- Paper: Creative creation and sense-making of mobile media

- CHI note: Watching the cars go round and round: Designing for active speaking

- CHI note: Ethnography in the Kindergarten: Examining children's play experiences

- CHI note: Robot-human interaction with an Anthropomorphic percussionist

A field trial was conducted during a cross-country car rally where the application motivated asynchronous discussions that revolved around planning, coordinating and socializing. The "media stories" amongst the study participants involved chained collections of messages and pictures. One of the findings of the study was the importance of common space, mutual awareness and colocated use. mGroup was seen to provide awareness cues such as digital presence and provides features to enrich collocated use such as assigning visual codes to stories.

A question raised was whether the system would work in a less constrained setting as the eveeryday life. The response was that more implementation studies needed to be conducted.

CHI note: Watching the cars go round and round: Designing for active spectating
Active spectating describes the complex social activity of being a participant in large spectator events such as car rallies. In fact the paper presented conducted fieldwork in rallies across various countries. The activities that revolve around "spectating" in car rallies include getting a good spot to view the cars and capturing/sharing photos of the event. One of the issues with spectating at car rallies is that participants tend to struggle gaining an overview of how the event progresses. This is identified by the authors as the viewing paradox: where a participant is able to get an upclose experience but find it difficult to understand what's happening. Thus there is a need to provide context of the event as it progresses.

The paper presented mySplitTime, an application that allows spectators to take pictures and stamp them with the ranking times cars in the race. Spectators are able to use those pictures and timestamps to make lists of the rankings and send and share them with other spectators. Through the use of mySplitTime, the authors hoped to promote active spectatorship where there us a sense of sociability created through the use of a topical resource for sharing.

The questions brought up during the session highlghted the remediation of experiences through the various media types. Paul Dourish brought up the point that spectating and the spectacular was trying to transform the real world to be more like television.

CHI note: Ethnography in the Kindergarten: Examining children's play experiences
The underlying question that this study seeks to answer was; what role should a computer play on an environment where children are actively working with materials? According to the author of the paper, this question is still largely left unanswered today.

To answer the question, the author conducted an ethnography of a kindergarten to investigate how to create playful technology to make it an enjoyable experience for kids in a noisy, creative, loosely structured environment. The results of the ethnography highlighted the fact that the childrens activities in the kindergarten were fluid and continually evolved through time. In particular, the study highlighted the fact that children's play involved objects that suited those activities. Thus technology designed for early childhood should be transformable, flexible and portable. It was found that children tended to adapt resources that "fit the play". Thus, technology needed to be designed to be flexible, open to continuous re-design and open to children's caring and sharing behavior. The author identified the fact that the best resource within the kindergarten were squishy foam cubes. Thus the point was to design the interaction but to design the medium for children to adopt.

CHI note: Robot-human interaction with an Anthropomorphic percussionist
The presented highlighted a musical robot named Haile. The motivation for developing this robot was to embed musicianship in a machine and create new musical interactions that can't be derived from playing with humans.

At present Haile is a proof of concept antrhopomorphic design that used of wood
and a moving arm that strikes a drum. Through videos shown in the presentation, Haile is able to mimic, improvise and perform in unison with other players. Future implications for the project include application to music education and more work to improve Haile's processor algorithm.

The project was very well received by the audience and many individuals who raised questions highlighted the fact that they were very impressed with the project. In particular, most of the questions revolved around queries of the reactions of the musicians in their interactions with Haile.

- Paper: Using intelligent task routing and contribution review to help communities build artifacts of lasting value
- Paper: groupTime: Preference based group scheduling
- Paper: Accounting for taste: Using profile similarity to improve recommender systems

Paper: Using intelligent task routing and contribution review to help communities build artifacts of lasting value

This presntation builds on prior work done on the well-known movielens project by suggesting a general algorithm that can be implemented in most communities.
The authors of the paper put forward the use of intelligent task routing that helps individuals make quality contributions by better matching their interests to the available work in a community.The implication of the use of this model is that people will respond to things that they are motivated to work on.m Intelligent task routing uses an algorithm based on Kurau & Williams' (1993) collective effort model. This model breaks down the efforts of both individuals and the community into parts. This allows developers to examine and modify each part of the collective effort model in order to improve group contributions. This is something that existing online communities have yet to implement. The authors of the paper suggest that as more contribution based community models surface, the use of intelligent task routing models may be useful for the design such communities.

Paper: groupTime: Preference based group scheduling
groupTime is describes a group scheduling interface that leverages the use of preferencesm social pressure and machine learning to optimize satisfaction amongst the users. The project addresses the problem of group calendar use where privacy and inappropriate scheduling are important considerations. The presenter describes the use of group calendaring where "HR uses it(this) like a weapon" to target individual user's free time. Typically it is difficult to tell when people are really busy or when they are trying to avoid meetings.

The central motivation for this project is to serperate out group calendaring from group scheduling and that decisions behind when to meet shouldn't be based on the calendar but on one's preferences. groupTime uses evite's 4 choices of preferences to suggest possible meeting times as a model. The tool builds on this model by developing ontologies of scheduling and commitments in order to allow users to indicate their preferences. Additionally, individuals' use of the system helps train the system to develop an algorithm through the use of the softmax logistic regression tool. The algorithm helps make a prediction of whether the individual can make it for a meeting at that time and weight the preferences of the user. For example an individual's preference of "can't make it" is strongly weighted to an exisiting commitment.

The implications of this study highlighted that users want to know what's going on and feel that they are in control. However an effective group scheduling application needs to use social pressure to enforce fairness and may be a more effective metric than the use of algorithms to schedule an individual's time.

Accounting for taste: Using profile similarity to improve recommender systems
The project deals with the problem of information overload with recommender systems. The typical experience of using recommender systems is that often there are too many results that are returned to be useful for the user. Thus a question that the project deals with is how to convert the large amount of recommnedations into information.

The authors attempted a 'bottom up' approach towards recommender system by using advice seeking by the users in taste domains. The study developed a scenario of recommender system use by implementing a film recommender system for a film festival in the project. A finding that was raised as a result of the project was that people preferred recommendations from individuals with similar profiles. Also people preferred recommendations from others with high rating overlap. Thus, this project suggests that the use of profile similarity in conjunction with rating overlaps could be useful to the develpment of a recommender systems.

Paper Remote Usability Evaluations With Disabled People [Best of CHI Nominee]
Helen Petrie, Fraser Hamilton, Neil King, Pete Pavan

Paper Desperately Seeking Simplicity: How Families with Young Adults with Cognitive Disabilities Adopt Assistive Technologies [Best of CHI Nominee]
Melissa Dawe

Key Findings:
- Allow users to quickly orient themselves in workspace
- Mouse input not recommended
- Short cut keys shoudl be avoided
- Audio cues can help prevent tactile clutter

First Prototype
- Graphics tablet (provides spatial frame of reference) with mouse
- Users receive speech feedback
- 5 participants (think-aloud)

Showed an impressive video of participants using the application.

http://www.tactons.org

Tactile feedback may help improve navigation of datasets for people with low vision. A tablet gives an absolute positioning system.

Questions

1. [U. Western Ontario] Do you have any idea of someone can follow a line or edge in an open space with this prototype?

Yes, I believe so. We have done some research with discriminating a line and they can do it within 10 degrees. Lines are difficult because it is a sparce representation.

2. There is a lot of work of translating visual representation to something visually impaired can "see." Is there any other methods of "visualization"?

Yes, we presented at CHI in Fort Lauderdale that had haptic input. It is a bit more work for haptic cues (stiffness, etc.) that people would have to poke to get information.

3. Were all of your subjects born blind?

It just so happens the four people were born blind.

[Have you looked at late on-set blindness such as from diabetes?]

No, we have not had anyone from that group. But we would like to.

Paper Remote Usability Evaluations With Disabled People [Best of CHI Nominee]
Two case studies describing the use of remote evaluation techniques with disabled participants. Can assist in understanding the advantages and disadvantages of using remote techniques with disabled users.
Helen Petrie, Fraser Hamilton, Neil King, Pete Pavan

Testing systems with disable users is important!

It is sad that there is a law that we have to make websites accessible to disabled, but not usable!

People usually do not want to evaluate technology with disabled because that is scary.

How do we find disabled people willing to participate in the study?

There are unforseen costs
- lab must be accessible to disabled (e.g., wheelchair ramps)
- software for disabled sometimes crashes when non-specialized handicapped software is installed

Is remote evaluation the solution?

Case Studies
Did a case study for the Disabilities Rights Group - Looked at websites.

Also looked at TeDUB - Technical Diagrams for Blind People. It required the use of a joystick. The participants loved using the joystick.

They rated 6 different functions (in the paper).

Participants came to the lab and then did the study in the home. Paid 50 pounds (Canada $100) when all completed - very high return rate of 98%.

Tasks successfully completed in the lab: 76.4% and remote: 75.3%

The Quantitative Data is valid if it is remote or local. Unless there is something odd that the participant won't be able to understand.

Questions

1. [Colorado] Could you account for some of the richness in data because remotely were reocrded and some were written?

We wanted to give them a chance to talk - that is not the same because it is not concurrent with doing the task. That is a good point and it would be an interesting improvement.

2. [Georgia Tech] How about having the developers go home to the individuals and do an in-situ evaluation? Have you thought about it?

We just did an evaluation that way. That is not a way to save time or money or your evaluators sanity. Because of the nature of the valuation, we were asked to do it and we did it. It is not quite solving the problem at the beginning.

3. [U. of Sascatchewan] Observation - You were trying to find blind people interested in looking at circuit diagrams, but couldn't find them. I don't know many sighted individuals who would want to see them - whether the disability is there or not.
Question - Given that you have done this - it would be really interesting to know - given the same protocol to see how people who do not consider themselves as having a disability. You may find even more so that understanding AT at home and the role of the disability itself may pop up a little bit more. Have you considered it?

Yes absolutely. WHen I wrote this paper for CHI, I wrote a draft and threw it away. I couldn't decide on how to approach this as a paper of remote vs. local evaluation...or write it as a paper on how to solve a problem with remote evaluation of people with disabilities. I'm not sure if whether they are disabled really matters. What is important is that there were no differences whether remote or local evaluation in the data received. Maybe there will be another paper next year.

4. [Alan Newell] It is very important that people see the white of the users eyes.

As someone who is a psychologist, I was very nervous about letting developers in with the evaluators. You do have to bear that in mind and I have had developers who intimidate the user. The benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

Paper Desperately Seeking Simplicity: How Families with Young Adults with Cognitive Disabilities Adopt Assistive Technologies [Best of CHI Nominee]
Case studies describing how families with individuals with cognitive disabilities adopt and incorporate assistive technologies. Illuminates the complexity of the adoption process and presents clear recommendations for assistive technology designers.
Melissa Dawe

The rate of abandonmet of assistive technologies (e.g., cane, hearing aid) is high - 35%! (where is this cited?)

Studies of abandoment usually group together all disabilities and thus misleading perceptions appear.

Research takes a binary adoption vs. abandonment approach.

Semi-structured interviews with teachers and parents of people with cognitive disabilities (interviews usually included and was present with the child with the disability. Interviews were 45-90 minutes onsite).

20 participant groups (5 teachers, 4 moms, 8 families (mom, dad, etc.), and 2 others. Boulder, Denver; Middle Income, Public School System.

5 down syndrome, 4 autism, 12 other/unidentified.

Majoritiy were between 15 and 21.

THey use technology to do various activities - communication, writing, prompting/scheduling.

Uses Grounded Theory

Themes in Analysis

1. Adoption as a multi-stage, multi-person process
2. Key features for successful assistive technologies
3. Hopes and dreams for assistive technologies (you have to think about what your user population dreams about - be inspired by their optimistic ideas)

Ian Rogers - Awareness, Persuasion, Decision-Making, Incorporation of the adoption process.

What is missing?
- Various share holders - specialists, teachers - not considered
- Parents expected to incorporate the device into the student's life

Specialists (recommend) -> Teachers Trial (study) -> Families (Incorporate)

Parents typically viewed the school as the expert. This caused some problems in terms of who is responsible for what.

Most stakeholders have different goals.

Devices are expensive because they are on custom hardware. It is getting better because we have better touch screen technology.

Questions

HCI, with its roots in Human Factors Engineering has traditionally been focused on efficiency and task completion. Lately, though, there is recognition that the affective aspects of human-machine systems play a role in the users' experience of a system, as well as having important implications for the usability of interfaces. Drawing on a tradition of psychological work on belief and affect, the speakers in this session present papers on how the affective aspects of interfaces can improve interaction, and how to measure and use affect in designing interfaces.

Paper Can a Virtual Cat Persuade You? The Role of Gender and Realism in Speaker Persuasiveness
Presents findings revealing how virtual characters are as persuasive as real people and that cross-gender interactions transfer to virtual speakers. Explains how virtual characters can be exploited for persuasive interfaces.
Catherine Zanbaka, Paula Goolkasian, Larry Hodges

Paper The Sensual Evaluation Instrument: Developing an Effective Evaluation Tool
Describes an instrument for collecting real-time self-assessment of affect. Portable, may work across cultures, offers consistency and flexibility. Can help elicit emotional feedback quickly and easily during the design process.
Katherine Isbister, Kristina Höök, Michael Sharp, Jarmo Laaksolahti

Note Listening to Your Inner Voices: Investigating Means for Voice Notifications
Reports on an user study of the notification qualities of voice and the development and deployment of a system exploiting the results. Suggests that voice familiarity is a useful property for notification.
Saurabh Bhatia, Scott McCrickard

Note Adaptive Language Behavior in HCI: How Expectations and Beliefs about a System Affect Users' Word Choice
Experimentally demonstrates that users adapt language behaviors depending on beliefs about the sophistication of a system. Suggests that designers should attend to relevant 'non-functional' system characteristics.
Jamie Pearson, Jiang Hu, Martin Pickering, Holly Branigan, Clifford Nass

http://www.chi2006.org/sessiondetail.php?sessionid=4213

Oren Zuckerman from MIT Media Lab and Lars Erik Holmquist from Viktoria Institute are the moderators.
Brygg Ullmer from Louisiana State University, Hiroshi Ishii from MIT Media Lab, George Fitzmaurice from Alias, Yvonne Rogers from Indiana University, Wendy Mackay from I.N.R.I.A., and Tom Rodden from University of Nottingham are the panel members.

Pioneers and active researchers in tangible user interfaces (TUIs) will give an up-to-date picture of TUI-related projects, research findings, and industry adoption case studies. The panel will discuss the merits and drawbacks of TUIs, review the open issues in the field, and hopefully help interested researchers to better direct their future research efforts.

Oren Zuckerman (panel organizer) is a researcher and PhD candidate at MIT’s Media
Lab, working with Mitch Resnick. Oren ‘s research focuses on the design, implementation, and study of tangible interfaces for learning and play. Currently,
Oren is developing digital learning blocks that make abstract concepts visible and manipulable.

Brygg Ullmer (panel moderator) is an assistant professor at LSU, jointly in computer science and the Center for Computation and Technology (CCT). He completed his Ph.D. in the Tangible Media Group of MIT’s Media Laboratory in 2002, where his research focused on “tangible user interfaces.” His research interests include tangible interfaces, visualization, programming languages for networked and embedded systems, RFID, grid computing, and rapid physical and electronic prototyping.

Lars Erik Holmquist (panel moderator) is leader of the Future Applications Lab at the
Viktoria Institute in Göteborg, Sweden. Before this, he founded and led the PLAY research group from 1997- 2001. He received his master’s degree in Computer Science in 1996, and his Ph.D. in Informatics in 2000, both at the Göteborg University. His research interests include human-computer interaction, information visualization and ubiquitous computing.

Hiroshi Ishii founded and directs the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab pursuing a new vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI): “Tangible Bits.” His team seeks to change the “painted bits” of GUIs to “tangible bits” by living physical form to digital information.

George W. Fitzmaurice is a senior Research Scientist at Alias and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in the Computer Science department. His main
research interests focus on novel input devices, 3D and two-handed interaction techniques, graspable/tangible user interfaces, computer-augmented environments, and interactions for mobile devices.

Yvonne Rogers is a cognitive scientist focusing on augmenting and extending everyday, learning and work activities with interactive technologies that move “beyond the
desktop”. This involves designing enhanced user experiences through appropriating and assembling a diversity of technologies including mobile, wireless, handheld and pervasive computing.

Wendy Mackay is a Research Director, responsible for the in|situ| research group at INRIA Futurs, in France. Initially trained as an Experimental Psychologist, she moved to Digital where she created a multimedia research group which produced the first commercial interactive video system (IVIS), a pre-Hypercard multimedia authoring language and over 30 multimedia projects. She then received her Ph.D. from the Massachusettes Institute of Technology and has subsequently managed research groups at MIT and Xerox PARC’s EuroPARC, as well as serving as a visiting professor at the Université Paris-Sud, France and Aarhus University, Denmark.

Tom Rodden is Professor of Interactive Systems in the Mixed Reality Laboratory (MRL) at the University of Nottingham. His research interests focus on the development of computer technologies to support new forms of user interaction. He research work has
involved close collaboration with a diverse set of disciplines over a number of years.

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Motivation

Q: Can you tell us what you mean by pushing boundaries and inspiring people?
-Technology, need, and vision drive design. Visual thinking (seeing, drawing, imaging) defines a new vision, design artifacts which embody that vision.
-Important question is how do I keep this very safe, tangible media and augment it with technology.

Impact

-There is a spectrum with physical and digital at the ends and I think the majority is at the end where you start with something physical and add the digital.
-There is a certain amount of time expected, while some things do go faster.
-Looking at the history of tangibles such as the button box and slot machines as well as graphical interfaces, it took 30 years before the conceptual and technology critical mass came together into synergy.
-The real challenge is to understand the technology as well as the practices.

Q: What sort of underlying modes of interaction are being explored?
-Situated interaction means that human beings in the real world do things with their hands, etc, and we should not separate them from what they are interacting with. It’s not how can I use tangible stuff to solve this problem but more looking at what works for them and doesn’t work for them and how to integrate tangibles.

-When you are in the field, you don’t have all your computers and devices so you need to scale down.
-Technology is becoming smaller and cheaper such as electronic paper, etc, so it depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

Challenges

Q: What do we need to do to get things out in the real world?
-It’s far more important to identify technologies that are already out there. There’s a conceptual challenge of getting pieces to work together as well as the technology challenge to get it to work.

Q: What is needed to support designers and domain experts as well as technology experts?
-We’re at the stage where every PhD student gets a degree by developing a toolkit. The question is how do you make toolkits relevant.

There were a lot of areas for future study in think aloud raised throughout the presentation. Joe Dumas of Bentley College suggested a study looking at people aged over 65 and their ability to think aloud and perform a task at the same time. Ted suggested research regarding the RITE method. Elisabeth Cuddihy of the University of Washington suggested more research looking into the problems of think aloud protocol and what think aloud is not telling us. Joe also suggested a study mixing in professionals in the test participant pool to see if more problems are uncovered than using all novice test participants. More guidelines for the think aloud practice are also needed, so that guidelines can be established.

The consensus of this panel is that think aloud is very important, and a lot more research deserves to be done in this area.

The panel began talking about what tagging systems are, and why people tag. Video interviews were conducted for the panel interviewing several everyday people on the street about tagging. With the exception of one person, everyone interviewed did not really understand the core principles of tagging.

Some concerns raised in this panel were that everyday people outside the tech community will probably never tag. Also, people have a problem with overtagging; some people do not know when to stop when tagging something. Sometimes people also have a hard time finding a tagged object if the tag is too vague.

Two primarily conclusions were drawn as to why people tag: people tag to share and to recall information. Most of the websites that people go to and search for are websites that they have already visited before.

All panelists were unsure of the future of tagging, but said they were excited to see where it goes in the future.

- Paper: From awareness to connectedness: The Design and Deployment of Presence Displays
- CHI Note: Negotiating Presence-in-Absence: Contact, Content & Context
- CHI Note: Using Linguistic Features to Measure presence in Computer-Mediated Communication
- Paper: The paradox of the assisted user: guidance can be counterproductive

The authors of the paper conducted a design investigation of presence information for college students through the use of contextual inquiry and user centered design. In their investigation, the authors identified that space is a very high consideration when designing awareness devices for college students. As such, students tended to prefer a continuous sense of presence awareness to be conveyed through information appliances like clocks, mirrors or thermometers.
One of the conclusions of the project was the feasibility of providing an alternate method for a population that uses IM to be aware pf the changes in status of a remote individual. One of the problems with this paper is whether there was a need to augment an existing IM connection or whether IM is the appropriate medium to promote a sense of connectedness.

CHI Note: Negotiating Presence-in-Absence: Contact, Content & Context
This presentation seeks to augment the feeling of presence-in-absence, or the emotions of longing for the person not present, through the development of a lightweight asynchronous communication application called the cube. The purpose of such an application is to facilitate communication between individuals in an intimate relationship when seperated by time or place. The application seeks to allow couples to compose messages on the sides of a cube using a graphical language that is idiosyncratic to the couple that is communicating. This is hoped to facilitate communications of implicit understanding in an intimate relationship.

The project conducted a study of 6 couples using the cube for everyday communications. What the study highlighted was that strong existing social bonds can be leveraged to provide a solution for communication and the creation of presence-in-absence. In particular, the graphical images designed and created by the couples formed an evolving code language that was unique to each couple.

CHI Note: Using Linguistic Features to Measure presence in Computer-Mediated Communication
The concept of presence is an important but diffifult thing to measure in Computer Mediated Communications (CMC). The problem is that typical measures are either retrospective or too intrusive. Thus this project seeks to develop a task-independant and non-intrusive way to measure presence in CMC. The method proposed is through the use of linguistic markers during CMC communications. The rationale for this is that people tend to talk about objects differently depending on whether the individuals were collocated or not. For instance, the use of deixis (e.g. this, that) are often used to refer to commonly focused-on objects. The assumption made is that when people feel more present they will talk about the env as iof they were colocated - i.e. the use of more local deixis.

A study was conducted with 38 pairs of subjects who had to complete 4 robot assembly tasks in the following 4 conditions:
- audio only
- video & audio
- video & DOVE
- face to face

The finding produced by the study was that local deixis strongly correlated with feelings of presence in the use of CMC. There is a relationship between words they use and presence that people feel.

Paper: The paradox of the assisted user: guidance can be counterproductive
This study is part of a dissertation project that compares the idea of internalization and externalization, and the effects they have on task performance. A large part of this study relies on the concepts of internalization and externalization. For the author, externalization refers to the presence of representations on the screen (e.g. the window gui) while internalization refers to the need for the user to be able to know the use and manipulation of functions before hand (e.g. command line interface in DOS). These two concepts relate to the following two behaviors:
- plan-based = user recalls fom long term memory
- display based = user relies on interface information

The assumption made here is that users who rely on externalization and the interface will produce shallow thinking and result in worse performance than with the use of internalization. Prior research has found that internalization produced better problem knowledge, better recall etc In particular, internalization will lead to a more plan based strategy and result in better performance than externalization.

The author conducted an experiment using "conference planning" as a scenario. The result of the experiment was that there was no difference in overall completion time. However, the author concluded by highlighting that when you want to provoke active thinking and comtemplation, or where learning is the aim, the use of internalization is recommended. This can be faciliated by not giving users too much assistance/guidnace in the interface.

Clipping Lists and Change Borders: Improving Multitasking Efficiency with Peripheral Information Design
We compare abstraction techniques in peripheral interfaces to determine their effects on task flow, resumption timing, and reacquisition in multitasking situations. Our empirical results will help guide future peripheral design.

A Fisheye Followup: Further Reflections on Focus + Context
Further understanding for creating small interfaces to large information worlds, includes unification of several visual techniques, discussion of non-visual fisheye-views, and models for why these kinds of presentations are valuable.

Fisheye has received a lot of flack over the years. Many people don't like it, due to its occlusion of peripheral data and distortion of the object of focus. Furnas reminds us, however, that the concept of "fisheye" is much more general than it is often given credit for; it is, in its most basic form, the ideal of focus plus context. This, it can be argued, it encompasses a much more general concept that includes not only geometric distortion, but also zoomable user interfaces, view plus overview/close-up, and multi-resolution displays. That may seem like a bit of a stretch, but not if you realize that focus plus context can be applied across time and space... and multiple other dimensions of semantic meaning.

The key here, as in all science, is to keep a clear idea of the concept apart from the details of implementation.

One consideration that gives the matter a little more perspective is when you consider the operation of the human eye. As in the case of traditional geometric distortion, objects in the center of one's field of vision have high resolution, while those in the periphery are blurred. Yet, what surprises many people is the realization that the periphery of one's vision is actually much more sensitive to movement than the center, because movement on the edge of your vision tends to have a much higher, personally relevant "degree of interest". Recall all those horror films, in which the protagonist always spins around to bring the movement at the corner of her eye into focus. Our bodies are built to raise the alarm if we are being hunted. One wonders what other biological input devices have yet to teach us, about differential resolution, filtering, and noise.

Fisheye, human eye.... In many ways, these are new interpretations of age-old truths: that humans are subjective, and that we care about what affects us. The interesting task for human-computer interaction is not only to distil the objectively relevant information, but to draw out the different subjective elements meaningful to each user.

Insert Movie Reference Here: A System to Bridge Conversation and Item-Oriented Web Sites
Sara Drenner, Maxwell Harper, Dan Frankowski, John Riedl, Loren Terveen

Motivating Participation by Displaying the Value of Contribution
Al Rashid, Kimberly Ling, Robert Kraut, John Riedl

Talk to Me: Foundations for Successful Individual-Group Interactions in Online Communities
Jaime Arguello, Brian S. Butler, Lisa Joyce, Robert Kraut, Kimberly S. Ling, Xiaoqing Wang

Routine Patterns of Internet Use & Psychological Well-being: A Complex Interaction [Best of CHI Nominee]
Irina Shklovski, Robert Kraut, Jonathon Cummings

item-land vs. forum-land
Rotten Tomatoes example
a bridge is needed between these two lands
built a bridge

bridge added to MovieLens
whenever a user mentioned a movie in a forum, created a link to movie

users could build the bridges
traffic increased in both directions (items to forums/forums to items)

questions:
this seems to work particularly well for movies because they have unique titles, what about items with generic names?
false positives was one thing that we were particularly interested in, we created a stop list, which worked pretty well in this case

there are titles that are close enough that you can't disambiguate, why isn't there a link to each title?
that's a great idea

did you look at increase in forum usage?
we had an initial peak but it leveled off

could you talk more about the survey?
very positive feedback from the users, users were excited about automatic linking

Motivating Participation by Displaying the Value of Contribution [project site]

John Riedl is giving the talk

social loafing is a problem for online communities
how to elicit valuable contributions to community resources?

collective effort model - people contribute more if they like the group and believe their effort is important
other studies have shown that smaller groups are better and that specificity matters

added smiley faces to MovieLens, suggesting value to community if the users rated them

had 160 total subjects for the experiment

showing users value of their work is persuasive
users care who their work helps

questions:
have you ever considered the number of people who would be impacted?
we didn't explore that but that would be interesting

Talk to Me: Foundations for Successful Individual-Group Interactions in Online Communities

presented by Robert Kraut

online communities are places online where people go to meet and support others
online communities are successful but problems do exist

problems include:
50% of "active" litserves have no traffic
Slashdot - only 5% of new subscribers return

we need people to participate more than they do

what do we mean by success in an online community?
many measurements that differ by group and member

success can be measured at multiple levels of aggregation

conversation is a major source of the benefits in online communities

what leads to a reply?
74% of initial posts get a reply
different types of predictors

context:
the type of group dictates if they're going to get a reply
cross-posted messages got more replies
poster status/reputation

attentional demands:
longer posts, sentences, and words - reduced replies

self-introductions increased replies

asking a rhetorical question increases the likelihood of getting a reply

questions:
is this (replies) are an elastic resource?
no direct data, more elastic than one would expect, though. This question makes an implicit assumption that the success of a community as a whole is depedent on a single interaction.

[Yahoo! Groups] have you done any research about avatars increasing replies?
no data but it seems that a photograph would make you more personable and specific and would increase replies

are you now contridicting yourself (doesn't the Internet make you more lonely)?
Kraut laughs - Internet makes you lonely because nobody responds to you!

Routine Patterns of Internet Use & Psychological Well-being: A Complex Interaction [Best of CHI Nominee]

Irina Shklovski is talking

what happens when people move
moves are stressful
the farther away you move, the more likely you are to feel depressed and lonely
can the Internet offer some coping mechanisms for feeling sad and lonely

would changes in psychological well-being drive changes in Internet use for socializing and for entertainment?

6000 recent movers filled out a long 20 page survey
85% of sample use Internet

couldn't ask movers about themselves before move
people tend to remember things before stressful events so retrospective questions were fairly accurate method

loneliness interacted with distance of move
people who aren't lonely but move long distance, reported increase in Internet usage

saw significant differences in how men and women react to changes in psychological well-being manifested in changes in patterns of Internet use

questions:
[UC Irvine] what about people who are using socializing for entertainment? how are you making that distinction? have you considered that people are using the Internet to make new connections in their new locations?
we didn't make a distinction, multi-player games are both
we're looking specifically into interactions with socializing with friends and family

have you split it by the age group? does reason of move matter?
reason of move doesn't impact patterns of Internet use

[Cornell University] Do you have a qualitative sense from the survey?
We don't have that kind of data

Anind Dey
Ed de Guzman

The study used contextual inquiry and urban probes to evaluate 10 awareness and presence design prototypes in college students' bedroom.
6 undergraduates were interviewed through a common blogfor 10 days and 2 of the design were selected for further study.

Negotiating Presence-in-Absence: Contact, Content and Context
Develops an analytic framework integrating previous HCI findings on intimate communication and illustrates it with a case study. Offers a design space for social presence systems.

Steve Howard
Jesper Kjeldskov
Mikael Skov
Kasper Garnæs
Olga Grünberger

How can we understand presence in absence?
This research investigated intimacy through cultural probes and contextual inquiry

• Contact is supported by communication acts (saying I m thinking of you)
• Content express the relationship in substance and form
• Context

The Cube is a single shared object between partners used for quick messaging. It uses symbols to represent expression and personal effort through creativity.

Using Linguistic Features to Measure Presence in Computer-Mediated Communication
Presents a new technique for measuring presence in computer-mediated communication using linguistic features of dialogues. Provides an easy-to-use method for assessing the effects of communications technologies on presence.

Adam Kramer
Lui Min Oh
Susan Fussell

Presence is rarely measured in computer-mediated communications and the typical measures of presence are either retrospective or too intrusive.
The study make the hypothesis that people use different words to describe their presence based on their feeling of persence and co-location.
Based on their conclusions, the self-reported presence can be predicted by a small number of linguistic features. Therefore, linguistics markers can be used to measure presence, even if performed after the facts in a video-conferencing session.

The Paradox of the Assisted User: Guidance can be Counterproductive
This paper contributes to the empirical and cognitive foundation of principles underlying human computer interaction. It shows that guidance in interfaces by externalizing information does not always yield better performance.

Christof van Nimwegen
Burgos Daniel
Herre van Oostendorp
Hermi Schijf

This paper discusses externalizing information required to run tasks by providing guiding interfaces does not always yield better results. Having information externalized tempt users to not learn what they need to do. This study used the simulation of a conference planner to test the impact of externalization vs internalization of information related to tasks.
The "external" version showed the participants the timeslots where they could place a particular speaker while the "internal" version did not have this information available.
The "internal" version took longer to complete and require less superflous moves but users of this version used "smart strategy" more often and felt less lost. Users of the "internal" version scored higher in terms of declarative knowledge.

This session continues the conversation of deviant behavior in online communities from the original 1994 session. The bulk of this panel session took the format of panelists giving their input to scenarios raised by the facilitator and elicited from the audience members as well.

Some of the issues that were raised in the panel were:
- laws and norms of online communities vary widely depending on the communities being served.
- not all deviant behavior is the same and sometimes the boundaries between legitimate deviant behavior is not clear.
- general avoidance of the term deviant and the parallels between the situation involving graffitti in cities
- whether victims/perpetrators of deviant behavior are allowed to speak out
- the issue of whether social justice can take place in online communities that are mostly owned

For other points that this entry may have missed, refer to the following blog entry:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0133184/2006/04/25.html#a546

The CHI design community is concerned, in one way or another, about the question of how to better incorporate a meaningful and productive dialogue about design work into the conference culture of CHI. There was a general vibe of frustration in the room regarding the difficulty of getting design work accepted in paper form, and this led to questions about whether the current reviewing panels really include enough people who know enough about design to offer a fair and informed critique. David Gilmore and the other committee representatives charged the people in the room to step up to that challenge, saying that they had an incredibly difficult time finding designers who were willing to serve as reviewers this year, so pointing the finger at CHI is not entirely fair.

This challenge seemed to be fairly well received, but other issues arose, including

• frustration with Experience Reports because some tenure committees are apparently not valuing them at the same level as short papers, so researchers feel pressured to avoid them


• frustration with the difficulty of presenting work from the practitioner's perspective - seeing the real process that people go through, and presenting work that is interesting even if there isn't time to write a paper about it


• the question of the relationship between CHI, DUX, and DIS -- what sort of work should be done where? What happens when individuals are required to choose one over the others? If designers feel excluded from CHI publication, and migrate to the more specialized conferences as a result, what will that do to the CHI vibe?

Several of the participants in the Design SIG spoke to the power of CHI as a place to spur new ideas, build new collaborative relationships, and just generally step back and see what else is out there and what lights people up across the community. This sort of bridge building seems to be the strength of CHI, but for it to work, everyone needs to feel like they are able to bring their own work on their own terms and also get the feedback of their closer peers. There seems to be a fear on this front among designers - they feel like the hurdles for submitting to CHI are often too great, and that the guidelines are not well grounded in the reality of their work experience. As a result, designers are feeling nudged out of CHI even as design itself is becoming more of a central focus in conversations about the future of HCI. Some fears were expressed that, if CHI doesn't make more of an effort to reach out to a broader array of designers, including members of organizations like the IDSA, who may or may not even know that CHI exists, CHI will be in danger of becoming something of a dinosaur, tromping along without really acknowledging the realities of the work that has evolved from its earlier days. No one really seemed to prefer this outcome, but there was a rather pronounced air of uncertainty and confusion in the room.

David's main response was to encourage feedback to the conference committee. The calls for next year have not gone out yet, so designers who have suggestions for ways that their work might be better supported should contact the planning committee. A few ideas were thrown out, including a "Practitioner's Competition" in the spirit of the Student Design Competition, where practitioners are given a problem at the beginning of the conference and charged to come up with designs to present for review by the end. Something similar to this was apparently tried in 2000 or so, with mixed success. The idea seemed to strike a chord with the audience, however, so perhaps it is worth another chance. Another idea was to build in more support for something like a two-year submission cycle, where practitioners submit exciting work in a more deliverable-oriented form, and then researchers take up the opportunity to test some of the methods and ideas in papers for the following year. This collaborative spirit is something that David says that the Experience Reports are meant to encourage, but it is not yet clear whether that will happen without further inducement.

All in all, the issues raised in this SIG seem widely applicable to the community as a whole, as we all work to both refine our own practice and enlarge our field of vision by keeping up with the work that like-minded people are doing in other areas. Doing our best to make CHI a place where this kind of juggling act is facilitated, and perhaps even eased a bit, seems a daunting yet vital goal.

Sorry this is a bit late. I had some technical difficulties. :)

This panel was a discussion of the trend towards the formation of "I-Schools": schools of Information, Informatics, Information Science, or some similar derivative of the "I" word, and the issues that this trend raises for the CHI community as a whole. As HCI matures and becomes more institutionalized, we need to consider what sort of institution we want to be, and this panel was about exploring that question. The panelists were representatives of I-Schools from around the world - John Carroll (Pennsylvania State, US), Paul Dourish (University of California - Irvine, US), Batya Friedman (University of Washington, US), Masaaki Kurosu (Soken-dai, Japan), Gary Olson (University of Michigan, US), and Alistair Sutcliffe (University of Manchester, UK).
The main ideas that the panelists raised were that:

• I-schools explicitly focus on the intersection of information, people, and technology, which leads to a more central role for HCI than is usually the case in schools of Computer Science or Engineering.


• I-schools are interdisciplinary in nature, which:


• provides a supportive and rich work environment within the school itself


• encourages faculty and students to take a broad perspective -- asking a wide range of questions, drawing on a wide range of theories, and reaching out to other areas of the university in order to deepen their work.




• As independent units within the university, I-schools have a high level of autonomy, which gives HCI an institutional clout that it usually does not have when it is a less central component of a larger school.


• I-Schools raise questions regarding the evolution of the relationship between HCI and CS, and not all of these questions are easy or pleasant.

• How much technical knowledge should HCI aim to cultivate among it's own?


• Will removing HCI from CS actually make it easier for CS to not think about the human side and become a narrower, more abstract discipline?


• How do we deal with different political situations at different universities - where CS is already its own school, or a part of engineering, and it would create divisions and confusion to have Two I-related schools. How do we make the case for independence and interdisciplinarity without making it seem like we are trying to take over the world?

-Kynthia

[1] Campbell D. T. (1969), "Ethnocentrism of Disciplines and the Fish Scale Model of Omniscience", in: M. Sherif and C.W. Sherif (eds.), InterdisciplinaryRelationships in the Social Sciences, Chicago: Aldine, 328-348.

http://www.chi2006.org/sessiondetail.php?sessionid=4109

Overview

Paper Event-Contingent Experience Sampling To Evaluate Ubicomp Technology In The Real World [Best of CHI Nominee]
Presents an event-contingent experience sampling technique to gather situated opinions on technology with reference to real-life situations. The technique can improve the design of mobile and ubiquitous computing applications.
Giovanni Iachello | Khai Truong | Gregory Abowd | Gillian Hayes | Molly Stevens

Note Design and Experimental Analysis of Continuous Location Tracking Techniques for Wizard of Oz Testing
Describes and evaluates two new gesture-based techniques for continuously tracking a moving object by hand, for use in Wizard of Oz studies of location-aware systems. Study shows an improvement in terms of task load.
Yang Li | Evan Welbourne | James Landay

Note Emotion Measurement during Interactive Experiences: Boys at Video Game Play
Describes the use of facial EMG as a measure of positive and negative emotion during interactive computer games. These methods appear useful for associating the player’s emotion with game events, and could be applied to HCI in general.
Richard Hazlett

Paper A Continuous and Objective Evaluation of Emotional Experience with Interactive Play Environments
We present a method for modeling emotion, based on physiology, for ludic experience. Our modeled emotions are quantitative and objective; have a high evaluative bandwidth; and correspond to reported emotion.
Regan Mandryk | M. Stella Atkins | Kori Inkpen

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Personal Audio Loop is a device embedded in cell phone that records audio and allows you to go back and listen to your conversations. It has a simple browsing access with only two buttons; the device also requires no storage.

Benefit versus lack of privacy
-To what degree and in what situation would secondary stakeholders object?
-What application parameters can be adapted to accommodate concerns? (range, retention, etc)

People in a diary study and deployment found PAL useful. They found the ideal retention time to be 15-60 min. The reasons to use PAL are to remember previous details, replaying conversation for partners, etc.

They are trying to understand the problem of privacy concerning the user’s partners. It is very hard to make references because often the adoption time is longer than the time to really use the product. They had a hard time determining the correct questions to ask in a fair manner and in a social context.

They came out with a survey asking people about daily activities in their every day life. At the end of people’s conversations they were asked to fill out a short questionnaire. The survey asks about informed consent, deletion of data, and retention time.

Informed consent
-Participants want to be informed about PAL.
-They want to consent to the use of PAL.
-Few would have asked to delete the data.

Retention
-Storage retention time is not a concern.
-Participants would allow users to record the conversation for as long as they want.
-Misuse is the biggest concern.

Privacy implications
-Informed consent in ubicomp must be implicit or exceptional.
-Learning, long-term adoption must be part of development models.
-“Sensitive information” does not equal “confidential conversation”.
-Retention time was not a determinant.

Paratypes
-Experience prototyping
-Experience sampling
* This introduces unfamiliar technology in real situations and probes individual’s opinions.

Advantages
-Fit for unfamiliar technology
-Can probe nondescript social settings
-Low cost but higher than surveys

Disadvantages
-May introduce bias based on situation or participant selection.
-Having an informed consent form the participants had to sign and read interrupted the flow of the study.
-The size of the survey was small.

Q & A

Mark Davis from UC Berkerly
Q: How would you better account for community or group norms versus individual norms?
-We could add questions in survey about relationships between people involved in the conversation. The problem there is that that would make the survey longer and harder to do on the fly.

Q: Do you see any cross-cultural results such as privacy legislation in countries?
-There was a low level in the question about deletion. That was probably a result of people not requiring it because the conversation was not private enough or they did not want to challenge the person they were having the conversation with. I would say that in terms of privacy, Americans are more private than people from say Europe where people are used to living closer together.

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Design and Experimental Analysis of Continuous Location Tracking Techniques for Wizard of Oz Testing
Yang Li | Evan Welbourne | James Landay

A wizard follows and keeps track of a user in a location based study. Two new location techniques, directional crossing and steering are looked at in this study.

Challenges and tasks
-Frequent updates require lots of attention.
-Trigger unimplemented application behaviors to test usability.
-Observe users and environments.

Technique #1: Directional Crossing
Technique #2: Steering-semi automatic tracking with inexpensive sensors
Technique #3: Drag and Drop
Technique #4: Pick and Drop

Story roles were involved in the experiment and the wizard was the participant and followed the user. In a 340 m walk 40 checkpoints were distributed along the path. The steering technique was aided with a multimodal sensor board. There were 12 participants with each experiment taking 70 minutes including an introduction, questionnaire, etc.

The steering technique was not much better than directional crossing. The directional crossing was the easiest to use with high ratings on all 6 dimensions and best global performance.

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Emotion Measurement during Interactive Experiences: Boys at Video Game Play
Richard Hazlett

This study looks at boys playing video games and interactive experiences. In particular he looks at the enjoyment of technology beyond the usability. The challenge is how one evaluates emotion without interfering with the experience.

Emotional experience is measured in three ways: self report, behavior, and physiologic. This study focuses on behavior and physiologic and in particular the participant’s facial expressions. Just observing facial expressions is not enough to get subtle and fleeting emotions. Through EMG (electromyography) with focus on the frown (corrugator), smile (zygomaticus) muscles more subtle emotions are caught.

The game is analyzed through positive (passing cars, winning a game) and negative events (being passed, crashing, wiping out). Study objective was to test whether the corrugator was higher for negative events and the zygomaticus was higher for positive events which was indeed true.

This study shows that both positive and negative emotional valence can be measured during interactive experiences. Facial EMG alone cannot identify the discrete emotions.

Q & A

Q: Did you collect any self report?
-For this study I did not. For past studies I used the EMG data as verbal probes to find out what’s going on for them at these particular emotional moments.

Q: People tend to use facial expressions more when they are with other people. Were the testers with other people?
-For these particular boys, I was the only one present and controls are needed. It would be interesting to look at multiplayer games.

Q: Were you communicating with them during the game?
-We played a couple of circuits without measurements and gave instructions then played without talking.

Q: Did you have problems with them smiling when they really screwed up?
-That did happen. You have to put that in context.

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A Continuous and Objective Evaluation of Emotional Experience with Interactive Play Environments
Regan Mandryk | M. Stella Atkins | Kori Inkpen

This study is motivated by emerging technologies as new opportunities for interactive play. Currently subjective techniques are used but they are bad at understanding user behaviors. Objective techniques such as video recording require a great amount of time. Most of these techniques suffer from limited evaluative bandwidth especially because the process of play is as relevant as the actual outcome of the game.

Goal of research is to develop an evaluation methodology for entertainment environments. Through physiology data they looked at the direct indication of user experience. Some measures are Galvanic Skin Response, EMG, and measuring heart rate. They are more interested in the emotional playing experience. They found that physiological measures exhibit systematic, measurable changes. Also normalized physiological measures correspond to subjective reports and physiological data is high-resolution.

This experiments looks at 24 adult male gamers playing NHL 2003. GSR, HR, EMGforehead (frown), EMGcheek (smile) were tested. Through a two step process they looked at physiology->Arousal Valence->Emotion.

Results show that there are no significant differences between the two different tests (subjective and modeled). Modeled and reported emotions show same trends for fun, excitement, and boredom. Frustration is close for both. Challenge is backward trends-people were more challenged when playing with computer. So when people are more challenged they would try to relax more and also consider that challenge is not an emotion such as arousal or boredom.

Future work is to model other emotional states, relate modeled emotions to objective data source, and integrate sensors into controllers.
Implications are that dynamically adapt games are needed to keep players in flow.
www.edgelab.ca/research
www.reganmandryk.com