Lab visit in Chengdu, University of Electronic and Science Technology of China

On the final day of the Sino-German Symposium on Wearable Computing in Chengdu Prof. Dongyi Chen invited us to see his lab. We drove to the new campus of the University of Electronic and Science Technology of China. Already the drive was impressive seeing the amount of building work happening in Chengdu, especially in the high tech area.

In the School of Computer Science and Engineering we visited a computer lab and got to see very interesting student projects in Prof. Dongyi Chen labs. The demos included a wireless controlled vehicle were the control is implemented on a mobile phone, industrial settings control applications using sensor nets, table top user interfaces and augmented reality applications on the table, different applications for wearable displays, and a wrist worn computer (developed from scratch).

The quality of the work by the students is impressive and so is the university campus (building and facilities). It shows a very clear determination to push science and education. We should probably talk to our government to consider investing more in research and higher education…
I hope this symposium will help us to start some more collaboration. As a next step we plan a summer school on Human Computer Interaction next year in Germany.

Public Displays in Chengdu

This is a post to document the transition of public display systems around the work (hopefully there are more to follow). In the European pdnet project we investigate and develop a new communication medium based on public displays. The transformation that takes place in this domain is extremely quick, and hence I think it is interesting to keep some record on specific displays.I found it very interesting to see that there are many simple animations used in simple displays when they become digital. One example is the use of animation in traffic lights. There are two types of dynamic information: informative (e.g. showing the count-down to the next green light) and decorative (e.g. moving bicycle wheels as shown in the video).Currently there is a mix of traditional painted/printed displays, illuminated static displays, illuminated displays that change between discreet presentations and fully digital high resolution displays. The digital advertising displays in the inner city center of Chengdu are impressive. Looking at the photos it could be anywhere in world. It seems that public displays lose more and more their local character - very different from 20 years ago when they were still painted/printed in most places around the world.

Live experience - media consumption is social

Before the dinner I decided to try a Chinese massage and it was astonishingly relaxing. It is one of those reminders that there are many things we need to experience and there is just no other way (at least so far) to gain a similar understanding…

The show after dinner showed to me how much a live presentation of artistic and musical performance transmits - it is so much richer than conserved/recorded media. Take as an example the shadow play - I really enjoyed it as live performance. In comparison to 3D animation movies it has little fidelity but it still works extremely well to engage people in the live presentation. But I could not imagine that I would watch it on TV - hence we probably miss something in creating the experience when playing/presenting conserved media. I would expect there is a lot potential in creating a social situation for digital media consumption that could improve the experience.

Chinese German Symposium on Wearable Computing in Chengdu

The Sino-German Symposium on Wearable Computing in Chengdu provided an interesting opportunity to get together with colleagues in China that work on similar topics.
My talk was entitled "Interaction on the Move - Wearable User Interfaces" and look at a very high level perspective at mobile and wearable interaction. As the main objective of the symposium is to initiate collaboration I also included some slides on the other work we are doing.

Bernt Schiele looked back on his early work in 1998 at MIT with Sandy Pentland and reflected on how wearable computing has evolved. It seems than many of the scenarios that were originally envisioned are now realized on smart phones and it seems that an active usage model - people taking the device explicitly instead of having something that is always on and in their face. However looking back on some of the early visions (continuous capture, contextual support) they are still attractive and the technology may be there to realize them for real. One example of a system that could now be easily realized and may have a growing market could be a device similar to the StartleCam [1], providing personal safety services.

Feng Tian, one of the top HCI researchers in China gave an overview of their current work which I found very exciting (especially the projects related to sports and education). Hopefully there is a chance for future collaboration.

There is more information on the symposium and on the Sino-German collaboration at Wearcom.org.

[1] Healey, J. and Picard, R. W. 1998. StartleCam: A Cybernetic Wearable Camera. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE international Symposium on Wearable Computers (October 19 - 20, 1998). ISWC. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 42.

In the talks and conversation I saw a set of technologies I like to remember (and share) some of them:

• Motion sensing suit from XSens
• Personal Display Carl Zeiss Cinemizer 3D Plus
• MotionNode - a 3-DOF inertial measurement unit (IMU)

Decorative Displays in Zürich Railway Station

In the railway station in Zürich is a display that consists of 25.000 light units (=10x50x50 - by my counting). It seems that for each unit the color can be set. As there is some space between the lights one can see the "hidden" layers which makes it a sort of 3D image. So far it seems to be used only as an artistic/decorative display - or I did not get the meaning. There is also still "conventional" art in the railway station…

I recognized an interesting effect of human behavior. I looked at the electronic display for about 2 minutes and nobody took a photo of it. When I started taking the photos there were within 30 seconds 10 other people starting to take photos ;-) Perhaps we should create an application that makes this easier - consiting of three parts: (1) if someone takes a photo the photo application broadcasts this event, (2) an application running in the back ground monitoring when others take photos and records the location and (3) a page, folder or dynamic query that shows fotos for this location (and perhaps sorted by time difference to the recording of the event).

PhD defense of Michael Kuhn at ETH Zurich

Michael Kuhn defended his PhD thesis on "Understanding and Organizing User Generated Data: Methods and Applications" at ETH Zurich and I had the honor to be one of the examiners. His thesis is a prime example how solid theoretical concepts and practical applications go well together. He investigated the similarities in different domains, including people, conferences, and music. I came first across his work at Mobile HCI [1]. He has published an interesting set of papers on his work, see his page at ETH.

As one of the datasets he used http://www.livejournal.com which is can be freely crawled. This is an interesting resource for doing research on social networks.

As part of his dissertation project he implemented several applications. I found the following two remarkable and very useful:

• http://www.confsearch.org Looking for conference based on keywords? Searching for a conference in a field? Which conferences are related? Have a look and you will find some answers.
• http://www.museek.ethz.ch a comprehensive mobile music application for Android.

PS: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/ is another conference/publication search site - not sure how much I believe in automating the rankings of scientists - as the sites lists me with Aalborg University - and even a change request did not help to put my affiliation right ;-)

[1] Goussevskaia, O., Kuhn, M., and Wattenhofer, R. 2008. Exploring music collections on mobile devices. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on Human Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 02 - 05, 2008). MobileHCI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 359-362. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409240.1409288

Call for Papers: IEEE Pervasive Computing special Issue on Automotive Pervasive Computing

Next year will be a special issue of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine on Automotive Pervasive Computing. I am honored to edit this issue together with Joe Paradiso and Brian Noble :-) The submission deadline for full papers is October 1st and work in progress one month later - see the call for papers for details.

Cars have become an interesting and challenging microcosm for pervasive computing research and we invite articles relating to pervasive computing in the automotive context. Examples of relevant topics are:

Sensing and context in automotive environments

• Pervasive sensor systems in the car
• Use of sensors and context for automotive applications
• Contextual vehicular applications
• Collaborative sensing with multiple cars

Automotive user interfaces

• Concepts for in-car user interfaces based on pervasive computing techology
• Multi-modal interaction in the car
• Detecting user intentions, emotions, and distraction
• User interfaces for assistive functionality and autonomous driving
• Applications of car to car communication

Pervasive computing applications in the car

• Contextual information and navigation systems
• Technologies to improve media consumption while driving
• Communication appliances for drivers and passengers
• In-car pervasive gaming for passengers and drivers

Experience with pervasive computing in the car

• Experiences with pervasive computing technologies in cars
• Case studies of automotive pervasive computing
• Ethnographic work on the use of technologies in cars

For details see the cfp at: http://computer.org/pervasive/cfp3

Scientific papers as audio content?

We have started to experiment with reading articles and providing them as MP3 files or podcasts (see the facebook page or the blogpost). So far I found for myself a number of places where I like it - from gym to car. Perhaps we should make it mandatory that the camera ready version of the paper is the PDF, the source, and an audio file (e.g. the paper read by the author or a description of the work - I guess the authors reading their papers could improve some papers as the authors would be finally read what they write ;-)

Coming across this sign in a bookshop in Essen made me smile - especially as we look into ways that may making reading feasible while driving [1].

[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

PS: to answer some of the questions about the audio files of research papers I got recently: Yes, I think it is nice to have real humans reading. Yes, I know that there are brilliant text to speech software (but as long as they do the Simpsons with actor's voices we are not there yet).

Handheld Laser Projector

Enrico got for his project a handheld laser projector. The nice thing about this technology is that the projected image is always in focus - it does not matter if you move the projector or if you project on an uneven surface. The AAXA L1 Laser Pico Projector (even though there are plenty of things that can be improved, noise for a start) provides some inspiration what will become possible if these devices will be common in mobile phones. In Lancaster Enrico explored already 2007/2008 some of the usage scenarios and interaction techniques [1] and I am really curious of further ones. There was a workshop at Pervasive 2010 looking at current research on personal projectors [2].

With this piece of technology we can also move on the idea of a device where interactive shell and functional core of a product is separated. We have published the concept as work in progress at CHI [3] and perhaps it is now time to look into a realistic implementation using such a laser projector.

[1] Hang, A., Rukzio, E., and Greaves, A. 2008. Projector phone: a study of using mobile phones with integrated projector for interaction with maps. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on Human Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 02 - 05, 2008). MobileHCI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 207-216. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409240.1409263

[2] UBIPROJECTION 2010 http://eis.comp.lancs.ac.uk/workshops/ubiproject2010/

[3] 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

Teaching Ubicomp? What is it we should teach?

Why should we teach Ubicomp? What are the core issues when teaching Ubicomp? How do we cope with the rapid changes in technologies if we provide practical exercises in our Pervasive Computing classes? What skills will students take away from the course?

As Ubicomp is still a young and dynamic subject it is inevitable that we have to ask these questions. To share our experiences in teaching we met at the ETH Zürich. Friedemann Mattern, Marc Langheinrich, Michael Rohs, Kay Römer, and many of our PhD students (and me ;-) spent two days in Zürich to collect materials and discuss the above questions. The hardest one is obviously the what is ubicomp question…

For me the key thing is that we teach about distributed computing systems that are aware and linked to the real world and which are used by humans. The systems aspect is key and I think which specific technologies, tools, methods, we teach are exchangeable. The second point I want to make in my pervasive computing class is to get students excited and aware of the potential of computing in the future and how we are at the heart of a major change that goes beyond technology.

We are currently compiling a Wiki with teaching materials which we hope will become public in the future (at least in parts). If you teach a ubicomp related course or if you know of course please feel free to add a comment with link to the webpage and we will try to include it in the collection.

PS: examples of the UI challenge of ubicomp are everywhere.

Feature or Bug - how do you end an annoying call?

My first mobile phone in 1998 had a detachable antenna (you could just screw the antenna off). This design feature enabled a socially acceptable mechanism to end annoying conversations by losing the connection. When talking became boring you told the communication partner that it seems that the connection gets worse (while you unscrewed the antenna) and then when you detached the antenna the call was usually dropped.

Reading about the iPhone I thought about this long forgotten feature and expected that Apple listened to its users and that there is a next version of this feature - nowadays implemented as touch interaction (not screwing required) on the iPhone 4. The photo shows a phone where the feature is disabled by some rubber cover.

I was really disappointed that Apple tells us it is a bug…

IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine facebook page

At the editorial board meeting we discussed new ideas on how to distribute content of the IEEE Pervasive Magazine in further ways. The magazine is widely read, has a healthy acceptance rate (about 20%) and articles are highly cited - but I think we cannot ignore that access to media is rapidly changing.

Currently this effort is not about replacing the print copy and the PDF in the online library but to add further channels. One Idea is to have a podcast that provides some of the articles (e.g. conference report or other departments) or to have an audio preview of a new issue (e.g. Guest editors introduction and abstracts of technical articles).

The experiment has started :-)

Grace Tai read one article (conference report on the Auto-UI conference, [1]) and this is now available as MP3. This MP3 is deliberately "home made" as we would expect that this is a quality we as a community (e.g. the authors reading their articles, volunteers reading the articles) can achieve.

• MP3: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5633502/ieee/AutoUI.mp3
• Digital library: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MPRV.2010.3
• PDF: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5633502/ieee/AutoUIpaper.pdf

It would be great if we can start a discussion how useful such a podcast would be. There is a facebook page where the discussion already started: www.facebook.com/pervasive

If you have recently authored an article for the IEEE Pervasive Magazine - it would be great if you could also read it an share it here for discussion on the facebook page.

[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.

Emmy Noether meeting in Potsdam

Before the meeting close to Berlin I once more underestimated the size of the planet (and how far Berlin is away from any other place in Germany). I volunteered to co-organize the computer science workshop on Friday afternoon and then realized when booking the flights that it is easily possible to get for lunch time on Friday to Berlin when leaving Santa Clara on Thursday morning. Was not an issue as there were others to run the workshop and I arrived on Friday late afternoon - thanks :-).

The political discussion on Friday night was on the utility of basic research. Frankly I did not really get the question. Increasing our understanding is a clear value. For me also the economic value of research is pretty obvious - even if the research outcome (basically what is in the papers and patents) is not of direct monetary value the people we educate (BSc, MSc, PhD) while the research is done are clearly of great value for the economy (an I would guess significantly more the staff cost that was invested in them).

The Emmy Noether meeting (this year with over 160 participants, all young researchers - I am already one of the old ones ;-) is the only meeting I go to where I really meet many other disciplines close up - it was really interesting to discuss about sociology and theology - and how it relates to computer science. I wonder what would happen if we would get together such a diverse set of people for 2 weeks to initiate new projects. Would this create entirely new ideas for research? Perhaps we should try…

Here you can find more information on the DFG Emmy Noether program - a very unique program for young researchers.

Pervasive Editorial Board Meeting in Santa Clara

The IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine is one of 4 magazines I still read in paper (the others are IEEE Computer, Communications of the ACM, and Interactions) and we had interesting discussions how we read/consume magazine content in the future. In the near future it seems likely to me that we will get more choice and will use more different media. For the Pervasive Magazine we will over the next month experiment with some new ideas. There is a new faccbook page: www.facebook.com/pervasive

It was for me the first editorial board meeting of the IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine and I was impressed by the people :-) We discussed the upcoming special issues for the magazine - and I am thrilled that one will be on automotive pervasive computing! The call will be published in the next weeks. The magazine has a set of departments and we discussed how to move these forward. It is exiting that we will have a new department that will provide short tutorials on research methods and I am looking forward to contribute in a department on new pervasive computing devices.

Prior to the meeting there was an interesting workshop at Intel in Santa Clara looking a future challenges and opportunities from ubicomp research.

PS: Satya suggested a book: The Shallows - What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr.

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