What alarm clock are you using?

The answer is probably "my phone" - it seems that for many people the phone has become their primary alarm clock. We have discussed this before in a blog post…

Some years back I took part in a design competition at the appliance design conference and suggested an alarm clock that links you to your friends [1]. One of the ideas was to have dynamic wake up times based on when you friends got up. The paper was accepted in March 2005 - this was before twitter was founded and before facebook was open for general registration. At this time we envisioned this as a stand-alone appliance as micro-blogging was not yet around.

Time has move on and many appliance ideas have since become apps on the phone. In the course of his research Ali is working on ideas for increasing the connectedness between people. One of the case studies is now an alarm clock - called weSleep - that has the basic alarm clock function and has additionally means to log sleep hours and perceived sleep quality. It also allows to post information related to the going to sleep or being woken up to social networking software such as facebook.

Interesting in trying it out? Check out the web page of weSleep and if you are interested in taking part in a study please contact Ali (not sure if he still is interested in more volunteers).

[1] Schmidt, A. 2006. Network alarm clock (The 3AD International Design Competition). Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 10, 2-3 (Jan. 2006), 191-192. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0022-y

TPC meetings in Atlanta, Palo Alto and Boston

December was filled with travel - twice to the US and several trips in Europe - and for the first time in two years I did not really get around to write my blog...

I am still wondering what technology we require that could make physical meetings less important. Video conference is getting better and I use it a lot - but it still does not facilitate a discussion between 30 or more people well. Besides the work that is in reviewing I really emjoy that part of my job - I find it really exciting to see so much (somehow) novel work in a very short time.

Academics often complain about a lot of travel - but sometimes we need a reality check. Walking around Atlanta airport and seeing the large number of soldiers I felt that I should not complain about my travels… At the same time I asked myself what we will have first: "remote only" wars or "remote only" critical business meeting.

In the first two weeks of December I had the privilege to be the CHI, Pervasive and PerCom program committee meeting. Having seen more than 100 papers being discussed made the effort in reviewing worthwhile. The overview of the field one gets is amazing. And with the insight view I am looking forward to three very interesting conference programs to come in 2010. By the way Geraldine Fitzpatrick (this years paper co-chair at CHI) has move to the Vienna University of Technology.

Besides the PC meetings there was some time to visit labs. In Palo Alto at Nokia Research we were shown a communication appliance that is designed to facilitate remote interaction and communication around a book. Looks interesting and they promised there will be a paper about this soon.

In Boston I went to the new MediaLab building (and met Leah Buechley and Joe Paradiso) - really exciting - research between boxes. Seeing some a Leah's work motivated again to look more into wearables. If you are curious too, have a look at Lilypad Arduino [1] and at the 2008 CHI paper [2].


[1] Buechley, L. Lilypad Arduino | build something. http://web.media.mit.edu/~leah/LilyPad/build.html

[2] Buechley, L., Eisenberg, M., Catchen, J., and Crockett, A. The Lilypad Arduino: using computational textiles to investigate engagement, aesthetics, and diversity in computer science education. In CHI '08: Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 423-432.

Taking pictures during sports - ideas for an appliance

If you do sports it typically requires another person to take the photos of you. Having the evening off in in Haifa Keith, Antonio and me went climbing at http://www.shafan-hasela.com/. It was not easy to get there - we used the typical way - first: take a bus to a random place (not intentially) - second: realize that the bus went to a place you did not want to go - third: take the taxi to where you wanted to go.

Being three people it was very easy to takes pictures while climbing - and I as I am climbing a class below Antonio and Keith I had a lot of time to take the pictures ;-)

Being computer scientist you always think about cool, challenging, and exciting projects. So we wondered if we could build an autonomous flying object that contains a camera that follows you (in a defined distance) and takes exciting photos. We have an idea how this could be done - let me know if you would be interested in the project (e.g. bachelor/master)- may be even done in a collaboration with Lancaster.