A. H. Maslow, A Theory of Human Needs, 1943

——-

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.

[a more extensive review here]

——–

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.

——–

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.

——–

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.

domingo, 04 de julio de 2010
NUEVAS INICIATIVAS
MoviPill: jugar y medicarse

El 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]

———–

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.

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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.

————–

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.

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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.

NO COMMENT

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

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.

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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This paper present an interesting study of privacy concerns for location-based services. The author used a diary approach. They asked 16 participants to generate a 5-day journal in which they answer pre-specified questions about the usefulness and level of concern in using presented location-based services. A subset of participant was interviewed after completing the the journal for completing their entries. Also, the other interesting methodological approach that the author used was that of asking participants to imagine the existance of LBS services that would use or display their location.

——

This paper describe a case study where ethnographic research methods are applied to understand contextual factors that play a role for distributed collaborative troubleshooting. The authors conducted a nine-month naturalistic study of real-world remote diagnosis of electronic devices by ad-hoc teams.

Ethnographic studies can be conducted with a number of strategies, including controlled and quasi-experiments, surveys, histories, archival analyses, and case studies. According to Yin (Yin 1994, pp. 1–9), the unique advantages of each depends on three conditions: (a) the form of the research questions(s); (b) the control over actual behavioral events; and (c) the focus on contemporary as opposed to historical phenomena.

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This paper present a user study of how and why information needs arise when the user is on the go. The study reports a diary study of 20 people over the course of two weeks. They examined the information needs the participants had and the strategies that they used to address these needs.They also focused on the contextual factors thar prompted each need and influenced how it was addressed.

The authors used a snipped technique which consists in sending a short SMS to capture the gist of the moment and a web diary to provide more structured information around that moment. At the end of the day participants logged into the website to answer six questions about their snippet:

1. Where were you?

2. What were you doing?

3. What was your information need?

4. I addressed the need (At the time, Later, Not at all)

5. If you attempted to address the need, how did you do so? If you didn’t make an attempt, why didn’t you?

6. Could you have addressed your need by looking at your personal data (e.g., email, calendar, web browsing history, chat history, or other)

Through the 421 generated entries they were able to define the following taxonomy: trivia needs (18.5%), prompted by conversations or location-specific artifacts; directions (13.3%); friend info (7.6%); business hours, phone numbers (7.1%); personal schedule (6.4%); movie times (2.4%); and travel related.

Participants indicated that 72% of their reported information needs were prompted by some contextual factor. The contextual prompting can be classified in four broad categories: Activity, Location, Time, and Conversation. Activities reflect what the person was doing at the time. Location is the place where the person was at and includes any additional artifacts at that specific location. Time is the time when the need arose, and conversation is any phone or in-person conversation the participant was involved in at the time. Some diary entries were related to multiple aspects of context, such as having a conversation with someone about artifacts at the current location.

Figure 5. Percentage of different contextual factors that prompted information needs

The study reports qualitative observations of the multitude of ingenious methods that people use to satisfy their information needs. Many needs were postponed or not addressed because of attentional cost orcontextual factors. The lack of mobile internet was not the only inibitor. The authors conclude that the device’s sensitivity to the task at hand, situational context, and the links between personal and public data holds promise to ease mobile information access.

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This paper reviews about 10 years of research on the users’ adoption of mobile technology. The author defines a typology of perspectives in end-user adoption studies dividing them between 3 kinds: a. diffusion research; b. adoption research; and c. domestication research.

Diffusion studies of mobile end-user services focus on describing adoption at aggregate level. typically, these studies classify adopters as belonging to different segments, such as early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards, and non-adopters. Adoption studies focus on describing and explaining adoption processes at the individual adopter level. Some descriptive studies focus on the decision process to adopt a new service, while others also investigate the attitudes towards using mobile services as use is habituated. Finally, domestication studies focus on studying service useand the consequences of use. However, these are not limited to individuals or aggregates but describe usage patterns of groups in society.

———-

An interesting ethnographical study of handset usability. Their data collection and analysis approaches were in the qualitative tradition of the social sciences. They conducted multiple in-depth and open interviews over the course of the 6 weeks immediately following service acquisition. To understand the context of use, the authors grounded our questions in information that subjects reported in voice mail diaries, a technique they adapted from a paper-based diary study approach (Rieman, 1993). To tie these observations to frequency of telephone use as a characteristic of communicative practice, they collected data on actual calling behavior.

As a result, they outlined four attributes of wireless telephony that articulate the sources of user confusion with the technology.

——–

An interesting conceptual article on the different theories about context. The author basically argues that we should avoid defining context as a status, a static entity (as in the positivist approach). Rather, the author argues that context could be defined within the interaction of agents in the communities of practices:

a. context is a relational property;
b. the scope of contextual properties are defined dynamically;
c. context is an occasioned property, relevant to particular settings, particular instances of actions, and particular parties to that actions;
d. context arises from the activity.

The central concern of context is with the question: how and why, in the course of their interactions, do people achieve and maintain a mutual understanding of the context for their actions?

The meaning of a technology, then, cannot be divorced from the ways that people have of using it. We see this in two points: a. people often find ways of using technology that are unexpected or unanticipated; b. even when technology conform to expectations, the meaning of the technology for those who use it depends on how generic features are particularized, how conventions emerge. The implications are well explained by Dourish:

the major design opportunity concerns not use of predefined context within a ubiquitous computing system, but rather how can ubiquitous computing support the process by which context is continually manifest, defined, negotiated, and shared? Ubiquitous computing technologies extend the reach of computation into the everyday world, and that world is one in which, through our everyday practice, we enact, sustain, and reproduce new forms of social meaning. The meaning itself may, by definition, be something that can never be removed from the social world and encoded in the technical. Nonetheless, though, technology plays a critical role in the evolution of meaning within communities of practice.

- Facebook EdgeRank: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/22/facebook-edgerank/

- Twitter Tunkrank: http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/04/07/go-tunkrank/

Paolo Borsellino

(1) Concerning the first point, I like Google’s idea of digitizing all the biggest public libraries to give people access to this knowledge worldwide. However, this does not solve the issue of those billion of books which lie in people’s premises. To address this second point, a group of artists has put together a number of recommendations on how to build an home-made book scanner. See an example in the picture below.

(2) Digitizing the book might soon become the easy part. The next step would be to add interactivity to these book so that advanced reading features might become available. See the demo at this link. The idea is that an interactive book might offer translations on the fly, pronunciations of uncommon words, dictionary entries, support for the visually impaired, etc.

— 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]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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]

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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]

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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.