Mobile phones as educational technologies; Vivien visiting our lab

Vivien visited us in the lab and tried out a number of ideas for the project "mobile phones as a learning platform". She really enjoyed to test and comment new applications and devices and she felt for one day like a real researcher and at the same time really contribute insights from a end-user perspective - it is never too early to spark the fascination of research ;-)

Elba is currently putting together applications for a field study later this year. We plan to study of the use of mobile phones for teaching and revision in Panama with a large deployment supported by Nokia Research Center.

We think that mobile phones - especially as they are widely deployed around the world - offer a good alternative to laptop computers [1]. Our expectations are that the mobile phones provide similar benefits as a laptop in education without the drawbacks seen at the OLPC project. Especially the multimedia capabilities of phones and use while on the way are very tempting.

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

PS: if you are in Essen you have to see the Zeche Zollverein (a world cultural heritage; the most beautiful coal mine in the world)

Talk at Automotive Interiors Expo 2010

Today I gave a talk at Automotive Interiors Expo 2010 in Stuttgart. Traditionally this fair is about car seats, wood for the dashboard, colors and lights - and they are still there. The talks were much more about digital technologies and there was a lot about the human machine interface. We are very interested in this topic (last year we started the auto-ui.org conference series) and published an article about automotive UI research in IEEE Pervasive [1]. The slides for my talk, entitled: "Multimodal human-computer interaction in the car Novel interface and application concepts" are online available. I first introduced pervasive computing, then talked a little about an application platform for the car, and then gave an overview of some of our recent projects on automotive user interfaces, in particular about:

• Gazemarks, support for attention switching by eye tracking [2]
• Vibrofeedback in the steering wheel [3]
• Text input while driving [4] and gesture interaction on the steering wheel [5]
• Video communication in the car [6]
• The design space for automotive user interfaces [7, 8]
• our open source driving simulator [9, 10] for evaluating attention demands of secondary tasks

When walking back I saw a concept car (www.edag-light-car.com/) that has an interesting public display integrated in the backside.



[1] Schmidt, A., Spiessl, W., and Kern, D. 2010. Driving Automotive User Interface Research. IEEE Pervasive Computing 9, 1 (Jan. 2010), 85-88. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2010.3
[2] Kern, D., Marshall, P., and Schmidt, A. 2010. Gazemarks: gaze-based visual placeholders to ease attention switching. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2093-2102. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753646
[3] Kern,D., Hornecker,E., Marshall,P., Schmidt,A., Rogers, Y. 2009. Enhancing Navigation Information with Tactile Output Embedded into the Steering Wheel. In Proceedings of the 7th Int. Conference on Pervasive Computing 2009 (Pervasive 2009). Nara, Japan. Springer LNCS 5538, pp 42-58.
[4] Kern, D., Schmidt, A., Arnsmann, J., Appelmann, T., Pararasasegaran, N., and Piepiera, B. 2009. Writing to your car: handwritten text input while driving. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 4705-4710. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1520340.1520724
[5] Pfeiffer, M., Kern, D., Schöning, J., Döring, T., Krüger, A., and Schmidt, A. 2010. A multi-touch enabled steering wheel: exploring the design space. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI EA '10. ACM, New York, NY, 3355-3360. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1753984
[6] Grace Tai, Dagmar Kern, Albrecht Schmidt: Bridging the Communication Gap: A Driver-Passenger Video Link. In: Mensch und Computer 2009. Berlin 2009.
[7] Kern, D. and Schmidt, A. 2009. Design space for driver-based automotive user interfaces. In Proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Automotive User interfaces and interactive Vehicular Applications (Essen, Germany, September 21 - 22, 2009). AutomotiveUI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 3-10. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1620509.1620511
[8] Fotos of over 100 different car UIs from IAA 2010
[10] CARS: Open source software for the driving simulator.

Paluno opening at Zeche Zollverein

At the University of Duisburg-Essen we have founded paluno - The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology. Stefan Eicker, Klaus Pohl, Michael Goedicke, Volker Gruhn and me have joined forces and we bring together our expertise (and the expertise of our groups - in total about 70 people) to move software engineering forward. See the mission statement on our website: paluno.uni-due.de

Yesterday night we celebrated the new institute at Zeche Zollverein - it was a really enjoyable evening. In the talks and discussion it became very clear that dealing with complexity in the context of the real world is the central challenges for engineering software systems. The sizes of projects our partners in industry have to master are impressive and we constantly work on our teaching and education strategies to prepare students for this world… and looking at the students who went into industry we are successful ;-)

After the software engineering talks and panel we had impressive life performances by a group of singers performing musical hits and the comedian Frank Goosen. Life performances - especially in music and dance - are always a very strong reminder for me how poor digital technology is… even in 3d, full HD and Dolby surround ;-)

PhD Defense of Ulrich Steinhoff

I had the pleasure to be external examiner for the PhD thesis of Ulrich Steinhoff at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Ulrich did his PhD with Bernt Schiele and looked at different location techniques. From my perspective his work on dead reckoning for mobile devices that are NOT fixed to a specific position on the body [1].

There are always suprises at PhD defenses ;-) and the positive one at this one was a cake in the shape of a doctoral hat.

[1] U. Steinhoff and B. Schiele. Dead Reckoning from the Pocket - An Experimental Study. Eighth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PERCOM.2010.5466978

Keynote at UBI Summit: Ubicomp - Are we there yet? And where is the business?

I was invited to give a keynote at the 2010 UBI Summit in Helsinki. I looked into the recent developments of Ubicomp and in particular when things that have been around in research are surfacing on the markets. Looking back at HUC99 and HUC2k (the first two Ubicomp conferences) things like pocket bargain finder [1], context call [2,3], or sensors in phones [4] have by now become common - however it is not clear how research relates to products. There are very few cases where early Ubicomp research has been exploited in products by the people who did the research…

It was fun to think a little more about the business prespective of Ubicomp. If you are curious about the talk, have a look at my slides on "Ubicomp - Are we there yet? And where is the business?". The title of the talk relates to a recent paper I wrote for IEEE Computer [5].

The investment made in Finland in Ubicomp technology research is impressive and looking at the presentations at UBI Summit it seems it is worthwhile. One example is a really simple technology - but with great potential: www.happy-or-not.com. Their motivation is based on a statement apparently made by Jack Welch (former CEO of GE):

"Too often we measure everything and understand nothing. The three most important things you need to measure in a business are customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and cash flow. If you’re growing customer satisfaction, your global market share is sure to grow, too. Employee satisfaction gets you productivity, quality, pride, and creativity. And cash flow is the pulse—the key vital sign of a company."(source)

It says that to assess the success of a company you have to look at customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and cash flow. Their product focuses on the first two. Technically it is simple as setting up some buttons is trivial - but creating a complete system to fit companies and their requirements is not straightforward. It is not hard to see the value...

[1] Adam B. Brody and Edward J. Gottsman. Pocket BargainFinder: A Handheld Device for Augmented Commerce. First International Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (HUC '99), 27-29 September 1999, Karlsruhe, Germany

[2] A. Schmidt, A. Takaluoma and J. Mäntyjärvi, Context-Aware Telephony over WAP, Personal Technologies 4(4), December 2000. pp. 225-229.

[3] A. Schmidt, T. Stuhr, H.-W. Gellersen. Context-Phonebook - Extending Mobile Phone Applications with Context. Third Mobile HCI Workshop, Lille, Sept. 2001

[4] Schmidt, A., et al. 1999. Advanced Interaction in Context. In Proceedings of the 1st int. Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (September, 1999). LNCS, vol. 1707. Springer, 89-101

[5] Schmidt, A. 2010. Ubiquitous Computing: Are We There Yet? Computer 43, 2 (Feb. 2010), 95-97. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MC.2010.54

Felix von Reischach - PhD defence

Over the last years Felix looked at how mobile phones can enhance the shopping experience in the real world. In particular Felix compared different identification techniques (e.g. text input, bar code, nfc) [1] and at mapping the design space for product recommendation systems on mobile devices [2]. We had an interesting discussion at the PhD defense and I think we will see many products and services popping up in the future.

Being in Zürich I took the opportunity to see more of Florian's group. There are a lot of exciting projects going on, see their Wiki for details. I looked especially at the work on mobile platforms and public displays. The AppAware application (http://appaware.org/) on Android has an amazing potential. Users share events (what applications they are installing, removing and updating) together with their location. It is just amazing to see what people around you install - and being close to ETH you see events every second.

[1] Reischach, F., Michahelles, F., Guinard, D., Adelmann, R., Fleisch, E., and Schmidt, A. 2009. An Evaluation of Product Identification Techniques for Mobile Phones. In Proceedings of INTERACT 2009, the 12th IFIP TC 13 international Conference on Human-Computer interaction: Part I (Uppsala, Sweden, August 24 - 28, 2009). LNCS, vol. 5726. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 804-816. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03655-2_88

[2] von Reischach, F., Michahelles, F., and Schmidt, A. 2009. The design space of ubiquitous product recommendation systems. In Proceedings of the 8th international Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (Cambridge, United Kingdom, November 22 - 25, 2009). MUM '09. ACM, New York, NY, 1-10. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1658550.1658552

pdnet kick-off in Lancaster - starting a new communication era?

We are excitet to start a new European FET Open project on pervasive display networks. With pdnet we hope to create an entirely new communication media in public spaces. At the University of Lancaster we had two intensive days to get the project started and it we developed a lot of exciting ideas!

pdnet project abstract: "The project aims to lay the scientific foundations for a new form of communications medium with the same potential impact on society as radio, television and the Internet. The goal is to explore the scientific challenges and new technologies required to enable the emergence of large scale networks of pervasive public displays and associated sensors that are open to applications and content from many sources.
In effect, the project will look to provide the foundations for work on a brand new global communications medium for information access and interaction and to ensure that Europe is in the best possible position to benefit from this new medium.
The project is highly innovative - no such pervasive display networks exist today and their emergence would represent a radical transformation in the way we think about information dissemination in public spaces; it is high risk - numerous technical and societal challenges need to be addressed before pervasive display networks are possible; and potentially high pay-off - if successful, the project will pioneer a new research area and provide the foundations for a new communications medium that offers entirely new opportunities for economic activity and a means to radically change public spaces - from today's environments in which information is pushed to passers-by in the form of adverts to spaces that can utilize public displays and ambient intelligence to reflect the hopes, aspirations and interests of its occupants using content and applications created anywhere in a global network."

PS: I learned about a new toy/educational kit from Ben: Lego WeDo Robotics kit connected to Scratch.

Sharing your Alarm Clock Settings and Interaction

We recently discussed more ideas on sharing alarm clock settings and sharing of the interaction with the alarm clock. Conceptually we have created a design some years back: the networked alarm clock that we published at the 3AD conference [1]. 2008 there was a interesting paper at CSCW that look in more detail what such designs can enable for group communication [2].

As many people (and I heard that the most used function on a phone is the alarm clock) use their phone as their alarm clock it could be the right time to put some of these idea into reality...

[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

[2] Kim, S., Kientz, J. A., Patel, S. N., and Abowd, G. D. 2008. Are you sleeping?: sharing portrayed sleeping status within a social network. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (San Diego, CA, USA, November 08 - 12, 2008). CSCW '08. ACM, New York, NY, 619-628. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1460563.1460660

Getting back to Europe, Remote teaching

Due to the volcanic activity in Iceland (and the resulting cancellation of many flights) I was a few days longer in North America than planned. I stayed in Toronto and looked at different options to get home - in short Europe is far away from the North America :-) much further than we typically experience it when we planes are flying.

Here are some options that I explored:

• looking for a place on a container ship, takes about 7-12 days (does not really work as the capacity of transatlantic ship with regard to transporting people is extremely low - my estimate is 100 people/week - does this sound right?)
• booking a transatlantic cruise, takes about 7-15 days (very few spaces available, only every few weeks available)
• flying via the middle east (e.g. Doha, Dubai, Cairo, Istanbul ...) and than taking bus/car/train/ship to get back to Germany - seemed feasible (cheap flights were available) but the land journey takes long (e.g. from Turkey to Germany it about 40h).
• flying to Moscow and taking the train(pretty straightforward ;-)
  

In the end I waited, got a stand-by space on a direct flight to Frankfurt on Wednesday, and did the teaching via Skype and Google-Talk and had a nice day in Toronto :-) (Fotos from Facebook and probably taken by Jan Gerbecks and Ali)

I had a discussion with Brygg Ullmer and others about the state of remote-X (X may be teaching, conferences, meeting, etc.) and I think it may be the right time to push for telepresence again... Perhaps we should try harder to make remote meetings work.

Talk at the University of New Hampshire, Durham

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Paper and Note at CHI 2010

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

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

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

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

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

Work in Progress at CHI 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHI 2010 - My Random Pick of the Day

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

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

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

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

EmoDetector App is online - Hear The Feeling of SMS

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

• :) or :-)
• :( or :-(
• ;) or ;-)
• ok (case insensitive)
• ?

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

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

CHI 2010 - Opening and Keynote

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

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

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

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

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

Zeitgeist, GNOME Activity Journal etc. - Workshop at CHI

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

Zeitgeist Magic from Seif Lotfy on Vimeo.

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

• workshop home page an papers
• personal informatics network
• Personal Experience Computing, towards truly Personal Semantic Technology, by Thorsten Prante
• GNOME activity-journal
• zeitgeist project

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

PS: CHI is good for your health :-)


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

Example for explaining affordance

Having used these cups I found that they are great examples for the concept of an affordance. Their shape and design prohibits some usage scenarios ;-) E.g. try to fill it and put it somewhere…

Full Paper and Work in Progress at Percom 2010

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

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

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

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

Keynote by Pertti Huuskonen: Ten Views to Context Awareness

Pertti Huuskonen from Nokia presented his keynote at Percom in Mannheim. I worked with Pertti in 1999 on a European Project TEA - creating context-aware phones [1].

After telling us about CERN and some achievements in physics he raised the issue that an essential skill of humans is that they are context-aware. Basically culture is context-awareness - learning how to appropriately behave in life is essential to be accepted. We do this by looking at other people and by learning how how they act and how others react. "Knowing how to behave" we become fit for social life and this questions the notion of intuitive use as it seems that most of it is learned or copied from others.

He gave a nice overview of how we can context-awareness is useful. One very simple example he showed is that people typically create context at the start of a phone call.

One example of a future to come may be ubiquitous spam - where context may be the enabler but also the enabler for blogging adverts. He also showed the potential of context in the large, see Nokoscope. His keynote was refreshing - and as clearly visible he has a good sense of humor ;-)

[1] Schmidt, A., Aidoo, K. A., Takaluoma, A., Tuomela, U., Laerhoven, K. V., and Velde, W. V. 1999. Advanced Interaction in Context. In Proceedings of the 1st international Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27 - 29, 1999). H. Gellersen, Ed. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 1707. Springer-Verlag, London, 89-101.

Opening of Percom, Keynote by Kurt Rothermel

About 300 people are at Percom 2010, which is held in the palace in Mannheim - and amazing location! The conference had 233 submission and is truly international (1/3 of the papers come from Europe, 1/3 from America, and 1/3 from Asia/pacific) and highly competitive (acceptance rate of about 12%).

Kurt Rothermel from the University of Stuttgart presented the opening Keynote on Large-scale Context Management. He presented a set of interesting example from Nexus (Collaborative Research Center 627, Spatial World Models for Mobile Context-Aware Applications) that showed the challenge in large scale systems. The size of the problem is can be easily seen when considering that half the population of the planet is using a mobile device and hence needs to be located… Now imagine everyone is contributing sensor data at a rate of one update per minute… For more details on their work see their 2009 percom paper [1]. In his talk he gave also some references to other interesting research platforms in this space: SensorWeb/SensorMap by Microsoft [2] and SensorPlanet by Nokia [3].

[1] Lange, R., Cipriani, N., Geiger, L., Grossmann, M., Weinschrott, H., Brodt, A., Wieland, M., Rizou, S., and Rothermel, K. 2009. Making the World Wide Space happen: New challenges for the Nexus context platform. In Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (March 09 - 13, 2009). PERCOM. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 1-4. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PERCOM.2009.4912782

[2] Kansal, A., Nath, S., Liu, J., and Zhao, F. 2007. SenseWeb: An Infrastructure for Shared Sensing. IEEE MultiMedia 14, 4 (Oct. 2007), 8-13. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2007.82

[3] Abdelzaher, T., Anokwa, Y., Boda, P., Burke, J., Estrin, D., Guibas, L., Kansal, A., Madden, S., and Reich, J. 2007. Mobiscopes for Human Spaces. IEEE Pervasive Computing 6, 2 (Apr. 2007), 20-29. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2007.38

NSF/EU workshop in Mannheim

Mohan Kumar and Marco Conti organized an EU/NSF workshop on Future Directions in Pervasive Computing and Social Networking for Emerging Applications. They managed to get together an interesting set of people and the discussion in the break out session were very enjoyable and I got a number of ideas what really are the challenges to come.

There are the position statements on the web page and at some point the identified grand challenges will be available.

PS: blackboards are still highly effective ;-)

CFP: 2nd Int. Conf. on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

The call for the 2nd International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications is online - see http://auto-ui.org - AutomotiveUI'10.

The conference will be in Pittsburgh on 11-12 Nov 2010.

Do not miss the submission deadline: 02 July 2010.

The call includes a wide range of topics, including:

• new concepts for in-car user interfaces
• multi-modal in-car user interfaces
• in-car speech user interfaces
• text input and output while driving
• multimedia interfaces and in-car entertainment
• evaluation of in-car user interfaces
• methods and tools for automotive user interface research
• development tools and methods for automotive user interfaces
• automotive user interface frameworks and toolkits
• detecting and estimating user intentions
• detecting user distraction and estimating cognitive load
• user interfaces for assistive functionality
• biometrics and physiological sensors as a user interface component
• using sensors and context for interactive experiences in the car
• user interfaces for information access while driving
• user interfaces for navigation systems
• applications and user interfaces for inter-vehicle communication
• in-car gaming

We enjoyed last years conference in Essen :-) There are several posts online in my blog and we had a conference report in IEEE Pervasive Magazine [1]. Last years proceedings are online in the ACM DL and on the 2009 conference website.

The full call for papers is online at: http://auto-ui.org.

[1] Albrecht Schmidt, Wolfgang Spiessl, Dagmar Kern, "Driving Automotive User Interface Research," IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 85-88, Jan.-Mar. 2010, doi:10.1109/MPRV.2010.3.

Poker surface on youtube - 5000 hits in a day :-)

A video describing the poker surface is available in youtube. It is an implementation of a poker game on a combination of a multi-touch table and mobile phones, for details see [1].



It is amazing how quickly it is picked up. It gained about 5000 views in a single day and it is already features in engadget.com, gizmodo.com, ubergizmo.com and on recombu.com. But as the comments on pokerolymp.com show the real poker players are hard to impress...

This really makes me think how research, publishing, and public perception of research is changing - rapidly…

[1] Shirazi, A. S., Döring, T., Parvahan, P., Ahrens, B., and Schmidt, A. 2009. Poker surface: combining a multi-touch table and mobile phones in interactive card games. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 - 18, 2009). MobileHCI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 1-2. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1613858.1613945

Heiko Drewes defended his PhD - Congratulations! (No. 4)

Heiko worked the last 6 years towards his PhD. He did a lot of things during this time - and even though not everything was on his PhD topic - I think the time was well spent, e.g. some visually interesting things came out [1].

The core of his PhD was on eye gaze as an additional modality for human computer interaction and it is worthwhile to read the thesis (which will be available in a few weeks) - till than you can have a look at the following papers. [2] describes a system that positions the mouse pointer on touching the mouse to the location on the screen where look at; [3] introduces the concept of gaze gestures - gestures done with the eyes. There is an interesting alt.chi paper coming on Fitts' law (don't start Heiko on this ;-).

In the evening Raphael showed me his interactive surface prototype [4] - it is really big :-). He is also co-organizing a course on Sketching with Hardware.

[1] Heiko Drewes. Yara - Yet Another Random Art.

[2] Drewes, H. and Schmidt, A. 2009. The MAGIC Touch: Combining MAGIC-Pointing with a Touch-Sensitive Mouse. In Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC 13 international Conference on Human-Computer interaction: Part II (Uppsala, Sweden, August 24 - 28, 2009). Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 5727. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 415-428. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03658-3_46

[3] Heiko Drewes, Albrecht Schmidt. 2007. Interacting with the Computer using Gaze Gestures. In Proceedings of the 11th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September 2007, ISBN 978-3-540-74794-9, DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74800-7_43

[4] Raphael Wimmer, Florian Schulz, Fabian Hennecke, Sebastian Boring, Heinrich Hussmann. Curve: Blending Horizontal and Vertical Interactive Surfaces. Adjunct Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Workshop on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces (IEEE Tabletop 2009), Banff, Canada, Nov. 2009

Doctoral Colloquium in Bommerholz

For the second time we organize a doctoral seminar for PhD students in CS from Bochum, Dortmund, Duisburg und Essen. The main purpose is to provide networking opportunities beyond the own subject area and to highlight to options for life after the PhD.

This year we had 4 invited speakers highlighting opportunities in academia, industry, and in SMEs:

• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christian Bauckhage, Fraunhofer-Institut für Intelligente Analyse- und Informationssysteme, Sankt Augustin: "Von einem der auszog, Wissenschaftler zu werden"
• Henning Dettleff, Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände, Berlin: "Beschäftigungschancen von Promovierten in der Industrie"
• Dr. Matthias Häsel, Senior Product Manager, XING AG: "Perspektiven und Karrierewege in der Internetökonomie"
• Dr. Wiltrud Christine Radau, Deutscher Hochschulverband: "Karrierewege in der Wissenschaft"

The main take away message is be open with regard to career choices (bottom line: good students will be good and happy whatever they do after their PhD ;-). However if you are sure that you want to be in the management of a large enterprise than go for a top management consultancy job after your PhD and if you are sure academia in Germany is your only choice than go to one of the top Universities in the US as postdoc. This does not guarantee anything but puts you in the best position…

In the evening the tasks for the teams was to think 100 years ahead! This was inspired by the book "the world in 100 years" [2] and by a talk from Friedemann Mattern [2].

One essential reference on doing a PhD is [3] :-)

[1] Arthur Brehmer (Herausgeber). Die Welt in 100 Jahren: Mit einer einführenden Essay "Zukunft von gestern" von Georg Ruppelt. Reprint der Auflage von 1910. (2010). ISBN-10: 3487083043.

[2] Friedemann Matter. Die Welt in 100 Jahren - Rückblick auf eine vergangene Zukunft. Kolloquium an der TU Darmstadt. 2006.

[3] PhD Comics. http://www.phdcomics.com

German Workshop on Tangible Interaction

Friday and Saturday we hosted the GI working groups on tangible interaction (GI Arbeitskreis Be-greifbare Interaction in gemischten Wirklichkeiten) for the second inventor's workshop. We were positively surprised that more than 30 people took part. We started with a set of nice demos from our students and then Nicolas Villar presented an invited talk.

The concept of the workshop was to create ideas by looking more closely at different materials that may be used for interaction and by assessing novel interaction technologies. On Friday afternoon we had several tables with material (e.g. smart materials, conductive fabric, magnetic materials, etc.) and technologies (e.g. VoodooIO, EduWear kit, Physiological sensing based on the Nexus system). We bought a set of materials from MUTR Teaching Materials. In groups the participants create many design ideas by imagining a certain technology to be used in a specific context.

The social event was at the unperfekthaus.de in Essen - if you visit Essen this is a "must see". The concept is unique!

On Saturday we started with an exercise to investigate the qualities of tangible UIs in comparison to traditional GUIs. For this we looked at different games (e.g. Space invaders, Super Mario, Sims, Halo) and though how we would make them more tangible and what pros and cons are there for the tangible and GUI version. In this context we also discussed the approach of exertion interfaces [1].

The rest of the morning was spent working on more concrete ideas for the concepts created on Friday afternoon - with remarkable results - see the Wiki for details.

[1] http://exertioninterfaces.com/

Invited Talk by Nicolas Villar

Nicolas visited us in Essen to give the opening talk of our German meeting on tangible interaction. In his talk he first showed some examples of the hardware and sensors group at Microsoft research in Cambridge, most notably the SenseCam (which we learned is licensed and will be soon commercially available).

In the main part of the talk Nicolas presented a modular embedded architecture that allows developers to create custom made digital systems with fairly little effort. By integrating physical development (3D printing), functional blocks and software development the approach aims at empowering developers to create entirely new devices. His examples were impressive, e.g. creating a fully functional game console in a few hours.

Assuming that electronics become really small and cheap and that displays can be directly printed I can see that this approach makes a lot of sense - the question is just how long will it take before we rather use a (nowadays) powerful ARM processor, instead of a logic circuit with 10 gates. I would imagine that from a economic perspective it will less than 20 years before this makes sense.

We talked about energy harvesting and hier is a link to a potential interesting component: LTC3108.

Cloud Computing Reading List

I recently got more often used about cloud computing and what my take on it is. So far I have not had time to write up my view but I can share at least my reading list on the topic:

Hayes, B. 2008. Cloud computing. Commun. ACM 51, 7 (Jul. 2008), 9-11. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1364782.1364786

Vaquero, L. M., Rodero-Merino, L., Caceres, J., and Lindner, M. 2008. A break in the clouds: towards a cloud definition. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 39, 1 (Dec. 2008), 50-55. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1496091.1496100

John Viega, "Cloud Computing and the Common Man," Computer, vol. 42, no. 8, pp. 106-108, Aug. 2009, doi:10.1109/MC.2009.252

Lin, G., Fu, D., Zhu, J., and Dasmalchi, G. 2009. Cloud Computing: IT as a Service. IT Professional 11, 2 (Mar. 2009), 10-13. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2009.22

Voas, J. and Zhang, J. 2009. Cloud Computing: New Wine or Just a New Bottle?. IT Professional 11, 2 (Mar. 2009), 15-17. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2009.23

Grossman, R. L. 2009. The Case for Cloud Computing. IT Professional 11, 2 (Mar. 2009), 23-27. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2009.40

Weinhardt, C., Anandasivam, A., Blau, B., and Stößer, J. 2009. Business Models in the Service World. IT Professional 11, 2 (Mar. 2009), 28-33. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2009.21

Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Andy Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, and Matei Zaharia
Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing. 2009. UC Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory. http://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/publication/285

Sensor modules for acceleration, gyro, and magnetic field

I came across 2 Sensor module recently released by ST Microelectronics:

• LSM303DLH - 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis magnetometer in a single chip
• L3G4200D - low-power yaw, pitch and roll digital gyroscope

There will be in the future probably very few mobile devices without such sensors. When we worked on the project TEA in 1999 it seemed far away… What can you do with sensors on the mobile? There are a few papers to read: using them for context awareness [1], for interaction [2], [3], and for creating smart devices [4].

Last week in Finland I met Antii Takaluoma (one of the co-authors of [1]) and he works now for offcode.fi - I saw impressive Linux hardware - I expect cool stuff to come :-)

[1] Schmidt, A., Aidoo, K. A., Takaluoma, A., Tuomela, U., Laerhoven, K. V., and Velde, W. V. 1999. Advanced Interaction in Context. In Proceedings of the 1st international Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27 - 29, 1999). H. Gellersen, Ed. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 1707. Springer-Verlag, London, 89-101.

[2] Hinckley, K., Pierce, J., Sinclair, M., and Horvitz, E. 2000. Sensing techniques for mobile interaction. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (San Diego, California, United States, November 06 - 08, 2000). UIST '00. ACM, New York, NY, 91-100. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/354401.354417

[3] Albrecht Schmidt. Implicit human computer interaction through context. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 4(2):191-199, June 2000

[4] A. Schmidt and K. Van Laerhoven. How to Build Smart Appliances?, IEEE Personal Communications, p.66 - 71, (2001)