an
engineer's favorite task.</span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Albrecht:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> What was the minimum number of items that were required in order to
make sense to start production and why? Is there an "Economy of
scale" for Ubicomp products?</span></i>
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<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Amanda: </span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">There is ABSOLUTELY an economy of scale for Ubicomp products, though it
depends a lot on your method of production. More and more manufacturers in
China and North America are willing to do small runs, but it will inevitably
cost more per piece.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">When we were calculating our Kickstarter goal and reward levels, we
calculated how much we would need for runs of 300, 500, and 1000. We ended up producing
a run of 1000, plus 100 wooden special edition Clydes. (Note: I don't recommend
Shenzhen for woodworking.) The cost of tooling for injection molding is high no
matter what (we paid $10,000, and that was a remarkably good deal), but the
more you make, the more that cost gets amortized across many units; and the
unit cost itself also go down. If you've ever prototyped hardware and shopped
for components somewhere like Digikey or even Sparkfun, you're probably
familiar with the idea of price breaks for electronic components: each
capacitor costs half as much if you buy 1000 instead of 10. The same logic
applies to injection molded plastic parts, too. Every time you do a
manufacturing run, a skilled technician has to set up the injection molding
machine. They have to get the mold temperature, plastic temperature, injection
speed, and release of air pressure calibrated exactly right for the size and
shape of your product, and this takes a lot of trial and error. Once that's
done, it's easy to spit out one unit after another; but you can see why
manufacturers would prefer to do 10,000 units at once rather than 1,000 ten
times. The calibration process also generates plastic waste that can't be
recycled since it's often warped and burnt.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Method of production matters a lot. Injection molding, as described
above, has a very high up-front cost and a low per-piece cost. However, if you
happened to be making something using CNC milling, you'd have a fairly low
set-up fee, and a relatively high per-piece cost. This really needs to be taken
into account when you set up a crowdfunding campaign. Campaigns that go way
over their funding goal are actually MORE likely to experience delays, and I
suspect that a lot of pain could be avoided if creators thought ahead about whether
their production methods scale well or not.</span></div>
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<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Albrecht:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> Ubicomp products typically include design, hardware and software (and
often networking) and I guess you had the know-how for prototyping yourself /
in your team. How did you transfer the expertise for prototyping to production?</span></i></div>
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<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Amanda: </span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">We learned the hard way. Bruno is extremely organized and
detail-oriented, and it is absolutely crucial to have someone on your team like
that. I turned out (to my own surprise) to be ruthless - kind of tactically
evil, in fact - when it came to negotiating prices with suppliers; you probably
also want someone like that on your team.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">If you can hire a senior engineer with lots of manufacturing experience,
that would be ideal. Most of us don't really have the budget for that, so we
muddle through.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">That said, we had great mentors. Bunnie Huang helped advise us on some
manufacturing issues, and he's been a wonderful resource to us, other hardware
startups, and even graduate students looking to manufacture creative hardware.
Our own contract manufacturer (AQS), since they often work with startups, was
willing to show us the ropes -- not everyone would have been so patient. It
costs a bit more to work with a factory like that, but I'd say it was worth it.
And we were also working in an environment where we had frequent contact with
other teams who were doing similar work to us. So we could always talk to
someone who was a year, six months, two months ahead of us in the process, and
anticipate what might go wrong. And in turn, we helped teams that were a few
months behind us.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Learning to manufacture is not easy, and it's not at all formalized.
Most of us learn by forming professional networks and getting help from our
friends. You have to be resourceful, and not shy about asking for help.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span><i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Albrecht:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> With crowdfunding you have customers for a product often already at the
idea stage. How does this impact the product development and the final
implementation?</span>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Amanda:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span>It's great! And it sucks! </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Most backers are really supportive. They back campaigns not just to
acquire an end product, but to engage with the process of invention and design
and production. So you can get great feedback from people regarding what
features they want you to prioritize. We opened up our source code and saw
people creating new modes of interaction for Clyde, and it was awesome. I'm
eternally grateful to the 965 people who gave us a chance.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">But it does add a lot of pressure. Even if people are nice, you feel the
weight of your promise to give them what they want, and you feel pretty awful
about every delay. I love learning new things, but it's more pleasurable
without all the pressure!</span></div>
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<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Albrecht</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">: How is crowdfunding changing how we make ubiquitous computing
products? Are there new classes of products that become economically viable?</span></i></div>
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<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Amanda:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> Crowdfunding, along with a growing class of manufacturers that are
willing to do small runs, allow us to actually bring more long-tail, niche
devices into existence. Clyde's a pretty niche product. It's a quirky design.
It's not meant to be one-size-fits all. 1100 was a pretty good number to
produce. If we'd been required to do a minimum order quantity of 10,000, it
just wouldn't have happened, but this way, about 1000 people get a neat little
product that powerfully appeals to them. But I think also these small
manufacturing projects have to be quite passion-driven, since the up front work
to design a 1000-unit run is not much less than the work required to set up
something much larger. You probably won't get filthy rich doing this stuff, but
if you handle things right, you won't go broke, either.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This new set of capabilities makes the boundary between research and
product-development a lot more porous. You could conceivably do a run of a
hundred or so devices for a research project, and deploy them in the wild for
validation. Universities and industrial research labs spin off research
projects into startups sometimes; crowdfunding and small-run manufacturing can
allow you to validate these projects before taking a big risk on them.</span></div>
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<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Albrecht:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> With crowdfunding you give your idea away (or at least you make it
public) before you can ship. Were you afraid of others being faster in creating
"your" product and having it on the market first? Did you take
precautions to avoid competition?</span></i></div>
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<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Amanda:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> Protecting our IP wasn't a huge deal for us, but it can be for others.
At $150K, we were below the threshold of interest for most copycats to try to
reverse engineer our product -- if we'd raised more than half a million I'd
have been a lot more worried. But anyway, we made it all open source.
Preventing copying wasn't a huge priority for us. It is for others.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In the US you get a one year grace period between going public with your
idea and filing a patent for it. This doesn't apply everywhere, so if you want
to patent, submit it before you launch a crowdfunding campaign. However, patent
protection is far from air-tight. Whether your patent protects you or not is
really for the courts to decide, if you ever get into a lawsuit. Do you have
the budget to hire a lawyer for this? A better lawyer than Xiaomi can afford?
If you have a US or European patent, that won't count for anything in China.
You can get a patent in Hong Kong if you're willing to translate everything,
and the People's Republic of China will *ostensibly* honor it. But I will eat
every ounce of our plastic waste if Chinese courts EVER rule in favor of a
foreign company suing a Chinese company for patent infringement. In fact, I
believe you have to set up a China-based subsidiary to even be allowed to sue.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">So if patents are not that useful, what do you do to protect your
product? You have a couple of options. 1) Move fast. Invent new things faster
than people can copy your old things. But watch out, those shanzhai
manufacturers are pretty quick. 2) Don't make incredibly simple pure-hardware
products. Those are the easiest things to copy. They're right in the shanzhai
manufacturer comfort zone. If you're doing something incredibly original in
hardware, something that required lots of R&D to get right, that can help a
lot. Or you can put a lot of the value in software and the creation of an
awesome UX. If you're worried about how honest your manufacturer is, don't give
them the source code -- just have them flash the binaries onto your
microprocessors, or if you're really paranoid, do it yourself (we know someone
who did that). The hardest thing for a competitor to steal is a fantastic user
community.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">That said, I really respect those shanzhai guys. Silvia Lindtner and
Bunnie Huang have both written about what that work looks like on the ground.
They are extremely clever about using their hardware ecosystem to reduce costs,
and they create niche (or not-so-niche) products for markets that mainstream
companies aren't touching, like a minimalist mobile phone that retails for 12
USD! That means the cost of materials, labor, and shipping have to add up to no
more than 4 USD. That is pretty crazy.</span></div>
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<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Albrecht:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> How did you continue after "kick starting" you project /
company?</span></i></div>
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<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Amanda:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> Manufacturing Clyde to fulfil our Kickstarter was a marvelous learning
experience. Once we finished up that project, we realized it had given us a ton
of ideas for tools that we wished we'd had during the manufacturing process.
Effective collaborative tools for manufacturing just didn't seem to exist yet,
at least not in any form usable to the increasing number of startups and
small-scale creators that need them. We're working on an exciting new project
now (up on </span><a href="http://fabule.com/"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">fabule.com</span></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">) for a hosted Bill
of Materials management tool. The Bill of Materials is a keystone document that
is an absolutely crucial point of communication between a creator and their
manufacturer, at all stages of production, from prototyping, to sourcing, to
assembly, testing, and subsequent manufacturing runs. Right now everyone is
using Excel, and spending hours doing tedious and error-prone revisions, and
maintaining multiple parallel copies for different purposes and different
audiences. We've spoken to manufacturers who've had to spend hours coaching
startups on how to provide them with the specific information they need to even
be able to provide a quote. We know we can do better. At this point we're
decent domain experts in hardware manufacturing, but we also have a really deep
background in UX and software development, which means that we're really
well-positioned to build a tool that can help guide first-timers to do the
manufacturing collaboration correctly.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In the hardware ecosystem right now, we're seeing a revolution in
prototyping technologies and fundraising techniques. The first two steps in
creating a ubicomp product have gotten much, much easier, and it's opened the
field up to a lot more people. However as soon as you face the problem of
manufacturing, you find that that part is about as hard to navigate as it ever
was. So now we're tackling that step, trying to find ways to standardize,
educate, and create smoother collaborations between creators, manufacturers,
and suppliers.</span></div>
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<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Albrecht:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> Further comments?</span></i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihc6mcrQ93QVC1hmtGjZP7c_utWPzsBkfNzNV2vLP_ez3eXJv9jgI-mrRVRWajst1C0lHY2pU5DHZSbTvAo106P53fpRi4rmQF6E86qyj7gFf4H8-Hhy2U0QpYHBUmKdLFq0nHgoWb0tw/s1600/fb_profilepic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihc6mcrQ93QVC1hmtGjZP7c_utWPzsBkfNzNV2vLP_ez3eXJv9jgI-mrRVRWajst1C0lHY2pU5DHZSbTvAo106P53fpRi4rmQF6E86qyj7gFf4H8-Hhy2U0QpYHBUmKdLFq0nHgoWb0tw/s200/fb_profilepic.jpg" width="133" /></a><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Amanda: </span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">When we make ubicomp products, we are often trying to make
"normal" objects smarter. We stuff processors, and wifi or bluetooth,
and batteries, and tiny circuit boards into everyday things like lamps,
jewelry, cat toys, bicycle handlebars, cribs, etc. But the manufacturers who
know how to make lamps, jewelry, cat toys, bicycle handlebars, and cribs don't
necessarily know ANYTHING about manufacturing and testing computational
hardware. And the manufacturers who know how to make and test PCBs don't
necessarily know how to work with the materials that you'd need to make your thing.
So when we try to make smarter everyday things, we often find ourselves in the
position of having to educate our manufacturer, or at least we have to be a
good bridge between manufacturers who have very different areas of expertise.</span></div>
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<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Short bio: </span></u></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Amanda Williams is Co-Founder and CEO of Fabule Fabrications. She's in
charge of creating beautiful interactions, beautiful hardware, and customer
development. She has a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Sciences from UC
Irvine and a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. Amanda has
worked at Xerox PARC, Adobe, Intel Research, and Microsoft Research.
Indecisively, she loves both qualitative user research and hardware design. </span><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">She has been accused of eating like a trucker. </span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: DE; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-themecolor: accent1;"></span></b><br />
<h3>
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Interview with Khai Truong</span><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></b><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></b>
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<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Albrecht: </span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">You had a successful indiegogo project with a
on-screen keyboard – can you shortly describe the product (perhaps you
have one or two photos, too)? And who was on the team?</span></i></div>
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<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Khai:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Minuum is an text input method which reduces a full size keyboard down
to a single dimension (or row) of keys. For on-screen keyboards, this reduces
the amount of space that would be taken up by the input method, giving more
real estate to the rest of the application. The challenge introduced with
enabling this is how to allow users to still type quickly as it becomes harder
for them to precisely hit keys on this reduced sized keyboard. To this end, the
backend of the product is a disambiguation engine that predicts what the user
is typing without requiring the user to always hit the exact keys in the word
that they are typing. By reducing text entry to being simply selection of keys
placed on a single row, this same mode of typing can be carried over to a
variety of other platforms and devices. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjld57EhqjG8jNMxK9CvJb7d9KwbRonZ9yWTIH3krXg87Khs86SYQQnVJkDG1EMi8KSe0ViSm4ncg6yqkJuoGnO1BlIB5S0vOP5zZDScZPPLnBmc-hSw3bKkfdPSNMwsVUMYXD7bx5kk_g/s1600/IMG_0990.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjld57EhqjG8jNMxK9CvJb7d9KwbRonZ9yWTIH3krXg87Khs86SYQQnVJkDG1EMi8KSe0ViSm4ncg6yqkJuoGnO1BlIB5S0vOP5zZDScZPPLnBmc-hSw3bKkfdPSNMwsVUMYXD7bx5kk_g/s200/IMG_0990.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The initial members of the team were
Will Walmsley, Xavier Snellgrove and myself. Severin Smith joined the team
later as a co-founder. Will, Xavier, and Severin remain a core member of the
company. I've taken a step back as and I am acting as a scientific advisor to
the company. The company, in the meantime, has grown to include more
developers, designers, as well as marking, communications and business
development people.</span></div>
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<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Albrecht: </span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Why did you go with crowdfunding? What were the
advantages for you over other funding approaches?</span></i></div>
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<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Khai: </span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Of course, there is the financial benefits of crowdfunding. Because it's
obvious, it probably does not need to be discussed. But there are several other
reasons that might not be as clear, yet are important to consider.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One advantage with crowdfunding is
that it is full of people who want to support new ideas. In a sense, these are
people who are likely to be early adopters of the technology. They might be
technology savvy. And they might be people who are open to the possibility that
the product is still be refined.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A second advantage with crowdfunding
is the buzz that it provides for the product. For Minuum, while the
crowdfunding campaign occurred, the Youtube video about the product was watched
by over a million people (there were two versions of the video because the
audio in the initial version needed to be improved--the combined viewership of
the two videos went over a million in a few weeks). This helped to advertise
the product. The media also caught wind of the campaign and helped to promote
awareness about the product because of the crowdfunding effort as well.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I think the final advantage is that
it provides a way for gaining feedback about the product/idea from the
potential users while the development of the product is still occurring. That
can help to shape the product.</span></div>
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<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Albrecht:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Can you give a short overview of your timeline … from
idea, to running the indiegogo campaign, to delivering the final products?</span></i></div>
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<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Khai:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> The timeline actually started well before the campaign. For Minuum, the
timeline might be somewhat unique as well. But the timeline went like
this. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I taught an HCI course that Will
Walmsley took. For the course, students were asked to develop and evaluate an
"eyes-free typing method." Will and his project team worked on a
rotational gesture-based keyboard. The basic premise of the keyboard is that
the user holds the phone in their hand. The user rotates their wrist along the
forearm's axis to select letters (arranged alphabetically), and taps the screen
to type that letter. As you can imagine, it's hard to imagine the user being
able to easily and accurately selecting a letter in this way. He and his team
designed and developed a rough prototype which demonstrated that with a
disambiguation engine behind it, it was possible to handle the imprecisions
(i.e., errors) involved with being able to correctly select letters using wrist
rotations. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The technique was interesting enough
that Will and I continued to work on it as a research project. Over this period
of time, we brought on another student in the lab (Xavier Snellgrove). Using an
iterative design process over the course of a year, we continued to develop,
evaluate and refine the prototype in numerous ways, including: dramatically
improving the disambiguation algorithm, supporting more input gestures,
providing auditory feedback and minimal visual feedback, and using two
different alphabet layouts (a layout which adapted the familiar
"QWERTY" layout to a single dimension and an expert/optimal
"ENBUD" layout). The research was published in a TOCHI 2014 paper,
but the interesting things that we learned were people could learn to use the
method to perform eyes-free typing and that users were able to use the QWERTY
layout to achieve comparable input rates to the optimal ENBUD layout (thus, the
user's familiarity with QWERTY could be leveraged rather than requiring
the user to learn a completely new layout).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The point of explaining the above is
to provide some context for what happens next.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Once we completed the Rotext
prototype, we thought it was an interesting eyes-free typing method and thought
about turning it into a product. Will was still a Master's student (and
furthermore, he was not my Masters student) and needed to finish his Master's
degree. I was also going to do my sabbatical leave at UC Irvine. So while we
were interested in commercializing, we decided to wait until he finished his
Master's before proceeding. However, when I started my sabbatical, I was
contacted by the partnership office at University of Toronto. I was told that
the university was starting a program to help incubate and commercialize early
stage technology that summer. They were interested in supporting one of my
projects. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This lead me to have a conversation
with Will about whether he would be interested in going forward with
commercializing, what we would commercialize, and what our timeline would be
like. While we thought eyes-free typing was interesting, we felt that it would
be a hard interaction method for many people to be able to learn and adopt. We
felt that the most interesting part of the work was the disambiguation engine's
ability to support imprecise typing. Furthermore, we felt that the
disambiguation engine could be used to support typing along any one dimensional
axis. I had also attempted another startup a few years earlier on the 1Line
Keyboard (a concept that we studied in a UIST 2009 paper). While that startup
effort was not nearly as successful, I had stumbled into an interesting user
problem: how to give the user more screenspace while typing. We targetted the
tablet platform with the 1Line keyboard, which was only still growing at the
time. So as a result, the 1Line company never picked up the momentum we had
hoped for it. However, Will and I thought that the concept of using his
disambiguation engine on a reduced size keyboard be really useful for mobile
phones, which has a very small screen and so any added screen space we could
give back to the applications in use would be really valuable. We decided
to call the product Minuum - because we were designing a mini sized keyboard
with keys laid along a single continuum. We also felt that this keyboard could
be the product that helps users become familiar to concept of imprecise typing
along a single axis, and then they could adapt and transition that typing
practice over to other devices/platforms/form factors (such as, typing on a
small watch or gesture-based typing like the Rotext work).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We entered the UTEST program that
summer to begin designing the Minuum keyboard. Over the course of the
summer, Will and I developed and refined our concepts for the Minuum keyboard
and the SDK which would allow us and other developers to use the engine to
support imprecise 1-dimensional typing on other devices/platforms/form factors.
It was over the summer that we started to think about crowdfunding as the way
to launch the product and bring awareness to the product and the company. Will
and I started some high-level plans about what the crowdfunding campaign might
involve, but it wasn't until we had the prototype that details of the
crowdfunding effort was thought out more.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One of the reasons why we decided to
go with crowdfunding was because the UTEST program gave us some initial funding
to help us pay Will for the summer and fall. This meant that we could afford to
ask for not a huge amount of money from the crowdfunding campaign to complete
the product. So basically we were working in stealth mode the summer and fall
of that year. We spent a significant amount of time on the keyboard design, the
various features we were going to support. Will then started to port the engine
so that it works on a number of platforms (including Android) and I developed
the Android input method. By the end of the year we had a mostly demonstrable
prototype. It wasn't a finished product, but it was close enough and
became the premise for what we showed in the crowdfuding video. When the next
year rolled around, I had returned to Toronto. Xavier had joined the team and
they worked on the launch.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We had to start to put together a
website, develop the concept video, bring on people to help with marketing and
communications (press releases, etc). I remember we had set the launch date to
be early in the year, but we ended up delaying it because getting all these
materials ready took a significant effort. Just to give you an example, the
video wasn't finished until the early morning of the day of the launch. We
still ended up needing to update the audio track in the video to make it easier
to comprehend a day or two after the launch. We ended up launching mid
March (instead of earlier) and the campaign ran for a month.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">With the launch came a lot of press
and a number of people/companies contacting us. While Will and the team took
all the press requests, feedback about the idea was also coming in. This really
helped to provide an understanding of what people liked and wanted/asked for,
etc.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What's involved in releasing a
product is making the software/system run robustly. This is quite different from
creating a research prototype. Coding and testing of the product, tracking of
bugs, etc. is quite important and requires a lot of resources (including time).
So while it seemed like a lot of time often goes by before a
product actually gets released after we hear about it initially, it's
primarily because taking it from a concept/research prototype to a deliverable
product still requires a significant amount of development/testing/debugging.
For us, the beta version was release June of that year (or about 3 months after
the launch).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The team has gone onto participating
in the Y Combinator accelerator program and grown in size some (adding
developers). They've developed an iPhone version of the keyboard. They've
developed smartwatch versions of the system demonstrated additional
experimental uses of the SDK (such as Glass typing, or typing using a remote
control, or a leap motion device, etc.). They've done a marvelous job of
growing the company and the product in exciting ways. More information about
all of these different efforts can be found: </span><a href="http://minuum.com/mediaroom/" target="_blank"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://minuum.com/mediaroom/</span></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> .</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<i>
</i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Albrecht:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> With crowdfunding you have customers for a product
often already at the idea stage. How does this impact the product development
and the final implementation?</span></i></div>
<i>
</i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Khai:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> User feedback at any stage of development is always valuable. The most
important one that crowdfunding provides is whether potential users find the
overall concept appealing or not. Different from traditional product
development, where we might have fully built the product, then try to put it on
the market and see if people *might* buy the product, crowdfunding allows for
companies to get insight into whether such customers exist already.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">During the campaign, funders will
discuss features that they are excited about and what they want and hope to
have included in the product. The funders also get early access to the
product (the beta version). This provides them with the opportunity to give
us additional feedback before the first non-beta version is completed. All of
this information helps us to understand user requirements and prioritize
features. Obviously, not everything can be included in the initial version that
gets released, but we can develop a list of features that gets added to
subsequent versions.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<i>
</i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Albrecht:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> You funded the development of software. In your
research you created typical ubicomp systems – what challenges do you see in
using crowd funding for ubicomp products that include hardware and software?</span></i></div>
<i>
</i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Khai:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> This is a really interesting question. Minuum was primarily a software
product, which has very different costs to a hardware product. In particular,
producing hardware in certain volume changes the costs involved. The same is
not true with software. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So in a sense, funding the
development of a hardware product is more difficult. But what I think
crowdfunding does for the funding of a product that includes a hardware
component is that it mitigates some of the expense incurred for initially
producing at smaller volumes. What makes it hard for a company, when
hardware is involved, is that the manufacturing of a large amount of their
product might not be wise early on. The challenge is then of course the
pricing associated with the product, and what to ask from crowdfunders so that
it seems reasonable. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Albrecht</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">: How is crowdfunding changing how we make ubiquitous computing
products? Are there new classes of products that become economically viable?</span></i></div>
<i>
</i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Khai:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> I think crowdfunding allows for us to take concepts that we have done
some basic research and development on, and turn into actual products when
previously we would need to secure the funds to do so first. Even if we know
that an idea can work and can be turned into a product, can we find people who
believe in us enough to fund that development? Crowdfunding allows for enough
people who believe in the idea to share some of that cost. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ultimately, I think this can benefit
ubicomp products that have some hardware component. The cost to create that
product is high. We can show people large bulky prototypes of the same concept,
but would a large bulky prototype be enough to convince an investor to provide
the significant funding needed for the development of that product? Maybe, if
they could be convinced that there is a particularly large market for the
finished product. And that's what I envision crowdfunding doing, it helps to
incur some of that cost. It helps to demonstrate market size. And this helps
the company grow and develop the products enough so that they can reach the
final design, price point, experience etc. that would be otherwise hard to
achieve for their product.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<i>
</i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Albrecht:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> With crowdfunding you give your idea away (or at
least you make it public) before you can deliver it. Were you afraid of others
being faster in creating "your" product and having it on the market
first? Did you take precautions to avoid competition?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Khai:</span></u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> We had patents filed already before the launch. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We also didn't want to overpromise
and not be able to deliver as well. So we had many of the capabilities and much
of the backend for the product created already. They were not fully tested.
They didn't do everything the released version supported, and they didn't do
everything that is supported in subsequent versions either. But enough of it
was completed that we knew a) we could do it, and b) we were "months"
away from an actual release. That would make it hard for others to catch up.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw5iOQOA0CJkU8aWux_bpentexkgSfW9SrHetHvtUnmXQ6_T6zyFXQBY2dZrlqso-imhxXtWASx3jVrwRjeDx1z5PewaZFTX_OrHgTa-M8UwzMgBgKq0brIwTS6cUDZ-T0HtntOAho5gI/s1600/khai-kinton.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw5iOQOA0CJkU8aWux_bpentexkgSfW9SrHetHvtUnmXQ6_T6zyFXQBY2dZrlqso-imhxXtWASx3jVrwRjeDx1z5PewaZFTX_OrHgTa-M8UwzMgBgKq0brIwTS6cUDZ-T0HtntOAho5gI/s200/khai-kinton.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Short bio:</u><br />
Khai N. Truong,
Ph.D. is a professor at the University of Toronto. His research lies at the
intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Ubiquitous Computing
(UbiComp), specifically examining the mutual impact of usability and technical
constraints on the design of applications and interaction techniques for novel,
off-the-desktop computing systems that may be commonplace in 5-10 years. He
received his PhD in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.<br /></div>
Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-59141141593574422312013-08-23T16:00:00.002+01:002013-08-23T16:00:46.583+01:00Usable Privacy - did you install the seat belt in your car?In a recent chat with the journalist <a href="http://www.ewo.name/">Eva Wolfangel</a> we discussed why digital security and privacy is so little usable and why many computer scientists seem not to understand the problem. Reading several articles in newspapers I got really annoyed by many of my CS colleagues who:<br />
(1) <b>blame the user</b> for not taking enough care of the data and for making little effort in installing the encryption modules into their email programs and<br />
(2)<b> focusing on new technologies </b>and better encryption and better algorithms to improve security and not considering the entire system including the human user.<br />
<br />
Eva wrote an interesting and <a href="http://www.spektrum.de/alias/informatik/sicherheitsgurt-fuers-world-wide-web/1203859">comprehensive article on usable security in Spectrum der Wissenschaft</a> (it is German and the <a href="http://zeitenspiegel.de/de/projekte/reportagen/sicherheitsgurt-fuers-world-wide-web/article/">full version</a> is online at her website). In the following I am sharing the some of the thougts..<br />
<br />
<u>@1: Mount the Seatbelts Yourself </u><br />
Technically I agree that encryption is not really complicated to install and that most people using computers <b>could </b>learn how to keep their data safe and how to communicate using encryption. From my experience in the real world I see that they chose not to learn it and I completely disagree that this is the user’s fault. Making the end user responsible for security and privacy is in my view entirely and utterly wrong.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQU8EI-GDLcqI-A51J3mbmIf0_z5B9Af7vKDwbWGwP92eHZ3wbpOyQtcgoKRSlqb7arSn4lNbZFgUjalaQfNAFH_S6UwSAlkT3C_iMuch38Vo-TSxmdr496mAQ5021Q2_PNXIoHfJEKXA/s1600/450px-Seat_belt_BX.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQU8EI-GDLcqI-A51J3mbmIf0_z5B9Af7vKDwbWGwP92eHZ3wbpOyQtcgoKRSlqb7arSn4lNbZFgUjalaQfNAFH_S6UwSAlkT3C_iMuch38Vo-TSxmdr496mAQ5021Q2_PNXIoHfJEKXA/s200/450px-Seat_belt_BX.jpg" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo by Wikipedia/Michiel1972</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Consider this (obviously fictional) example that applies “user responsibly for safety” to another widely used product and shows how strange the idea is:<br />
<i>When you get a new car there are already fixtures and wholes prepared where you can attach the seat belts. In order to get the seats belts which you can than mount in your car, you just have to fill in a post-card (you get with the car) and send it to the manufacturer of your favorite seat belts. You get then the safety belts mailed to you home – free of charge – together with a 2-page manual how to fix them in the car. The only thing you need is a screwdriver and a wrench. It is so easy that really everyone can make their car safe within 30 minutes.</i><br />
<br />
It is very clear and little surprising to anyone that this is not how we do it with cars. We have agreed that the car company is responsible for the safety of the car. Economically the above example would make it cheaper for the manufacturer – probably not all people would claim their seatbelt and the company saves the effort in mounting it. Nevertheless car companies still have to provide you with a build in seat belt if they want to sell their car in Germany…<br />
<br />
<u>@2: Live in a Bunker </u><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsPFNB61_YmGZ72KPsFTYpeno5OZo4lcwnsJdGmgQI8m5aJPR618pBqmsVuyQg3eTLF2WLZUDLjciVx2S4h_xgaGpoStAz30OVUpkLtNhO3Uaswbux3UEOINO773-6W-TTT3l4SwJVhfU/s1600/800px-Maginot_line_12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsPFNB61_YmGZ72KPsFTYpeno5OZo4lcwnsJdGmgQI8m5aJPR618pBqmsVuyQg3eTLF2WLZUDLjciVx2S4h_xgaGpoStAz30OVUpkLtNhO3Uaswbux3UEOINO773-6W-TTT3l4SwJVhfU/s200/800px-Maginot_line_12.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
Again from a technical perspective it is of great importance that the algorithms are secure and the encryption is strong. Nevertheless this is in my view not the key problem. Take the following example. What is better a 20 random character string password or a 4 digit PIN? From a technical perspective this is clear – however most people will be able to remember a 4 digit PIN (without writing it down) but not many will be able to remember a 20 random character string. Hence the overall system with the PIN – if well designed – may be “better” than the apparently save password based solution (as people will write it down or email it to themselves).<br />
<br />
In the physical world we are used to complex (social) systems that allow us to live in a secure environment. In Germany people generally live in houses and flats where people who are determined can break in (e.g. using a sledge hammer on the door, a stone from the front yard on the window, or using more subtle methods). Even though people could fortify their house most people I know value their windows and easy access to their house and do not live in a bunker or add seven additional locks to their front doors – they balance risk and comfort. In traditional environments we rely on the whole system: we expect that neighbors will keep an open eye, forced entry will leave traces, police will try to find a burglar and that they will be punished, and that for most people the risk of committing a crime is not worth the potential benefit.<br />
<br />
From a society perspective we similarly balance risk and freedom. If a purse is stolen in a small town the police will not seal off the area and check each person and search each house. Traditionally this is not possible due to the effort involved but also due to our understanding that the actions taken by law enforcement has to follow the proportionality principle. In Germany we do not consider imposing a curfew, even though one could imagine that this would even more reduce the crime rate.<br />
<br />
I think we should take the physical and social world as example and inspiration to create usable and secure systems that offer privacy to the end user.<br />
<br />
Overall I think security and privacy in digital systems is much more a human computer interaction problem than most people (especially from the security community) think! If you read German you may want to look at <a href="http://www.spektrum.de/alias/informatik/sicherheitsgurt-fuers-world-wide-web/1203859">the article Eva Wolfangel</a> wrote on the topic.
Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-12038426063390071032013-06-21T11:39:00.005+01:002013-06-21T12:13:41.268+01:00Reading List: Developing Ubiquitous Computing Devices<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglDSOlNUfiQbSZhcmOgoQGtWg_MmTWaC0xG5lR5kaggFW1LL2XKANtB8s5NtPK88QR9g9IKAZUEGO7MuaPPyg2O8PH5Mp306rE7DheVC047meIcgm4rLFQILbf8013dLWcEAWMZC1a5YE/s1600/all-ubi.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="122" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglDSOlNUfiQbSZhcmOgoQGtWg_MmTWaC0xG5lR5kaggFW1LL2XKANtB8s5NtPK88QR9g9IKAZUEGO7MuaPPyg2O8PH5Mp306rE7DheVC047meIcgm4rLFQILbf8013dLWcEAWMZC1a5YE/s400/all-ubi.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Together with Thomas Kubitza
I was teaching a class in the <a href="http://www.ubioulu.fi/en/UBI-summer-school-2013">UBI summer school</a> on Developing Ubiquitous Computing Devices. The summer school was held in Oulu and organized by <a href="http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~skidi/">Timo Ojala</a>.<br />
<br />
In total the summer school include the following 4 courses:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>EXPERIENCE-DRIVEN DESIGN OF UBIQUITOUS INTERACTIONS IN URBAN SPACES
Prof. Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Tampere University of Technology, Finland &
Dr. Jonna Häkkilä, University of Oulu, Finland</li>
<li>DESIGNING MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY INTERFACES
Prof. Mark Billinghurst, University of Canterbury, New Zealand </li>
<li>DEVELOPING UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING DEVICES
Prof. Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart, Germany </li>
<li>URBAN RESOURCE NETWORKS
Prof. Malcolm McCullough, University of Michigan, USA </li>
</ul>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbWN7vWZBVngPUDs0_p0GIFlm3bJWsRhLlVMG_CZsxztvKlCOkaxjEsj4Jesoe5iplhqDjF6lH_dEcQxu0wcANKO2UTwRDGM0qsnXfxYVj8Thyphenhyphen0oq4_tlu_mhkmqe7XVZT0dod8puqFqA/s1600/albrecht9018050728_3947913ee3_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbWN7vWZBVngPUDs0_p0GIFlm3bJWsRhLlVMG_CZsxztvKlCOkaxjEsj4Jesoe5iplhqDjF6lH_dEcQxu0wcANKO2UTwRDGM0qsnXfxYVj8Thyphenhyphen0oq4_tlu_mhkmqe7XVZT0dod8puqFqA/s200/albrecht9018050728_3947913ee3_o.jpg" width="126" /></a>There was more than work... if you are curious have a look at flickr for <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mkukka/sets/72157634070930142/with/9018040484/">photos</a> and <a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/ubisummerschool2013/pool/with/9018040484/">more photos</a>.<br />
<br />
As some people asked for the reading list for our course on <a href="http://www.ubioulu.fi/en/UBI-summer-school-2013-workshops#CW">Developing Ubiquitous Computing Devices</a>, I thought I post it here.... The <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5633502/web/ReadingList-Ubicomp-Devices-v1.pdf">reading list is also available as PDF</a> for download.<br />
<br />
The reading list comprises 4 areas that are relevant to our course. We expect that you have come across the original paper by Marc Weiser, introducing the concept of ubiquitous computing [1].<br />
<br />
In the first part we have included papers that provide an overview of interaction concepts that are relevant in the context of ubiquitous computing. In particular this is tangible interaction [2a] [2b], reality based interaction [3], embedded interaction [4]. The concept of informative art [5] is introduced as well as the notion of persuasive technologies [16].This part is concluded with an overview of interaction with computers in the 21st century [6].<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_Ul7p37LukpT09JlLQQDVRn4uV6Nw0-H77hyZTY8_F2YGuR1_9SvuKw2lM-lxKHOorvdGQjul9KDZ_9xCk6aEeUFeJkdrAR983oRcIxVO0CshQHmGe2cLXgEPega4Et5SAN8uMSf8G3c/s1600/device9034627547_8cef2ed62f_h.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_Ul7p37LukpT09JlLQQDVRn4uV6Nw0-H77hyZTY8_F2YGuR1_9SvuKw2lM-lxKHOorvdGQjul9KDZ_9xCk6aEeUFeJkdrAR983oRcIxVO0CshQHmGe2cLXgEPega4Et5SAN8uMSf8G3c/s200/device9034627547_8cef2ed62f_h.jpg" width="200" /></a>In the second part we have included a paper on how to create smart devices [7], which gives an overview of sensors that may be useful for creating novel and reactive devices. In [8] sensing is extended to context and context-awareness. In the third part we introduce the .NET Gadgeteer platform [9] and show some trends in the development of ubiquitous computing devices: how can we create new products once we can fabricate things [10] and enclosures [10b] and how ubicomp technologies enable new devices and devices concepts [11].<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBIwXlOygNNs7hNw66p0fXRNGgRRu_E7Z7-wzUfBYASentmo_QnGylPIYAGlyfFqecsm_gGUiful_-xV5EiqeUKzM54RwPAt4ZJLMmNXorye3CAJlm3qKIh16QWi_6CxUzOlWsZziDFQM/s1600/rainbow9030664539_969501ef97_h.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBIwXlOygNNs7hNw66p0fXRNGgRRu_E7Z7-wzUfBYASentmo_QnGylPIYAGlyfFqecsm_gGUiful_-xV5EiqeUKzM54RwPAt4ZJLMmNXorye3CAJlm3qKIh16QWi_6CxUzOlWsZziDFQM/s200/rainbow9030664539_969501ef97_h.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
The final part provides some ideas for application scenarios that we plan to assess during the course. In [12] a concept of how to change a bed into a communication media is presented and in [13] a social alarm clock is presented. A recent study [14] shows the impact of technology on communication and in [15] an overview of novel alarm clocks and sleep monitoring devices is given.<br />
<br />
<b>References</b><br />
[1] Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st century. Scientific american,265(3), 94-104. <a href="http://wiki.daimi.au.dk/pca/_files/weiser-orig.pdf">http://wiki.daimi.au.dk/pca/_files/weiser-orig.pdf</a><br />
[2a] Ishii, H., & Ullmer, B. (1997, March). Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 234-241). ACM. <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/258549.258715">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/258549.258715</a> <a href="http://labs.rightnow.com/colloquium/papers/tangiblebits.pdf">http://labs.rightnow.com/colloquium/papers/tangiblebits.pdf</a><br />
[2b] Ishii, H. (2008, February). Tangible bits: beyond pixels. In Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction (pp. xv-xxv). ACM. <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1347390.1347392">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1347390.1347392</a><br />
[3] Jacob, R. J., Girouard, A., Hirshfield, L. M., Horn, M. S., Shaer, O., Solovey, E. T., & Zigelbaum, J. (2008, April). Reality-based interaction: a framework for post-WIMP interfaces. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 201-210). ACM. <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357089">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357089</a> <a href="http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~audrey/papers/chi08.pdf">http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~audrey/papers/chi08.pdf</a><br />
[4] Kranz, M., Holleis, P., & Schmidt, A. (2010). Embedded interaction: Interacting with the internet of things. Internet Computing, IEEE, 14(2), 46-53. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MIC.2009.141">http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MIC.2009.141</a> <a href="http://pure.ltu.se/portal/files/39756776/FINAL_PRINT_w2iot_preprint.pdf">http://pure.ltu.se/portal/files/39756776/FINAL_PRINT_w2iot_preprint.pdf</a><br />
[5] Ferscha, A. (2007). Informative art display metaphors. In Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Ambient Interaction (pp. 82-92). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. <a href="http://www.pervasive.jku.at/Research/Publications/_Documents/InformativeArtDisplayMetaphors-ferscha2007.pdf">http://www.pervasive.jku.at/Research/Publications/_Documents/InformativeArtDisplayMetaphors-ferscha2007.pdf</a><br />
[6] Schmidt, A., Pfleging, B., Alt, F., Sahami, A., & Fitzpatrick, G. (2012). Interacting with 21st-Century Computers. Pervasive Computing, IEEE, 11(1), 22-31. <a href="http://www.hcilab.org/wp-content/uploads/schmidt-ieeepc-21century.pdf%20http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2011.81">http://www.hcilab.org/wp-content/uploads/schmidt-ieeepc-21century.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2011.81</a><br />
[7] Schmidt, A., & Van Laerhoven, K. (2001). How to build smart appliances?.Personal Communications, IEEE, 8(4), 66-71. <a href="http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~albrecht/pubs/pdf/schmidt_ieee_pc_08-2001.pdf">http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~albrecht/pubs/pdf/schmidt_ieee_pc_08-2001.pdf</a><br />
[8] Schmidt, A. (2013). Context-Aware Computing: Context-Awareness, Context-Aware User Interfaces, and Implicit Interaction. The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.
<a href="http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/context-aware_computing.html">http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/context-aware_computing.html</a><br />
[9] Villar, N., Scott, J., Hodges, S., Hammil, K., & Miller, C. (2012). . NET gadgeteer: a platform for custom devices. In Pervasive Computing (pp. 216-233). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/163162/Gadgeteer%20Pervasive%202012%20Proof.pdf">http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/163162/Gadgeteer%20Pervasive%202012%20Proof.pdf</a><br />
[10] Schmidt, A., Doring, T., & Sylvester, A. (2011). Changing How We Make and Deliver Smart Devices: When Can I Print Out My New Phone?. Pervasive Computing, IEEE, 10(4), 6-9. <a href="http://www.hci.simtech.uni-stuttgart.de/wp-content/uploads/schmidt2011changing.pdf">http://www.hci.simtech.uni-stuttgart.de/wp-content/uploads/schmidt2011changing.pdf </a><a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2011.68">http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2011.68</a><br />
[10b] Weichel C., Lau M., Gellersen,H. (2013). Enclosed: A Component-Centric Interface for Designing Prototype Enclosures. Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction conference (TEI 2013) <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2460625.2460659">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2460625.2460659</a> <a href="http://www.csweichel.de/papers/2013-enclosed.pdf">http://www.csweichel.de/papers/2013-enclosed.pdf</a><br />
[11] Hodges, S., Villar, N., Scott, J., & Schmidt, A. (2012). A New Era for Ubicomp Development. Pervasive Computing, IEEE, 11(1), 5-9. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2012.1">http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2012.1</a> <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/163175/ANewEraForUbiCompDevelopment-IEEEPervasiveComputing.pdf">http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/163175/ANewEraForUbiCompDevelopment-IEEEPervasiveComputing.pdf</a><br />
[12] Dodge, C. (1997, March). The bed: a medium for intimate communication. InCHI'97 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems: looking to the future (pp. 371-372). ACM. <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1120212.1120439">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1120212.1120439</a><br />
[13] Schmidt, A., Shirazi, A. S., & van Laerhoven, K. (2012). Are You in Bed with Technology?. Pervasive Computing, IEEE, 11(4), 4-7. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2012.63">http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2012.63</a><br />
[14] Schmidt, A. (2006). Network alarm clock (The 3AD International Design Competition). Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 10(2-3), 191-192. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0022-y">http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0022-y</a> <a href="http://old.hcilab.org/documents/Schmidt_NetworkAlarmClock.pdf">http://old.hcilab.org/documents/Schmidt_NetworkAlarmClock.pdf</a><br />
[15] Shirazi, A. S., Clawson, J., Hassanpour, Y., Tourian, M. J., Schmidt, A., Chi, E. H., Borazio, M., & Van Laerhoven, K. (2013). Already Up? Using Mobile Phones to Track & Share Sleep Behavior. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1071581913000244">http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1071581913000244</a><br />
[16] Fogg, B. J. (2009, April). A behavior model for persuasive design. In Proceedings of the 4th international conference on persuasive technology (p. 40). ACM. <a href="http://bjfogg.com/fbm_files/page4_1.pdf">http://bjfogg.com/fbm_files/page4_1.pdf</a><br />
<br />
<b>Appendix</b>: .NET Gadgeteer Links (optional)<br />
<ul>
<li>Home website of the .NET Gadgeteer project
<a href="http://www.netmf.com/gadgeteer/">http://www.netmf.com/gadgeteer/</a> </li>
<li>Starting point for the hardware we use in the workshop (FEZ Spider Kit), follow steps 1-3 (choose VS C# Express 2010) to setup your development environment for the workshop in advance (only for MS Windows)
<a href="http://www.ghielectronics.com/support/.net-micro-framework">http://www.ghielectronics.com/support/.net-micro-framework</a></li>
<li>MSDN Gadgeteer Blog – What is going on?!
<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/net_gadgeteer/">http://blogs.msdn.com/b/net_gadgeteer/</a> </li>
<li>Get an overview of available Hardware! Think about what you always wanted to build!
<a href="http://gadgeteering.net/hardware">http://gadgeteering.net/hardware</a> </li>
<li>Very useful Gadgeteer hints by Steven Johnston
<a href="http://stevenjohnston.co.uk/category/net-gadgeteer/">http://stevenjohnston.co.uk/category/net-gadgeteer/</a> </li>
<li>Various interesting Gadgeteer projects
<a href="http://mikedodaro.net/">http://mikedodaro.net/</a> </li>
<li>First Gadgeteer Project Video by Nic Villar
<a href="http://www.ghielectronics.com/docs/43/first-gadgeteer-project">http://www.ghielectronics.com/docs/43/first-gadgeteer-project</a>
</li>
</ul>
Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-58154686978312160342013-06-04T22:09:00.002+01:002013-06-04T22:15:17.154+01:00Keynote at PerDis2013: Proxemic Interactions by Saul Greenberg<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiK_-Fh1V4o-y1kM1TMZIkmXtSQnnDwqO7mOyyJ0-bOfI4HsULo4lfu5yR4lU0fW71sOVOFYOoz99coY39N4TGGWTkshsNZ_6sQO1Alb8cBldq5ntyU6VlZAmIA5v21KSLCJSGTIL5Q5A/s1600/saul-1-993091_10201342560954243_1214817367_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiK_-Fh1V4o-y1kM1TMZIkmXtSQnnDwqO7mOyyJ0-bOfI4HsULo4lfu5yR4lU0fW71sOVOFYOoz99coY39N4TGGWTkshsNZ_6sQO1Alb8cBldq5ntyU6VlZAmIA5v21KSLCJSGTIL5Q5A/s200/saul-1-993091_10201342560954243_1214817367_n.jpg" width="200" /></a><a href="http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~saul/wiki/pmwiki.php">Saul Greenberg</a> presented the opening keynote at <a href="http://pervasivedisplays.org/2013/">PerDis2013</a>, the <a href="http://pervasivedisplays.org/">second international symposium on pervasive displays</a>, held at Google in Mountain View, US.<br />
<br />
Saul gave a brief history motivating the challenges that arise from the move to interactive ubiquitous computing environments. The degrees of freedom for interaction, when moving from graphical user interfaces to ubiquitous computing environments, are massively increased and the social context becomes central.<br />
<br />
The other line of motivation Saul used is the notion of proxemics as studied in social science. The primary element is the distance between people. By physical proximity a lot in the interaction between people is determined. Interpersonal relationships are at the heart of the theory by Edward Hall, who explored this already in the 1960ties ([1], for a short overview and introduction see the Wiki-Pages on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_T._Hall">Edward Hall</a> and on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxemics">Proxemics</a>). It is interesting (and not undisputed) to see that people in computer science have moved the notion of proxemics beyond human-to-human interaction to include technologies.<br />
<br />
Saul outlined the dimensions for proximic interactions:<br />
<ul>
<li>Distance </li>
<li>Movement </li>
<li>Location </li>
<li>Orientation </li>
<li>Identity </li>
</ul>
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSR4KfB1KzuAsiPXXlTlV_v0iHF6D0vDxQKPRWQkcXoRZZTIDi5s4HqMRRPxE_pg_vp98XjomX74gg_lz2jO-u6sWWKG2FXrKqsEMGmfDN6cuVLp2yPeRfuPYCHDqNreUJzynrrhaRjE0/s1600/saul-2-993091_10201342560954243_1214817367_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSR4KfB1KzuAsiPXXlTlV_v0iHF6D0vDxQKPRWQkcXoRZZTIDi5s4HqMRRPxE_pg_vp98XjomX74gg_lz2jO-u6sWWKG2FXrKqsEMGmfDN6cuVLp2yPeRfuPYCHDqNreUJzynrrhaRjE0/s200/saul-2-993091_10201342560954243_1214817367_n.jpg" width="200" /></a>In a paper in ACM Interactions Saul provides a really good and easy to read introductory text to proximic interactions – which is also well suitable for teaching [2]. There is more on the dimensions, the overall concept of proximic interactions, and potential applications in a 2010 paper they presented at ITS [3].
One of the aspects they have looked into in their work is at supporting proxemic interactions through a toolkit [4].
For more details we can be looking forward to the PhD thesis of <a href="http://www.nicolaimarquardt.com/">Nicolai Marquardt</a>, who worked in Saul’s group and who will defend in a few weeks.<br />
<br />
Proxiemic interaction is a hot topic and several researchers have started to explore this space. There is also a Dagstuhl Seminar on the topic later this year (<a href="http://www.dagstuhl.de/13452">http://www.dagstuhl.de/13452</a>) orgamized by Saul Greenberg, Kasper Hornbæk, Aaron Quigley, and Harald Reiterer.<br />
<br />
[1] Hall, E. T., & Hall, E. T. (1969). The hidden dimension (p. 119). New York: Anchor Books.
<a href="http://courses.arch.ntua.gr/fsr/137555/Hall-The-Hidden-Dimension.pdf">http://courses.arch.ntua.gr/fsr/137555/Hall-The-Hidden-Dimension.pdf</a><br />
[2] Greenberg, S., Marquardt, N., Ballendat, T., Diaz-Marino, R., & Wang, M. (2011). Proxemic interactions: the new ubicomp?. interactions, 18(1), 42-50. <a href="http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/grouplab/uploads/Publications/Publications/2011-ProxemicInteraction.Interactions.pdf">http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/grouplab/uploads/Publications/Publications/2011-ProxemicInteraction.Interactions.pdf</a><br />
[3] Ballendat, T., Marquardt, N., & Greenberg, S. (2010, November). Proxemic interaction: designing for a proximity and orientation-aware environment. In ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (pp. 121-130). ACM. <a href="http://www.cs.ucf.edu/courses/cap6121/spr11/readings/proxemic.pdf">http://www.cs.ucf.edu/courses/cap6121/spr11/readings/proxemic.pdf</a><br />
[4] Marquardt, N., Diaz-Marino, R., Boring, S., & Greenberg, S. (2011, October). The proximity toolkit: prototyping proxemic interactions in ubiquitous computing ecologies. In Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (pp. 315-326). ACM. <a href="http://curis.ku.dk/ws/files/44312111/marquardt.UIST_2011.proximity_toolkit.pdf">http://curis.ku.dk/ws/files/44312111/marquardt.UIST_2011.proximity_toolkit.pdf</a><br />
<br />
<br />Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-73037521635501070922012-12-17T08:51:00.000+01:002012-12-17T08:51:04.812+01:00Silvia Miksch talking about time oriented visual analytics<br />
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It seems this term we picked a good slot for the lecture. On Thursday we had <a href="http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~silvia">Prof. Silvia Miksch</a> from Vienna University of Technology visiting our institute. We took this chance for another guest lecture in my advanced HCI class. Silvia presented a talk with the title “A Matter of Time: Interactive Visual Analytics of Time-Oriented Data and Information”. She first introduced the notion of interactive visual analytics and then systematically showed how time oriented data can be visually presented.<br />
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I really liked how Silvia motivated visual analytics and could not resist to adapt it with a Christmas theme. The picture shows three representations (1) numbers, always 3 grouped together, (2) a plot of the numbers where the first is the label and the second and the third are coordinates, and (3) a line connecting the labels in order. Her example was much nicer, but I missed to take a photo. And it is obvious that you do not put it on the same slide... Nevertheless I think even this simple Christmas tree example shows the power of visual analytics. This will go in my slide set for presentations in schools ;-)<br />
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If you are more interested in the details of the visualization of time oriented data, please have a look at the following book: Visallization of Time-Oriented Data, by Wolfgang Aigner, Silvia Miksch, Heidrun Schumann, and Christian Tominski. Springer, 2011. <a href="http://www.timeviz.net/">http://www.timeviz.net</a> [2].
After the talk there was an interested discussion about the relationship and fundamental difference between time and space. I think this is worthwhile further discussion.<br />
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Another direction to follow up is tangible (visual) analytics. It would be interesting to assess the contributions to understanding of further modalities when interactively exploring data, e.g. haptics and sound. Some years back Martin Schrittenloher (one of my students in Munich) visited Morten Fjeld for his project thesis and experimented with force feedback sliders [1], … perhaps we should have this as a project topic again! An approach would be to look specifically at the understanding of data when force-feedback is presented on certain dimensions.<br />
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References<br />
[1] Jenaro, J., Shahrokni, A., Schrittenloher, and M., Fjeld, M. 2007. <a href="http://www.t2i.se/pub/papers/IEEE_VR_MRUI07.pdf">One-Dimensional Force Feedback Slider: Digital platform</a>. In Proc. Workshop at the IEEE Virtual Reality 2007 Conference: Mixed Reality User Interfaces: Specification, Authoring, Adaptation (MRUI07), 47-51<br />
[2] Wolfgang Aigner, Silvia Miksch, Heidrun Schumann, and Christian Tominski. Visallization of Time-Oriented Data. Springer, 2011. <a href="http://www.timeviz.net/">http://www.timeviz.net</a>Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-52802764717725075522012-12-11T10:15:00.001+01:002012-12-12T12:00:49.862+01:00A proposal to replace non-archival publicationsIn the CHI community we have the <b>notion of non-archival publications. </b>Some years back this concept may have been good but I find it harder and harder to understand. Over the month I had several people about this concept and in Paris I discussed it with several colleagues, who are involved in SIGCHI. Here are some of the thoughts – hopefully as a starting point for further discussion.<br />
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First a short introduction to the concept of Non-archival publications: non-archival publications in the “CHI world” are papers that are published and shown at the conference, but that must not be held against a later publication. In essence these papers are considered as not-published when reviewing an extended version of the paper. A typical example is to publish a work in progress (WIP) paper in one year showing outlining the concept, the research path you have started to take, and some initial findings. Than in the following year you publish a full paper that includes all the data and a solid analysis. In principles this a great way of doing research, getting feedback from the community on the way, and publishing then larger piece of work. Elba in our group did this very well: a WIP in CHI2010 [1] and then the full paper in CHI2011 [2]. This shows there is value to it and understand the motivation why the concept of non-archival publications was created.
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Over the last years however I have seen a number points that highlight that the concept of non-archival publication is everything but not straightforward to deal with. The following points are from experience in my group over the last years.
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<b>1) Non-archival publications are in fact archival.</b> Once you assign a document a DOI and include them in a digital library (DL) these publications are archived. The purpose of a digital library and the DOI is that things will live on, even if the people’s websites are gone. The point that the authors keep the copyright and can publish it again does not chance the fact that the paper is archived. It is hard to explain someone from another community (e.g. during a TPC meeting of Percom) that there is a paper which has a DOI, is in the ACM DL, it counts into the download and citation statistics of the author in the ACM DL and is indexed by Google Scholar, and yet it has to be considered as not published, when assessing a new publication.
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<b>2) Non-archival publications may be the only publication on a topic</b>. Sometimes people have a really cool idea and some initial work and they publish it as WIP (non-archival). Then over the years the authors do not get around to write the full paper, e.g. because they did not get the funding to do it. Hence the non-archival work in progress paper is the only publication that the authors have about this work. As the believe it is interesting they and probably other people will reference this work – but referencing something that is non-archival is questionable, but not in this case as in fact is archival as it is in the DL with DOI. Here is an example from our own experience: Sometimes back we had in our view a cool idea to chance the way smart objects can be created [3] – we did initial prototypes but did not have funding for the full project (we still work on getting it). The WIP is the only “paper” we “published” on it and hence we keep it in our CVs.
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<b>3) Chances in authorship between non-archival and full paper. </b>Academia is a dynamic environment and hence things are started in one place and continued somewhere else. In this process the people doing the research are very likely to chance. To account for this we typically include a reference to the first non-archival publication to acknowledge the earlier contributions made. We have one example were we had an idea for navigation system that we explored in Munich very superficial and wrote up a WIP [4]. Enrcio then moved on to Lancaster and did a serious system and study – and as he is a nice person he references the WIP to acknowledged that some other people were involved in initial phase of creating the idea [5]. And by doing so he increased Antonio’s and my citation count, as we list the WIP paper on our Google scholar page.
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<b>4) Non-archival publication are part of people’s citation count and h-index.</b> When assessing the performance of individuals academia seems to move more and more towards “measurable” data, hence we see that citation counts and h-index may play a role. I have one “publication”, it was a poster at ISWC 2000 about a wearable RFID reader [6], that has 50+ citations and it hence impacts my h-index (on Google). For ISWC2000 posters were real publications in the IEEE DL, but this could have equally been a WIP at CHI. Hence there is the question: should non-archival material be part of the quantitative assessment of impact?
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I have some further hypothetical points (inspired by the real world) that highlight some of the issues I see with the concept of non-archival publications:
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<b>Scenario A) </b>Researcher X has great idea for a new device and publishes a non-archival paper including the idea, details about the way the implementation, some initial results, and a plan how she will do the study at Conf201X. She has a clear plan to complete the study and publish the full paper at Conf201X+1. She falls short in time due to be ill for a few months and manages to submit only a low quality full paper. Researcher Y talks to Research X at the conference is impressed and reads the non-archival version of the paper. He likes it and has some funds available hence he decides to do a follow-up building on this research. He hires 3 interns for the summer, gets 20 of the devices build, does a great study, and submits a perfect paper. The paper of Researcher Y is accepted and the paper of researcher X is not. My feeling would be that in this case Y should at least reference the non-archival paper of X, hence non-archival papers should be seen as previous work.
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<b>Scenario B) </b>A researcher starts a project, creates a systems and does an initial qualitative study. He publishes the results as non-archival paper (e.g. WIP) including a description of the quantitative study to be conducted. Over the next month he does the quantitative study - it does not provide new insights, but confirms the initial findings. He decides to write a 4 page note in two column format that is over 95% the same text as the 6 page previously published WIP, just with the addition, of one paragraph that a qualitative study was conducted which confirmed the results. In this case having both papers in the digital library feels not write. The obvious solution would be to replace the work in progress by the note.
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<b><span style="background-color: yellow;">Here is a proposal how non-archival publication could be replaced:</span> </b><br />
<ul>
<li>Everything that is published in the (ACM) digital library and which has an DOI is considered an archival publication (as they are in fact are) </li>
<li>Publications carry labels such as WIP, Demo, Note, Full paper, etc. </li>
<li>Scientific communities can decided to have certain venues that can be evolutionary, e.g. for SIGCHI this would be to my current understanding WIP, Interactivity, and workshops. </li>
<li>Evolutionary publications can be replaced by “better” publications by the authors, e.g. an author of a WIP can replace this WIP in the next year with a Full paper or a Note, the DOI stays the same </li>
<li>To ensure accountability (with regard to the DOI) the replaced version remain in the appendix of the new version, e.g. the full paper has then as appendix the WIP it replaces </li>
<li>If evolutionary publications are not replaced by the author they stay as they are and other people have to consider these as previous work </li>
<li>Citations accumulated along the evolutionary path are accumulated on the latest version include. </li>
<li>Authors can decide (e.g. when the project team changes, when the results a contradictory to the initial publication, when significant parts of the system chance, when authors chance) to not go the evolutionary path. In this case they are measured against the state of the art, which includes their own work.
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</ul>
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In the CHI context this could be as follows: you have a WIP in year X, in year X+1 you decided to replace the WIP by the accepted Full paper that extended this WIP, in year X+3 you decided to extend Full Paper with your accepted ToCHI paper. When people download the ToCHI paper they will have the full conference paper and the WIP in the appendix. The citations that are done on the WIP and on the full paper are included in the citations of the journal paper. In a case where you combine conference several papers into a consolidated journal paper, you would create a new instance not replacing any of it or you may replace one of the conference papers.
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This approach does not solve all the problems but I hope it is a starting point for a new discussion.<br />
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Just claiming stuff that is in the ACM DL and has a DOI is not archival feels like we create our own little universe in which we decide that gravity is not relevant…<br />
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<i>UPDATE - Discussion in facebook (2012-12-11):</i><br />
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<b>Comment by Alan Dix:</b><br />It seems there are three separate notions of 'archival':<br />(i) doesn't count as prior publication for future, say, journals<br />(ii) is recorded in some stable way to allow clear citation<br />(iii) meets some minimum level against some set of quality criteria<br /><br />In the days before people treated conferences as if they were journal publications. It was common to have major publications in university or industrial lab 'internal' report series. These were often cited, and if they made it to journals, it was years later. The institutions distributed and maintained the repositories, hence they were archival by defn (ii). Conference and workshop papers likewise were and have always been cited widely whether or not they were officially declared 'archival'.<br /><br />Conference papers, even if from prestigious conferences such as CHI are NOT usually archival by defn (iii) - or at least cannot be guaranteed to - as it is not a minimal standard in all criteria, more a balance between criteria, if something is really novel and important, but maybe not 100% solid it would and *should* be conference publishable, but shuld not be jiurnal publishable until *everything* hits minimum standard may not be fantastic against any though - faultless != best<br /><br />As for (i) that is about venue, politics and random rubbish rules. For a conference the issue is "is there enough new for the delegates to see?" (unless the conference is pretending to be 'archival' meaning (ii), but we should ignore such disingenuous venues).<br /><br />For a journal, it would quite valid to publish a paper absolutely identical (copyright issues withstanding) one that had previously been published (and is archival by (i)) as its job is to ensure (ii).<br /><br />This was common in the past with internal reports and common again now with eprints services providing pre-prints during submission as well as pre-publication.<br /><br />In a web world *all* conference contributions are archival by defn (i) and *none* are by def. (ii).<br /><br />Conferences are news channels, journals and quality agencies ... and when the two get confused the discipline is in crisis.<br /><br /><b>Comment by Eva Hornecker</b><br />Reading Alan's response I am reminded I used to learn the distinction between 'grey' literature (citable, e.g. technical reports) and white/black (not sure anymore which is which) that is either informal and not archived (e.g. workshop position papers) or fully published and peer reviewed. Difference with WiPs etc. is they are peer reviewed (although only gently)<br /><br /><b>Comment by Rod Murray-Smith</b><br />I guess there is also a question about whether WIPs are really still being used as "works in progress", or more frequently as a way to attend the conference despite the paper not being lucky enough to get in. Do we have any stats on % of papers which are recycled from the main conference, as by submitting them to that, authors are claiming that these are ready for archival. Similar issues for many workshop papers.<br /><b><br />Comment by Alan Dix</b><br />Of course workshop position papers are often web 'archived' (my criteria (ii)), and some even heavily refereed ... indeed many people would prefer a CHI workshop paper on their CV than a more heavily refereed conference paper elsewhere ... I guess about brand, like a Nike holdall.<br /><br />There is another orthogonal issue too which is about the level and surety of the process, which is pretty independent of the clarity and kind of criteria. You may have a poor quality journal that is using similar criteria to a better journal, but simply having a lower bar and perhaps, because of quality of reviewing, lower level of confidence. I'm sure both Fiat and Ferrari have quality control, just the level different.<br /><br />In some ways I am happier with low quality journals that you now are low quality (and therefore readers apply caveat emptor) than high quality conferences, where it is easy for readers to assume high quality = all OK.<br /><br />This is why I always feel that all reviewing processes should have a non-blind point, as a paper with a fantastic idea, but major methodological flaw, is fine if produced by an unknown person in and unknown institution (as readers will take it with a inch of salt), but should be rejected if from a major name in the field (as it is more liely to be taken as a pattern of how to do it by readers).<br /><br />Alternatively anonymous refereeing + anonymous publication <br /><br />... and none of this is about the absolute value, significance, etc. of the work, quality control is about stopping the bad apples, not making good ones.<br /><b><br />Comment by Susanne Boll</b><br />I fully agree. Coming from the Multimedia community initially, I never understood this concept. SIGMM and the annual conferences will publish anything that undergoes a peer-review. Full papers are the most prestiguous one, short papers (4 pages) are for smaller contributions or more focused work. Workshops are THE platform to start new topics in the field and of course the work is peer-reviewed and published. For example, the Multimedia Information Retrieval run for several years and gained more and more interest in the field until it finally became an own conference.<br /><br />I also found it strange this year that I reviewed a full paper for one year but had a deja vu as the work was already shown in the interactivity session the year before. This not only makes it difficult to judge novelty but also is contradictory to the blind review. Maybe have a look how other SIG conferences such as Multimedia handle it.<br /><b><br />Comment Amanda Marisa Williams</b><br />I'm intrigued -- no time at the moment but it's bookmarked for later today. Def wanna have this conversation with some CHI veterans since I have some concerns about the archival/non-archival distinction as well.<br /><br /><b>Comment by Bo Begole</b><br />I think the crux of the issue is simply that we shouldn't use the term "archival" at all - as you point out, anything published on the DL with a DOI is "archived". It's an archaic term. More properly, we should use accurate terms to describe the level of review. CHI uses the terms "refereed" "juried" and "curated" for different levels http://chi2013.acm.org/authors/call-for-participation/#refereed which map to ACM categories of CHI refereed is roughly equiv to "refereed, formally reviewed" CHI juried is equiv to "reviewed" and CHI curated is roughly equiv to "unreviewed". CHI also uses the ACM criteria regarding republishability of content <br /><br /><b>Comment by Chris Schmandt</b><br />What Bo says is good, but this distinction is lost on the masses. It's a "CHI paper" no matter what venue. And even in the old day when we had the separate "abstracts" volume, only the few in the know could recognize the difference between the short ...<br />--- <br />
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<u>References
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[1] Elba del Carmen Valderrama Bahamóndez and Albrecht Schmidt. 2010. A survey to assess the potential of mobile phones as a learning platform for panama. In CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3667-3672. DOI=10.1145/1753846.1754036 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754036
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[2] Elba del Carmen Valderrama Bahamondez, Christian Winkler, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2011. Utilizing multimedia capabilities of mobile phones to support teaching in schools in rural panama. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 935-944. DOI=10.1145/1978942.1979081 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1978942.1979081
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[3] Tanja Doering, Bastian Pfleging, Christian Kray, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2010. Design by physical composition for complex tangible user interfaces. In CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3541-3546. DOI=10.1145/1753846.1754015 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754015
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[4] Enrico Rukzio, Albrecht Schmidt, and Antonio Krüger. 2005. The rotating compass: a novel interaction technique for mobile navigation. In CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1761-1764. DOI=10.1145/1056808.1057016 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1056808.1057016
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[5] Enrico Rukzio, Michael Müller, and Robert Hardy. 2009. Design, implementation and evaluation of a novel public display for pedestrian navigation: the rotating compass. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 113-122. DOI=10.1145/1518701.1518722 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518722
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[6] Albrecht Schmidt, Hans-W. Gellersen, and Christian Merz. 2000. Enabling Implicit Human Computer Interaction: A Wearable RFID-Tag Reader. In Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '00). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 193-194.
Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-62036547758600709092012-12-10T22:12:00.002+01:002012-12-10T22:13:49.673+01:00Congratulation to Dr. Florian Alt (No. 6)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhherNofJn2Ls2V4mdbMABy-loEZ58jruZF8HO4Mcx64f4GmKalgKl3NOWDvw7z5dd6sTNIjvrnN8XGO-cBEvedVimw-pFT_MknGRbxpnjqS092UVyjx5Olw7_YLRiqUjjHlnl84MsDGVM/s1600/556815_10151192157787690_1816969948_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhherNofJn2Ls2V4mdbMABy-loEZ58jruZF8HO4Mcx64f4GmKalgKl3NOWDvw7z5dd6sTNIjvrnN8XGO-cBEvedVimw-pFT_MknGRbxpnjqS092UVyjx5Olw7_YLRiqUjjHlnl84MsDGVM/s200/556815_10151192157787690_1816969948_n.jpg" width="200" /></a><a href="http://www.florian-alt.org/">Florian Alt</a> defended his PhD thesis “<b>A Design Space for Pervasive Advertising on Public Displays</b>” at the University of Stuttgart. Over the last years Florian work at the crossroads of interactive public displays and pervasive advertising. His research output during the last years and while working on the <a href="http://pd-net.org/">http://pd-net.org</a> project was amazing, see his <a href="http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/%7Eley/pers/hd/a/Alt:Florian.html">DBLP entry</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFkey8utowzGSDmTjxMnhpiF7MG0dHvCIn0j8oNu-8GyYgqrmbPKGNlkXbz6Xi6dZLNxtvJnps71SeYnJtnm6PYWJZKtIVBH8i5we5zP6c82VS0k_2oxheHysXwPFph3sEd1tMjaINh_Q/s1600/panel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFkey8utowzGSDmTjxMnhpiF7MG0dHvCIn0j8oNu-8GyYgqrmbPKGNlkXbz6Xi6dZLNxtvJnps71SeYnJtnm6PYWJZKtIVBH8i5we5zP6c82VS0k_2oxheHysXwPFph3sEd1tMjaINh_Q/s200/panel.jpg" width="200" /></a>The dissertation will be soon available online. If you are curious about his work right now, there are a few papers or a book you should read. A high level description of the findings is described in a paper published in IEEE Computer on Advertising on Public Display Networks [1]. The initial paper that paved the way towards understanding design space of public displays [2] is providing a comprehensive descriptions of ways for interaction with public displays. One of the highlights of the experimental research is the paper “Looking glass: a field study on noticing interactivity of a shop window” [3], which was done during Florian’s time at Telekom Innovation Laboratories in Berlin (it received a best paper award at CHI 2012). Towards the end of the thesis everyone realizes that evaluation is a most tricky thing, hence there is one paper on “How to evaluate public displays” [4]. If you are more interested on the advertising side, have a look at the book he co-edited with Jörg Müller and Daniel Michelis: <a href="http://www.springer.com/computer/hci/book/978-0-85729-351-0">Pervasive Advertising by Springer Verlag</a>, 2011, available as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007EMR9BA/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb">kindle version at Amazon</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdaIHjeFW03BtyGSU7wa7bGhSwq6hRe78dxOX7TcmbyZ4qN8kZD8tX-fJcqbfXH94Syttl3qmN36nCJib0IHpTt_lTJwpgJYznUROw5f587AL-5WIun6KekpFw_4Hg4EfgTTLGi4rA97c/s1600/book.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdaIHjeFW03BtyGSU7wa7bGhSwq6hRe78dxOX7TcmbyZ4qN8kZD8tX-fJcqbfXH94Syttl3qmN36nCJib0IHpTt_lTJwpgJYznUROw5f587AL-5WIun6KekpFw_4Hg4EfgTTLGi4rA97c/s200/book.JPG" width="132" /></a>Florian joined my research group already back in Munich as a student researcher, where we explored ubiquitous computing technologies in a hospital environment [5]. He followed to Fraunhofer IAIS to do his MSc thesis, where he created a web annotation system that allowed parasitic applications on the WWW [6]. I nearly believed him lost, when he moved to New York – but he came back to start his PhD in Duisburg-Essen… and after one more move in 2011 to the University of Stuttgart he graduated last week! Congratulations! He is no. 6 following <a href="http://albrecht-schmidt.blogspot.fr/2012/01/congratulations-to-frau-doktor-dagmar.html">Dagmar Kern</a>, <a href="http://albrecht-schmidt.blogspot.fr/2010/03/heiko-drewes-defended-his-phd.html">Heiko Drewes</a>, <a href="http://albrecht-schmidt.blogspot.fr/2008/08/matthias-kranz-defended-his-phd.html">Paul Holleis</a>, <a href="http://albrecht-schmidt.blogspot.fr/2008/08/matthias-kranz-defended-his-phd.html">Matthias Kranz</a>, and <a href="http://albrecht-schmidt.blogspot.fr/2007/02/enrico-rukzio-finished-his-phd.html">Enrico Rukzio</a>. The photo shows the current team in Stuttgart – when looking at the picture it seems there are soon more to come ;-)<br />
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References<br />
[1] Alt, F.; Schmidt, A.; Müller, J.; , "Advertising on Public Display Networks," Computer , vol.45, no.5, pp.50-56, May 2012. DOI: 10.1109/MC.2012.150, URL: <a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6193076&isnumber=6197765">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6193076&isnumber=6197765</a><br />
[2] Jörg Müller, Florian Alt, Daniel Michelis, and Albrecht Schmidt.
2010. <a href="http://www.pervasive.wiwi.uni-due.de/uploads/tx_itochairt3/publications/brave631-mueller.pdf">Requirements and design space for interactive public displays</a>. In
<i>Proceedings of the international conference on Multimedia</i> (MM '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1285-1294. DOI=10.1145/1873951.1874203 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1873951.1874203">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1873951.1874203</a><br />
[3] Jörg Müller, Robert Walter, Gilles Bailly, Michael Nischt, and Florian Alt. 2012. <a href="http://pd-net.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/looking-glass.pdf">Looking glass: a field study on noticing interactivity of a shop window</a>. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 297-306. DOI=10.1145/2207676.2207718 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2207676.2207718">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2207676.2207718</a><br />
[4] Florian Alt, Stefan Schneegaß, Albrecht Schmidt, Jörg Müller, and Nemanja Memarovic. 2012. <a href="http://pd-net.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/ispd2012-alt.pdf">How to evaluate public displays</a>. In Proceedings of the 2012 International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 17 , 6 pages. DOI=10.1145/2307798.2307815 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2307798.2307815">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2307798.2307815</a><br />
[5] A. Schmidt, F. Alt, D. Wilhelm, J. Niggemann, and H. Feussner, <a href="http://paluno.uni-due.de/uploads/tx_itochairt3/publications/klinik-muenchen_02.pdf">Experimenting with ubiquitous computing technologies in productive environments</a>. Journal Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik. 2006, 135-139. <br />
[6] Florian Alt, Albrecht Schmidt, Richard Atterer, and Paul Holleis. 2009. <a href="http://www.cip.ifi.lmu.de/%7Eholleis/files/publications/BringingWeb20ToTheOldWeb_Alt.pdf">Bringing Web 2.0 to the Old Web: A Platform for Parasitic Applications</a>.
In <i>Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Part I</i>
(INTERACT '09). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 405-418.
DOI=10.1007/978-3-642-03655-2_44 <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03655-2_44">http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03655-2_44</a>
Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-11862873502971166892012-12-05T14:39:00.000+01:002012-12-05T14:40:43.838+01:00Call for Papers: Augmented Human Conference 2013 (AH2013) In 2013 the 4th <a href="http://www.hcilab.org/ah2013/">Augmented Human Conference</a> will talk place in Stuttgart, Germany. The submission deadline is January 8, 2013 and the conference is in cooperation with ACM SIGCHI. The papers will be published in the ACM digital library. <a href="https://www.andreas-bulling.de/">Andreas Bulling</a> and <a href="http://www.christianholz.net/">Christian Holz</a> are the program chairs and there is a fabulous <a href="http://www.hcilab.org/ah2013/committee">technical program committee</a>.<br />
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With <a href="http://www.hcilab.org/ah2013/">AH2013</a> we continue a Conference that over last years has ventures beyond the usual things in human computer interaction and pervasive computing. Improving and augmenting human abilities is at the core of the conference, ranging from navigation systems, to actuator that help human movement, to improved or novel senses. This may include hardware, sensors, actuators, and software, such as web based applications or mobile apps.<br />
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We are curious about technologies and solutions that make humans smarter and augment human capabilities.
Over the last years the conference has highly valueed novel contributions, inspiring ideas, forward thinking applications and new concepts. <b>Originality, ingenuity, creativity, novelty come in this context before rigorous evaluations and flawless statistical analysis of the study data</b>. We are looking forward to your contributions. Please the web page at <a href="http://www.hcilab.org/ah2013/">http://www.hcilab.org/ah2013/ </a><br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.hcilab.org/ah2013/">Submission deadline</a>: January 8, 2013 </li>
<li>Author notification: February 5, 2013 </li>
<li><a href="http://www.hcilab.org/ah2013/venue">Conference in Stuttgart</a>: March 7–8, 2013 </li>
</ul>
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Thanks to <a href="http://www.luehne.de/">Patrick Lühne</a> for the great designs!Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-90771765868377002172012-11-30T09:58:00.004+01:002012-11-30T10:20:22.475+01:00Timo „Timppa“ Ojala talking about Ubicomp in the Wild<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj07y_Xf927QwTBaUQYUUJLV1FXZTNb0JdNj1D4spSjhhkiv2m99zAbOEYR4syrREZiD_EEaB17c486Ck2eZJZK4m7kWdLPYeaqqawl2jWjm4xwrZkL1DEXj1rMtCnStfq4wvbPScbyupk/s1600/timppa_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="148" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj07y_Xf927QwTBaUQYUUJLV1FXZTNb0JdNj1D4spSjhhkiv2m99zAbOEYR4syrREZiD_EEaB17c486Ck2eZJZK4m7kWdLPYeaqqawl2jWjm4xwrZkL1DEXj1rMtCnStfq4wvbPScbyupk/s200/timppa_n.jpg" width="200" /></a>I learned from <a href="http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/department/staff.php?name=hwg">Hans Gellersen</a> that inviting colleagues to give talks in your lecture is a good approach. You get interesting original content into the lecture and provide potential contact points for students to go abroad. Last year’s talks were quite successful, some of your students ended up to go abroad, e.g. to Lancaster in the UK. This week <a href="http://www.ee.oulu.fi/%7Eskidi/">Timo "Timppa" Ojala</a> from Oulu University is visiting.<br />
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In the first part of the talk Timppa was presenting several examples of trails in the wild from the Rotuaari project (<a href="http://www.rotuaari.net/">www.rotuaari.net</a>). The work done over 10 years ago had many new ideas, ranging from location based guides [1] to contextual mobile advertising [2], that Timppa and his team explored in the wild. Many of these ideas are slowly entering the market today. <a href="http://www.hdm-stuttgart.de/hochschule/kontakt/suche_ergebnis_liste?Id=6367419">Jürgen Scheible</a>, one of Timppas PhD students and now a professor at the Hochschule der Medien (and into media arts, see <a href="http://www.mobilenin.com/">www.mobilenin.com</a>), jointed into the presentation and discussed the findings of his 2005 paper on interactive video on public displays and phones [3].<br />
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In the second part he talked about “<a href="http://www.ubioulu.fi/en/node/91">Open UBI Oulu</a>” and about <b>human city interaction</b> and its project history and future. The research strategy is to do application led research that contributes to basic knowledge. Looking at the cost of the infrastructure it is amazing how cheap it is in comparison to other infrastructure provided by communities. He showed some example of interaction via Bluetooth access point, one of it is proximity marketing that will be published next week at <a href="http://mum2012.org/">MUM2012</a> in Ulm. With our European project <a href="http://pd-net.org/">pd-net</a> (Florian, Nemania, Ivan, Thomas, and others) we where last year as participants in the finals of the <a href="http://www.ubioulu.fi/en/UBI-challenge">first UbiChallenge</a> showing Funsquare (1st place) [4] and Digifieds (3rd place) [5]. The Challenge will be on this year again.<br />
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LightStories (<a href="http://www.valotarina.fi/en/">http://www.valotarina.fi/en/</a>) is project where anyone can book an hour long slot for programming LED stripes on street lights in the city of Oulu. I really wonder how the API of future cities will look like and what applications would become possible if developers have access to an open infrastructure in the city.<br />
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After the lecture we went to the Stuttgart Christmans Market :-)<br />
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<u>References</u> <br />
[1] Markus Aittola, Pekka Parhi, Maria Vieruaho, Timo Ojala: <a href="http://www.rotuaari.net/downloads/publication-28.pdf">Comparison of Mobile and Fixed Use of SmartLibrary</a>. Mobile HCI 2004: 383-387<br />
[2] Lauri Aalto, Nicklas Göthlin, Jani Korhonen, and Timo Ojala. 2004. Bluetooth and WAP push based location-aware mobile advertising system. In Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services (MobiSys '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 49-58. DOI=10.1145/990064.990073 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/990064.990073">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/990064.990073</a><br />
[3] Jürgen Scheible and Timo Ojala. 2005. MobiLenin combining a multi-track music video, personal mobile phones and a public display into multi-user interactive entertainment. In Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia (MULTIMEDIA '05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 199-208. DOI=10.1145/1101149.1101178 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1101149.1101178">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1101149.1101178</a><br />
[4] Nemanja Memarovic, Ivan Elhart, and Marc Langheinrich. 2011. FunSquare: first experiences with autopoiesic content. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 175-184. DOI=10.1145/2107596.2107619 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2107596.2107619">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2107596.2107619</a><br />
[5] Florian Alt, Thomas Kubitza, Dominik Bial, Firas Zaidan, Markus Ortel, Björn Zurmaar, Tim Lewen, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2011. Digifieds: insights into deploying digital public notice areas in the wild. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 165-174. DOI=10.1145/2107596.2107618 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2107596.2107618">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2107596.2107618</a>
Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-59060890113963287442012-11-16T11:47:00.002+01:002012-11-16T11:47:20.445+01:003DUI Technologies for Interactive Content by Prof. Yoshifumi Kitamura <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the lecture on multimodal interaction in ubiquitous computing professor <a href="http://www.riec.tohoku.ac.jp/lab/icd/index-e.html">Yoshifumi Kitamura</a> presented research on 3D user interface technologies. His research goal is to create 3D display technologies that allow multi-user direct interaction. Users should be able to move in front of the display and different users should have different perspectives according to the location in front of the display. He showed a set of rotating displays (volumetric displays) that allow for the visual presentation, but not for interaction.<br />
<br />His approach is based on an illusion hole that allows for multiple users and direct manipulation. The approach is to have different projections for different users, that are not visible for others but that creates the illusion of interaction with a single object. It uses a display mask that physically limits the view of each user. Have a look at their SIGGRAPH Paper for more details [1]. More recent work on this can be found on the webpage of Yoshifumi Kitamura’s web page [2]<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Example of the IllusionHole from [2].</td></tr>
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<br />Over 10 years ago they worked on tangible user interfaces based on blocks. Their system is based on a set of small electronic components with input and output, that can be connected and used to create larger structures and that provide input and output functionality. See [3] and [4] for details and applications of Cognitive Cubes and Active Cubes.<br />
<br />He showed examples of interaction with a map based on the concept of electric materials. Elastic scroll and elastic zoom allow to navigate with maps in an apparently intuitive ways. The mental model is straight forward, as the users can image the surface as an elastic material, see [5].<br />
<br />One really cool new display technology was presented at last year ITS is a furry multi-touch display [6]. This is a must read paper!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The furry display prototype - from [6].</td></tr>
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<b>References</b><br />[1] Yoshifumi Kitamura, Takashige Konishi, Sumihiko Yamamoto, and Fumio Kishino. 2001. Interactive stereoscopic display for three or more users. In Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques (SIGGRAPH '01). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 231-240. DOI=10.1145/383259.383285 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/383259.383285">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/383259.383285</a><br />[2] <a href="http://www.icd.riec.tohoku.ac.jp/project/displays-and-interface/index.html">http://www.icd.riec.tohoku.ac.jp/project/displays-and-interface/index.html</a><br />[3] Ehud Sharlin, Yuichi Itoh, Benjamin Watson, Yoshifumi Kitamura, Steve Sutphen, and Lili Liu. 2002. Cognitive cubes: a tangible user interface for cognitive assessment. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '02). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 347-354. DOI=10.1145/503376.503438 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/503376.503438">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/503376.503438</a><br />[4] Ryoichi Watanabe, Yuichi Itoh, Masatsugu Asai, Yoshifumi Kitamura, Fumio Kishino, and Hideo Kikuchi. 2004. The soul of ActiveCube: implementing a flexible, multimodal, three-dimensional spatial tangible interface. Comput. Entertain. 2, 4 (October 2004), 15-15. DOI=10.1145/1037851.1037874 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1037851.1037874">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1037851.1037874</a><br />[5] Kazuki Takashima, Kazuyuki Fujita, Yuichi Itoh, and Yoshifumi Kitamura. 2012. Elastic scroll for multi-focus interactions. In Adjunct proceedings of the 25th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST Adjunct Proceedings '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19-20. DOI=10.1145/2380296.2380307 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2380296.2380307">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2380296.2380307</a><br />[6] Kosuke Nakajima, Yuichi Itoh, Takayuki Tsukitani, Kazuyuki Fujita, Kazuki Takashima, Yoshifumi Kitamura, and Fumio Kishino. 2011. FuSA touch display: a furry and scalable multi-touch display. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 35-44. DOI=10.1145/2076354.2076361 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2076354.2076361">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2076354.2076361</a>Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-26051841321177650152012-11-12T09:45:00.002+01:002012-11-12T09:48:03.645+01:00SIGCHI Rebuttals - Some suggestions to write them<a href="http://www.sigchi.org/conferences">ACM SIGCHI</a> has in it's review process the opportunity for the authors to respond to the comments of the reviewers. I find this a good thing and to me it has two main functions: <br />
<ol>
<li>The reviewers are usually more careful in what they write as they know they have to face a response for the authors</li>
<li>Authors can clarify points that they did not get across in the first place in the original submission.</li>
</ol>
<br />
We usually write for all submissions with an average score over 2.0 a rebuttal. For lower ranked submissions it may be OK if we think we have a chance to counter some of the arguments, which we believe are wrong or unfair.<br />
<br />
For the rebuttal it is most critical to address the meta-review as good as possible. The primary will be in the PC meeting and if the rebuttal wins this person over the job is well done. The other reviews should be addressed, too.<br />
<br />
For all the papers where we write a rebuttal I suggest the following steps(a table may be helpful):<br />
<ol>
<li>read all reviews in detail</li>
<li>copy out all statements that have questions, criticism, suggestions for improvement from each review</li>
<li>for each of these statement make a short version (bullet points, short sentence) in your own words</li>
<li>sort the all the extracted statements by topic</li>
<li>combine all statements that address the same issue</li>
<li>order the combined statements according to priority (highest priority to primary reviewer) </li>
<li>for each combined statement decide if the criticism is justified, misunderstood, or unjustified </li>
<li>make a response for each combined statement</li>
<li>create a rebuttal that addresses as many points as possible, without being short (trade-off in the number of issue to address and detail one can give)</li>
</ol>
Point 8 is the core...<br />
There are three basic options: <br />
<ul>
<li>if justified: acknowledge that this is an issue and propose how to fix it</li>
<li>if misunderstood: explain again and propose you will improve the explanaition in the final version</li>
<li>if unjustified: explain that this point may be disputed and provide additional evidence why you think it should be as it is</li>
</ul>
The unjustified ones are the most tricky ones. We had cases where reviewers stated that
the method we used is not appropriate. Here a response could be to cite
other work that used this method in the same context. Similarly we had
reviewers arguing that the statistical tests we used cannot be used on
our data, here we also explained in more details the distribution of the
data and why the test is appropriate. Sometimes it may be better to
ignore cases where the criticism is unjustified - especially if it is
not from the primary.<br />
<br />
Some additional points<br />
<ul>
<li>be respectful to the reviewers – they put work in to review the papers</li>
<li>if the reviewers did not understand – we probably did not communicate well</li>
<li>do not promise unrealistic things in the rebuttal</li>
<li>try to answer direct questions with precise and direct answers</li>
<li>if you expect that one reviewer did not read the paper – do not directly write this – try to address the points (and perhaps add a hint it is in the paper, e.g. “ANSWER as we outline already in section X)</li>
</ul>
Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-60646037315380414322012-06-29T18:39:00.001+01:002012-07-02T09:02:20.706+01:00Karin Bee has defended her dissertation.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizn4GoDZwyhZdxYqwhoelUr9DGWNgPRNL0180GZ1_3FlQK07wJqWF44mUuKduRszy8sjRJgjzScvQ-pj7bzY5SkfL0htLQLS-Jh-qMPgOs5iW_QLqp9nUIrH-VhmUNLMZqKv2e72Upl4M/s1600/karin-bee.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizn4GoDZwyhZdxYqwhoelUr9DGWNgPRNL0180GZ1_3FlQK07wJqWF44mUuKduRszy8sjRJgjzScvQ-pj7bzY5SkfL0htLQLS-Jh-qMPgOs5iW_QLqp9nUIrH-VhmUNLMZqKv2e72Upl4M/s200/karin-bee.JPG" width="200" /></a>Karin Bee (nee Leichtenstern) has defended her dissertation at the University of Augsburg. In her dissertation she worked on methods and tools to support a user centered design process for mobile applications that use a variety of modalities. There are some papers that describe her work, e.g. [1] and [2]. To me it was particularly interesting that she revisited the experiment done in her master thesis in a smart home in Essex [3] and reproduced some of it in her hybrid evaluation environment.<br />
<br />
<br />
It is great to see that now most of our students (HiWis and project students) who worked with us in Munich on the Embedded Interaction Project have finished their PhD (there are some who still need to hand in – Florian? Raphael?, Gregor? You have enough papers – finish it ;-) <br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtb6szbbc30c8nMzuJDI7aDfBDptpKORJcb8DaW6q_7vRYcpKsqtd1rtpz9x1qf5uhzVAmFPUli5aobhUXT-eKWBnoEU89C5lgOIZ2P5LQQIkNvVezvb_XVUainrByTg9LLe45BaZhe8Q/s1600/augsburg1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtb6szbbc30c8nMzuJDI7aDfBDptpKORJcb8DaW6q_7vRYcpKsqtd1rtpz9x1qf5uhzVAmFPUli5aobhUXT-eKWBnoEU89C5lgOIZ2P5LQQIkNvVezvb_XVUainrByTg9LLe45BaZhe8Q/s200/augsburg1.JPG" width="149" /></a>In the afternoon I got to see some demos. <a href="http://www.informatik.uni-augsburg.de/lehrstuehle/hcm/staff/andre/">Elisabeth André</a> has a great team of students. They work on various topics in human computer interaction, including public display interaction, physiological sensing and emotion detection, and gesture interaction. I am looking forward to a joined workshop of both groups. Elisabeth has an impressive set of <a href="http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/%7Eley/db/indices/a-tree/a/Andr=eacute=:Elisabeth.html">publications</a> which is always a good starting point for affective user interface technologies.<br />
<br />
[1] Karin Leichtenstern, Elisabeth André,and Matthias Rehm. <a href="http://www.irma-international.org/viewtitle/55888/">Tool-Supported User-Centred Prototyping of Mobile Applications</a>. IJHCR. 2011, 1-21.<br />
<br />
[2] Karin Leichtenstern and Elisabeth André. 2010. MoPeDT: features and evaluation of a user-centred prototyping tool. In <i>Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems</i> (EICS '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 93-102. DOI=10.1145/1822018.1822033 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1822018.1822033">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1822018.1822033</a><br />
<br />
[3] Enrico Rukzio, Karin Leichtenstern, Vic Callaghan, Paul Holleis, Albrecht Schmidt, and Jeannette Chin. 2006. An experimental comparison of physical mobile interaction techniques: touching, pointing and scanning. In <i>Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Ubiquitous Computing</i> (UbiComp'06), Paul Dourish and Adrian Friday (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 87-104. DOI=10.1007/11853565_6 <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11853565_6">http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11853565_6</a>Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-7928916206799978632012-06-26T15:42:00.014+01:002012-06-27T19:06:37.648+01:00MobiSys 2012, Keynote by Paul Jones on Mobile Health Challenges<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8nVlZL9hzPAjSBY4wBUXC6LIscOISHWcVun46CwHiVYyYClgoIWY9jhX4zLlDNhCslKaMg133KkQXxmMpD30ZFN1OqUciD9bamluaCF8gCt8uTKAI_6rE5Ph_fklHmKNJgWwfZ-0rhl4/s1600/a0-IMG_1620.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8nVlZL9hzPAjSBY4wBUXC6LIscOISHWcVun46CwHiVYyYClgoIWY9jhX4zLlDNhCslKaMg133KkQXxmMpD30ZFN1OqUciD9bamluaCF8gCt8uTKAI_6rE5Ph_fklHmKNJgWwfZ-0rhl4/s200/a0-IMG_1620.jpg" width="200" /></a>This year’s <a href="http://www.sigmobile.org/mobisys/2012/">ACM MobiSys conference</a> is in the Lake District in the UK. I really love this region in the UK. Already 15 years back when I studied in Manchester I often came up over the weekend to hike in the mountains here. The setting of the conference hotel is brilliant, overlooking Lake Windermere.<br />
The opening keynote of <a href="http://www.sigmobile.org/mobisys/2012/">MobiSys 2012</a> was presented by Dr. Paul Jones, the NHS Chief Technology Officer who talked about “Mobile Challenges in Health”. Health is very dear to people and the approach to health care around the world is very different.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3vRYBhAQV8pfkRDxIgRnnzojuHeaIag1UokZ9MklDdQ8f3zfQsfTHqMpTd-WdUU-3yf5rMqR3M3LnIXbrCjiYYZ8MZlSVKs5DF8tr3LdwSGvaxjbV0r9vJAwvH5jJElRXwki9ENkiLos/s1600/a2-stat-IMG_5923.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="141" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3vRYBhAQV8pfkRDxIgRnnzojuHeaIag1UokZ9MklDdQ8f3zfQsfTHqMpTd-WdUU-3yf5rMqR3M3LnIXbrCjiYYZ8MZlSVKs5DF8tr3LdwSGvaxjbV0r9vJAwvH5jJElRXwki9ENkiLos/s200/a2-stat-IMG_5923.jpg" width="200" /></a>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Service_%28England%29">NHS</a> is a unique intuition that is providing healthcare to everyone in the UK. It is taxation funded and with its 110 billion pounds per year budget it is one of the cheaper (and yet efficient) health care systems in the world. The UK spends about 7% of its national cross product on health care, whereas the US or Germany nearly spend double of this percentage. Beside the economic size the NHS is also one of the biggest employers in the world, similar in size to the US department of defense and the Chinese people’s army. The major difference to other larger employers is, that a most part of the staff in the NHS is highly educated (e.g. doctors) and is not easily taking orders<br />
<br />
Paul started out with the statement: technology is critical to providing health care in the future. Doing healthcare as it is currently done will not work in the future. Carrying on will not work as the cost would not be payable by society. In general information technology in the health sector is helping to create more efficient systems. He had some examples that often very simple system help to make a difference. In one case he explained that changing a hospitals scheduling practice from paper based diaries to a computer based systems reduced waiting times massively (from several month to weeks, without additional personal). In another case laptops were provided to community nurses. This saved 6 hours per week and freed nearly an extra day of work per week as it reduced their need for travelling back to the office. Paul argued, that this is only a starting point and not the best we can do. Mobile computing has the potential to create better solutions than a laptop that are more fitting the real working environment of the users and patients. One further example he used is dealing with vital signs of a patient. Traditionally this is measured and when degrading a nurse is calling a junior doctor and they have to respond in a certain time. In reality nurses have to ask more often and doctors may be delayed. In this case they introduced a system and mobile device to page/call the doctors and document the call (instead of nurses calling the doctors). It improved the response times of doctors – and the main reason is that actions are tracked and performance is measured (and in the medical field nobody wants to be the worst).<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjhLa-EbhXXJ6lzpNwf6J5dz4k_1rq-vrhQPyyxfLB_MoJE-UzlXp9wcJ8oOgjmG5mvhHg4ngbotAEikNyKvepDZGD6-f6bf3ynVsMBsnK_BJGVc1JgM1tmJ71TSK837-2o6z_m_fQgyg/s1600/a1-IMG_5997.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjhLa-EbhXXJ6lzpNwf6J5dz4k_1rq-vrhQPyyxfLB_MoJE-UzlXp9wcJ8oOgjmG5mvhHg4ngbotAEikNyKvepDZGD6-f6bf3ynVsMBsnK_BJGVc1JgM1tmJ71TSK837-2o6z_m_fQgyg/s320/a1-IMG_5997.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Paul shared a set of challenges and problems with the audience – in the hope that researchers take inspiration and solve some of the problems ;-)<br />
<br />
One major challenge is the fragmented nature of the way health care is provided. Each hospital has established processes and doctors have a way they want do certain procedures. These processes are different from each other – not a lot in many cases but different enough that the same software is not going to work. It is not each to streamline this, as doctors usually know best and many of them make a case why their solution is the only one that does the job properly. Hence general solutions are unlikely to work and solutions need to be customizable to specific needs.<br />
<br />
Another interesting point was about records and paper. Paul argued that the amount of paper records in hospital is massive and they are less reliable and save as many think. It is common that a significant portion of the paper documentation is lost or misplaced. Here a digital solution (even if non-perfect) is most certainly better. From our own experience I agree on the observation, but I would think it is really hard to convince people about it.<br />
<br />
The common element through the talk was, that it is key to create systems that fit the requirements. To achieve this it seems that having multidisciplinary teams that understand the user and patient needs is inevitable. Paul’s examples were based on his experience of seeing the user users and patient in context. He made firsthand the observation, that real world environments often do not permit the use of certain technologies or create sup-optimal solution. It is crucial that the needs to are understood by the people who design and implement the systems. It may be useful to go beyond the multidisciplinary team and make each developer spending one day in the environment they design for.<br />
<br />
Some further problems he discussed are:<br />
<ul><li>How to move the data around to the places where it is needed? Patients are transferred (e.g. ambulance to ER, ER to surgeons, etc.) and hence data needs to be handed over. This handover has to work across time (from one visit to the next) and across departments and institutions</li>
<li>Personal mobile devices (“bring your own device”) are a major issue. It seems easy for an individual to use them (e.g. a personal tablet to make notes) but on a system-level they create huge problems, from back-up to security. In the medical field another issue arises: the validity of data is guaranteed and hence the data gathered is not useful in the overall process. </li>
</ul><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigyZO4LhC6pF2gwzEI702zccqF_-CkfC_WCMCKBML02obgGh0jb3rUABebpqluC4xRqPAMPqjkmONzW0G3fLvaMosPOVqCwdo5Ll3jtmcJpsC-QnNjpHCAuZK5RJ8ZzicmsYU6Cdr_Vkk/s1600/a3-challenges-IMG_1706.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigyZO4LhC6pF2gwzEI702zccqF_-CkfC_WCMCKBML02obgGh0jb3rUABebpqluC4xRqPAMPqjkmONzW0G3fLvaMosPOVqCwdo5Ll3jtmcJpsC-QnNjpHCAuZK5RJ8ZzicmsYU6Cdr_Vkk/s200/a3-challenges-IMG_1706.jpg" width="200" /></a>A final and very interesting point was: if you are not seriously ill, being in a hospital is a bad idea. Paul argued, that the care you get at home or in the community is likely to be better and you are less likely to be exposed to additional risks. From this the main challenge for the MobiSys community arises:<b> It will be crucial to provide mobile and distributed information systems that work in the context of home care and within the community.</b><br />
<br />
<br />
PS: I like one of the side comments: Can we imagine doing a double blind study on a jumbo jet safety? This argument hinted, that some of the approaches to research in the medical field are not always most efficient to prove the validity of an approach.Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-15013756220478712322012-06-11T09:09:00.001+01:002012-06-11T09:18:48.536+01:00If you do not research it – it will not happen?Over the last days plans to do research on the use of public date from social networks to calculate someone’s credit risk made big news (e.g. <a href="http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,16007583,00.html">DW</a>). The public (as voiced by journalists) and politicians showed a strong opposition and declared something like this should not be done - or more specifically such research should not be done. <br />
<br />
I am astonished and a bit surprised by the reaction. Do people really think if there is no research within universities this will (does) not happen? If you look at the value of facebook (even after the last few weeks) it must be very obvious that there is a value in the social network data which people hope to extract over time… <br />
<br />
Personal credit risk assessment (in Germany Schufa) is widely used – from selling you a phone contract to lending you money when buying a house. If you believe that we need a personal credit risk assessment - why would you argue that they work on very incomplete data? Will it make it better? I think the logical consequence of the discussion would be to prohibit the pricing based on personal credit risk ratings – but this, too would be very unfair (at least to the majority). Hence the consequence we see now (the research is not done in Universities) is probably not doing much good… it just pushes it into a place where the public sees little about it (and the companies will not publish it in a few years…).Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-35964789344210123142012-06-05T01:02:00.002+01:002012-06-05T08:25:06.683+01:00Keynote at the Pervasive Displays Symposium: Kenton O'Hara<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz-2eUFHaGC-NwdpAiB25xV6JsrcXcux2BF9iXtsxIi3T_Hw0dNn1da9A87LjHTSQEv9rdy1lDVS85KCBW6opAhlIIfup4b3hxkBfLNWfQ2-8F_3IzYRs5DGcLSn9n-kpElzrvf4NrZIA/s1600/DSC_9491+%28Medium%29.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz-2eUFHaGC-NwdpAiB25xV6JsrcXcux2BF9iXtsxIi3T_Hw0dNn1da9A87LjHTSQEv9rdy1lDVS85KCBW6opAhlIIfup4b3hxkBfLNWfQ2-8F_3IzYRs5DGcLSn9n-kpElzrvf4NrZIA/s200/DSC_9491+%28Medium%29.JPG" width="200" /></a><a href="http://pervasivedisplays.org/2012/keynote.php">Kenton O’Hara</a>, a senior researcher in the <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/sds/">Socio-Digital-Systems</a> group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, presented the keynote at the <a href="http://pervasivedisplays.org/2012/">pervasive displays symposium</a> in Porto on the topic “Social context and interaction proxemics in pervasive displays“. He highlighted the importance of the spatial relationship between the users and the interactive displays and the different opportunities for interaction that are available when looking at the interaction context.<br />
<br />
Using examples from the medical field (operating theater) he showed the issues that arise from the need of sterile interaction and hence avoiding touch interaction and moving towards a touchless interaction mode. A prototype, that uses a Microsoft Kinect sensor, allows the surgeon to interact with information (e.g. an x-ray image) while working on the patient. It was interesting to see that gestural interaction in this context is not straightforward, as surgeons use tools (and hence have their hands not free) or gesture as a part of the communication in the team.<br />
<br />
Another example is a public space game; there are many balls on a screen and a camera looking at the audience. Users can move the balls by body movement based on a simple edge detection video tracking mechanism and when two balls touch they form a bigger ball. Kenten argues that “body-based interaction becomes a public spectacle” and interactions of an individum are clearly visible to others. This visibilility can lead to inhibition and may reduce the motivation of user to interact. For the success of this game the designing of the simplistic tracking algorithms is one major factor. By tracking edges/blobs the users can play together (e.g. holding hands, parents with the kids in their arm) and hence a wide range of interaction proxemics are supported. He presented some further examples of public display games on BBC large screens, also showing that the concept of interaction proxemics can be use to explain interaction .<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoTqrILMdf8_gsfGMzGWshrR7UNbfYyvz7VrkEZwMczFWS3FDvhvxFNt7zbKUIsXflKOifyBn-0RiWYMPL-tmZyO4eoEMqOBtLVeE-dGM4D6zb6DH8fW1ztFwsIjKX4bJFJR8Zgr0di-Q/s1600/DSC_9490+%28Medium%29.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoTqrILMdf8_gsfGMzGWshrR7UNbfYyvz7VrkEZwMczFWS3FDvhvxFNt7zbKUIsXflKOifyBn-0RiWYMPL-tmZyO4eoEMqOBtLVeE-dGM4D6zb6DH8fW1ztFwsIjKX4bJFJR8Zgr0di-Q/s200/DSC_9490+%28Medium%29.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>TVs have change eating behavoir. More recent research in displays in the context of food consumptions have been in contrast mainly pragmatic (corrective, problem solving). Kenton argued that we look at the cultural values of meals and see shared eating as a social practice. Using the example of eating in front of the television (even as a family) he discusses the implications on communication and interaction (basically the communication is not happening). Looking at more recent technologies such as phones, laptops and tablets and their impact on social dynamics probably many of us realized that this is impacting many of us in our daily lives already (or who is not taking their phone to table?). It is very obvious that social relationships and culture changes with these technologies. He showed “4Photos” [1] a designed piece of technology to be put on the center of the table showing 4 photographs. Users can interact with it from all sides. It is designed in a way to stimulate rather than inhibit communication and to provide opportunities for conversation. It introduces interaction with technologies as a social gesture.<br />
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Interested in more? Kenton published a book on public displays in 2003 [2] and has a set of relevant <a href="http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/%7Eley/db/indices/a-tree/o/O=Hara:Kenton.html">publications</a> in the space of the symposium.<br />
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References<br />
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[1] Martijn ten Bhömer, John Helmes, Kenton O'Hara, and Elise van den Hoven. 2010. 4Photos: a collaborative photo sharing experience. In <i>Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Extending Boundaries</i> (NordiCHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 52-61. DOI=10.1145/1868914.1868925 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1868914.1868925 <br />
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[2] Kenton O’Hara, Mark Perry, Elizabeth Churchill, Dan Russell. Public and Situated Displays: Social and Interactional Aspects of Shared Display Technologies. Kluwer Academic, 2003Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-12079878197456468012012-05-30T23:03:00.001+01:002012-05-31T01:16:50.756+01:00Visiting the Culture Lab in NewcastleWhile being in the north of England I stopped by in <a href="http://www.ncl.ac.uk/culturelab/">Newcastle at the Culture Lab</a>. If the <a href="http://www.sigchi.org/conferences">CHI-conference</a> is a measure for quality in research in Human Computer Interaction <a href="http://www.ncl.ac.uk/culturelab/">Culture Lab </a>is currently one of the places to be - if you are not convinced have look at <a href="http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/%7Eley/db/indices/a-tree/o/Olivier:Patrick.html">Patrick Olivier's publications</a>. The lab is one of a few places where I think a real ubicomp spirit is left – people developing new hardware and devices (e.g. mini data acquisition boards, specific wireless sensor, embedded actuators) and interdisciplinary research plays a central role. This is very refreshing to see, especially as so many others in Ubicomp have moved to mainly creating software on phones and tables…<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHv2vxtO3g3icctiVfwKy1cOTxUO6PVDhu0EULdLARc_pLBcANQqexTJVWeVwNmEnfjje8AxpKmPFqFheaE4SmqJ7bsDS0lufpRlCgzVUiqXz675180iuJCOgYIOl4nWrtdtJtIxzjEyY/s1600/398828_4110381046088_505906769_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHv2vxtO3g3icctiVfwKy1cOTxUO6PVDhu0EULdLARc_pLBcANQqexTJVWeVwNmEnfjje8AxpKmPFqFheaE4SmqJ7bsDS0lufpRlCgzVUiqXz675180iuJCOgYIOl4nWrtdtJtIxzjEyY/s200/398828_4110381046088_505906769_n.jpg" width="200" /></a>Diana, one of our former students from Duisburg-Essen, is currently working on her master thesis in Newcastle. She looks into new tangible forms of interaction on table top UIs. Especially actuation of controls is a central question. The approach she uses for moving things is compared to other approached, e.g. [1], very simple but effective – looking forward to reading the paper on the technical details (I promised not to tell any details here). The example application she has developed is in chemistry education.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3LFRM8IM7aS_MVw4OMdzEXKHX0TEZ7NUBv3sZPAEMHR1foN7rfQ15ewiK3YveAos-8vxQJb266NkfP1vP77blyz2UCFONOGAX884Rr6PAJ_Na6iVnUZHy4G8n26DARiHrTJmPYldGz2Q/s1600/534316_4110371605852_1789357240_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3LFRM8IM7aS_MVw4OMdzEXKHX0TEZ7NUBv3sZPAEMHR1foN7rfQ15ewiK3YveAos-8vxQJb266NkfP1vP77blyz2UCFONOGAX884Rr6PAJ_Na6iVnUZHy4G8n26DARiHrTJmPYldGz2Q/s200/534316_4110371605852_1789357240_n.jpg" width="200" /></a>Some years back at a <a href="http://albrecht-schmidt.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/visit-to-newcastle-university-digital.html">visit to the culture lab</a> I had already seen some of the concepts and ideas for the kitchen. Over the last years this has progressed and the current state is very appealing. I really thing the screens behind glass in the black design make a huge difference. Using a set of small sensors they have implemented a set of aware kitchen utensils [2]. Matthias Kranz (back in our group in Munich) worked on a similar idea and created a knife that knows what it cuts [3]. It seems worthwhile to exploring the aware artifacts vision further …<br />
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<b>References </b><br />
[1] Gian Pangaro, Dan Maynes-Aminzade, and Hiroshi Ishii. 2002. The actuated workbench: computer-controlled actuation in tabletop tangible interfaces. In Proceedings of the 15th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '02). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 181-190. DOI=10.1145/571985.572011 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/571985.572011%20">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/571985.572011 </a><br />
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[2] Wagner, J., Ploetz, T., Halteren, A. V., Hoonhout, J., Moynihan, P., Jackson, D., Ladha, C., et al. (2011). <a href="http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/patrick.olivier/perHealth11.pdf">Towards a Pervasive Kitchen Infrastructure for Measuring Cooking Competence</a>. Proc Int Conf Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (pp. 107-114). <a href="http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/patrick.olivier/perHealth11.pdf">PDF </a><br />
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[3] Matthias Kranz, Albrecht Schmidt, Alexis Maldonado, Radu Bogdan Rusu, Michael Beetz, Benedikt Hörnler, and Gerhard Rigoll. 2007. <a href="http://vmi.lmt.ei.tum.de/publications/2007/ContextAwareKitchen_preprint.pdf">Context-aware kitchen utilities</a>. InProceedings of the 1st international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction (TEI '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 213-214. DOI=10.1145/1226969.1227013 <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1227013">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1227013</a> (<a href="http://vmi.lmt.ei.tum.de/publications/2007/ContextAwareKitchen_preprint.pdf">PDF</a>)Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-2786319381607825212012-05-25T22:55:00.001+01:002012-05-26T09:25:34.599+01:00Media art, VIS Excursion to ZKM in Karlsruhe<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL03U2-7Vp_S9gH8rb_YsQCMQ9ZhAlqJjcx-DcQJ1cNLv1QzaNuvuXlwQdTURvLN4OLhGQnEmDfLdOXEcnGMlPkI4-rARyuajUrR9ZgYlIlYbVOloiv59WpF1r_ZSfZx1drXypM9vDaK0/s1600/gunzenh%C3%A4user.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="161" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL03U2-7Vp_S9gH8rb_YsQCMQ9ZhAlqJjcx-DcQJ1cNLv1QzaNuvuXlwQdTURvLN4OLhGQnEmDfLdOXEcnGMlPkI4-rARyuajUrR9ZgYlIlYbVOloiv59WpF1r_ZSfZx1drXypM9vDaK0/s200/gunzenh%C3%A4user.JPG" width="200" /></a>This afternoon we (over 40 people from <a href="http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/">VIS</a> and <a href="http://www.visus.uni-stuttgart.de/">VISUS</a> at the University of Stuttgart) went to Karlsruhe to visit the <a href="http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/e/">ZKM</a>. We got guided tours to the panorama laboratory, the historic video laboratory, to the SoundARt exhibition and some parts of the regular exhibition. Additionally <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rul_Gunzenh%C3%A4user">Prof. Gunzenhäuser</a> gave a short introduction to the Zuse Z22 that is in on show there, too.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6Xwh05aeDWRghqZoj0OF-WK48UGF2HM21-DcwGHvaw005Nk8u2bckIcVUmkz2knbMKybAEEySpQQT2t35KlGxKabLFjXCgKAjO6P6hgDIAqhske_RSfRtCXj9Y1QWEL1j0jl2BG5UgOs/s1600/zkm.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="138" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6Xwh05aeDWRghqZoj0OF-WK48UGF2HM21-DcwGHvaw005Nk8u2bckIcVUmkz2knbMKybAEEySpQQT2t35KlGxKabLFjXCgKAjO6P6hgDIAqhske_RSfRtCXj9Y1QWEL1j0jl2BG5UgOs/s200/zkm.JPG" width="200" /></a>The ZKM is a leading center for digital and media art that includes a museum for media art and modern art, several research institutes, and an art and design school. The approach is to bring media artists, works of art, research in media art and teaching in this field close together (within a single large building). The exhibitions include major media art works from the last 40 years.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPbJaCVDt2neDcc5MibqEm-eUXcQy8pfFDY4V-fd4mcmy1isuudzmd3LRSTfHe4Hq7hMilyfM67noIPfU3XhYh7UGlFJ8SVTNxTZPpY4NEunCmx7FPrTzySImPjHHFn9jSHlku5L_4J58/s1600/panorama.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPbJaCVDt2neDcc5MibqEm-eUXcQy8pfFDY4V-fd4mcmy1isuudzmd3LRSTfHe4Hq7hMilyfM67noIPfU3XhYh7UGlFJ8SVTNxTZPpY4NEunCmx7FPrTzySImPjHHFn9jSHlku5L_4J58/s400/panorama.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br />
The panorama laboratory is a 360 degree (minus a door) projection. Even though the resolution of the powerwall at VISUS [1] is higher and the presentation is in 3D, the360 degree 10 Megapixel panorama screen results in an exciting immersion. Without 3D, being surrounded by media creates a feeling of being in the middle of something that happens around you. Vivien described the sensation of movement similar to sitting in a train. The moment another train pulls out of the station you have a hard time to tell who is moving. I think such immersive environment could become very common once we will have digital display wallpaper.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh85W_8O5NQIDMrisyJF15_fcDbJ_Z-MdF-TPbZHNMO0vWzYuVN7jJyGRxv2pYp-TxKpk1mbXSbTnmUJm5eWy8PEOJdKqHTMR6zyuIDI8G3oDnD-572FNagDp8uMZr1dMLxECWDs0i2Q4I/s1600/video.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh85W_8O5NQIDMrisyJF15_fcDbJ_Z-MdF-TPbZHNMO0vWzYuVN7jJyGRxv2pYp-TxKpk1mbXSbTnmUJm5eWy8PEOJdKqHTMR6zyuIDI8G3oDnD-572FNagDp8uMZr1dMLxECWDs0i2Q4I/s400/video.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>The historic video laboratory is concerned with “rescuing” old artistic video material. We sometimes complain about the variety of video codecs, but looking at the many different formats for tapes and cassettes, this problem has a long tradition. Looking at historic split screen videos that were created using analog technologies one appreciates the virtues of digital video editing… Two are two amazing films by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Rybczy%C5%84ski">Zbigniew Rybczyński</a>: Nowa Książka (New Book): <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46Kt0HmXfr4">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46Kt0HmXfr4</a> and and Tango: <a href="http://vodpod.com/watch/3791700-zbigniew-rybczynski-tango-1983">http://vodpod.com/watch/3791700-zbigniew-rybczynski-tango-1983</a><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIx5858kmNXvzmDhL-9rj3P6-UvqmaMp91fFv903QDBd56vNORwG2TUD47fFSbHPFUptKQxoOBS0mzW_CjRCGKnItdSkN8CR3jWCYrGhHnliCiYBsOcUWFfMDeQjiRHSvghoOfGneI7kg/s1600/video1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="148" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIx5858kmNXvzmDhL-9rj3P6-UvqmaMp91fFv903QDBd56vNORwG2TUD47fFSbHPFUptKQxoOBS0mzW_CjRCGKnItdSkN8CR3jWCYrGhHnliCiYBsOcUWFfMDeQjiRHSvghoOfGneI7kg/s400/video1.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br />
The current SoundArt exhibition is worthwhile. There are several indoor and outdoor installations on sounds. In the yard there is a monument built of speakers (in analogy to the oracle of Delphi) that you can call from anywhere (+49 721 81001818) and get 3 minutes of time to talk to whom even is in the vicinity of the installation. Another exhibit sonfied electron magnetic fields from different environments in an installation called the cloud.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdzrPIh2XHj_cogOEgLwTtzswKxpuk2GJTOt2X3ZFlfDDqFnjwozHJPuTWWT23VdyfoA5hvdbJJVQDKu7nQmDZRt4ulGe3kDKx73S1VfVy6ubK_iDnwLI1_QW6N0SCw_6xNe6Wwx7FPus/s1600/soundart.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="148" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdzrPIh2XHj_cogOEgLwTtzswKxpuk2GJTOt2X3ZFlfDDqFnjwozHJPuTWWT23VdyfoA5hvdbJJVQDKu7nQmDZRt4ulGe3kDKx73S1VfVy6ubK_iDnwLI1_QW6N0SCw_6xNe6Wwx7FPus/s400/soundart.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br />
[1] Powerwall at VISUS at the Univeristy of Stuttgart (6m by 2.20, 88 million pixel in, 44 million pixel per eye for 3D). <a href="http://www.visus.uni-stuttgart.de/institut/visualisierungslabor/technischer-aufbau.html">http://www.visus.uni-stuttgart.de/institut/visualisierungslabor/technischer-aufbau.html</a>.Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-24167442631863587592012-05-24T23:16:00.001+01:002012-06-11T08:41:29.166+01:00Golden Doctorate – 50 years since Prof. Gunzenhäuser completed his PhDIt is 50 years now that Prof. <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rul_Gunzenh%C3%A4user">Rul Gunzenhäuser</a>, my predecessor on <a href="http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/">human computer interaction and interactive systems at the University of Stuttgart</a>, defended his PhD. Some month back I came across his PhD thesis “<a href="http://www.agis-verlag.de/agispublikationen/agis_verlag_rul_gunzenhaeuser_mass_und_information_als_aesthetische_kategorien_theorie_birkhoffs_informationsaesthetik.html">Ästhetisches Maß und ästhetische Information</a>“ (aesthetic measure and aesthetic information) [1], supervised by Prof. <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Bense">Max Bense</a>, and I was seriously impressed. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV1Zfu5CtsSf88cyhGzluupW-rZ9ADT8MK_-NP8T90-PZw_7n3yF4710M7D6yJ_sMU92QGFQ-kZkWx5CjDkYPrb_rRbt-R0RJQjz_VUBPKOdfkyptgXRKr_fOMhYjGPJyMNYjWCddwOrM/s1600/2012.05.24_18.38.58_IMG_0055.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV1Zfu5CtsSf88cyhGzluupW-rZ9ADT8MK_-NP8T90-PZw_7n3yF4710M7D6yJ_sMU92QGFQ-kZkWx5CjDkYPrb_rRbt-R0RJQjz_VUBPKOdfkyptgXRKr_fOMhYjGPJyMNYjWCddwOrM/s400/2012.05.24_18.38.58_IMG_0055.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>He is one of the few truly interdisciplinary people I know. And in contrast to modern interpretations of interdisciplinary (people from different working together) he is himself interdisciplinary in his own education and work. He studied Math, Physics and Philosophy, worked while he studied in a company making (radio) tubes, completed a teacher training, did his PhD in Philosophy but thematically very close to the then emerging field of computer science and became later a post-doc in the computing center. He taught didactic of mathematics in a teacher training University, was a visiting professor at the State University of New York and finally became in 1973 professor for computer science at the University of Stuttgart staring the department of dialog systems. This unique educational path shaped his research and I would expect his whole person. Seeing this career path I have even more trouble accepting the streamlining of our educational system and find it easier to relate to a renaissance educational ideal. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUyUJYGhnf-sHIK3VnUuihJR0_tiSKamGKzZbS31iFA7i_TjP2SCGV12jvUGLp-3rItCyiWoIfO7osS9W_5FdxPqfjI9cpfmCAJ7Ki9Jc4O6HKZwCfCkOf4IMBO1JFxLAeSzahMxEL76E/s1600/2012.05.24_17.44.58_IMG_0008.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUyUJYGhnf-sHIK3VnUuihJR0_tiSKamGKzZbS31iFA7i_TjP2SCGV12jvUGLp-3rItCyiWoIfO7osS9W_5FdxPqfjI9cpfmCAJ7Ki9Jc4O6HKZwCfCkOf4IMBO1JFxLAeSzahMxEL76E/s200/2012.05.24_17.44.58_IMG_0008.JPG" width="200" /></a>Yesterday evening we had a small seminar and gathering to mark the 50th anniversary of his PhD. Our colleague Prof. Catrin Misselhorn, a successor on the chair of philosophy held by Max Bense, talked about “Aesthetic as Science?” (with a question mark) and started with the statement that what people did in this area 50 years ago is completely dated, if not largely wrong. I found the analysis very interesting and enlightening as it highlights that scientific results, to be relevant, do not have a non-transient nature. For a mathematician this may be hard to grasp, but for someone in computing and especially in human computer interaction this is a relief. It shows that scientific endeavors have to be relevant in their time but the lasting value may be specifically in the fact, that they go a single step forward. Looking back a human computer interaction a lot of the research in 70ties, 80ties, and 90ties looks now really dated, but we should not be fouled, without this work we would not be in interactive systems where we are now, if this work would not have been done. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidmZlgvHoi7xW-oZcb0K22AE8_iukqGEUqmHsERp-G3WI2SnmmTlJhAuE8S_NxhBQGw8QNbCuhvxx2UvQnZb0h9pTxsCZpPhvEMO-v8xBK7qED984GKIVLq0OxgGHOftIczCew2VsTLb0/s1600/2012.05.24_17.54.04_IMG_0025.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidmZlgvHoi7xW-oZcb0K22AE8_iukqGEUqmHsERp-G3WI2SnmmTlJhAuE8S_NxhBQGw8QNbCuhvxx2UvQnZb0h9pTxsCZpPhvEMO-v8xBK7qED984GKIVLq0OxgGHOftIczCew2VsTLb0/s200/2012.05.24_17.54.04_IMG_0025.JPG" width="200" /></a><br />
Prof. <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frieder_Nake">Frieder Nake</a>, one of the pioneers of generative art and a friend and colleague of Prof. Gunzenhäuser, reflected on the early work of computers and aesthetics and on computer generated art. He too argued the original approach is 'dead', but the spirit of computer generated art is stronger now than ever, with many new tools available. He described early and heated discussions between philosophers, artists, and people who made computer generated art. One interesting approach to solve the dispute is is that the computer generated art is “artificial art” (künstliche Kunst).<br />
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<b>The short take away message from the event is</b>:<br />
If you do research in HCI, do something that is fundamentally new. Question the existing approach and creates new ideas and concepts. Don’t worry if this will last forever, accept that your research will likely be 'only' one step along the way. It has to be relevant when it is done, it matters less that it may have little relevance some 20 or 50 years later.<br />
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[1] Rul Gunzenhäuser. Ästhetisches Maß und ästhetische Information. 1962.Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1806219560789889959.post-61451242131107535392012-05-22T15:19:00.001+01:002012-05-22T19:47:16.836+01:00Share your digital activities on Android - AppTickerIf you share an apartment with a friend you know what they do. There is no need to communicate “I am watching TV” or “I am cooking” as this is pretty obvious. In the digital space this is much more difficulty. Sharing what we engage with and peripherally perceive what others do is not yet trivial.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNEkwkXZhQHWeAMY9-GOvWx2WYwh_2jd9x3Hs-fIymiJ3SDavjBM3uLWhkp24gl7W-rhqzsW-CG_gvV0dvb2DHULdhym2k0fxHdvebu94y9FhvBkBJxlPtene8UoH-YhYn9b2AiYPBlGc/s1600/Screen+shot+2012-05-22+at+4.12.32+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNEkwkXZhQHWeAMY9-GOvWx2WYwh_2jd9x3Hs-fIymiJ3SDavjBM3uLWhkp24gl7W-rhqzsW-CG_gvV0dvb2DHULdhym2k0fxHdvebu94y9FhvBkBJxlPtene8UoH-YhYn9b2AiYPBlGc/s400/Screen+shot+2012-05-22+at+4.12.32+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Niels Henze and Alireza Sahami in our group have made a new attempt to research how to bridge this gap. With the AppTicker for Android they have released a software, that offers means to share usage of applications on your phone with your friends on Facebook. You can choose that whenever you start a certain app (e.g. the web browser, the camera, or the public transport app) this is shared in your activities on Facebook. In the middle screen you can see the means for control.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyEU6x8oiq0DYwthZLLaqx7ZIqO_vy83NyMJlOaacJp7bMFVBQgrtk127qD7piwMas5dojBGKHuFWcXaJhcHnQN5AcuPc1w3HOndJm_urmXc3qZZuCZmJeJPUCcj85EmQnjn-1MPs8BGg/s1600/Screen+shot+2012-05-22+at+4.14.00+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyEU6x8oiq0DYwthZLLaqx7ZIqO_vy83NyMJlOaacJp7bMFVBQgrtk127qD7piwMas5dojBGKHuFWcXaJhcHnQN5AcuPc1w3HOndJm_urmXc3qZZuCZmJeJPUCcj85EmQnjn-1MPs8BGg/s320/Screen+shot+2012-05-22+at+4.14.00+PM.png" width="221" /></a>The app provides additionally a personal log (left screen) of all the apps that were used. I found that feature quite interesting and when looking at it I really started to reflect on my app usage patterns. If you are curious, have an android phone and if you use Facebook, please have a go and try it out.<br />
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The App homepage on our server: <a href="http://projects.hcilab.org/appticker/">http://projects.hcilab.org/appticker/</a><br />
Get it directly from <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.hcilab.projects.appshare">Google Play</a> or search for AppTicker in Google Play.<br />
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To access it directly you can scan the following QR-Code: <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghhAkOIBRKwJpxU0MuJylbN8hnjEJhvDkzCpXn8TPpTWr4_oeteHEK-yxPo2-taOvKu1Fh_xhWnAyADNuhIOF4s5NQRVSpFGKI2d-MzbIhTK7iM-CBrjpyyDKJfigsFh02-lUcHpaZr0U/s1600/appticker-qrcode.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghhAkOIBRKwJpxU0MuJylbN8hnjEJhvDkzCpXn8TPpTWr4_oeteHEK-yxPo2-taOvKu1Fh_xhWnAyADNuhIOF4s5NQRVSpFGKI2d-MzbIhTK7iM-CBrjpyyDKJfigsFh02-lUcHpaZr0U/s320/appticker-qrcode.png" width="320" /></a></div>Albrecht Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13753714842277000938noreply@blogger.com1