Author: admin

From the Internet of Things to the Web of Things

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The central role of ICT becomes very visible when it does not work. Sometimes for the good as I was late arriving at Düsseldorf airport but the Airberlin check-in system was down for a few minutes – just enough that I was still in time 🙂

In the evening I met Prof. Lorenz Hilty, who gave a talk in the afternoon at ETH Zurich. I missed the talk but after the interesting and though provoking dinner conversation I decided I should finally really read his book [1] – perhaps over Christmas. Meeting with Friedemann Mattern and Hans Gellersen was very inspiring and I hope we get a change to have future joint projects.

Looking out over Zürich we talked about the transformation from the internet of things to the world wide web of things. The use of prototcol seems a little technical detail, but in my eye it may have a major impact. The WWW of things is creating a world of networked artefacts (much like the internet of things) but is completely based on Web protocols (e.g. http, RESTful web services). By working with web protocols the objects can easily become part of the web and interact with web-platforms and applications on the www (e.g. facebook, twitter, etc.). I expect by having a WWW of things we enable many more developers to create new and exciting applications on top of the internet of things. There are many challenging research questions. I am particularly interested in how will a good platform look like that empowers web programmers to create and distribute applications on the Web of things. I think we should run a workshop on this in the near future!

[1] Information Technology and Sustainability: Essays on the Relationship between Information Technology and Sustainable Development. Lorenz M. Hilty. 2008.

Large pixels along the underpass

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In the refurbished railway station (not yet finished) there is an interesting new pixel display in one main underpass. One wall is covered with a display. It is about 10 pixel (probably about 4 meters) high and several hundred pixels long (have not counted/measured them). It changes colors and shows writing (so far not really exciting).

How cool would it be if there is a freely accessible programmable web-service to control these pixel? I would guess people could create all sorts of interesting content… Perhaps people would start to bargain to get their 5 minutes of virtual graffiti shown…

Tangible, Embedded, and Reality-Based Interaction

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Together with Antonio’s group we looked at new forms of interaction beyond the desktop. The journal paper Tangible, Embedded, and Reality-Based Interaction [1] gives overview and examples of recent trends in human computer interaction and is a good starting point to learn about these topics.

Abstract: Tangible, embedded, and reality-based interaction are among novel concepts of interaction design that will change our usage of computers and be part of our daily life in coming years. In this article, we present an overview of the research area of tangible, embedded, and reality-based interaction as an area of media informatics. Potentials and challenges are demonstrated with four selected case studies from our research work.

[1] Tanja Döring, Antonio Krüger, Albrecht Schmidt, Johannes Schöning: Tangible, Embedded, and Reality-Based Interaction. it – Information Technology 51 (2009) 6 , S. 319-324. (pdf)
http://www.it-information-technology.de/

Our PERCI Article in IEEE Internet Computing

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Base on work we did together with DoCoMo Eurolabs in Munich we have published the article “Perci: Pervasive Service Interaction with the Internet of Things” in the IEEE Internet Computing special issue on the Internet of Things edited by Frédéric Thiesse and Florian Michahelles.

The paper discusses the linking of digital resources to the real world. We investigated how to augment everyday objects with RFID and Near Field Communication (NFC) tags to enable simpler ways for users to interact with service. We aim at creating a digital identities of real world objects and by this integrating them into the Internet of Things and associating them with digital information and services. In our experiments we explore how these objects can facilitate access to digital resources and support interaction with them-for example, through mobile devices that feature technologies for discovering, capturing, and using information from tagged objects. See [1] for the full article.

[1] Gregor Broll, Massimo Paolucci, Matthias Wagner, Enrico Rukzio, Albrecht Schmidt, and Heinrich Hußmann. Perci: Pervasive Service Interaction with the Internet of Things. IEEE Internet Computing. November/December 2009 (vol. 13 no. 6). pp. 74-81
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIC.2009.120

The computer mouse – next generation?

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In my lecture on user interface engineering I start out with a short history of human computer interaction. I like to discuss ideas and inventions in the context of the people who did it, besides others I take about Vannevar Bush and his vision of information processing [1], Ivan Sutherland’s sketchpad [2], Doug Engelbart’s CSCW demo (including the mouse) [3], and Alan Kay’s vision of the Dynabook [4].

One aspect of looking at the history is to better understand the future of interaction with computers. One typical question I ask in class is “what is the ultimate user interface” and typical answers are “direct interface to my brain – the computer will do what I think” and “mouse and keyboard” – both answers showing some insight…

As the mouse is still a very import input device (and probably for some time to come) there is a recent paper that I find really interesting. It looks at how the mouse could be enhanced – Nicolas Villar and his colleagues put really a lot of ideas together [5]. The paper is worthwhile to read – but if you don’t have time at least watch it on youtube.

[1] Vannevar Bush, As we may think, Atlantic monthly, July 1945.
[2] Ivan Sutherland, “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System” Technical Report No. 296, Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology via Defense Technical Information Center January 1963. (PDF, youtube).
[3] Douglas Engelbart, the demo 1968. (Overview, youtube)
[4] John Lees. The World In Your Own Notebook (Alan Kay’s Dynabook project at Xerox PARC). The Best of Creative Computing. Volume 3 (1980)
[5] Villar, N., Izadi, S., Rosenfeld, D., Benko, H., Helmes, J., Westhues, J., Hodges, S., Ofek, E., Butler, A., Cao, X., and Chen, B. 2009. Mouse 2.0: multi-touch meets the mouse. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Victoria, BC, Canada, October 04 – 07, 2009). UIST ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 33-42. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1622176.1622184

Shared editing is still hard – why?

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Having coordinated the editing of a shared document with about 100 pages I still wonder why I have not come across a really good solutions that work in a real life context. We were 10 people working on the document which also contained about 100 references various tables and graphs, which originated in spreadsheets. Our solution using (different version) of Microsoft Word and Excel on different platforms (Win and Mac) was at best sup-optimal. Track changes works great if I write something and someone else corrects it – but with a larger number of people creating and reworking the document just seems unmanageable.

We tried google-docs before, which is nice for joint editing but lack essential functions and is to my experience unreliable. We lost most of the document we created at some point. The same happened to one of our students writing up his project…

The purists argue that Latex and SVN is the solution – however if you have ever worked with real people outside the geek world you will know that it is not 🙂 and it would question if there was any progress in text processing in the last 20 years at all.

Is it only me who does not see the solution? Here are the requirements:

  • Shared editing of a document of considerable size (100+ pages)
  • Functionality required for larger scientific documents such as styles, (cross)-reference, creation of tables, etc.
  • Comfort functions in editing, such as spelling and grammar checking, auto completion, tracking of changes
  • Works in a heterogeneous environment including Macs and Windows and across administrative domains (e.g. people can be behind different firewalls)
  • Automatically creating a backup of the document every few minutes
  • Integration of other media (e.g. images) and data sources (e.g. spreadsheet tables)

What is your solution? I think mine (email and copy and paste) is not really the optimal one….

In comparison to some years ago awareness, video and audio conferencing with skype works very well – but again for application sharing I have not seen a perfect solution that works in real live – any suggestions?

PS: our final and printed document missed 115 spaces (a known error from exchanging docx between Windows and Mac)

What portion of research time is spent writing proposals?

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The next European deadline is close and hence everyone is writing proposals and essays…

I wonder if someone has assessed how much work goes into proposal writing on a European scale. On one hand I see the value of forcing researchers to write proposals and to articulate their ideas but on the other hand it seems a great lot of research could be conducted if senior people would use this time for doing actual research. In proposals formulating the actual core of the research idea is exciting (often even more exciting than carrying out research) but this is only one part of proposal writing. But what would be an alternative for deciding what research to fund?

As should be obvious, the first sentence ensures it alludes to the point (IT) and uses certainties about IT taken from the inquiry. Note that these are summarized – you must not duplicate from the rubric! The second part then obviously sets out the highessay com/ what the exposition will be about and affirms the essayists sentiment (a few inquiries may not request your conclusion, but rather this one does).

Having spent a 30 hours in Lancaster improved our idea and we got a good step forward…

PS: Birthday is a perfect day for finding out which companies have you on your mailing list

Finishing my term as External Examiner at Trinity College Dublin

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Over the last three years I have been regularly to Dublin to act as external examiner for the Ubicomp MSc course. For me this was a good experience to see how serious The School of Computing at Trinity College takes external quality control and how well processes are managed. And besides the administrative part I saw a great many interesting MSc dissertations over the years. Even though the term has come to an end I hope to travel to Dublin in the future too – perhaps on Holiday to see more of the city (which I did not really manage …)

PS: recession seems to have hit Ireland – I have never seen such short queue in Dublin airport – and it is definatly not the selfservice machines that reduced the queue …

What did you do last Weekend: Soldering a radio kit and trying out a Sony Walkman

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What did I do with Vivien the last weekends? We soldered a radio receiver kit (retro style) and it worked – there are still plenty of stations on the air all over Europe. Nowadays you have to make quite some effort to find interesting electronic kits – besides the radio we got a candle light simulator (it is an LED controlled by a PIC microcontroller that imitates a realistic flickering candle in the form factor a small candle).

Do you remember the Sony walkman? It was at the time quite a revolution – looking at it now it looks a bit bulky. The BBC4 program “electric dreams” featuring a fast-forward through technologies from the time I was born till now was very entertaining and it brought back a lot of memories … ups getting old 🙁

Land of ideas – Award for the innovation factory at the University of Duisburg-Essen

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Every day per year one place or institution is Germany is awarded “a place in the land of ideas“. This initiative is quite completive (each year well over 2000 institutions apply and the year has only 365 days…).

The innovation factory at the University of Duisburg-Essen has a really interesting vision and received the award for its concept of converting ideas into innovations and products. It promotes thinking in product rather and by this challenges researchers to look how their research results could enable new products or enhance existing products. I find this a most useful exercise – especially when having basic research results that are not directly linked to an application. To facilitate thinking in products they have a number of industrial designers that act as innovation scouts.

Such events always offer the official speeches (not my favorite part but I see one needs them) but also the chance to meet interesting people. I enjoyed the discussions – in particular one question I found interesting – whether or not the ebook reader based on eInk (now just entering the marked on massive scale) is already dead… and replace by the next generation of multimedia extra-thin wireless tablets.

Workshop on Pervasive Advertising at Informatik 2009 in Lübeck

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Following our first workshop on this topic in Nara during Pervasive 2009 earlier this year we had on Friday the 2nd Pervasive Advertising Workshop in Lübeck as part of the German computer science conference Informatik 2009.

The program was interesting and very diverse. Daniel Michelis discussed in his talk how we move from an attention economy towards an engagement economy. He argued that marketing has to move beyond the AIDA(S) model and to consider engagement as central issue. In this context he introduced the notion of Calm Advertising and interesting analogy to Calm Computing [1]. Peter van Waart talked about meaningful adverting and introduced the concept of meaningful experience. To stay with the economy term consider advertising in an experience economy. For more detail see the workshop webpage – proceedings will be soon online.

Jörg Müller talked about contextual advertising and he had a nice picture of the steaming manhole coffee ad – apparently from NY – but it is not clear if it is deployed.

If you are interested in getting sensor data on the web – and having them also geo-referenced – you should have a look at http://www.52north.org. This is an interesting open source software system that appears quite powerful.

Florian Alt presented our work interactive and context-aware advertising insight a taxi [2].

[1] Weiser, M., Brown, J.S.: The coming age of calm technology. (1996)

[2] Florian Alt, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Max Pfeiffer, Paul Holleis, Albrecht Schmidt. TaxiMedia: An Interactive Context-Aware Entertainment and Advertising System (Workshop Paper). 2nd Pervasive Advertising Workshop @ Informatik 2009. Lübeck, Germany 2009.

Tag clouds as a title page

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For some of the recent proceedings (Automotive User Interfaces Conference and Pervasive Advertising Workshop) we used a tag cloud generator (http://www.wordle.net/) to generate a picture for the title page. The tag cloud below of the pervasive advertising workshop is based on the whole proceedings and the one above based on my professional CV.
Bastian just told me there are other interesting ways to characterize a person … see http://personas.media.mit.edu/

Auto-UI 2010 announced – 2009 Proceedings available in the ACM DL

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The Auto-UI 2009 conference in Essen is over – and for us it was very enjoyable to have this many visitors at the University of Duisburg-Essen – see the photos. The conference facilitated good discussions and had a very constructive atmosphere. We should continue this exchange of ideas and there is always room for improvement… and that is why there is a Auto-UI conference 2010 in Pittsburgh, US – and there is interest beyond this in hosting the conference.

You can register to get information about the next conference on the Auto-UI webpage.

The proceedings are now online in the ACM DL and the linked on the program website.

Auto-UI 2010, Proceedings in the ACM DL

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The Auto-UI 2009 conference in Essen is over – and for us it was very enjoyable to have this many visitors. The conference facilitated good discussions and had a very constructive atmosphere. We should continue this exchange of ideas and there is always room for improvement… and that is why there is a Auto-UI conference 2010 in Pittsburg, US – and there is interest beyond this.

You can register to get information about the next conference on the Auto-UI webpage.

The proceedings are now online in the ACM DL and the linked on the program website.

Social event at Zeche Zollverein, Accidents are avoidable

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In the evening we went to Zeche Zollverein – a world cultural heritage site called “the most beautiful coal mine in the world”. We got a guided tour and had dinner in the Kokerei.
It was interesting to see and learn about working conditions – which were really hard. 100 years ago it was common that live expectancy of the workers was less that 60, that there was typically one serious accident per day and that about 30 people died every year in the coal mine.

We find that nowadays inhumane and it would be in Germany (and many other countries) completely unacceptable. Coming back to cars … we accept that in order to have personal transportation it sees unavoidable to have accidents and that 4477 people were killed 2008 in traffic accidents in Germany (which was lower than all the years before). Perhaps in 100 years people will look back at us similar to how we look back at the working conditions in coal mines 100 years ago. And I think research in Automotive User Interfaces can help working towards safer individual traffic.

Automotive UI 2009 – Proceedings online available

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The proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI 2009) [1] are freely available on the conference website and in the ACM digital library (see the table of contents of the proceedings). We created a printed version of the proceedings and it seemed that a lot of participants used it during the conference – so paper seems to have still a value (at least to some of us).

We decided to pursue an open policy for disseminating the proceedings. The authors keep the copyright of their paper and the authors grant the ACM digital library and the conference to distribute the electronic version over the web site (and as printed book and on a USB-Stick in car-shape). We think this approach maximizes the exposure and hence is good for the community. We are happy that the ACM agreed to this model!

If you are interested in the conference and you want to be updated please register for receiving information on future conference.

[1] Albrecht Schmidt, Anind Dey, Thomas Seder, Oskar Juhlin, Dagmar Kern. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI 2009). Essen. Germany. 21-22 Sept. 2009. (table of contents of the proceedings in the ACM DL)

Dagmar Kern presents a Automotive UI Design Space

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Dagmar presents her work on a design space for automotive user interfaces [1]. The design space allows to categorize user interface components and elements with regard to interaction agent, position in the car, and type of interaction. The design space can be used to compare interfaces and as tool for assessing new opportunities for interaction.

The design space is based on an analysis of more than 700 pictures from IAA 2007. The photos (and soon photos from IAA 2009) are available at https://www.pcuie.uni-due.de/AUI/

[1] Kern, D. and Schmidt, A. 2009. Design space for driver-based automotive user interfaces. In Proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Automotive User interfaces and interactive Vehicular Applications (Essen, Germany, September 21 – 22, 2009). AutomotiveUI ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 3-10. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1620509.1620511

Keynote at Automotive UI 2009: Gert Hildebrand, MINI/BMW

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Tom Seder and I openend the conference and welcomed our keynote speaker.

I was very excited that Gert Volker Hildebrand accepted to be the keynote speaker for the 1st International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI 2009). He is with BMW Group in Munich and is the director of design for MINI. The topic of his talks was: “MINI Design: From the Original to the Original. The path from Center Speedo to Center Globe”. When I first came across the UI concept I wanted to meet the person – and a keynote is always one way 😉

I introduced the keynote with pictures from the Italian Job Movies (the first from 1969 and the second from 2003) and I find it impressive that the re-design inspired people to redo the movie.
In his talk he explained the design language used in the MINI- in short everything is a circles or a derivatives of circles. The concept of the center globe is a central sphere display that uses layers to include information. It has a horizontal surface (like a stage) and a background as well as a foreground.

The concept separates the UI for the driver (e.g. she gets navigation) and the passenger (she gets a access to the Internet). Search on Google or Bing for Mini Center-Globe and you get the idea. The concept uses a physical object (a sphere again) to transport content and to grand access – this reminded me of Durrell Bishop’s marble answering machine… Tangible UIs again 🙂

Gert Hildebrand also recommended his book “Mini Design” by Othmar Wickenheiser and Gert Hildebrand. The books contains many design sketches and is partly English and partly German (only available at Amazon in Germany).

Overall the presentation showed again that likeability and aesthetics play an essential role in creating an attractive product – and especially an interactive product. Opening Automotive UI 2009 I made an analogy to mobile phones in 1998. Phones were then closed systems, UIs were very basic and it was very hard for 3rd parties to create applications. And now – 10 years later – UI and applications seem to play a more important role than the core technologies (or why would in 2007 people think a phone with a 2 Megapixel and without video recording and no UMTS is great).

Engineering Thrill – Why is a fairground fun?

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On the weekend I went with Vivien to a fairground at the Volksfest in Crailsheim (smaller Version of the Oktoberfest). Vivien is now old enough for some of the attractions – giving me an excuse to try them out 🙂 The forces on the body are pretty exciting when you feel them for the first time or after 20 years again…

It is amazing how much (mechanical) engineering is in these attractions, even though many are still the same as when I was a child (about 30 years ago). It seems that computer science plays a very minor role (besides controlling the mechanics). Virtual reality does not feature at all. What people are attracted to is physical (e.g. a fraction of a second of zero G, great heights, and a life boxing fight).

When I was in Lancaster working in the Equator project I worked with Brendan Walker – and he is the world’s only thrill engineer. He is an aeronautical engineer (Imperial College, London) and Industrial Design Engineer (Royal College of Art, London) by training and had a research grant to investigate how thrill works and how to create thrill. Some of his results are published in a booklet [1] and the work is continued in the Thrilllaboratory [2]. Earlier this year he gave an interview to that gives an intro of his work – a quick and fun read. There are some youtube videos of his work, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v1M59Aaa2A

[1] Brendan Walker. The Taxonomy of Thrill and Thrilling Designs: Chromo11 (Volumes One and Two). Aerial Publishing (Jan 2005)

[2] http://www.thrilllaboratory.com/

Closing Keynote by Kentoaro Toyama at MobileHCI

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Kentaro Toyama presented the closing keynote of MobileHCI 2009 with the title “Technology for Global Socio-Economic Development”. He gave an experience report of projects he works on in India. I liked especially that he included things that work but also discussed a set of myth with regard to ICT in the developing world (see Myths of ICT4D).

It is worthwhile to read more about his work, see Kentaro’s home page for more.

Our Paper and Posters at Mobile HCI 2009

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Ali presented our joint work with Nokia Rearch and DoCoMo Eurolab in the paper on sharing emotions [1] (the acceptance rate was about 20%). The research is motivated by the question how we can make communication more emotional and how we can enable digital craft creating. The idea is to have a new communication medium were a communication item is hand crafted and can carry emotion. The questions were encouraging and we hope to continue to work on this topic.

In the poster session we had two contributions. Christian Winkler showed his project on Flash-light interaction [2]. The idea is simple: a camera in the environment or screen tracks the flash light of the phone – but it is very effective.

Ali presented a poster on a new poker table; this is a project some of our students build last term. An interesting aspect is that the playing cards are on the phone, the table is a multitouch table, and interaction is based on gestures (on the table as well as with the phone).

Have look at the table of contents of the entire conference to get an overview of current work in mobile HCI.

[1] Shirazi, A. S., Alt, F., Schmidt, A., Sarjanoja, A., Hynninen, L., Häkkilä, J., and Holleis, P. 2009. Emotion sharing via self-composed melodies on mobile phones. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 – 18, 2009). MobileHCI ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 1-4. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1613858.1613897

[2] Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Christian Winkler, Albrecht Schmidt: Flashlight Interaction: A Study on Mobile Phone Interaction Techniques with Large Displays (Poster). In: Adjunct Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI’09) – Poster. Bonn, Germany 2009.

[3] Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Tanja Döring, Pouyan Parvahan, Bernd Ahrens, Albrecht Schmidt: Poker Surface: Combining a Multi-Touch Table and Mobile Phones in Interactive Card Games (Poster).In: Adjunct Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI’09) – Poster. Bonn, Germany 2009.

Best papers at MobileHCI 2009

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At the evening event of MobileHCI2009 the best paper awards were presented. The best short paper was “User expectations and user experience with different modalities in a mobile phone controlled home entertainment system” [1]. There were two full papers that got a best paper award: “Sweep-Shake: finding digital resources in physical environments” [2] and “PhotoMap: using spontaneously taken images of public maps for pedestrian navigation tasks on mobile devices” [3]. We often look at best papers of a conference to better understand what makes a good paper for this community. All of the 3 papers above are really well done and worthwhile to read.

PhotoMap [3] is a simple but very cool idea. Many of you have probably taken photos of public maps with your mobile phone (e.g. at a park, city map) and PhotoMap explores how to link them to realtime location data from the GPS on the device. The goal is that you can move around in the real space and you have a dot marking where you are on the taken photo. The implementation however seems not completely simple… There is a youtube movie on PhotoMap (there would be more movies from the evening event – but I do not link them here – the photo above gives you an idea…)

Since last year there is also a history best paper award (most influential paper from 10 years ago). Being at the beginning of a new field sometimes pays of… I got this award for the paper on implicit interaction [4] I presented in Edinburgh at MobileHCI 1999.

[1] Turunen, M., Melto, A., Hella, J., Heimonen, T., Hakulinen, J., Mäkinen, E., Laivo, T., and Soronen, H. 2009. User expectations and user experience with different modalities in a mobile phone controlled home entertainment system. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 – 18, 2009). MobileHCI ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 1-4. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1613858.1613898

[2] Robinson, S., Eslambolchilar, P., and Jones, M. 2009. Sweep-Shake: finding digital resources in physical environments. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 – 18, 2009). MobileHCI ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 1-10. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1613858.1613874

[3] Schöning, J., Krüger, A., Cheverst, K., Rohs, M., Löchtefeld, M., and Taher, F. 2009. PhotoMap: using spontaneously taken images of public maps for pedestrian navigation tasks on mobile devices. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 – 18, 2009). MobileHCI ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 1-10. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1613858.1613876

[4] Albrecht Schmidt. Implicit human computer interaction through context. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Journal, Springer Verlag London, ISSN:1617-4909, Volume 4, Numbers 2-3 / Juni 2000. DOI:10.1007/BF01324126, pp. 191-199 (initial version presented at MobileHCI1999). http://www.springerlink.com/content/u3q14156h6r648h8/

Papers are all similar – Where are the tools to make writing more effective?

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Yesterday we discussed (again during the evening event of MobileHCI2009) how hard it would be to support the process of writing a high quality research paper and essays. In many conference there is a very defined style what you need to follow, specific things to include, and certain ways of how to present information. This obviously depends on the type of contribution but within one contribution type there could be probably provided a lot of help to create the skeleton of the paper… In many other areas Sounds like another project idea 😉

You ought to keep your essay presentation for the IELTS paper short. Recall that you just have 40 minutes to compose the exposition, and some of this time should be spent arranging. Along these lines, you should have the capacity to compose your presentation decently fast so you can begin composing your body sections and ask if needed.

Mobile HCI 2009 Keynote by Jun Rekimoto

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The opening keynote of MobileHCI 2009 in Bonn was given by Jun Rekimoto. He showed selected work that he did over the last year and showed that some of the far out concepts (from a few years ago) are becoming products now – augmented reality with playing cards as one example and WIFI based location using placeEngine.

Context also featured in his talk: but there was little new in it – still where when why who what how. He suggested the notion of sensonomy (as folksonomy – just for sensor information). I can see the value of share sensor information but the concept sensonomy remains fuzzy – at least for me. Perhaps we hear more about this in the future.

In the final part of the talk he moved to life-logging – but not for humans but for cats (or pets in more general). I think the work is interesting and he clearly showed that this is enterainment computing (not entertainment for the cat – for the human). Pets are an interesting area: they are still a major form of entertainment and people are willing to spend a lot on it…

Workshop at MobileHCI: Context-Aware Mobile Media and Mobile Social Networks

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Together with colleagues from Nokia, VTT, and CMU we organized a workshop on Context-Aware Mobile Media and Mobile Social Networks at MobileHCI 2009.

The topic came up in discussions some time last year. It is very clear that social network have moved towards mobile scenarios and that utilizing context and contextual media adds a new dimension. The workshop program is very diverse and ranges studying usage practices to novel technological solutions for contextual media and application.

One topic that is interesting to further look at is to use (digital) social networks for health care. Taking an analogy in history it is evident that the direct social group you were in took were the set of people that helped you in case of illness or accident. Looking at conditions and illnesses that cause a loss of mobility or memory it could be interesting to find applications on top of digital social networks to provide help. Seems this could be a project topic.

In one discussion we explored what would happen if we would change our default communication behavior from closed/secret (e.g. Email and SMS) to public (e.g. bulletin boards). I took the example of organizing this workshop: our communication has been largely on email and has not been public. If it would had been open (e.g. public forum) we probably would have organized the workshop in the same way but at the same time provided an example how one can organize a workshop and by this perhaps provided useful information for future workshop chairs. In this case there are little privacy concerns but images all communication is public? We would learn a lot about how the world works…

About 10 years ago we published at paper there is more to context than location [1]. However, looking at our workshop it seems: location is still the dominant context people think of. Many of the presentations and discussions included the term context, but the examples focused on location. Perhaps we do need location only? Or perhaps we should look more closely to find the benefit of other contexts?

[1] A. Schmidt, M. Beigl, H.W. Gellersen (1999) There is more to context than location, Computers & Graphics, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 893-901.

Tutorials at Mobile HCI 2009 in Bonn

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This year Enrico Rukzio organized the tutorials at mobile HCI 2009. He got an exciting program together:

The mobile HCI 2008 tutorials slides are still online – have a look.

Ethics as material for innovation – German HCI conference – Mensch und Computer

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On Tuesday I was at the German human computer interaction conference called Mensch und Computer. The keynote by Alex Kirlik was on Ethical Design (slides from his talk) and he showed how ethics extends beyond action to technology leading to the central question: Why should we build certain systems? His examples and the following discussion made me wonder whether “Ethics become the next Material for innovation”. Taking his example of 9/11 where old technology (air planes) and a different view on ethics was used to strike this is in contrast to previous/typical warfare where new technologies (e.g. Gun powder, Nuclear bomb) have changed the way wars are conducted.

Considering ethics as material for innovation is obviously risky but looking at successful businesses of the last decade such a trend can be argued for (e.g. google collecting information about the user to provide new services, youtube allowing users to share content with limited insurance that it is not copyrighted). Would be interesting to have a workshop on this topic sometime in the future…

Grace who left our group after finishing her Master’s degree (to work in the real world outside of university 😉 presented her paper on how to aid communication in the car between driver and passenger [1].

In the afternoon the working group on tangible interaction in mixed realities (in German Be-greifbare Interaktion in Gemischten Wirklichkeiten) had a workshop and a meeting. We will host the next workshop of the working group in Essen early next year (probably late February or early March).

PS: the next Mensch & Computer Conference ist at the University of Duisburg-Essen 🙂

[1] Grace Tai, Dagmar Kern, Albrecht Schmidt. Bridging the Communication Gap: A Driver-Passenger Video Link. Mensch und Computer 2009. Berlin.

Special issue of I-COM on automotive user interfaces

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Together with Susanne Boll and Klaus Bengler I was guest editor for a special issue of the I-COM magazine on automotive user Interfaces. The papers are largely in German (but there are English abstracts available). The special issue shows different examples of work in this domain.

Dagmar and Stefan have a paper that describes the CARS driving simulator and its application [1]. Together with Stefan and Wolfgang from BMW research I published a paper on search interfaces in the car [2] – which was originality investigated in two master theses in Munich and also discussed in a CHI Note [3].

[1] Dagmar Kern, Schneegaß Stefan. CARS – Konfigurierbarer Fahrsimulator zur Bewertung der Fahrerablenkung (CARS – Configurable Automotive Research Simulator). i-com, Volume 8, Issue: 2 (Nutzungsschnittstellen und interaktive Anwendungen im Auto), 08/2009, ISSN: 1618-162X, pp. 30-33. doi: 10.1524/icom.2009.0022

[2] Wolfgang Spießl, Stefan Graf , Albrecht Schmidt. Suchbasierte Interaktion mit Fahrerinformationssystemen (Search-Based User Interfaces for In-Car Interaction). i-com, Volume 8, Issue: 2 (Nutzungsschnittstellen und interaktive Anwendungen im Auto), 08/2009, ISSN: 1618-162X, pp. 5-9. doi: 10.1524/icom.2009.0017

[3] Graf, S., Spiessl, W., Schmidt, A., Winter, A., and Rigoll, G. 2008. In-car interaction using search-based user interfaces. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 – 10, 2008). CHI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 1685-1688. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357317

More surface interaction using audio: Scratch input

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After my talk at the Minerva School Roy Weinberg pointed me to a paper by Chris Harrison and Scott Hudson [1] – it also uses audio for creating an interactive surface. The novelty on the technical side is limited but nevertheless the approach is interesting and appealing because of its simplicity and its potential (e.g. just think beyond a fingernail on a table to any contact movement on surfaces – pushing toy cars, walking, pushing a shopping trolley…). Perhaps having a closer look at this approach a generic location system could be created (e.g. using special shoe soles that make a certain noise).

There is a youtube movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E8vsQB4pug

Besides his studies Roy develops software for the Symbian platform and he sells a set of interesting applications.

[1] Harrison, C. and Hudson, S. E. 2008. Scratch input: creating large, inexpensive, unpowered and mobile finger input surfaces. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Monterey, CA, USA, October 19 – 22, 2008). UIST ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 205-208. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1449715.1449747