My life, my interests, my research
Thus man is a perpetually wanting animal. Ordinarily the satisfaction of these wants is not altogether mutually exclusive, but only tends to be. The average member of our society is most often partially satisfied and partially unsatisfied in all of his wants.
A. H. Maslow, A Theory of Human Needs, 1943
Maslow, A. H. A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370-396. 1943. [HTML]
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This is a seminal paper by which Maslow first introduced the hierarchy of human needs. While reading the paper I highlighted a couple of interesting ideas:
- Any motivated behavior must be understood to be a channel through which many basic needs maby be expressed or satisfied.
- Classification of motivations myst ve based upon goals rather than upon istigating;
- Motivations are only one class of determinants of behavior. While behavior is almost always motivated, it is amolst always biologically, culturally and situationally determined as well.
- the present theory should be considered as a program for future research;
- a cause for reversal of the hierarchy is that when a need has been satisfied for a long time this need might become underevaluated.
- another partial eplanation of apparent reversals is seen in the fact that there are many determinant in behavior other than the need and desires (e.g. marthyrs).
- most members ofour society who are normal are partially satisfied in all their basic need and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs ate the same time.
- our needs emerge only when more prepotent needs have been gratified. When a need is faily well satisfied the next prepotent (’higher’) need emerge, in turn to dominate the conscious life and to serve as the center of organization of behavior, since gratified needs are not active motivators.
Kaasinen, E. User needs for location-aware mobile services. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. volume 7, number 1, pp. 70-79. 2003. [PDF]
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This paper present a qualitative study of mobile services that could be enhanced with location-aware features thus providing the user’s point of view. The authors conducted interviews with 13 evaluation groups with a total of 55 persons of different ages, genders, ans socio-economic status. To guide the interactions, they provided participants with structured scenarios and prototypes that they had to test. Also, they conducted interviews with experts during a conference.
The paper draws conclusion about key issues related to users’ needs. Topical information, the kind of information that might change while the user is on the mobe, turned out to be important to the user (e.g., weather forecast, train schedule). They also identified the push vs pull modality of delivery information to the user as being one of the possible issued with designing these kind of services. Users declared the need of having detailed search options, the ability of personalizing the interaction with the service and that of contributing to the system providing data. Also, they discussed the need of giving the ability to the user to override the recommendations of the system (e.g., exporatory search). Privacy was also mentioned.
Dey, A. Understanding and Using Context. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 5, No. 1. (20 February 2001), pp. 4-7. [PDF]
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This work builds on previous studies of contextual applications and proposes to define what context is a what context-aware applications are. The author refer to the work of Schilit and Theimer (1994) where context is referred to as location, identities of nearby people and objects, and changes to those objects. A later definition of Schilit , Adams, and Want (1994) and the definition of Pascoe (1998) defines the important aspects of context, which are: where you are, who you are with, and what resources are nearby.
The author consider these definitions as too generic and presents his own: “Context is any information that can be used to characterise the situation of an entity, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves.“
Subsequently, the author defines context-aware applications as: “A system is context-aware if it uses context to provide relevant information and/or services to the user, where relevancy depends on the user’s task.” According to the author, there are three categories of features that a context aware application can support: a) presentation of information and services to a user; b) automatic execution of a service for a user; c) tagging of context to information to support later retrieval.
As a last contribution, the paper introduces the situation abstraction, which is an aggregated description of the states of relevant entities.
S. Tamminen, A. Oulasvirta, K. Toiskallio, and A. Kankainen, “Understanding mobile contexts,” Personal Ubiquitous Comput., no. 8, pp. 135–143, 2004. [PDF]
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This paper describes an ethmomethodologically inspired study of 25 participants in Helsinki. The authors were interested in understanding the challenges that ubiquitous computing has to face because of the changing context of the user. The authors wrote their implications thinking about phisical devices mor than thinking about services.
Starting from the definition of context in the HCI field, the authors describe how scholars did not agree on a single definition of context. Their starting point was that contexts are always determined by their specific use situations in relation with the motives, plans, other poeple, mobile computers, and the like. They believe that by explicating the actions and resources by which people go about, they can gain insight on how mobile contexts get done and the extent by which these can be modeled and recognized by ubiquitous devices. The authors organized a group of 25 participants that they shadowed and interviewed during the course of 3 days.
Their storyline was divided into travel episodes consisting of temporally organized action patterns depicting a meaningul journey between two places. A special emphasis was given to finding nodal events, where an action transformed the present context into another recognizable context (e.g., reading the newspaper on the metro).
They describe 5 characteristics of mobile contexts: 1) situational acts within planned ones, actions performed in ad-hoc manner during the journey. Plans do not simply determine action (Suchman). 2) claiming personal an group spaces, users create space around themselves for the actions they are about to take. 3) social solutions to problem sin navigation, seeking help through the social channel. 4) temporal tensions, situations where time becomes problematic in relation to the action at hand and where, at the same time, the temporal aspect of a situation is actively used to orient action. 5) multitasking, social conventions might reduce some cognitive load.
In information technology, vanilla (pronounced vah-NIHL-uh ) is an adjective meaning plain or basic. The unfeatured version of a product is sometimes referred to as the vanilla version. The term is based on the fact that vanilla is the most popular or at least the most commonly served flavor of ice cream.
This article appeared yesterday on “La Vanguardia“, one of the major newspaper in Spain.
domingo, 04 de julio de 2010
NUEVAS INICIATIVAS
MoviPill: jugar y medicarseEl departamento de I+D de Telefónica en Barcelona lleva meses desarrollando un juego para móviles llamado MoviPill que controla la periodicidad con la que algunas personas tienen que tomar pastillas a diario. La principal característica de esta aplicación es que utiliza técnicas persuasivas basadas en el juego y la relación social para conseguir una mayor disciplina de los pacientes a la hora de seguir las indicaciones del médico. Los estudios de la Organización Mundial de la Salud estiman que sólo el 50% de los pacientes siguen las indicaciones de sus médicos a la hora de medicarse. El programa MoviPill, desarrollado por Rodrigo de Oliveira, Mauro Cherubini y Núria Oliver, combina el juego, la relación entre pacientes y un dispositivo para las pastillas que controla si los pacientes dicen la verdad cuando introducen en el teléfono que han cumplido en la toma del medicamento. El programa establece un ranking en el que cada paciente puede ver cómo está situado respecto a otros en el “juego” de tomar la medicación cuando le toca. Pruebas desarrolladas con pacientes en Andalucía demuestran que, al jugar, los incumplimientos se reducen en un 60%.
[LINK]
The article refer to the work we developed last summer on MoviPill, an application for mobile phone to help elderly comply with their medications. The scientific contribution of this work was recently accepted for publication in the forthcoming UBICOMP 2010. [PDF]
S. R. Klemmer, J. Graham, G. J. Wolff, and J. A. Landay, “Books with voices: paper transcripts as a physical interface to oral histories,” in CHI ’03: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, (New York, NY, USA), pp. 89–96, ACM, 2003. [PDF]
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This paper describes Books with Voices, an enhacement of paper transcripts enabling random access to digital video interviews on a PDA. Historians collect a huge amount of audio interviews that later are transcribed. However, the audio recording preserves some value as the original voice of the interviewee, the intonation of the words, etc. Unfortunately, because this material is mostly undedited and difficult to find, the textual trasncripts are the preferred source of infromation. Therefore, the authors proposed a prototype that could help relate a certain textual transcript to the original audio souce.
They performed a qualitative evaluation of the prototype with 13 participants. The video helped readers clarify the text and observe non-verbal cues.
The paper contains also a thorough literature review on the subject.
C. Duarte and L. Carriço, When You Can’t Read It, Listen to It! An Audio-Visual Interface for Book Reading, vol. 5616 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 24–33. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2009. [PDF]
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This paper describe the Digital Talking Book player for mobile devices, an application that was designed to allow people with visual impairments to learn from audiobooks. It allows the user to replicate the same functionalities of a paper book on digital content. The paper presents an usability evaluation of the prototype.
S. Zerachovitz and M. Zuker, “The book is talking to you – using an audio version of the course textbooks to support learning,” in Proceeding of ITHET07 conference, (Kumamoto, Japan), June 10-13 2007. [PDF]
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This paper presents subjective-reported data that support the thesis that audio-books of course material is helpful for students with learning disabilitites and for those whose main language is not the one the course is taught. The authors found that students like tghe convenience of learning whenever and wherever they choose. Many student listened to the audio books while reading the printed book. Learning by the audio book si more passive than learning by reading. Many students felt that learning while listening to the audio book increased their comprehension.
I. Trancoso, C. Duarte, A. Serralheiro, D. Caseiro, L. Carriço, and C. Viana, “Spoken language technologies applied to digital talking books,” in Proceedings of Interspeech, (Pittsburgh, PA, USA), September 17-21 2006. [PDF]
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This paper presents the DTB player, which offer to visually impaired users an evolution of paper books. The prototype offers a multimodal interface that presents the textual content of the book synchronized with an audio narration, either pre-recorded by a human speaker or constructed using a text-to-speech synthetizer. Speech recognition allows further the user to add bookmarks or annotation to the book. This paper summarized the different language technologies that may be integrated in spoken books and the different application domains in which spoken books might be used.
Today I am happy: Draquila, the movie, was presented at Cannes festival: http://bit.ly/bKBTIg looking forward to seeing it.
Why do Italians vote Berlusconi? The violence of propaganda, the impotence of citizens, questions of the economy, illicit power relationships…
And a catastrophe: the city of L’Aquila devastated by an earthquake… all these combine to show how the young Italian democracy has been subdued. The caricature of Berlusconi – one of the director’s most celebrated impersonations – strolls through Aquila’s refugee camp and wanders the deserted town like an emperor at the end of his reign. A town devastated by an earthquake – the perfect location from which to recount Italy’s drift into authoritarianism, the mess of blackmail, scandal, swindles and inertia of the political classes, the media and the citizens, that have paralysed the country. Why do the Italians vote for Berlusconi? Why do they consider democracy an unsuitable system of government? Aquila – this magnificent city laid low by an earthquake – will give us the answers. Why did the proud people of Aquila exchange their most precious commodity – their community, a dynamic town full of students and works of art – for a little apartment in a dormitory town, furnished by Berlusconi? Why did they believe TV propaganda rather than the evidence of their own eyes? And how did it happen to others too, as quickly and as deceitfully? Who was leaning on them? The days of Berlusconi’s reign seem numbered: it’s time to search through the rubble and draw what conclusions we can. —Cannes Film Festival, 2010
My colleague Karen Church wrote a great report of WWW2010:
As usual with multiple tracks and loads of great talks it was difficult to choose between sessions at this years WWW, in Raleigh, North Carolina. I focused my attention on the keynotes, panels and technical sessions related to interfaces, users profiling, and search.
(1) Mobile will be big: although there was no specific mobile track at this years WWW and although there was very few mobile-related papers (ours was one of 2 in the entire conference!!!) – one of the key trends mentioned in panels, future web sessions and in all of the key notes is the future of the mobile web and the importance of mobile handsets as pervasive information access devices. Vint Cerf’s keynote pointed to the fact that only 25% of the worlds population access/use the internet through desktops which according to him means he still needs to “convert” 75% of the worlds population! Vint pointed to the fact that there are almost 5 billion mobile users worldwide, and for many their mobile handsets will be their first point of contact to the mobile Internet, thus making it possible to reach higher levels of mobile internet penetration. It appears that mobile will be a bigger trend at next years conference
(2) The future of search according to people from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft is (a) getting to the long tail, (b) intelligent facets and improve interfaces, (c) moving to mobile search and (4) social search. I attended a very interesting panel called “Search is dead: long live search”. The panelists were Marti Hearst (she wrote a very nice book on search user interfaces which is available free to download online: http://searchuserinterfaces.com), Barney Pell from Bing/Microsoft who is big into voice-enabled mobile search, Andrew Tomkins who is director of engineering at Google and Andrei Broder from Yahoo! Research. Prabhakar Raghavan the Head of Yahoo! Labs acted as moderator. You can see the whole thing via video here: http://qik.com/video/6360405
(3) Twitter, twitter, twitter: there were lots of twitter-related papers at this years WWW and in the Web Science (WebSci) conference being co-held in the same venue. This blog article summarizes all the twitter related papers: http://blog.marcua.net/post/566480920/twitter-papers-at-the-www-2010-conference
The take away message is that all the big players are trying to incorporate social networks into the online search experience. Search is not going to be an isolated activity any more.
(4) I attended some tutorials related to web search behaviour. The most relevant/interesting was “Recent Progress on Inferring Web Searcher Intent” given by Eugene Agichtein, from Emory State. He presented lots of detail on how we can try to gather information regarding the intent of web users in their search tasks through log analysis, click-through behaviour, eye-tracking and mouse movements, etc. Interesting/relevant for anyone working in search, web behaviour or user profiling.
This reminds me of Anne Aula’s talk at CHI2010 where she presented a similar piece of research that was demonstrating that doing some machine learning on top of repeated search strings it was possible to infer whether the user was getting frustrated.
(5) A new track this year called Future Web involved discussions/interviews with various leaders in the field on future trends on the web related to politics, environment, social, mobile, etc. They have a YouTube channel so you may be able to catch up on some of these interviews: http://futureweb2010.wordpress.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/user/Futureweb2010#p/u
(6) Best papers award was given to a Recommender Systems paper: All recommender systems related papers were mainly in the personalization track http://www2010.org/www/2010/04/best-paper-awards/
(7) Lots of advertising – those interested check out the internet monetization tracks
(8) Social networks – 3 tracks dedicated to this pretty hot topic – again you can check the papers online
(9) Danah Boyd keynote focused on big data and privacy issues – she challenged the audience with the following – just because you have access to lots of data does not mean you should work with it. According to Danah we should all be more concerned with ethical questions associated with the data/the users rather than than access to data itself. Here’s a summary of the talk: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/WWW2010.html
This goes against the Linked data and semantic web movement. Their motto is get the data out there and then we will figure out what to do with it.
Some nice papers related to search that are worth a mention:
(1) Kumar & Tomkins, “A Characterization of Online Search Behaviour”: The authors look at online search behaviour using a dataset from the Yahoo search and toolbar logs. The dataset is over a year old at this point and as such some characteristics may have changed. The authors propose a new taxonomy of pageviews. The paper shows that1/3 of page views are for content, approx. 1/3 are related to communications while approx. 1/6 are search, however, the authors go on to show that although explicit search activity is low, this activity leads to increased browsing/content accesses by users.
(2) Horowitz & Kamvar: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine”. Following on from the original Google paper presented by Brin & Page in WWW 1998, the Aardvark team (who now belong to Google) provided an overview of their social search engine at this years WWW. A very nice read, describing the search engine architecture/algorithms used and an overview of the behaviour of its users.
Note: All papers are available online
Next years WWW will be in India: and the deadline for papers is always at the start of November! http://www2010.org/www/2010/05/www2011/
Thanks Karen for sharing these notes.
This reminds me of FixMyStreet a project I blogged about three years ago. As my fellow readers know I really much like these sorts of application to engage citizen in a more active engagement with local government.
Potholes, stray garbage, broken street lamps? Citizens of Eindhoven can now report local issues by iPhone, using the BuitenBeter app that was launched today. After spotting something that needs to be fixed, residents can use the app to take a picture, select an appropriate category and send their complaint directly through to the city council. A combination of GPS and maps lets users pinpoint the exact location of the problem, providing city workers with all the information they need to identify and resolve the problem.
Website: www.buitenbeter.nl
Related projects:
— In San Francisco, civic complaints via Twitter
— NYC challenges developers to create apps using city data
— Tagging repairs for local government
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