Paper Reading #23 - Activity Awareness in Family-Based Healthy Living Online Social Networks

Comments

Shena

Paola

Reference

Activity Awareness in Family-Based Healthy Living Online Social Networks

Stephen Kimani, Shlomo Berkovsky, Greg Smith, Jill Freyne, Nilufar Baghaet, Dipak Bhandari

IUI 2010 - Hong Kong

Summary

This work focuses on using social networking features to supply users with an awareness of healthy activities which are taking place around them. The basic idea is that surrounding yourself with news of other people’s healthy activities will inspire you yourself to be healthy. To study this, families of 4 were given access to a social networking tool that either did or did not support activity awareness. At the end of the study period both groups were evaluated to determine the effectiveness of the activity awareness feature. The results indicated that users with access to the activity awareness feature were more motivated to be active and more aware of their health.

Analysis

This paper illustrates that what we know to be true in the real world about activity awareness also applies in social networking situations. Personally, I do not find any real world potential for this idea. I think at best it will have a niche group (people interested in physical fitness) as regular users. I am uncertain of the study’s design, and feel that any feature presented could have had the same effect. For example, replace physical fitness with recently watched movies and you would probably observe that one group had better awareness of their friends recently watched movies. Overall I don’t find much of a contribution in this paper.

Paper Reading #22 - A $3 Gesture Recognizer - Simple Gesture Recognition for Devices Equipped with 3D Acceleration Sensors

Comments

Adam

Shena

Reference

A $3 Gesture Recognizer - Simple Gesture Recognition for Devices Equipped with 3D Acceleration Sensors

Sven Kratz, Michael Rohs

IUI 2010 - Hong Kong

Summary

This paper presents an algorithm for using 3D accelerometer data in the task of gesture recognition. The algorithm presented is simple in nature and easily implementable for prototyping situations. It uses only trigonometric and geometric calculations and is sensor independent. It has a success rate of 80% and can support about 10 to 15 gestures successfully. The recognizer requires little training data. A user study with 12 participants indicated the 80% success rate.

Analysis

I was greatly disappointed to find out that this was not a $3 hardware device but rather an algorithm. However, I really appreciated the direct and thorough nature of this paper. It presented its exact claims and its shortcomings. It acknowledged its scope of application and its reason for being a good choice within that domain. Additionally, it’s always nice to have some basic algorithms to use when you aren’t looking to be the world’s best at something (like when prototyping). Overall this paper illustrated the power of simple algorithms and their usefulness.

Media Equation: Microblogs

Part 1 - Machines and Mindlessness

Summary

This paper examines the general social reactions that people have towards computers during an interaction. Social responses such as politeness are apparent in interactions. The paper explains that this is not caused by human ignorance or inability to recognize the computer as non-human, but rather simple cues which subconsciously create social reactions in the brain. Attributes such as politeness, reciprocity, self-disclosure, and gender are illustrated in the examined studies. Attention is given to clarifying that this is not because of factors like anthropomorphism.

Discussion

The concepts discussed in this paper are easily observable in everyday life. This study really proves the idea of the social treatment of computers by illustrating it in so many different ways. Direct parallels to psychology of human to human interactions can be seen in the experiments. I appreciate the thorough nature of the studies run.

Part 2 - Computers Are Social Actors

Summary

This paper focuses on disproving ideas that the social interactions between machines and humans are the result of some sort of dysfunction or ignorance of the user. The experiments focused on aspects like politeness, gender, and the computer opposed to the programmer of the computer. The studies continued to find that social attributes are given to machines by humans and are not the result of any kind of dysfunction or ignorance.

Discussion

This paper was nice in that it gives detailed accounts of the trials used to establish the truth of these rules. The experiments are cleverly designed and very interesting from a Computer Science standpoint. They give clues as to how we can create programs which elicit social responses from users, without the need for extremely complex software.

Part 3 - Can Computer Personalities Be Human Personalities?

Summary

This work focuses on the identification of the minimal set of attributes required to create a personality within a machine. Attention is given to the ideas of dominance and submission traits within personality by assigning them to computers within experiments. Results continued to indicate that human-human psychological theory holds true for human-machine interactions (where the machine has a set of social attributes).

Discussion

This paper was mostly a repeat of what we've seen illustrated in previous papers. However special emphasis was given to the main hypothesis with many details given. The conclusions, though not surprising (based on the other papers), are important for the field of Computer Science and software/hardware design.

Paper Reading #21 - A Multimodal Labeling Interface for Wearable Computing

Comments

Steven

Adam

Reference

A Multimodal Labeling Interface for Wearable Computing

Shanqing Li, Yunde Jia

IUI 2010 - Hong Kong

Summary

Using wearable computers poses an interesting question when it comes to user input. This paper examines the idea of labeling objects using a wearable computer system without the use of a keyboard and mouse. The system is equipped with a stereo camera and speech recognition capabilities. Using these two technologies the user can indicate a region of interest with a gesture recognized by the vision system. The user can then utter a word to describe the selected real world object and thereby label it for future recognition by the system. Studies indicated the system showed a large speed boost from traditional keyboard and mouse entry. Performance was best on easily distinguishable large objects.

Analysis

Well mission accomplished if you want to wear a bulky computer system and label things in well lit low noise environments. Otherwise, this technology is probably not quite ready for you. The paper addresses valid concerns about input devices for wearable computers, but the good results are hard to believe. Speech recognition and vision are two very difficult areas, especially when users are in uncontrolled environments with noise and varying lighting conditions. Wearable computing is supposedly emerging as a convenience, but right now these systems seem impractical for daily use. The gesturing concept presented in this paper seems logical, but the wearable computer seems a bit imposing. Overall the paper presents a great prototype but isn’t quite ready for mainstream use.

Paper Reading #20 - Supporting Exploratory Information Seeking by Epistemology-based Social Search

Comments

Patrick

Paoloa

Reference

Supporting Exploratory Information Seeking by Epistemology-based Social Search

Yuqing Mao, Haifeng Shen, Chengzheng Sun

IUI 2010 - Hong Kong

Summary

This paper looks at new techniques for improving exploratory search strategies. There is a large focus on reusing searches to aide other users in their quests for information. The system proposed, Baijia, uses an epistemology-based search in addition to exploratory information seeking techniques to add a new dimension of relevance assurance to search. When a search is run a user can select pages to add to the epistemology. Other users rank these epistemologies. As use of a particular epistemology increases it becomes more reliable and helpful to new searchers. In effect, users benefit from previous searches. The system was compared against data which AOL released regarding their search engine. It was demonstrated that this system creates a better performance than the AOL system.

Analysis

This is one of many approaches to creating more relevant search results. Over the past few years we have learned both the beneficial and negative power of crowd sourcing information. While sites like Wikipedia for the most part enjoy great benefits from polling users for data, they are also occasionally attacked and caused to show incorrect data. I could imagine a system like this being attacked in order to augment search results for financial or political purposes. I think future work should focus on noticing trends which seem oddly motivated in systems like this.

Things That Make Us Smart: Full Blog

Reference

Things That Make Us Smart

Donald Norman

Basic Books 1994

Summary

This book focuses on the cognitive artifacts which effect a user's understanding and perception of a system. A strong argument for human-centered, rather than machine-centered design is given. Humans are subject to emotion and distraction and systems must account for this when interacting with them. Cognition is divisible into two major areas: experiential and reflective. These two approaches allow either reaction to events in an automatic manner or the ability to compare two choices and form a decision. Emphasis is given to the fact that both types of cognition must be considered when designing a system. Styles of learning are also important to the creation of easily understandable and usable systems. Learning can be divided into accretion (acquiring information), tuning (becoming an expert or mastering something) and restructuring (or internal reflective thoughts). Also important to understanding of a system is the method by which we represent concepts in the world. Norman also details cognitive artifacts and their various meanings to different individuals.

Discussion

The most interesting portion of this book was that of learning methods and representations. Understanding these concepts can lead to the creation of systems which are enjoyable to use and easy for users to learn. Humans are capable of recognizing many symbolic representations and the correct usage of these in software design can be very beneficial to a system. The idea of increasing motivation within education is particularly interesting.

Things That Make Us Smart: Microblogs

Chapter One

Summary

A comparison of machine oriented versus human oriented design is presented. Norman argues for the increasing of human centered design rather than machine oriented methods. Cognition is explored in terms of experiential and reflective cognition. One of these leads to reaction to events and the other to comparisons and decision making.

Discussion

This seems to point out the obvious, that humans are subject to emotion and aren't the perfect thing to interact with. System should take this into account and build in flexibility so that human emotional responses can be handled.

Chapter Two

Summary

This chapter focuses on the different types of cognition and learning. The different learning styles are expressed as accretion, tuning, and restructuring. The first is useful in discovering and capturing information, the second in becoming an expert, and the third on refining understanding. Various methods for dealing with each type of cognition are explored as well.

Discussion

The discussions of improving learning or educational styles was very interesting. I don't agree with Norman's ideas that motivations like video games can successfully increase learning or educational efforts. It seems like people learn out of necessity more than anything else.

Chapter Three

Summary

The different representations of information in the world are explored. Norman focuses on the types of cognition that are inspired from various types of representations. The difference of the represented world and the representing world is discussed.

Discussion

Representations are highly important to the navigation and understanding of an environment. Humans have a great capacity for identifying these symbols and parsing them into cognitive understanding. This chapter did a good job of highlighting this process.

Chapter Four

Summary

This chapter expresses that all humans interpret artifacts in different ways. Concepts like internal vs surface representations and passive vs active artifacts are explored. Emphasis of confusion of artifacts was given.

Discussion

It seems difficult to design for a universal user when considering cognitive artifacts. Cultural divides and differences will effect the user's understanding of these artifacts. This leads me to believe that many of our attempts to universalize design concepts may be flawed.