great names are like knots—they’re woven from the same stringy material as other words, but in their particular arrangement, they catch, become junctions to which new threads arrive, from which other threads depart

Jack Cheng, writer , June 2012

Great article by Jack Cheng on the Slow Web Movement. I particularly liked these quotes:

- And where the Fast Web is built around real-timedness, the Slow Web is built around timeliness.

- But timeliness alone doesn’t make something Slow Web. …Reliable rhythms lead to predictable outcomes, and rhythm is an expression of moderation.

- Fast Web is destination-based. Slow Web is interaction-based

- Behavior change, not growth. Behavior change is about improving the lives of others, scale is about ego. Getting scale after nailing behavior change is easier than nailing behavior change (and thus having a shot at durability) after hitting scale.

- Fast Web is about information. Slow Web is about knowledge.

- Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information.

Updated to wordpress 3.3.1 (http://wordpress.org). Looks nice and smooth.

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This paper reports the results of a quantitative study on how people take notes in meetings. The goal of the authors was that of aiding the design of innovative applications to support work-related meetings.

Notes taken during meetings have a pivotal role in helping people understand what happened during the meeting and to recall important information or decisions that were shared during the gathering. Taking notes is usually a tedious activity and therefore lots of scholar have focused on work-related meetings, trying to come up with automatic solutions to summarize what happened during the interactions.

The paper reports interesting references to studies that demonstrate a relation between acoustic features (i.e., pitch, intensity, speaking speed, and pauses) of the recordings of the meetings and annotations created by participants (Arons, 1994; Kennedy & Ellis, 2003).

Also, some possible implications in the design of systems to support annotations: shared note-taking was investigated by Landay & Davis, 1999 and by Wolf et al., 1992. Finally, the possibility to suggest notes to participant was examined by Banarjee & Rudnicky, 2009.

The paper describes interesting related work on how people take notes for personal reasons. These notes are created in daily life meetings regardless of whether specific instructions to create summaries are given to participants. Note-taking mainly takes place tin order to create a personal record to aid remembering what was being discussed. Participants in meetings usually take notes of the most informative events. They contain “personally important” points and details on action items assigned to the note-taker. Most relevant references for these findings are the studies of Khan, 1992; Whittaker et al., 2005; and Wittaker et al., 2008.

These studies point out that during work meetings only salient and personally interesting points are recorded. The notes people generally take are short (i.s., 20-30 s long on average) [Khan, 1992]. These notes are likely to have predictive power for finding the most important parts of meetings.

The same authors examined the role of of individual differences in talking and note-taking activities in meetings (Bothin & Clough, 2010). Participants had different behaviour according to their gender, age, and native language. Women wrote more but men talked more within meetings. The older the participants were, the more they talked and noted. Native English speakers wrote more, but there was no significant difference in talking behavior.

In their experiment, Bothin & Clough examined the AMI corpus, involving 104 participants in total, and found that personal notes were generally short. Single items were around 8 seconds long on average (SD 3). They found a positive correlation between the total meeting length and the total number of the notes (r = 0.21), as well as the total meeting length and the total duration of the notes (r = 0.20). Perhaps people prefer to write down key words only [Khan, 1992] and every time something important to them occurs in the discussion.

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This paper surveys and discusses various ways of indexing meeting records by categorizing existing approaches along multiple dimensions. The authors introduce the notion of creating indices based upon user interaction with domain-specific artifacts.

The paper contain a detailed literature review of previous studies of note taking behavior during and about meetings.

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This paper presents a study of how people take notes in meetings. The authors interviewed people who used audio recordings in offices to identify the main benefits and barriers they experienced. Later, they interviewed 28 non-users of audio recording devices about the way they took notes during meetings.

They found a need for supplementing handwritten meeting notes with a verbatim speech record of the conversation. On the basis of this, they built a prototype system that combined co-indexed handwritten notes and recorded audio in a digital notebook. They discussed perceived benefits of this technology.

In their literature review, they discuss some “speech-as-data” applications, such as the Voicenotes (Stifelman et al., 1993) and the Ubiquitous audio (Hindus & Schmandt, 1992). These applications allowed the organization of brief segments of personal audio such as “ideas” or “reminders”.

As humans we are fundamentally social creatures. For most people an ordinary day is filled with social interaction. We converse with our family and friends. We talk with our co-workers as we carry out our work. We engage in routine exchanges with familiar strangers at the bus stop and in the grocery store. This social interaction is not just talk: we make eye contact, nod our heads, wave our hands, and adjust our positions. Not only are we busy interacting, we are also remarkably sensitive to the behaviors of those around us. Our world is filled with social cues that provide grist for inferences, planning and action. We grow curious about a crowd that has gathered down the street. We decide not to stop at the store because the parking lot is jammed. We join in a standing ovation even though we didn’t enjoy the performance that much. Social interactions like these contribute to the meaning, interest and richness of our daily life.

More: interviews with Tom Erickson

Erickson, Thomas (2011): Social Computing. In: Soegaard, Mads and Dam, Rikke Friis (eds.). “Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction”. Available online at http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/social_computing.html

MobileHCI 2011 has been organized in Stockholm, Sweden by the SICS and by the MobileLife center. I was in the organizing committee. I chaired the design competition. This year we had 420 registered participants. We received around 270 submissions out of which 63 papers were chosen for presentation at the conference (23% acceptance rate). Best paper award was given to a work of Niels Henze titled: “100,000,000 Taps: Analysis and Improvement of Touch Performance in the Large”.

The keynote was given by Jeanna Kimbré (Sony Ericsson). She started her talk with the premise that form (hardware design) should reinforce function (software design). In her line of thinking form should follow function + fun. Therefore they do lots of research on materials and colors to find the most appealing combination for what they call aesthetic expression (a combination of user experience and design). They follow the 6D (design, develop, distill, discard, delight). They publish every year a 250 pages trends report because they are a global organization and they need to be on the same page.

On the first day, I presented Karen’s paper in the session “Understanding mobile phone use”. Tricia Wang from UCSD presented the paper titled “Ethnography of the telephone: changing uses of communication technologu in village life”. The study was conducted in isolated villages of Guatemala. They conducted a focused field work on communication technology because in these villages usually adult males leave the country to find a job in the States and to send back the money to their family. Cell phone signal coverage is poor and even if there was they probably could not afford the fares. They use call shops called “caseta telefonica”, locutorios. These are important places to make and receive phone calls. People in the villages do not have private phones in their homes and therefore use the casetas. People are called through loudspeakers so everybody knows about the phone calls they receive. People in some villages now use a telefono fijo that is an hybrid embedding GSM technology. This kind of phones are used by a third of the families. These are typically shared by 4 families. Understanding how communication technologies are used in this places is important because these remote villages like this one exists everywhere in the world. We need to understand the social conditions that underly the use of technology. Implications: 1- cost of mobility -> for most people in the world mobility comes with a cost; 2- intermediate technology -> older technology comes back into intermediate ways.

MATTHIAS BOHMER presented a paper titled “Falling asleep with facebook Angry bidrs and kindly / a large/scale study on mobile application usage.” They tried to answer the question: How do people use their applications on mobile phones? Their work relates to the paper by girardello and michahellis, 2009 on Appaware. However, while this looks only at applications installed and disinstalled, they also look at how these applications are used. They developed an app sensor that was embedded within a recommender application for smartphone applications. APPAZAR. Basic findings: typical user uses an app for about one hour per day. They also have usage per category. App usage correlates with circadian circle. They showed a table of probabilities of applications being used in specific times of the day. They also looked at transitions between applications. Implications: 1- menus should adapt to time, location, previously used apps; 2- app design should incorporate apps transition patterns; 3- app sensor can provide additional context information.

HENRIETTE CRAMER presented a paper titled: “Performing a check/in: emerging practices, norms and conflicts in in location.sharing using foursquare”. They focused on applications such as foursquare that use a check-in model. Why does it work? There is a semantic naming of places. There is a gamification aspect because you can get points for checkins. They tried to understand foursquare usage motivations and norms. There are utilitarian reasons to check in. Also, for social-connection & self-presentation. To learn about new people and to discover new places. 17% of the participants of the study did not share their check-in with others. Why? For future reference, to get discounts, to self-motivational tool, and to pass time. Some people self-impose some rules such as actually visiting the place and not just passing by. The system does not impose this limitation. Some users only friends their inner circle. They say they would not want to friend strangers and colleagues and their bossed but they actually have this people in their friends list. People adapt to their audience. Some content is acceptable in one network but it is not acceptable on another network. Some users invent virtual places to make inner jokes such as checking into a bridge over the road where most people get stuck in morning traffic. The game element also affect the real world perception.

JAIME TEEVAN conducted an interesting study that is relevant to our work on Mobile Information Needs. The paper was titled: “Location, Time & People in Mobile Local Search”, They conducted a survey on mobile local search with 929 microsoft employee. They asked questions in what was the last local search they conducted on mobile decide. People search while they are on the go. People plan to visit the POI fairly soon and want the poi to be fairly close. 63% of searches were conducted with another person. 24% of reasons to begin search involved another person. About half of searches are for generic places. In addition to users’ current location the users’ destination is also important. People often use search results immediately.

MOHIT JAIN presented a paper titled: “Exploring display techniques for mobile collaborative learning in developing regions.” Many times it happens that multiple children interact in front of a single display. The paper review previous literature on this theme. They designed collaborative games that could be deployed in mobile devices for developing regions. They redesigned a collaborative version of boggle. In the experiment they compared a single display with pico projector with a multiple display on mobile devices.

RONALD ECKER from BMW research presented a paper titled: “EcoChallenge: a race for efficiency.” Their goal was to encourage the drivr to have a more eco-friendly driving style without patronizing him/her. They describe the designing a location based driving challenge. The driver bahavior can influence efficiency up to 50%. They designed a community based and in-car system that allow the users to compete in a challenge to maintain the most efficient driving style.

COSMIN MUNTEANU focused on adult literacy. He presented a paper titled: “Showing off your mobile device: Adult literacty learnung in the classroom and beyond.” Nearly 9 million Canadian adults are at low literacy levels (1 or 2). Literacy levels have not changed over the past decade. They studied eleven participants in two classes over six months. They designed a mobile application to improve reading skills for adults. They application offered also the possibility to understand the meaning of words. They referred to the TAM (technology acceptance model).

In the afternoon I took part in the context session where I presented our work on contextual applications. BRIAN LIM presented a nice work on the “Design of an Itelligible Mobile Context-Aware Applications”. They started from the premise that if users do not understand how application works they end up misusing or abandoning them. The work he is focusing on is how to make applications intelligible. How to design an intelligible context-aware application for mobile social-awareness. They designed LAKSA a prototype they designed to answer this question and to test previous findings. They describe 4 design strategies for intelligibility. They run usability studies to test these 4 strategies.

JOEL FISHER presented a paper titled: “Investigating Episodes of Mobile phone Activitys indicators of opportune moments to deliver notifications.” They tried to use contextual information to find when was the best time to show a notification on a mobile phone. They tried to model breakpoints in cognitive tasks. Opportune moments for delivery lay at the breakpoints between subtasks. They designed an experiment to test the hypothesis. They designed an application on the android to popup the question related to the interruption.

Later, I attended a session on navigation and wayfinding. STEFANO BURIGAT presented a paper titled: ¨Pedestrian Navigation with Degraded GPS Signal: Investigating the Effects of Visualizing Position Uncertainty¨. The basic question they tried to answer was: “How can we support navigation when the GPS signal is degraded or not available?”. Their solution was to make the position uncertainty explicit, visualizing an estimate of the area where the user might be located. The area of uncertainty is centered on the last accurate position. They compute the size of the area of uncertainty base on the motion of the user. They display the area of uncertainty as a circular area or as a colored street network. They conducted an evaluation where they simulated a degrated GPS signal and presented the users with one of the visualization (either circular or street network). They found that street visualization required a smaller workload (NASA TLX) than the basic visualization.

The first session of Thursday afternoon was on text entry technology. PER OLA KRISTENSSON presented a paper titled: “A Versatile dataset for text entry evaluation based on genuine email”. Text entry methods were usually based on methods that asked people to type predefined sentences. Experiments should be reproducible. They propose to use the EXXON dataset. Many emails in this corpus have been marked as sent by a blackberry. From this corpus they extracted 2239 sentences or fragments. They manually reviewed them and fixed spelling mistakes and removed duplicate sentences or incomprehensible sentences. They compared this corpus with other datasets obtained through desktop pcs and found that emails written on a mobile devices are different because contains less letters, they are written in 1st person, and they contain questions. The impications is that we should use this corpus to test text entry on mobile devices.

http://keithv.com/software/enronmobile/

SAURABH PANJWANI presented the paper: “Script-Agnostic Reflow of Text in Document Images”. Sometimes evectronic documents are available to users only in the form of document images (PDF bitmap). Screen width can hinder readability of text. With document images the user is forced to pan and scroll. Reflow tools exists but these works largely for english documents only. They rely on ocr (optical character recognition). Less than 15% of the wold speaks English natively. Increasingly books in such scripts are being digitized. Therefore they tried to answer the following question: “Can we build tools that can reflow non-english text without using OCR?” They designed a script-agnostic reflow for PDF documents and demonstrated the tool during the talk. Their method works for scripts that separate words by white spaces. They evaluated the technique with 4 languages: english, hindm hannadam and arabic.

KIMBERLY WEAVER presented an interesting paper titled: “Understanding information preview in email email processing”. The goal is to undertand the tradeoff between information preview in emails and workload. They asked participants had to triage their work email on a personal iphone. They were using their actual emails not corpus. They asked participant to repeat the task for a week. Each day they were using a different number of preview lines. The recorded the logs and they administered a questionnaire each day. From a log side they found that 3 lines are optimal, while use choice was on 2 lines.

YOUNGHEE JUNG presented an interesting paper titled: “Solving the Indian Text Input Puzzle”. In India there are 22 official languages in Constitution. 77 M English literate (< 10%) People in India they are not using their own language on mobile phones because these script languages are not supported on these phones. They aimed at designing a text input mechanisms that could minimize the learning curve and that could support all 22 languages. They designed the new input technology and this reduced dramatically the keypresses when compared to Panini and the Nokia ITU keypad.@JABBERER HTTP://YOUNGHEE.COM

The very same problem was tackled by ANIRUDHA JOSHI who presented a paper titled: “Devanagaru virtual keyboards for touchscreens mobile phones.” They designed a virtual keyboard that grouped vowels and consonants and that mapped them on the keyboard by frequency of use. Also, they applied a color code. They produced several designs and compared them.

JEFF PIERCE presented a paper titled: “Smart Phone use by non-mobile business users”. Mobile phones to produce information not just consuming information. People do less input of the information than consumption of the information. Device password and device limitations push people away from using mobile devices for their work. They did not observe any difference in terms of using a virtual vs. physical keyboard. People normally overestimate reading time, while they underestimate typing time. People normally think that doing tasks on mobile phones takes more time and effort. One of the implication of this work is that perhaps we can separate personal and business use through some sandboxing and ‘personas’ for devices.

Later I attended a session on the collaborative production of video. AUDUBON DOUGHERTHY presented a paper titled: “Live Streaming Mobile Video: Productions as civic engagement”. She works for the Comparative media study department, MIT. Their research question was the following: What kind of videos are actually being broadcast online through mobile devices. They studied Qik which is a smartphone app to broadcast video from the mobile. They assigned value tags to the videos found on the website to understand production trends. Thgey interviewed some of the top producers of videos in Qik. 11% of the video had personal values while the rest being personal videos. Civic videos were largerly generalistic. Users were largerly male. The average length of videos wer 7 minutes and 30 seconds while civic videos were 5 minutes longer in average. Sharing ideas with strangers was enough of a motivating factor to push users of Qik to produce their videos.

http://amd4.net

HELI VAATAJA presented a work titled: “Crowdsourced news reporting: supporting news content creations with mobile phones.” They focused on a hyperlocal community news. This is a local newspaper where readers send 20K pictures every year. At the moment, the journalists of the newspaper choose stories and then send MMS to volunteers/readers so that s/he can write a short article about the story and add some pictures on it. The best story that appears in the tabloid receive a prize. They are now looking at solutions to geolocate their readers to be able to assign them to stories that are also diverse in terms of coverage of the territory. They conducted a study with 9 participants. Most of them had stubmitted photos 2-3 times in last half a year. Their main motivation to participate was the incentive given. They conducted a study on SMS + location based assignments. They found several benefits for reporters and for the news room.

The final keynote was delivered by Adrian Cheok (university of Singapore and KEIO JP). His main argument was that we should move from informational communication to experiental communication. He showed a number of prototypes on experiental communication. E.g., giving hugs to your pet friends, hugging people at a distance, enriching paper communication. He showed examples of communication involving food printing. He also presented example related to sound and smell communication.

http://www.adriancheok.info/

I attended the first three days of the conference and –as always– there were many papers that got my attention. What you are going to read next are some notes I took of papers that I found interesting. Particularly, I attended sessions on the following topics: research methods (mostly qualitative), telepresence, tagging, low-cost ICT for development, microblogging, user studies in developing regions, wireless networks, home automation, HCI for peace, location sharing, and low-cost phones.

On the first day, I attended a session on research methods, that got three honorable mentions. Of these I liked the presentation of Eric Baumer (Cornell) who conducted a study to compare activity theory and distributed cognition. His argument was that depending on the theory that you choose as researcher you can get results that are dramatically different. To prove the point, they conducted a fake study that was analyzed using both the AC theory and the DC theory. They discussed several points that help researchers choose the right research method. The other presentation I liked was that of Jens Riegelsberger and Audrey Yang (Google) who reported on methodological issues they identified while conducting field research across 9 locations. There were several things that worked well such as in-field pre analysis, cloud tools and templates used by the various teams to share data, and card-sorting at the basecamp. However, there were several things that did not work well, such as safety margins for logistics that were too short, and work load of field teams that was set too high. On the same session, Leah Findlater (HCIL, U Maryland) presented the Aligned Rank Transform for non-parametric Factorial Analysis [2]. Basically, error rates and user satisfactions are often measured with ordinal scales. Also, Error rates are often skewed towards zero and therefore we cannot analyze the data using a factorial ANOVA. The method they presented, called ART retain familiarity with the f-test and allow to conduct factorial analysis using ANOVA procedures on these situations. Unfortunately, they did not present the math behind, need to look at the paper.

In the afternoon, I attended the Designing for Democracy session. The first presentation did not fully fit in this session because it was about persuasive technology to promote ideal weight. It was presented by Victoria Schwanda (Cornell). They presented a system called Fit4Life that used sensor to monitor all the user was doing and to even listen to his conversations with the aim of persuading him/her to have a more active lifestyle. The system is NOT real. The created this design to provoke discussion on the limit that this kind of technology should have. The second presentation was delivered by Joan di Micco (IBM research), about how to engage citizens through visualizations of congressional legislation. She proposed 4 stages of engagement with government data: a. understanding, b. communication, c. interpretation, d. contribution. Their system was dealing with the first level. They used MALLET, a machine classifier to assign each part of a bill to a certain topic. They conducted analysis of usage patterns of power users vs. casual users. They also interviewed many of the casual users. Later, Moira Burke (CMU) presented Social Capital on Facebook, a longitudinal study on social capital based on kinds of facebook activities and individual differences. They run longitudinal surveys paired with facebook server logs. To measure casual relations between the variables they used a lagged dependent variable analysis. They found that lots of direct communication is associated with well-being. So, for social capital it is not enough to have friends in network. Benefits, come from interacting one-to-one with them. Similar findings were presented by Christian Yoder (U North Carolina). They found that status updates were not associated with an increase of social capital. This is mostly because these updates were not “talking” to anybody in particular.

Later on the same day, I attended the “tagging” session. One of the most interesting presentation was delivered by Michael Bernstein (MIT) who talked about “friendsourcing”. The whole concept was extremely related to the Social Tagging Revamped paper that we presented last year. Their basic premise was that some applications need specific information about you and can perform vey interesting forms of personalization. He described in particular Collabio, a facebook game that allows participants to tag each other with keywords that describe their interests and preferences. Using this information they could propel a number of services that are better tailored to people’s needs. He also listed a number of commercial services that were designed using the “social crowdsourcing” premise: GuessWho, FeedMe, Social Q&A (a specialized version of Quora), and Socialpedia. All in all, it was interesting to see that our idea of crowdsourcing is taking place and being incorporated into several commercial products. Michael has posted the paper and the slides of the presentation on his website [3].

On Tuesday, I attended the low-cost ICT for development session. Elba del Carmen (U Duisburg-Essen) and colleagues conducted surveys and field studies to understand how children appropriated the presence of mobile phones in rural classrooms in Panama. They lent the phones to the students for the duration of the study. Ruy Cervantes (U California Irvine) presented a study of how mexican schools used low-cost laptops. Their findings showed that the ecological infrastructure is key to support laptop-based education. Technology coordinators were extremely important to bring teachers up to speed and to administer the sharing of the resources. A strong human infrastructure was key to support change. Next, Gaurav Paruthi (MSR India) presented a study on how DVD players can be used as offline browsers for wikipedia. Their basic premise was that DVD players penetration rate was higher than PC penetration rate in India. Therefore they designed a distribution of wikipedia for DVD [4]. The menu and search could be done through the remote control of the television. They believe this is the cheapest way of distributing multimedia content in developing regions.

In the afternoon, I attended the session on microblogging behavior. Kate Starbird (U Colorado) presented a paper titled: “Voluntweeters: Self-Organizing by Digital Volunteers”. The released a microsyntax for twitter to help during the emergency situations. They studied how people used twitter during the quake in Haiti last year. Volunteers were retweeting, tweeting ushahidi reports, verifying information and putting people in contact with local coordinators. Volunteers did not know each other before the quake. Therefore they studied the emergence of the organization. Cathy Marshall (MSR) presented a study of people’s perception of ownership of user generated content. Who owns the tweets? What are the limits that people feel about media they did and did not create themselves? For many people is perfectly fine to take online content and re-use it for personal presentations and communications. Haewoon Kwak (KAIST) presented a study on the reasons why people unfollow others in social networks. Studying this kind of behavior is hard because social networks do not expose this kind of behavior. Therefore they scraped a dataset of 1.2M users in Korea and collected daily snapshots of follow networks and compared consecutive structures of this network. They found that people unfollow frequently in twitter, 43% of the time during the subsequent 2 months after following a peer, with an average 15 unfollow per person. The study reported a number of reasons for unfollowing a peer. A similar study was conducted by Funda Kivran-Swaine (Rutgers U) who focused on the impact of network structure on breaking ties in online social networks. They tried to understand what structural properties of the social network of nodes can predict the breaking up of ties in twitter. They used a huge dataset that was analyzed with multi-logistic regression. The model is reported in the paper. The more neighbors a dyad shared the less likely the breaking of the relationship. They also found that follow-back rate in twitter is a good indication of status in the SN.

Less related to this last group was the study presented by Jennifer Golback (U Maryland) on computing political preference among twitter followers. They used a list of congress members that are active on facebook. They also used a secondary source of information to understand how much liberal or conservative they are. They also intersect this information with news on online news sites. They found that people tend to follow politicians whose ideas reflect theirs. They are thinking about using this system to create a recommender system. They can use the same method to rate companies with their environmental score.

In the afternoon, I attended a session on user studies / ethnography in developing regions. Indrani Medhi (MSR India) presented a study on designing mobile interfaces for novice and low-literacy users. Deepti Kumar (IIT Madras) presented a study on how mobile payments are handled in India. The study focused on how people bargain and negotiate prices. Elisa Oreglia ( U California Irvine) describes information-sharing practices and ICT use in rural northern China. They found an abundance of information, and a scarce localization. There is an abundance of ict but under-utilization. They found a prevalence or oral information exchanges. Also, they found that information brockers are extremely important.

One last paper in the afternoon caught my attention. Barry Brown (U California San Diego) presented an interesting study on challenges and opportunities for field trial methods. The paper discusses methodological challenges in running user trials. They constructed a fake trial to examine how trial insights are dependent on the practices of investigators and participants. The best quote: “participants do not like your system, they like you!”.

On Wednesday, I attended the wireless networks session. Marshini Chetty (Georgia Tech) presented a paper on making network speeds visible. They designed Kermit a prototype [5], who visualize who is online, to allow personalization of the display, show the biggest bandwidth user, and show a history of bandwidth usage to make correlations. Participants in their interview showed that they had little understanding of what bandwidth is. They also showed to have little knowledge of how internet applications use bandwith. The tool seemed to help understanding who was consuming the internet in the household. Kermit also allowed them to control network usage in ways that participants were not used to.

[1] http://www.chi2011.org/

[2] http://faculty.washington.edu/leahkf/pubs/CHI2011-wobbrock-AlignedRankTransform.pdf

[3] http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/

[4] http://www.wikipediaondvd.com/site.php

[5] http://www.ic.gatech.edu/news/kermit-helps-households-monitor-and-manage-their-internet-speed

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This work focuses on new temporalities of media consumption in the home as enabled by new media technologies. The authors conducted in-home interviews and diary study with 14 households over two weeks. They found many instances of the classic image of television temporality, namely families relaxing together in front of the television. They also found examples of time-shifting to adjust broadcasts to fit one’s agenda. However, they also found a range of complex temporal patterns that sit between these two extremes.

They found many instances of rhythmic television watching. These are subject to change and are negociated. When made visibles these are a source for social coordination. DVR technologies allowed people flexibility in the times they watched television.

They found that rhythms might span across households. However, while most of the previous literature focused on the synchronous nature of these social events, they found instances of watching television independently at individually convenient times that still sustained the rhythm of the collective discussion experiences.

They also found accounts of “plastic” television watching. Plastic time activities are the variable, ad hoc time that fits between or along with other activities. On Demoand cable television allowed users to browse lists of shows, find one that fit into one’s anticipated amount of time, and immediately begin watching. This kind of television would also allow users to skip not relevant or interesting content or to watch more episodes of a series of interest.

The study concludes with interesting and relevant design implications:

1) the design and support of temporal awareness may support the sociality of television. Design that support asymnchronous sociality might also support some users keep up with television shows.

2) on demand TV might support plastic time by having a selection of very short video segments;

3) recommender systems would benefit from sense of timing and social awareness and realizing that timing might be as important as the stories or genres presented.

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The main argument of this work is that context-sensitive information needs can be supported by individuals in the social network. The authors support the idea that many contextual needs require specialized knowledge that is often not available on the Internet.

Under this assumption they conducted a 4-weeks diary study in which a diverse group of participants recorded the information they needed or that they wanted to share. They collected 1290 entries that were analyzed using grounded theory affinity analysis. They grouped the needs into 9 main categories with relative subcategories. Participants were able to satisfy their needs 45.3% of the time. Participants satisfied their information need by asking someone, going to a location where the information was available, look the answer on the web and user other methods suchg as the GPS, paper documents, trial and error and other media.

By looking qualitatively at the answers they observed some interesting facts: The timeliness of the information was a key factor and also the trust relationship with the source of the answer was an higly quoted variable that participants took into account.

The concept of the app came out of the joint work that we did last summer with the UDSI team in Barcelona. I also like the idea because of my past work with the DigitalSeed [link] etc.

If you want to try out the app: WishTree

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The authors of this paper looked at the effect of dataplan on smartphones have on mobile information needs and poractices. The authors used a diary study with 8 participants over the course of two weeks. Participants were filling a web form where they were asked to answer a certain number of questions (where / when / what / how / did you find what you were looking for?). They used a strict definition of information needs: need for a piece of informationthat you cannot recall from memory or that is not immediately available to you and that you would likely spend few minutes attempting to solve it while mobile.

They classified with simple coding the information needs into 15 topical categories. They divided the needs into utilitarian (pragmatic) and hedonic (entertainment). Most of the needs, 45%, were addressed immediately. The majority of the users answered the needs through web search. Interestingly, they also found that the contributing reasonto the information need is not easily attributable to any environmental factor (33% of the times).

The paper also presents some nice implications for design, such as the use of communal knowledge to solve mobile search needs. Also, they suggested several techniques to take advantage of the user’s interaction to predict mobile information needs.

http://www.mobilehci2011.org/node/34

I would be grateful if you could spread the word around to colleagues who might be interested in academia and industry.

Design brief: The Essence of Mobile Communication and Connectivity

Mobile technology is very close to everyday lives, for more than half of the world’s population. It is reflected well by the fact that we hear about it very often. However designers, researchers, technologists and journalists alike tend to give too much highlights on what’s new, especially around high-end, so-called ‘Smart phones’. Arguably, smart phones embody the exciting future of mobile connectivity, but they may not reflect the reality of mobile connectivity for majority of users around the world for many years to come, due to affordability, infrastructure, total cost of ownership, and simply, user preference.

Overall, people’s behaviors around mobile communication devices have certainly changed over the past decades. People have experienced a considerable diversity of mobile phones, hence it is logical to assume that what people may consider as essential features of a mobile phone would have been diversified and changed as well.

Thereby we challenge contestants to define the essence of mobile communication and connectivity and demonstrate what, why and how to design it. Most importantly, contestants need to think about a mobile device that is not about extra new features but is rooted on the good design of its core essential functionalities and experience they will create. Perhaps we can think about a phone that uses the exact same hardware features of existing basic phones but with a completely redesigned user experience. Perhaps we can think about a phone that “pushes” some of its intelligence to the cloud. Or a phone that can be operated with voice and that does not require a display.

——

This paper describes software that reacts to an individual’s changing context. According to the authors, three important aspects of context are: where you are, who you are with, and what resources are nearby. Context includes different aspects of the physical environment around the user.

To investigate these topics they developed ParcTab, a small hand-held devices that uses infrared based cellular network for communication. The Tab acts as a graphics terminal and most of applications run on remote hosts.

Using this experimental environment, they describe four interaction mechanism:

1. Proximate Selection, the located-objects that are nearby are emphasized or otherwise made easier to choose.
2. Automatic Contextual Reconfiguration is the process of adding new components, removing existing components or altering the connections between components.
3. Contextual Information and Commands happens when contextual information can produce different results accodring to the context in which they are issued.
4. Context-Triggered Actions are sets of rules that specify how contex-aware systems should adapt.

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This paper presents a summary of theoretical definitions of context that were developed in the past in the field of computer science. The authors’ argument presented in the paper is that most of the definitions that were proposed in the past were indirect definitions that used synonyms or that were either too general or incomplete.

By summarizing previous work, the authors presented an operational definition of context that could be used to characterize the situation of anentity. According to the authors, elements for the description of this context information fall into five categories:

1. individuality
2. activity
3. location
4. time
5. relations

Also, according to the authors something is context because of the way it is used in interpretation, not due to its inherent properties. When interacting and communicating in everyday life, the perception of situations, as well as the interpretation of the context is a major part. Therefore, the author presents some operational additive to the general definition: context transitions, variation of approximation, change of focus, shift of attention, shared contexts, the establishment of relations, the adjustment of shared contexts, and the exploiting of relationships.

—–

This paper presents a comprehensive literature review of multidisciplinary research on context. The primary aim of the authors was that of reviewing and merging theories of context within linguistic, computer science, and psychology to propose a multidisciplinary model of context that would facilitare application developers.

The authors find out that contextual interactions appered to comprise the cross-disciplinary component for understanding and using principles of context. From a liguistic perspective it is the interaction between two people, within computer science it is the user-application interaction (combined with possible interactions with other people and objects=, and within psychology it is the internal and external interactions. Last, contextual interactions should be considered also though the notion of embodiment, as described by Dourish (2001).

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]

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This paper present a qualitative study of mobile services that could be enhanced with location-aware features thus providing the user’s point of view. The authors conducted interviews with 13 evaluation groups with a total of 55 persons of different ages, genders, ans socio-economic status. To guide the interactions, they provided participants with structured scenarios and prototypes that they had to test. Also, they conducted interviews with experts during a conference.

The paper draws conclusion about key issues related to users’ needs. Topical information, the kind of information that might change while the user is on the mobe, turned out to be important to the user (e.g., weather forecast, train schedule). They also identified the push vs pull modality of delivery information to the user as being one of the possible issued with designing these kind of services. Users declared the need of having detailed search options, the ability of personalizing the interaction with the service and that of contributing to the system providing data. Also, they discussed the need of giving the ability to the user to override the recommendations of the system (e.g., exporatory search). Privacy was also mentioned.

——–

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.

———

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.

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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.

———

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.

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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.