— C. Everett Koop, M.D.

rememberthemilk.com

gmail task list

www.reQall.com

highrisehq.com

http://hiveminder.com

http://teuxdeux.com

George Bernard-Shaw

—Arthur C. Clark

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This paper describes the results of a pilot study conducted to investigate the effect of a computer-assisted cognitive training software on aging-associated memory deficits, information processing speed, learning, etc. The authors conducted a longitudinal study with 19 residents of a home for older people. Cognitive tests were administered prior to the program, immediately after, and after a period of five months to assess the effectiveness of the cognitive training.  

Participants were asked to participate in 14 weeks of cognitive training program consisting of 45 minutes each week. The psychometric test battery was administered three times and consisted of two tests: the California Verbal Learning Test (Delis et al, 1987) and the Nurnberger-Aging-Inventory (NAI, Oswald and Fleishman, 1986). The study used “Cognition I”, developed by Marker (1992), which includes tasks that are designed to increase attention, verbal performance, and general knowledge.

When comparing performance pre-training and immediately post training, significant improvements were observed in the majority of cognitive functions. Verbal and visual, secondary and long-term memory, information processing speed, learning, and interference tendency improved significantly.

Mauro Cherubini, Rodrigo de Oliveira, Nuria Oliver, Christian Ferran

(Submitted on 18 Jan 2010)

This paper proposes a controlled experiment to further investigate the usefulness of gaze awareness and gesture recognition in the support of collaborative work at a distance. We propose to redesign experiments conducted several years ago with more recent technology that would: a) enable to better study of the integration of communication modalities, b) allow users to freely move while collaborating at a distance and c) avoid asymmetries of communication between collaborators.

[PDF]

Position paper, International Workshop New Frontiers in Telepresence 2010, part of CSCW2010, Savannah, GA, USA, 7th of February, 2010. [conf. URL]

Square uses a small card scanner which hooks up to a mobile by plugging straight into the audio-in jack. It lets you make physical credit card transaction payments, instantly. Think PayPal but for the physical world. At the moment it works on both the iPhone and Android handsets. [...more]

I believe this is an interesting application because it might allow to extend further the concept of virtual economy allowing users to create virtual currencies as forms of payment. Of course, enhancing the range of companies that have access to credit card payments has also social implications for the management of the credit as some people might might be lend to spend more than what they can afford.

As a child of the 80s, the Choose Your Own Adventure books were a fixture of my rainy afternoons. My elementary school library kept a low, fairly unmaintained-looking shelf of them hidden in one of its back corners. Whether this non-marquee placement was an attempt by the librarians to deemphasize the books in favor of ‘serious’ (children’s) literature or was simply my good luck I still haven’t worked out. But it meant there was a place that I could retreat to and dive into unfamiliar worlds without distraction.

A lot of what I read in those days served a similar purpose. A narrative was all well and good, but more interesting to me were the books that laid out a set of places and situations that could outlive their attendant plots — stories that provided scaffolding for my own imagining.

[more]

——–

This paper describes Sweet Talk a system that is used to enhance self-efficacy and facilitate uptake of intensive insuline theraphy and improve glycaemic control in patients. The system was tested with 126 patients. Sweet Talk was associated with improvement in diabetes selef.efficacy and self-reported adherence. Participants felt that Sweet Talk improved their self-management.

———

This paper presents the results of a field study involving the use of Huston, a protype mobile application for encouraging activity by sharing step cound with friends.

The authors build three versions of Huston for the pilot study: a baseline, personal, and sharing. During the first three weeks all three groups used the baseline version of Huston which was used to gather the data needed to establish the individual daily step goals. Then they provided one group with the personal version of Huston and two other groups with a sharing version of the application. The personal version provided a daily goal, indication of progress, and recognition for meeting the goal. The sharing version had an additional feature which allowed the users to share the physical-activity related information with members of their group.

They found that the sharing groups were significantly more likely to meet their goal than participants in the personal group.

——–

The author of this work aimed at designing a system for motivating physical activity that could be adopted without extra equipment. The argument was that specialized technology for sending physical states of the user are indeed useful but can reduce the widespread adoption of a particular technology. They designed Shakra, an application for mobile phones that was able to detect the fluctuactions in the GSM network and use this information to infer the activity level of the user. This information was then used to inform a group of peers to stimulate competition and support self-awareness of activity levels. The authors critic the transteoretical model because it tries to explain motivation using only intrinsic factors, while communicty influence might just be as important as self-motivation.

They tested the Shakra prototype with three groups of users and they found that the participants were more active when they could see each other’s activity level then during the control periods.

——–

This article reports the finding from a three week field trial of technology designed to encourage physical activity in teenage girls by leveraging the power of personal relationships. The author provided 10 subjects with a mobile phone application and a pedometer which work together to provide a group support sytem that promotes walking towards a self-established daily step goal. Entered step counts are shared within the group with text messages.

The authors found that automated messages from the sytem were perceived negatively from the participants. More importantly, they found that competition between friends can be a fun way to create motivation for excercise but if competition is taken too far it may contribute to bad feelings and or bad behavior. Finally, they found that the intimacy of a small group of friends was consistently reported by participants as a benefit. The challenge of persuasive technology is to allow for good peer pressure while minimizing opportunities for bad peer pressure.

RIKEA (a manual about how to make a free market set with Ikea re-assembled furniture) received an honorable mention at the International Architecture Biennale, within the exhibition Squat City.

———-

This paper describes psychological theories that can help and inform the design of persuasive technologies. The starting assumption of the authors is that in the design of persuasive technology a critical design component is often ignored: namely, that the proposed technologies often must effectively integrate into the individual’s everyday life and that they impact the individual’s social world.

According to the authors, the design of persuasive technologies should draw goal-setting theory [Locke and Latham, 2002], which describes how individuals respond to different types of goals and thus which tend to motivate well. For example, the individual must have decided that the goal is important to her and that it is easy to gauge her progress and know when she has met the goal. Feedback and incentives should bve provided at intermediary steps and not only when she finally meet the goal.

The Transtheoretical Model [Prochaska et al., 1992] describes the stages through which an individual progresses to intentionally modify addictive or other problematic behaviors: precontemplation, no intention to change in the foreseable future; contemplation, seriously considering changing; preparation, intends to take action in the next month; action, has performed the desired behavior consistently for less than six months; and maintenance, where the desired behavior has been performed for more than six months.

The theory of Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [Gofman, 1959] describes how individuals attempt to managethe impressions they want others to have of them. The performance encompasses all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presencebefore a particular set of observers. A given performance has two regions: front and backstage. Other important concepts include dramatic realization (when the individual draws attention to facts that may go unnoticed), misrepresentation (individuals may bebe incented to misrepresent facts), and secret consmption (acted actions that are incompatible with ideal standards).

According to the authors, technology to encourage lifestyle behavior change must support fundamental impression management needs. Technology may also need to enable the individual to misrepresent something about her behavior perhaps to support secret consumption.

The Cognitive Dissonance theory [Festinger, 1957] explains what happens when an individual realizes that her attitudes and behaviors are inconsistent. When that happens the individual experience discomfort, or dissonance. Therefore, the individual will be motivated to reduce or eliminate the dissonance. The more important the beliefs are to the individual, the more likely she will try to reduce the dissonance.

Therefore, the author conclude that technology should hep the individual remain focused on her commitment to change and her relevant pattern of behavior. The awareness provided by the technology should be persistently available and easy to access.

———

This paper contain a seminal definition of the domain of persuasive technologies, named captology. The author defines five different perspective on computers and persuasion. His original definition of persuasion is: an attempt to shape, reinforce, or change behaviors, feelings, or thoughts about an issue, object or action. According to the author, the persuasive nature of technology does not reside with the object itself. Instead, the persuasive nature of technology depends on the context of creation, distribution, and adoption. In particular contexts, technology inherits a type of intent from human actors. Finally, the paper lists seven research directions for captology.

——

This paper describes an ethnographic study of how elders manage their medication with the objective of informing the design of in-home assistive health technology to support medication adherence. The authors describe many strategies that elderly uses to organize their medication many of which leverage a kind of socially distributed cognition. For instance, the position of the pillboxes in a cabinet is used to remember the sequence at which the medications have to be taken during the day.

These findings inform five design principles: 1) assistive IT should support personalized medication management systems that can be distributed across the home using spatial arrangements in places that support rutines; 2) computation should benefit elders in the management of their medications; 3) systems should provide windows of inference for remote assistance (e.g., when health care workers see that the place is messy and understand that something is wrong with the elderly); 4) technology should respect the privacy and dignity of the user; and 5) “health” should be conceptualized to be broader in scope than what occurs in the context of a doctor-patient exchange.

Survival analysis attempts to answer questions such as: what is the fraction of a population which will survive past a certain time? Of those that survive, at what rate will they die or fail? Can multiple causes of death or failure be taken into account? How do particular circumstances or characteristics increase or decrease the odds of survival?

[more]

————

This paper describe Playful Bottle, a system to motivate user to drink the right quantities of water during the day. The author designed a very smart object by sticking an HTC device to a bottle. The camera of the device could read the level of the liquid inside the bottle, while the accelerometers of the device could detect when a person was actually drinking. Finally, the display of the device was showing the application.

They tested the system with 16 university hospital staffers. The authors developed two “hydratation games”: one called the TreeGame where the user could see a tree on the screen of the device. The health of the plant was regulated by the right amount of water intake by the user. The second game, called the ForestGame was besically showing the same TreeGame with the possibility of seeing other friends and colleagues participating in the same game, thus leveraging on the social pressure to persuade user to drink water regularly.

Results from 7-week user study with 16 test subjects suggest that both hydration games are effective for encouraging adequate and regular water intake by users. Additionally, results of this study suggest that adding social reminders to the hydration game is more effective than system reminders alone.

The authors used an interesting analysis technique called “survival analysis”.

The keynote speaker was Jun Rekimoto, professor at University of Tokyo and researcher at Sony Research Lab. He presented some work he conducted on “Large Scale Integration of Real and Virtual Worlds”. One of their latest project is called PlaceEngine. It is basically a WiFi based Position Recognition engine which might combine also GPS information. The idea of building this infrastructure started a couple of years ago with a project called Annotated Reality [Rekimoto 1998]. WiFi positioning is important because it is fast to acquire location and also works indoor and outdoor. Finally it can distinguish the height at which the user is located. Their basic idea is that people might participate into the data collection part of building this database of access points: they want to turn a folsksonomy collection into wifi infostructure sensing (sensonomy). Prof. Rekimoto makes the example of wiper wheater maps (wheather sensors on taxi cabs). They basically come out with a strategy to geolocate the position of the access points. Similare to what I was proposing for GSM antennas.

They used this lagorithm to implement some realworld markerless AR.

I basically opened the conference presenting the first paper titled: Text versus speech: a comparison of tagging input modalities for camera phones:

Speech and typed text are two common input modalities for mobile phones. However, little research has compared them in their ability to support annotation and retrieval of digital pictures on mobile devices. In this paper, we report the results of a month-long field study in which participants took pictures with their camera phones and had the choice of adding annotations using speech, typed text, or both. Subsequently, the same subjects participated in a controlled experiment where they were asked to retrieve images based on annotations as well as retrieve annotations based on images in order to study the ability of each modality to effectively support users’ recall of the previously captured pictures. Results demonstrate that each modality has advantages and shortcomings for the production of tags and retrieval of pictures. Several guidelines are suggested when designing tagging applications for portable devices.

[link to PDF] [DOI] [Slides of the presentation]

Sian Lindley presented a qualitative study on pictures taken with SenseCam devices. They noticed that pictures taken with sensecam devices capture things that are normally nor photographed. People in their qualitative experiment did not use sensecams to record their lifelog but they use it as a special kind of photography. Their work focused on aesthetics and sentimentality of photography. The paper is titled: Frozen in time and “time in motion”: Mobility of vision through a SenseCam lens, and it is available here.

Arto Puikkonen presented an interesting field study to understand how people create videos with mobile phones. They recruited 11 participants that collected a total of 255 videos during two weeks. They found that 65% of the videos were planned and watched on large displays. Also over 85% of the video were meant for oneself and not for others. The paper was titled: Practices in Creating Videos with Mobile Phones.

Peter Mockel addressed the Industrial Keynote of Deutsche Telekom AG. He described how at DT Labs they are trying to get the user more involved. They have 150 researchers but they manage to produce 250 publications per year and a paper application per week. They designed a game called “Scotland yard on your mobile phone”.

Richard Harper from MSR Cambridge presented “Glancephone an exploration of human expression”. His initial argument was that sociology does not exist. He quoted a book of Hutchinson titled: “There is no such thing are social science”. In essence, the point that Winch was trying to make, that has so often been misinterpreted (though thankfully clarified by Hutchinson, Read and Sharrock), is that the desire to utilise and replicate the methods and achievements of the ‘natural’ sciences to the ’social’ and ‘human’ sciences is profoundly mistaken. The concept of a ’social science’ is a misnomer that merely displays itself as ‘bad’ philosophy and is the very scientism that Wittgenstein and Winch aimed to steer us away from. In their work, Harper and colleagues are interested in fitting design to human use. Richard explains how communicating for people is a really rich activity that is usually reduced when mediated by technology. The glancephone allows users to let callers glance at what they are doing before making a phone call. They conducted a user study to understand how it was perceived. What happened during the trial was that people used the system to be glanced not to glance at people.

Karin Leichtenstern presented as study titled: “Studying Multi-user settings for pervasive games”. They tried to understand what is the best way to allocate resources in a multi-user pervasive game so to balance collaboration and communication. They conducted a user study with 18 children. They built 3 group with different configurations.
Ohad Inbar presented a study on how to design “Online Help in Mobile Devices”. They noticed that 63% of 1 out of 7 phones sold are returned because said to be “faulty” however they are not broken. Built-in help solutions are not good because these people are not good in seeking these information.On the other hand an online help might be considered intrusive. Therefore they designed a context-aware help that could kick-in every time they were facing a difficult situation. They were detecting the problematic aspect of the user’s interaction by the activity of the user as seen from the system.

Anupriya Ankolekar presented: “Friendlee: A mobile application for your social life”. Their starting assumption is that true social networks are smaller than the contacts you have on FB. Interactions are driven by smaller, more intimate groups of users like Twitter and phone communication (CDR). Difficult to filter out unwanted staff from Facebook to concentrate on the core. Friendlee construct your intimate social network from the call-logs and SMS. Share personal context and browse connections of friends. Big social networks do not distinguish between the general and intimate contacts. MIG33 is an social network application for phone only, like loopt. [more]

Nirmal Patel presented a study on “Two Thumbs Chording”: This works explain and evaluates a technique to enter text with the keyboard of a mobile with two thumbs. The paper includes a nice methodology and metrics for comparing inputing techniques.

Stephen Brewster presented a paper titled: “Pressure-Based Text Entry for Mobile Devices”. Their motivation was that currently pressure input is of little help for interaction because we do not have good ways to offer good feedback to the user so that they can adapt their movements and control finely the device. They designed a pressure keyboard where a light pressure brings a lower case letter and and hard pressure brings an uppercase letter. They found that good feedback is key for pressure input. The pressure keyboard is slower than other input method but is more robust to error when the user is walking. They used the NASA TLX for measuring workload.

Kun Yu presented a paper titled: “Coupa: operation with pen linking”. It is basically an interface where the user can operate the phone by just drawing a line between a number of labels sitting on the edges of the screen. The labels represents actions and items that the user uses frequently.

Leif Opperman presented a study titled: “Ubiketous computing”. They explained how cycling is good for many reasons. They want to augment riding by providing hystorical information and other information while the user is riding. The project was called “sillitoe trail“. The second study was called “rider spoke” where players could freely explore the city for 1 hour. They could hear a narrator voice recorded and they could record messages that others could hear. The paper contains useful design suggestions for designing interactive systems for cyclists.

Ronald Ecker, from BMW research presented an interactive menu for car entertainment systems called PieTouch. The paper addresses the complexity of designing interactive menus for in-car entertainment systems that do not conflic the most important navigation functionalities of the car.

Martin Pielot presented a study on how to support map-based wayfinding. Their initial argument was that paper-based maps are favored over navigation systems and allow more effective navigation [Ishikawa et al., 2008 & Rukzio et al., 2009] than GPS for pedestrians. They developed a belt with many vibration motors that could offer egocentric cues to the user toward the final destination. They designed a user study to understand the impact of this technology. They found that the belt was helping pedestrian navigation a lot. The belt allowed them to orientate the map and to detect and correct maps mistakes that were difficult to fix without (e.g., pedestrian paths).

Simon Robinson presented a study titled: “Sweep-Shake: Finding Digital Resources in Physical Environments”. They designed an interaction technique to access digital resources using the shake device. moving the device users could select specific content and using the vibrator feedback they could locate the location connected with some content in the environment.

Johannes Schoning presented a study titled: “PhotoMap: Using Spontaneously taken Images of Public Maps for Pedestrian Navigation Tasks on Mobile Devices”. They started from the assumption that when you are visiting a parc you do not use your mobile navigation device but you use public maps to understand where to go because they contain better information that you could find online. The idea of Photomap is to take a picture of these publically available map and transfer them to the mobile device to add dynamic positioning on top of the map. The main idea behind photomap is the georeferencing that is required to position yourself on top of these locally available maps. Userg generated maps are richer that the ones you can get from google, yahoo, or microsoft. [more]

Alireza Sahami Shirazi presented a paper titled: “Emotion Sharing via self-composed Melodies on Mobile Phones”. The paper includes interesting references that are relevant for MobiMoood. They designed a system for composing tunes that could be sent to a certain recepient to share emotions.

Finally, Markku Turunen, from Tampere university, presented a paper titled: “User Expectations and User Experience with Different Modalities in a Mobile Phone Controlled Home Entertainment System”.The author designed an experiment to test different ways of using the mobile phone to control a Home Entertainment Systems. The best part of this paper was to devise an interesting methodology to extrapolate users’ feedback. The same methodology was presented in INTERACT and INTERSPEECH. [more]

Speech and typed text are two common input modalities for mobile phones. However, little research has compared them in their ability to support annotation and retrieval of digital pictures on mobile devices. In this paper, we report the results of a month-long field study in which participants took pictures with their camera phones and had the choice of adding annotations using speech, typed text, or both. Subsequently, the same subjects participated in a controlled experiment where they were asked to retrieve images based on annotations as well as retrieve annotations based on images in order to study the ability of each modality to effectively support users’ recall of the previously captured pictures. Results demonstrate that each modality has advantages and shortcomings for the production of tags and retrieval of pictures. Several guidelines are suggested when designing tagging applications for portable devices.

[link to PDF] [DOI] [Slides of the presentation]

Full reference:

Cherubini, M., Anguera, X., Oliver, N., and de Oliveira, R. Text versus speech: a comparison of tagging input modalities for camera phones. In MobileHCI ’09: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (New York, NY, USA, 2009), ACM, pp. 1–10.

- it does not have an owner. It was founded by a bunch of journalists of “L’Unità” that left that journal and took equal shares of the new journal.

- it does not take public money. It works with subscriptions and selling copies through news-agents.

- it does not take a particular point of view. It criticize equally the government and the opposition, although it bends a bit for the opposition.

- it publishes news that nobody else usually want/can publish.

One of the plant was developed by a Korean team, at Chonnam National University. The robotic plant has has humidifying, oxygen-producing, aroma-emitting, and kinetic functions. The robot was developed using characteristics of plants normally grown for ornamental purposes. It is 130 cm tall and 40 cm in diameter and consists of a pot, a stem, and five buds of a flower reminiscent of a rose of Sharon.

The second model was developed by Sega and it is called Pekoppa Robot Plant. It looks surprisingly lifelike but never needs watering or sunlight… what it craves is your attention. Talk to your Pekoppa plant and it responds to your voice by bending and moving in a very lifelike manner.

What I like about these two projects is that designers are increasingly more interested in plants as interaction objects. For centuries they have been delicate and vulnerable beings that did not interact at all with superior species. However, there is something primal in their essence that has always captured the attention and fascinations of humans (besides sustaining human life on earth). I also like the idea of a robo plant. In my digital seed project, I was using virtual characters to help kids interact with plants and learn about life science. However, the virtual elements of my design destroyed completely the tangible experience you could have with physical plants. I bet with a robo plant it would be completely different.

Biography:

M. Cherubini. Microworlds for ecology explorations: From DigitalSeed to Biosphera in fostering children’s understanding of plant biology. Master’s thesis, St. Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, Ireland, May 2004. [PDF]

M. Cherubini, H. Gash and T.J.J. McCloughlin The Digital Seed: An interactive toy for investigating plant growth and the generalized plant life cycle., Journal of Biological Education, Institute of Biology Press, London, 2008

Tu pure, o, Principessa,

nella tua fredda stanza,

guardi le stelle che tremano d’amore

e di speranza.

Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me,

il nome mio nessun saprà!

No, no, sulla tua bocca lo dirò

quando la luce splenderà!

Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio

che ti fa mia!

(Il nome suo nessun saprà!… e noi dovrem, ahime, morir!)

Dilegua, o notte!

Tramontate, stelle!

Tramontate, stelle!

All’alba vincerò!

vincerò, vincerò!

[G. Puccini, Turandot, 1920]

———–

This paper investigates the uses of social networking site Facebook, and the gratifications users derive from those uses.

In the first study, 137 users generated words or phrases to describe how they used Facebook, and what they enjoyed about their use. These phrases were coded into 46 items which were completed by 241 Facebook users in Study 2. Factor analysis identified seven unique uses and gratifications: social connection, shared identities, content, social investigation, social network surfing and status updating. User demographics, site visit patterns and the use of privacy settings were associated with different uses and gratifications.

The author starting assumption is that actual uses and gratifications of social networking sites are not well understood. The authors shed some light on probe more in depth the exact nature of “keeping in touch” as both use and gratification. The results of this study suggest that comprises two main functions: the first is a surveillance function, while the second is a self-presentation function. The goal of using sites like FB is to meet new people and therefor making one’s profile more open increases the chances of an interaction. Finally, associated with this use is the social capital building gratification, where FB is used to build and maintain ties with peers.

William Shakespeare

Randy Paush, 2006

http://beta.cell.com/

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This paper presents CityFlocks, a mobile system to enable visitors and new residentsin a city to tap into the knowledge and experiences of local residents to gather information about their new environment. The main argument of the authors is that social navigation (e.g., the cue in front of a restaurant is an hint that the place is good) is one of the main mechanism that we use to discover new knowledge and find new places in the environment that we inhabit.

Unfortunately, social navigation cues are not available for digital information. While most of the previous projects discuss such different features around indirect and asynchronous interaction method (i.e., people attaching information to physical places), not much work has yet been carried out on studying direct interaction methods (e.g., phone calls, text message).

Therefore the author of this paper build an application for mobile phone called CityFlocks that allowed the user to be in contact with a local citizen when in the need of local information. The application allowerd the user to make a phone call to the local citizen or to send text messages. Interviewed participants reported to have preferred this latter method because they felt awkward to call a stranger. One of the major issues that was reported in the study was that users could not associate a specific level of trust to the strangers they were paired with using the application. Also they reported misgivings in the use of SMS for time-sensitive information because the method could not offer rapid feedback that was necessary in certain situations.

Hermann Hesse

——–

Social tagging systems provide users with the opportunity to employ tags in a communicative manner. To explore the use of tags for communication in these systems, we report results from 33 user interviews and employ the concept of social roles to describe audience-oriented tagging, including roles of community-seeker, community-builder, evangelist, publisher, and team-leader. These roles contribute to our understanding of the motivations and rationales behind social tagging in an international company, and suggest new features and services to support social software in the enterprise.

——-

This paper builds a conceptual model of the factors that stimulate people in generating tags for their multimedia items they share online. The model mainly tests three elements: te stated motivations for creating tags, namely to serve the self, family and friends, or public, social presence indicators, and participation level.

To test these hypothesis they used a questionnaire together with quantitative data extracted from the logs of Flickr the popular picture sharing web sites they focused on. They analyzed the answers and tested the model using principal component analysis (PCL). All the relation were significant except the relationship between family and friends motivation and the tagging level because, according to the authors, users added tags to describe images to family and friends, not to help them find images. The authors found that one of the key motivation of tagging behavior is the ability of increasing one’s social presence.

——

This paper presents a technique for supporting the generation of metadata in Flickr through tag recommendation. The authors used tag co-occurrence to generate a list of tags that could complement some user-entered tags. The initial motivation of the author is that photo annotations provided by the author of the pictures relfect a personal perspective and cotext that is important to the owner but that might be confusing for other users trying to retrieve the same picture. Additionally, they note how suggesting non-obvious tags might be confusing for the users. They validated the tag recommendation using tag assessors that had to verify the “descriptiveness” of the generated tags.

Given a photo with user-defined tags, an ordered list of m candidate tags is derived for each of the user-defined tags, based on tag co-occurrence. The lists of candidate tags are then used as input for tag aggregation and ranking, which ultimately produces the ranked list of n recommended tags.

——-

This paper report a qualitative study conducted using the Grounded Theory of how people use photo-sharing wesites. The authors interviewed a group of 10 Flickr users and found among then a number of power-users that differ from the standard “Kodak culture”.

The paper contains a structured literature review of how people use cameras and particularly digital cameras. One of the main issues is that organizing pictures is kind of inefficient with current technologies.

One of the most interesting finding of the study is that for power users tagging was reported to be a social activity where they could include inside reference and jokes as tags. Conversely, normal users tagged infrequently because they could easily retrieve their picture using their chronological order. Many of the participants interviewed said to share pictures through web sites like Flickr and emails. An interesting finding of the study was that the current tools do not use the storytelling aspect of photo sharing that are so important to the Kodak culture.

——-

This paper describes an online game that is used to collect commonsense knowledge about human goals. The basic mechanics of the game is that people are presented questions that follow a finite number of pre-formatted templates that they have to fill. Provided answers are matched to verify whether they are similar and points (and relevance of the provided answer) are assigned based on the frequency of the provided answer (i.e., the consensus). The game was tested with 11 subjects.

Peter Skomoroch’s dataset and image Bookmarks

Image databases, University of Essex

Some Datasets Available on the Web

The ESL Photo Data Set

Computer Vision Test Images

Copyright Free and Public Domain Media Sources

This session featured four interesting talks on the use of technology to support personal health. Kiefer presented a system to improve cancer management through biosensor cartridges that could communicate test results to a remote doctor. Verschure presented a virtual reality rehabilitation game for people that suffered of a stroke. Leeb presented a brain-computer interface that could extend rehabilitation games to people that could not operate a computer using their hands. Finally, Dalton presented a platform for supporting behavioral cognitive therapy through the internet.

———

STEPHAN KIEFER -Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering. Smart Integrated Biodiagnostic personal health systems for improved cancer management (SmartHEALTH). EU founded project. Multiple tests in a single device at the proteome and genome level. The project has the objective to design biosensors and markers that can be used to diagnose the clinical evolution of cancer. They are researching protein markers for detecting breast cancer using protein markers and mRNA markers. They are developing a Transmission Plasmon sensor which allosw quantitative measurements of … Intelligent Biodiagnostic Devices are able to task to each-other using an ad-hoc network and then to communicate their readings to a clinical laboratory terminal often situated in a hospital. Interpretation of multi parameter cancer marker measurement is achieved with machine learning techniques like Trained Neural Networksa nd Support Vector Machine.

PAUL VERSCHURE – Universitat Pompeu Fabra – Rehabilitation Gaming System- http://specs.upf.edu Healing the brain by becoming a cyborg. Gost in the Shell, 1989. Cyborgs are a bridge between mind and matter. The three pillars of the cyborg: augmentation, replacement and substitution. Rehabilitation Gaming Paradigm (2003). 1989. Cognitive Rehabilitation Games. They took people that suffered a stroke attack. The objective is to recovery a substrate of neuro cells that surround the area affected by the stroke… Distributed Adaptive Control: Lost functions can be recovered compensated through engaving live-long cortical plasticity. They designed a game that using visualstimuli stimulated the users to perform movements that can stimulate areas of the brain that can then repair and substiture the broken areas. They used an open source solution: TORQUE. They measured a number of design variable for the game like the speed of the stimuli and the areas of interaction and they performed statistica comparisons beteen these parameters. They measured positive effects of being exposed to this rehabilitation. They are now inquiring haptic techniques and eye-tracking techniques.

ROBERT LEEB. Thought-driven control of virtual world. It is designed for people that after an accident are unable to control a PC. Brain-Computer Interfaces: Scalp Electroenchephalogram (EEG). certain brain patterns are correlated to specific mental tasks. These brain patterns have particular characteristics, such as timing, amplitude, frequency, and topography. They tried to simulate a wheelchair movement in VE and performed a case study with a tetraplegic. http://bci.tugraz.at/ Brain-Computer Interface can be an additional exclusive communication channel.

KAYE DALTON. Beating the blues: cognitive behavioral therapy. One in five adults suffer an episode of depression or anxiety in ayear. 80% of people are managed in primary care. There are drugs that are demonstrated to be effective. However, there are side effects. Their company is interested in Cyber Psychology: the advantages of computer theraphy is that it is time effective and cost effective. There is an increased acceptability bacause of the anonymity given by the internet. The presenter listed a number of previous studies on the use of computers in theraphy. Beating the Blues is the world most fully realised computer programme for enxiety and depression; standardized provision of psychological therapies on best practice. Cognitive Behaviour theraphy is a form of therephy that used a structured form of interaction between the therapist and the patience. The challenges to make this online is the ability of maintaining credibility and maintain a therapeutic alliance. The efficacy of the program was published in Computers in human Behaviour, 19, 277-289. The objective of the trial was to tes the software, functionality, etc. They also measured a reduction of anxiety and depression in a general practive. They also benchmarked the online threatement against F2F threatement and they proved comparable results. They fond less certified days off sick compared to control group. Is suitable for a wide variety of patients.

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Example: Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS). The Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) provides information on the use of energy in residential housing units in the United States. This information includes the physical characteristics of the housing units, the appliances utilized including space heating and cooling equipment, demographic characteristics of the household, the types of fuels used, and other information that relates to energy use.

http://www.data.gov/

2) Yahoo! GeoPlanet Data

Yahoo! GeoPlanet helps bridge the gap between the real and virtual worlds by providing an open, permanent, and intelligent infrastructure for geo-referencing data on the Internet.

http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/data/

TOSHIO IWAI presented a series of art+technology artifacts. His talk was titled: “Expanding Media Art from Flipbooks to TENORI-ON”. His work was based on Afterimages, namely the impression that an high-contrast image leaves on the retina. His work was deeply influenced by toys. Once, he was playing with The music box, which uses a piece of paper with holes to activate some drums. Toschio played “happy birthday” and then its inverse. The inverse was actually more interesting than the original and therefore he develop the idea that some visual patterns could be translated into melody. From this intuition, he developed TENORI-ON: a matrix of buttons and leds that can be used to generate a cellular automata. Positions in the matrix are associated with tones and therefore produce melodies.

During the first session of the conference, Jorg Muller and Florian Alt presented research on context-aware displays. Jorg equipped displays with cameras to understand who was paying attention to the ads displayed in the displays. They did not find a correlation between what people like and what they look at. Some participants actively looked away to tell the system they did not like the content being displayed. Florian presented research on “Users’ view on car advertisement”. Roof-mounted displays in US are location-aware. They asked which part of the car would they like to devote to advertisement. They asked particular form factor for the interactive display. They conducted an online survey. Their paper offers a number of technological implication on the design of car advertisement displays. They implemented a prototype for car advertisement.

JOHN KRUMM presented a study on “Realistic driving trips for location privacy”. A consistent amount of this work consisted in building a realistic simulation of trips to test out the system. His focus was on making false trips look more realistic.

DAGMAR KERN presented an interesting prototype for “Enhancing navigation information with tactile feedback in the steering wheel“. Their motivation is that the audio channel is often cluttered by many other information (e.g., chatting with another passenger, listening to the radio). Therefore multimodality can help. They used a vibro-tactile feedback system.

SOMAYA BEN ALLOUCH presented research on “Perceived benefits for using ambient technologies“. They used a path diagram and a validation technique similar to Structural Equation Modeling. They used a large-scale questionnaire to validate the adoption of a technology that is not yet on the market.

STEPHEN INTILLE presented a paper titled: “Adding GPS-Control to Traditional Thermostats: An experiment of Potential …”. Their starting assumption is that 50% of the thermostats is not effective. Furthermore, in the US 53% of the owner do not lower temperature during the day. They proposed a Context aware power management (CAPM) [Harris and Cahill 2005]. They proposed a context-aware thermostat that was informed of when the user was leaving home and coming back from work. The system used GPS signals detected with the mobile phone of the user. They tested with few families. The placed the system in their homes and placed a GPS tracker in their cars. The system switches the heating off when they leave and on when they commute back home. They simulated the saving (about 100 dollars for 70 days???). This study raises the discussion on whether we should talk about temperature or comfort.

JAMES SCOTT presented a new interaction modality with Mobile Devices using Force Sensing. The idea is to introduce force sensing as an input modality on mobile devices. The benefits are multiple: using unused parts of the device; avoid cluttering of the device; useful in combination with other inputs. They used bending motions to control the display of documents. Twist was used to turn web pages. Bending back/forward was used to emulate page up/down and stretching was used to emulate alt-tab. They conducted a user study to understand whether users could manage to use this modality for operating the device. They designed a task with some targets that needed to be used using one single modality. They needed to hold the selector on the target for 2 second. They found out that smal forces are not necessarily easier to apply and control. Force sensing seemed to be easy to learn and use.

JEFFREY HIGHTOWER presented a super interesting paper where they tried to Infer Identity of the user using Accelerometers in Television Remote Control. The motivation is that if you know who is watching then you can customize recommendations. This is not biometric authentication but more as biometric inference.Do people seem to use remote controls in physically different ways? They started with observations and notices that people hold their remote control in different ways. They used a classifier to infer who whas using the remote. they had 156 sensor features (3 windows x 4 lenghts x …). They tested using weka software. They used a decision-tree classifier. In a second attempt they tried to understand who was using by using acceleration on the device. They defined a session, which consist in the period of time between picking up the remote and setting it back. They got more accurate results. The most important features are: unique botton codes and sequences, button press rate, hand shake, angle the remote is held. There is a good literature review including commercial recognition, body worn accellerometers, etc.

STACEY KUZNETSOV focused on Human memory. The proposed an haptic bracelet that gives a specific vibration every time a similar concept is encountered. They used the device to support situation of blending where the meaning of two concept gets confused. The second study focused on auditory recognition. The paper present a controlled experiment. The haptic cues seemed to be helping recall but not so much free recall in low performer. Some participants found cues as distractive. This can be used as memory aid for people with memory problem.

JEFFREY HIGHTOWER presented a research titled: “Exploring Privacy Concerns wih Personal Sensing“. They basically conducted an in-depth study on privacy perception with the non technical participants that participated in the UbiFit study presented at CHI’08. They did not feel that their privacy was exposed by the data that was shared in the ubifit study. Acceptability of sensible data depends on the use you do of that data. Participants were not in favour of using raw audio even if it was filtered. Professionsl context can make audio recording unacceptable. Try to design core functionality with only minimally invasive sensors. When invasive sensors are usedm filtering or purging data may increase acceptability.

SHIN’ICHI KONOMI presented ASKUS: Amplifying global actions. They conducted a study on Location Based Services trying to extend the study of information needs to action needs. They conducted a good literature review and a diary study. They designed ASKUS, a platform that can help people to ask favour to remote strangers. The field trial revealed several variables that can have an impact on the deployment of LBS services: like awareness and accountability, cost and motivation.

ERICH TUNTEBECK presented an interesting approach for Detecting batteryless Tags Through the Power Lines in a Building (Pl-Tags). Motivation: reducing the need for infrastructure. A broad class of devices produces powerline voltage transients. Transients are radiated from the power-line as broadband RF energy. The author show that basically without any radio receiver, the presence of a RDidtag near the powerline is detected any time a device produces a transient. Application: detecting who activated what electrical device. Detecting the presence or avsence of objects such as medicine cabinet, batteryless sensor.

ANMOL SHETH presented a paper titled: “Geo-Fencing: Confining WiFi in physical places“. Flexible Acess Control is Challenging (e.g., provide wifi access only to the patrins of the cafe). The GeoFencing approach creates a controlled overlap between multiple directional antenna patterns. Tie connectivity to the intersection of these ovelapping patterns. Antenna pattern is an iscoscele triangle with an radiation angle of 28 degrees. As a threshold they used the number of packets received. Less than 70% of the packets received makes most of the WiFi systems unusable.

NATHAN EAGLE presented a paper titled: “Methodologies for Continuous Cellular Tower Data Analysis“. Tower transitions into meaningful locations. We are good at analyzing small static graphs. What we are not so good at is in analyzing weighted large graphs with dynamic covariates and outcomes. This study studies IMMI Data collected with a number of phones that were instrumented with software that was collecting bluetooth scans, tower transitions, and sampling audio. They recruited 215 participants within Los Angeles. Time Series of Visible Cellular Towers. No information about tower location. This information can be represented as a graph. Nodes are towers and edges are the probabilities that two antennas can be seen at the same time. To segment this graph he used different algorithm. They used a bluetooth beacon to identify “home”. Then they segmented the graph and they trained a bayesian predictor to calculate the transition probabilities between different group of antennas. Nathan is trying to caraterize behavior with an entropy metric. Youngsters are much more entropic in their movements while senior staff is more regular in the mobility patterns.

STINA NYLANDER presented a paper titled: “It’s just easier with the phone: A diary study of Internet access fro m celll phones“. One week diary study with 19 participants. The average age was 30 years. 28% of news reading and 21% of email access. Other information 16% and travel and contact infor 15% (this comes from a Swedish service that provides this kind of information). They found some specific services used only on PC and some used only on mobile phones (e.g., jaiku.com microblogging service). News and email is read frequently because is usually available in small chuks which are frequently updated and it is good to pass time. They used the phone even if they were at home (31%) and with a computer access (51%). Most of the time when they were using the phone they were relazin (38%) and they were conducting home activities (18%). It is easier to avoid spending too much time with a phone. It supports mobility.

KAI KUNZE introduced a thoughtful quantitative study on context-aware information for supporting workers. The paper is titled: “Does context matter? A quantitative evaluation in a real world …”. Wearable computing. The question is that context awareness might not be beneficial. Is context useful in real life evanlaation? in tasks long/difficult enouh to need contextual help? with subjects that work on such tasks? They wanted to test context awareness with real tasks. The selection of the task took a long time. They used regular workers that did similar tasks every day. They used a wizard of oz software that they developed that they are planning to open source: http://jwoz.sf.net. They used a test training with lego where the technician had to use the head-mounted display with the goal of building the lego model. They found that context-aware system was the most efficient system to finish the task (time used as dependent variable). The fastest user with speech only. Context-aware system seems to help less proficient technicians.

BO BEGOLE presented a nice study “On the Anonymity of Home/Work Location Pairs“. Location traces are useful for personalized location-based services. However, they can be sensitive because they can reveal business connections, political afficiliation, medical conditiron, risky behaviors, etc.Some ways to mitigate the risk –> only my trusted network provider knows my location. Sometimes it is possible to infer identity by comgining data sources. 87% of US population have unique date of birth gender and postal code. With 2-week woth of GPS data collected you can infer person home location (Krumm, 2007). Obfuscation techniques does not prevent entirely reverse-engineering this data to disclose sensitive information. K-anonymity (Sweneey, 2000): data safe to release if at least k other people share the same data. What level of accuracy of location information could result in small sizes of k anonymity for some portion of the population. 7% of the US population live and work in a unique combination of postal codes. Approximate home and work location can result in a small anonymity set. If you combine this information with other information sources can reveal the identity of a person. Obfuscation is not necessarily providing anonymity.

AMY KARLSON presented a nice study of PC and phone transitions. The paper is titled: “Working Overtime: Paterns of Smartphone and PC usage in the Day on an Information Worker“. Workers are sourranded by a multitude of devices that often work in isolation. What opportunities exists for Mobile-PC interaction exists? They recuited 16 participants and installed a PC logger and a logger on the smartphone. They distinguished interaction patterns where workers were using their PC and their phone. Simple analysis of these patterns reveals that workers use the PC most of the time, and the mobile during the intervals and after work. However time to time they receive phone calls during the working hours. Besides time of use they were able to tell what ind of activity people were conducting. Using this information they were able to detect “handoff patterns” where participants started interaction on the phone and then they could move to the PC. They observed many situations where the phone was preferred but they did not observe many situations in which a task was started in a mobile phone and then handed over the PC. They concluded that people are not handing over tasks because there is not much support for that.

San Agustin, J., Skovsgaard, H., Hansen, J. P., and Hansen, D. W. 2009. Low-cost gaze interaction: ready to deliver the promises. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 – 09, 2009). CHI EA ‘09. ACM, New York, NY, 4453-4458. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1520340.1520682

Theme 1: Methods for harnessing the messy mobile reality  e.g. simulating mobile conditions in and out of the lab; passively collecting data, e.g. on disruptions and context during use

Theme 2: Tools and methods that combine multiple kinds of data, to understand the bigger picture e.g. combining diary studies with context logging; understanding flow between mobile and non-mobile communication channels; tools that bring different data into one dashboard/ representation of ‘what happened’

Theme 3: Selecting participants and devices e.g. recruiting social/spatial groups of people; when/how to employ participants’ own devices vs. provided devices

Theme 4: Strategies for getting into the mobile future It’s often been said that we are currently witnessing in mobile what happened in the 1980’s for the personal computer: technological advances are enabling new interaction paradigms and entirely new categories of use.

I contributed with a paper summarizing methodology for research on mobile technology, particularly focussing on an extension of the Experience Sampling Method. Here is a short abstract:

This paper reviews research methods used to understand the user experience of mobile technology. The paper presents an improvement of the Experience Sampling Method and case studies supporting its design. The paper concludes with an agenda of future work for improving research in this field.

[REVIEW]

Easy to use, subject-friendly, powerful and reliable, Psykinematix runs standard psychophysical protocols, presents complex stimuli, collects subject’s responses, and analyzes results on the fly. Psykinematix is also a great learning tool to introduce visual perception and to illustrate psychophysical concepts to students.

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This article summarizes many years of research in the field of image information retrieval. It describes open challenges and the state of the art in the field.

One of the main difficulty results from the rich content in the images and the subjectivity in human perception. This, according to the authors creates a mismatch between the metadata annotations, produced with different techniques and the retrieval efficacy and satisfaction perceived by the user.

To the extent of improving image information retrieval systems, “humans have to be in the loop”. The authors cite a good deal of work that has been conducted to this specific extent (e.g., QBIC interactive region segmentation, the interactive FourEyes, the dynamic feature vector recomputation of WebSEEK, the MARS and PicHunter relevance feedback, and so forth.

The ultimate end user of an image retrieval system is human: therefore the study of human perception of image content from a psychophysical level is crucial.

Additionally, the autors refer to Rogowitz et al. (1998) who conducted a series of experiments analyzing human psychophysical perception of image content. According to their results, even though visual features do niot capture the whole semantic meaning of the images, they do correlate a lot with the semantics. These results encourage the development of metrics to achieve semantically meaningful retrievals.

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In this work, the author used human perception of similarity as a guide in optimizing an image distance function in a content-based image retrieval system. A psychophysical experiment was designed to measure the perceived similarity of each image with every other image in the database. The weights of the distance function were optimized by means of a genetic algorithm using the distance matrix obtained from subjective experiments. Using the optimized distance function, the retrieval performance of the system was significantly improved.

In this study, the authors focused on shape similarity. However, the authors argue that the same approach can be used to develop similarity functions based on other low-level features such as color or texture.

This paper contains relevant references of image retrieval systems trained over human perception.

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Evaluating the similarity of motions is useful for motion retrieval, motion blending, and performance analysis of dancers and athletes. Euclidean distance between corresponding joints has been widely adopted in measuring similarity of postures and hence motions. However, such a measure does not necessarily conform to the human perception of motion similarity.

In this paper, the authors propose a new similarity measure based on machine learning techniques. They make use of the results of questionnaires from subjects answering whether arbitrary pairs of motions appear similar or not. Using the relative distance between the joints as the basic features, they train the system to compute the similarity of arbitrary pair of motions. Experimental results show that our method outperforms methods based on Euclidean distance between corresponding joints.

Their method is applicable to content-based motion retrieval of human motion for large-scale database systems. It is also applicable to e-Learning systems which automatically evaluates the performance of dancers and athletes by comparing the subjects’ motions with those by experts.  

Future was sketched as a stylish future. What happened to these visions? Science Fiction as a genre stated at the beginning of the 20th century. Future in these early attempts was not a function but it was a style. Flying cars did exist. There were many existing prototypes produced and certified in the past. Why they did not work? It is because they were not answering a real need but only a dream desire. Other things did make it to the present: examples, the wristwatch, cybernetics. The future did not take the form it was designed. But some functions are here. We do not have an urgent need for utopias any more. We live in too much comfort in developed countries. With food, lodging… There is no way that only our material world will chage our life. We require a societal change.

Nicolas Nova, my friend and colleague back at EPFL, extended this initial flow of ideas with a talk titled: “The Recurring Failure of Holy Grail”. He talked about many products that were designed and used as examples of futuristic technology but which failed at becoming mass products. He presented three examples: 1) the videophone, 2) the intelligent fridge, and 3) location-based services. Nicolas tried to sketch possible reasons that brought to the failures of these products. He described how researcher were overoptimistic, and how they had little knowledge of similar previous attempts. He described how it is easy to get trapped in the zeitgeist of the futuristic wave surrounding an invention. Additionally, he pointed out how we often forget the development and adoption cycles that it takes for new technologies to get adopted. Finally, he pointed out the we generally have a poor understanding of “users”. I totally subscribe to Nicolas’ idea that there is a need to document failures just as we document successes.

David Rose presented a number of “Ambient Devices“, little gadget interfaces that were somewhat inspired by fictional stories. He described how fiction sometimes foreshadows innovation. He presented a number of “enchanted objects” designed around some basic fictional powers/desires: 1) to know. Example: to know the truth — invention — truth machine –> Snow white: the mirror. Therefore he presented the Single pixel browser, a sphere that changes color in relation to some information available somewhere in the internet. Its principle was that summarization is more valuable because it requires less time and attention. David presented a number of other inspiring projects like an Internet connected pills container or sensors embedded in the fabric of the home.

Lee Bryant gave a presentation titled: “The twentieth century was wrong”. His main message was that many products, campaigns, initiatives treat people like objects/mass. This is wrong. Models based on social networks, where every member contributes to the group, are much more interesting and proven to work. Let’s stick to that.

Juliana Rotich talked about citizen journalism: “Globalism, Mobiles and the Cloud”. She described how volunteers around the world can provide objective and localized news that are not controlled by mainstream media. She described the project GlobalVoices. In order for this platform to work, another project had to be started, called LINGUA translation project because English does not equate with global. She described a couple of examples of services that are extremely popular in Africa like MobInfo in Kenya. Citizen Journalists does not equate with a person with a mobile phone. They still need to have some journalistic skills.

Carlo Ratti direct the senseablecity lab at the MIT. He described a number of project that he conducted around the theme of “Future Cities”. GreenWheeil in Copenhagen is a system to enhance a bicycle system so that some of the energy accumuated while pedaling can be reused to propel the bike. Trash Track is a project aiming at tracking movements of transh in a city to improve sanitizing systems. He finally described the Digital Water Pavillon built for the expo in Zaragoza.

Anne Galloway described the core of her PhD research: Envisioning the future city. She argues that many services/ products that researchers develop should be considered as gifts to the users. Expectations, promises and hopes are things that we do: these are GIFTED opportunities, as for example sensors technologies can allow citizens to map environmental conditions, or citizens can use these data to take political action. This gift needs us to want to act as data collectors and it needs us to have the ability to make sense of the data we collect. Most of the time people do not want these gifts, hence their failures. Additionally, gifted opportunities imply also gifted risks: when active citizenship requires access to technology, people without access effectively become non-citizens.

Finally, Baba Wame talked about “how African woman have embraced dating websites in Cameroon”. He explained, in a hilarious speech, how they use this new technology to escape the difficult situations they live in and how they appropriate this technology even if they are, in most of the cases, illiterate.