Author: admin

Light themes – cool idea but with usability flaws

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Over new year we went for a short skiing trip to Bödele in Austria. It is a small ski resort but great for learning to ski (and this is what Vivien did 🙂
We stayed in Dornbirn (not far from Lake Constance) in at Hotel Krone and had a really nice room – and it had a remarkable light installation. 

There were several lights (like you have them typical in a hotel room), then there were many switches, and finally there was a full page manual how to use the light – welcome to ambient intelligence! Instead of switching on and off individual lights one can chose a predefined light theme, e.g. a setting for working on the desk, a setting for watching TV, a setting for reading, etc. All lights are switched and dimed to fit this situation (or at least as the designer thinks it would fit the situation).

The basic idea of having light themes is quite interesting but when being in the hotel room with 3 people it gets really difficult to set the lights. Even after a lot of trying out I could not manage to set the lights so that I can work on the desk (desk lamp on), Petra can read in bed (reading light at on bed on), and Vivien can sleep (her bedside lamp off). 
Nevertheless one should not underestimate the entertainment of previously simple tasks – We spend have the evening exploring potential settings, rhythms, and speeds of the colored wellness light 😉

PS: (1) There is a good natural science museum in Dornbirn – inatura and (2) 3D projections are still not convincing…
PPS: using a GPS tracking device to record your skiing activity (including speed) is cool!

New project on ambient visualization – kick-off meeting in Munich

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We met in Munich at Docomo Euro Labs to start a new project that is related to context and ambient visualizations. And everyone already got bunnies 😉

Related to this there is a large and very interesting project: IYOUIT. Besides other things it can record and share your context – if you have a Nokia series 60 phone you should try it out. As far as I remember it was voted best mobile experience at mobile HCI 2008. 

Random Links, toys and free location data

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Over the last day I have learned about some (more) interesting things out there – here are some to share with you:

Tactile interfaces, Visit from Gordon Bolduan

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This afternoon Gordon Bolduan from Technology Review was visiting the lab. We talked about haptic and tactile interfaces and showed some demos (e.g. navigation with tactile cues). 
When preparing for the visit I looked for some good examples of tactile interaction – and interestingly there is more and more work out there that has the potential to change future interfaces and means of communication. 
Recent work on connecting people [1] and [2] at the boundary between computing and design shows new options for emotional communication. 

We used in our work multiple vibration motors and explored the potential for mobile devices [3]. What to use for tactile interaction beyond vibration is one obvious question, and I find the paper by Kevin Li [4] a good starting point to get some more ideas.
When talking about human computer interaction that includes stroking, tapping and rubbing an association to erotic and sexual interactions seem obvious; and there is more to that if you are curious just search for teledildonics and you will find interesting commercial products as well as a lot of DIY ideas.
[1] Eichhorn, E., Wettach, R., and Hornecker, E. 2008. A stroking device for spatially separated couples. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on Human Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 02 – 05, 2008). MobileHCI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 303-306. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409240.1409274 
[2] Werner, J., Wettach, R., and Hornecker, E. 2008. United-pulse: feeling your partner’s pulse. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on Human Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 02 – 05, 2008). MobileHCI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 535-538. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409240.1409338 
[3] Alireza Sahami, Paul Holleis, Albrecht Schmidt, Jonna Häkkilä: Rich Tactile Output on Mobile Devices. European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (Ami’08). Springer LNCS Nürnberg 2008, S. 210-221. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89617-3_14
[4] Li, K. A., Baudisch, P., Griswold, W. G., and Hollan, J. D. 2008. Tapping and rubbing: exploring new dimensions of tactile feedback with voice coil motors. 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, 181-190. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1449715.1449744

One Ez430-F2013 for each student in DSD

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This term we teach digital system design and besides the essential (gates, flip-flops, 2-complements, alu, data path, etc) we decided to include some practical parts. In the first part we introduced Verilog. We did the exercises with Icarus Verilog (free, text-based verilog) and there are more powerful tools available, e.g. ISE WebPACK.

In the second part we have practical exercises in assembly language using the Ez430-F2013 development kit. We borrowed one kit to each student (just in case someone is bored over Christmas) and the current task is to complete and assembly program (incomplete sample) that the LED shows repeatedly “Hello” in Morse code. This is just the start – perhaps we do some more interesting stuff in January. The development kit is really interesting – especially given the fact that it is only 20€ (including hardware, compiler, and IDE). The MCU is small – but still good enought to generate a video signal (eagle CAD files, some assembly code). 

Enrico Rukzio visits our Lab

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Enrico Rukzio (my first PhD from Munich, now lecturer in Lancaster) visited our Lab. He was make a small tour of Germany (Münster, Essen, Oldenburg). In the user interface engineering class Enrico showed some on his current work on mobile interaction, in particular mobile projectors and NFC tags. After the presentation we wondered how long it will take till kids on the train will play with mobile projections 😉

We showed Enrico a demo of eye-tracking for active customization of browser adverts. In our setup we use the Tobii X120. For tracking of people in the room we still have not decided on a system – and Enrico told me about the Optitrack system they have. That looked quite interesting… 
As we all do studies in our work – the design of studies is critical and there is an interesting book to help with this: How to Design and Report Experiments by Andy Field  and Graham J. Hole.

Biometrics will come, who will care about privacy

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Arriving at the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow airport I saw some extra installations (and extra lines) for iris scan immigration. Arriving at 4 am in the morning they were closed and there were not queues – but I could see that it is very attractive at other times of day when queues are long. On the official website they claim that border control will be down to 20 seconds. There is a more detailed document on the schema – I saved the document to have it in 10 years when we will have a very different view on privacy.

Will we have face-2-face PC meetings in the future?

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On Thursday morning I flew to Boston for the CHI 2009 PC meeting. The review and selection process was organized very professional and efficient. We discussed all papers in one and a half days – and I think an interesting program came out and I learned a lot about what values my colleagues see or see not in papers. On Friday afternoon I flew back to the UK for the Pervasive 2009 PC meeting in Cambridge (with the same crew on the plane).

Nevertheless the question remains how sustainable is it that 100 people fly to a face-2-face meeting. In what way could we do such a meeting remotely? Video conferencing still does not really work well for larger group discussions (just collecting experience here in Cambridge during the Pervasive PC meeting)… Can it be so difficult to make a reasonable video link between two meeting room? How could we recreate the social aspects (like a joined dinner or walking back through the city with Gregory) as well as side conversations in the meetings? We probably should try harder – It cannot be that difficult – there have been massive amounts of work in CSCW research? Perhaps we should try linking two rooms at different universities as a group project next term? 

Christmas market in Essen

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Going to Christmas market is in Germany a tradition – and obviously our group went, too 😉
It is interesting that most of us had time for this “appointment” with only two days notice – usually it takes us weeks to find a date for a meeting and so far we did not find a date for a strategy meeting in the near future. Perhaps offering Glühwein (that is what you drink at Christmas markets) would help…
The quality of photos taken with a mobile phone is in difficult context (e.g. night, lights around) still not satisfactory (even with 5MP, downscaling, and image enhancing).

Known route – driving your car in mental auto-pilot?

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Mandy Marder, a doctoral student at university hospital in Essen has done an interesting study, looking at the activity of the brain at different driving situations. It seems that if you are driving a well know route you are less alert than when you drive an unknown route (see press release, we have yet to find the appropriate reference). This is an interesting finding that may help to inform some of our work on automotive user interfaces. Together with trends that move more responsibility from the driver to assitive functions this nay be an indication that driving could be a valid domain for serious games.

Exporting your cars information to the mobile phone

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In our user interface engineering class one of the tasks in the exercise is to create a concept design for providing information from the car on the mobile phone (e.g. millage, amount a fuel in the car, next service date, alram status, etc). The first part is to assess what information could be made accessible and what value it would create for the user. 
Today I came across a device (Tyredog TD-1000A) that is concerned with a one sub-part of this scenario: checking your pressure in the tires of the car. It is a simple sensor system, screwed on to each of the tires, connected to a wireless receiver. There is also a version that includes features for the car alarm (Tyredog TD-3000A).
Another group is looking yet again into the domain of  restaurant finders or more general night life. Apropos restaurant finders, Saturday night we got out of the subway onto union square and discussed where to go for dinner (an we probably looked disoriented). A local lady stoped and recommended the Union Square Café – and it was just great… sometimes just talking to someone in the street may provide you with an excellent alternative to technologies 😉 Perhaps the students find a solution that can reflect personal recommendations well…

Information vs. Mobility, Percom PC meeting in New York

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The PC meeting for Percom 2009 took place at IBM in Hawthorne, NY. Percom had about 200 submissions and many good ones – so we could compile an exciting program across the whole field of pervasive computing and communication. As one of three program vice chairs I have looked in detail in about 1/3 of the submissions that were application related. It is interesting to observe that research as a whole in the field becomes more major and at the same time more incremental. 

To me this puts up the big question in which domains will the new big innovations happen, what is the next trend after we have pervasive computing? There are luckily plenty of options, but at the moment it seems that there develops an interesting relationship between information, communication, mobility and energy. It seems that we can compensate mobility by information and communication and similarly we can reduce energy required by information available. One example is: if I know where things are (=information) I can reduce the effort required to find them (=mobility). Is there more to it?
Each time in the US – even in New York were public transport works quite well – one is surprise how alien it appears to many that it could be an option to take public transport on a business trip (e.g. there are no first class coaches on regional trains). Flying from Düsseldorf into Newark it was convenient to take the train to Penn Station in NY City and then an express train to White Plaines. If we would not have gone for a walk in the city we probably would have been equally fast as by car. With the again low gas prices in the US (less than 2U$ per gallon, down from 4 just a few month ago) I would expect public transport and small cars will not gain too much popularity – before the next rise in gas prices.

PS: it is amazing how many possiblities there are to serve coffee (and this is probably not one of the most environment friendly)

Male (88%), writing like Oscar Wilde (35%)

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Looking into Paul Rayson’s blog and discovered an interesting link: http://www.genderanalyzer.com. It is a web form where you can put in an URL and you get an estimate whether the author of this text is male or female. For me it worked great 😉 It says that the text I wrote in my blog is with 88% written by a male. I tried it with a few more of my pages and it worked. Then I looked at some pages of some of my female colleagues and to my surprise it seems they do not write their web pages by themselves (as the program indicated 95% male writer) – they probably all have a hidden male assistant 😉

While I was in Lancaster I shared for most of the time an office with Paul. During this time I learned a lot of interesting things about corpus linguistics and phenomena in language in general – just by sharing the office. One fact at that at the time was surprising to me is that if you take 6 words from an arbitrary text in the exact order as they appear in the text and you search on the web for the exact phrase it is likely that you will only find this text. How many hits do you get for phrase “I was at Trinity College reading” in google? Try it out 😉 [to students: that is why not getting caught when you plagiarize is really hard]

From http://www.genderanalyzer.com I came to http://www.ofaust.com and to my great surprise I write like Oscar Wilde (35%) and Friedrich Nietzsche (30%). Thinking of social networks (and in particular the use of languages within closed groups) such technologies could become an interesting enabling technology for novel applications. Perhaps I should visit Paul again in Lancaster…
PS: and I nearly forgot I am a thinker / INTJ – The Scientists (according to http://www.typealyzer.com/)
PPS (2008-11-17): a further URL contrinuted from my collegues on the gender topic: http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/

Exoskeletons soon in the real world

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Exoskeletons have received some attention over the last years (some with a clear application area in the army), e.g. Robot suit HAL and the BLEEX Project.  
Honda showed now an interesting exoskeletons as walking aid. It is called  “computerized leg device” or “walking assist device” and there is an short movie on youtube and it is designed to help people walk. The application areas are probably broad – I expected mainly in care and rehabilitation, but looking around there seem to be more application domains…

Illusions 2.0, Talk at the Museum Ludwig in Köln

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In Cologne in the Museum Ludwig I gave in the afternoon a talk on “Illusions 2.0 – embedded interactive media” at the Forum Mediendesign. The talk focused on the new qualities of magical experiences we will be able to create with pervasive computing technologies in the future and linked this to Alan Kay’s notion of user illusion and metaphors. I looked at trends that are ingredience for creating Illusions 2.0 – in particular ubiquitous communication and display, constant tracking and logging, and the decrease of value of traditional content (text, audio, video, software, tv, statistical data). I highlighted one development that have already happened and has impacted our lives with the following statement. The question “If I only would know when the others come and where they are now…” was common to people born before 1970 but is completely alien to people born after 2000. Mobile communication has changed this and tracking will add more change over the next years.

Based on some examples from recent popular fiction (Harry Potter) I showed that things that we have considered magical are becoming rapidly community products (e.g. marauders map). Spinning this idea forward I asked how far are we with regard to other human dreams such as looking into the future or never forgetting anything we have seen or heard. And the answer in short is: we are close 😉 for more see the slides of my talk on Illusion 2.0. There is an upcoming paper we wrote for IEEE Multimedia Magazine on this topic – will tell as soon as it is published 😉

In the morning I had some time for sightseeing and Vivien and I went to the chocolate museum. The museum is brilliant and I learned how the hollow chocolate santas are made 🙂 In the top floor they have a table top projection for a quiz – it is very well done (as the whole museum) but the technology did not work on the table close to the window. As we know from our experience if you have sun light your camera-projector systems may have trouble 😉
PS: it was interesting that the whole organization was done by students as a course in project management – and they did it really well.

My first hotel fire alarm, debugging smart environments

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We arrived in the evening in Köln and went to our hotel and around 10:30 pm the fire alarm sounded (really loud – you want to leave) and a voice over the speaker system asked us to leave the hotel immediately. When we checked in an hour earlier we overheard that they called for the elevator repair man…

Better safe than sorry I packed up my laptop and rucksack and we went downstairs. At the reception they were pretty busy – but it seemed everyone clear that this a false alarm but it seemed they had no way of really understanding why the system behaved in this way [gap of evaluation 😉 teaching user interface engineering this term]. The error search reminded me on one error search strategy in C (if you do not have a debugger). Comment out part of the code (here: disable fire sensing for certain areas in the hotel) till you can tell which parts cases the error. If you have found this part and it is not essential just leave it as a comment (you can do the same with fire sensor – hope they did not…)

A fire alarm system has compared to smart environments we envision a very low complexity. I think providing appropriate means for debugging smart environments by end-users could be a topic worthwhile to look at.
PS: the elivator had the best display for showing the level you are in I have seen so far. From a UI perspective it is really a boring recreation of the non-digital version… 

USA votes, election party in our lab

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There many good reason to have an international team – especilly when doing research in pervasive computing and user interface engineering. This morning I learned another one: you can have election parties (=drinks and food in the lab ;-). 
Predicting elections results goes new ways and it is interesting that the Xbox Live Polls (http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/09/xbox-live-poll.html) were quite close to the result – already quite some time ago. Perhaps this large poll produced just by accident good results – but it may be a first step towards internet elections. Having internet voting on a game console brings new models for voting to one’s mind (e.g. only if you have reached a certain level in the game you can vote 😉

Geocaching, Travel bug

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On Saturday we went for a walk and to make it more exciting we decided to look for a geocache (GCXP87, N 49° 08.775 E 010° 06.672). To our surprise it took us quite some time (10 minutes) to find it as the GPS reception was not perfect. Vivien, my daughter was excited by the idea of geo caching (I think I can anticipate some of our activities on the next weekends ;-), especially as we even found a travel bug. The travel bug is alreay on its second continent and we still discuss where we place it 😉 

Technologies of Globalization 2008 in Darmstadt

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I have been chairing the Stream “Aging as a Global Issue” at the conference Technologies of Globalization 2008 in Darmstadt. It is always very suprising who different research is across different diciplines…

On-Kwok Lai from Kwansei Gakuin University gave a really interesting overview on the current situation in Asia and in particular in Japan with regards the aging society. Learning more about ageing I find myself more often thinking the current “aging research” is more like treating a symptom and not looking at the real problem. And it seems the real problem: reduced reproduction in industrial states – basically we do not have enough children anymore. This leads to the obvious question: would researching into solutions and technologies that make it easier to raise children while working or studying not be the more important challenge?

In another talk Birgit Kasper reported from a study of multi-modal travel in Köln (“Patenticket”). In the trail they got people who have a yearly ticket to introduce other older people to public transport by providing them a 3 month flat-rate ticket for public transport in the region. The benefits seem to come from two sides: (1) people do not worry if they have the right ticket and (2) having a person that acts as a patron learning the public transport system is supported. If we look at the results a radical suggestion would be to introduce a car-city-tax (e.g. like London) and give in return free public transport to everyone – would this simple solution not solve many of our problems (economic, ecological, …) or would it create a two-tier society?

The social event was at castle Frankenstein – but surprisingly everyone came back in the morning unharmed 😉

History and Future of Computing and Interaction

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Today I was teaching my class on user interface engineering and we covered a selected history of HCI and looked at the same time at a potential future. We discussed how user interface evolved and where UI revolutions have happed. To my question “What is the ultimate user interface?” I got three very interesting answers (1) a keyboard, (2) mind reading, and (3) a system that anticipates what I want. 
With regard to history in HCI one of my favorite texts is the PhD dissertation of Ivan Sutherland [1]. The work described was done in 1960-1963 when the idea of personal computing was very far from main stream. Even just browsing some of the pages gives an impression of the impact the work had…
For future user interfaces we talked about brain computer interfaces (BCI) and how they very much differ from the idea of mind reading. I came across a game controller – Mindlink – developed by Atari (1984) and that was never released [2]. It was drawing on the notion of linking to the mind but in fact it only measured muscle activity above the eye brows and apparently did not perform very well. However there is a new round coming up for such devices, see [3] for a critical article on consumer BCI.
On the fun side I found a number of older videos that look at future technology predictions- see the videos for yourself:
http://www.paleofuture.com one is a site that has an amazing (and largely funny) selection of predictions. There is a more serious – but nevertheless – very entertaining article on predictions for computing and ICT by Friedemann Mattern: Hundert Jahre Zukunft – Visionen zum Computer- und Informationszeitalter (hundred years future – predictions of the computing and information age) [4].
[1] Sutherland’s Ph.D. Thesis, Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. 1963 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf
[3] Emmet Cole. Direct Brain-to-Game Interface Worries Scientists. Wired. 09.05.07. http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2007/09/bci_games
[4] Friedemann Mattern.Hundert Jahre Zukunft – Visionen zum Computer- und Informationszeitalter. Die Informatisierung des Alltags – Leben in smarten Umgebungen, Springer Verlag 2007. http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/publ/papers/mattern2007-zukunft.pdf

Ideas in Advertisment, Privacy, German Law

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In our master course we offer a project on pervasive advertisement (it is an interdisciplinary course project from computer science and marketing) where we look at future forms of advertisement that become possible by new technologies.
The students presented a set of really exciting ideas – an I would expect (if they get some of their ideas implemented) that advertising will be more entertaining and fun in the future. For some of the ideas we discussed potential privacy issues and I promised to provide later the reference to the German privacy law that restricts the use of optical/camera devices in public spaces. The German law is at a first glance very restrictive with regard to using cameras in public spaces. In short it can be summarized that data can only obtained for a legitimate, concrete and defined purpose and that the privacy interest of the people are not higher to value as the purpose. Additionally it has to be clear to the person observed that he or she is observed. (We probably need a lawyer to figure out what is allowed 😉 In [1] the text of the law (in German) can be found.

Lucia and Thomas from Vodafone R&D visiting

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Lucia Terrenghi and Thomas Lang from Vodafone R&D in Munich visited our lab. We talked at lot about the future role of mobile devices and in particular how they may change personal computing in the near future. 

After lunch they gave a talk for our students describing Vodafone research and their particular research interests. Using a nice visualization of train lines they showed the research themes and introduced some of their research foci. One area of interest is electronic paper, resulting future devices and potential applications and services. In the discussion I briefly mentioned that I had a look at some of the displays with my microscope – have a look in the previous blog post if you are interested.

Privacy – will our understanding change radically?

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As one issue this morning we came across issues related to privacy. In particular it seems that social network analysis based on behavior in the real world (e.g. the reality mining project [1]) is creating serious interest beyond the technology people. Beyond measuring the frequency of encounters qualifying the way people interact (dominance, emotion, …) will reveal even more about social networks… 

In our discussion I made a reference to a book: “The Transparent Society” by David Brin. Even Though it is now nearly 10 years since it was first published I still think it is an interesting starting point for a privacy discussion.

[1] Eagle, N. and (Sandy) Pentland, A. 2006. Reality mining: sensing complex social systems. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 10, 4 (Mar. 2006), 255-268. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0046-3 

[2] The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? David Brin, Basic Books (June 1, 1999). At Amazon

2 day faculty meeting in Essen

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The last 2 day we had a meeting – with all faculty of the ICB – discussing the future challenges of work at universities in the context of our current situation. For me the this time was very well spent as I got to know many of my colleagues better and it was incredible to see the potential (from a scientific perspective as well as looking at the people) we have in our organization.

To me it is always amazing how much of a difference it makes to have a professional external moderator running such workshops (and we were very lucky with Klaus Schneider Ott from focus-team). Even though many of the psychological games are well known to many of us – they still work well and move discussion forward and help in creating common ground and even increase trust. He lectured us (after much of the discussion has happened) on basics of communication (e.g. transactional analysis) and again not novel they lead to serious reflection and progress.
PS: Do you know how to continue the row in the image below? What is the next sign? …
If you think of M-Omega-8 you are wrong – but still it is really easy 😉

Trip to Dublin, Aaron’s Display Project

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Visiting Dublin is always a pleasure – even if the weather is rainy. Most of the day I was at Trinity College reading master theses (which is the second best part of being external examiner, best part is to have lunch at the 1592 😉
In the evening I met with Aaron Quigley and we talked about some ongoing display and advertsing projects in our groups. He told me about one of their recent workshop papers [1] on public displays where they investigated what people take in and what people remember of the content on displays in an academic environment. It is online available in the workshop proceedings of AIS08 [2]. I found it worthwhile to browse the whole workshop proceedings.
[1] Rashid U. and Quigley A., “Ambient Displays in Academic Settings: Avoiding their Underutilization”, Ambient Information Systems Workshop at UbiComp 2008, September 21, Seoul, South Korea (download [2], see page 26 ff)

Richard Atterer defended his PhD-thesis

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At LMU in Munich Richard Atterer defended his PhD thesis on Usability Tool Support for Model-Based Web Development. The external examiner was Prof. Martin Gaedke– it was great meeting Martin again, we shared an office some years back at TecO, University of Karlsruhe. While I was with LMU I worked with Richard on a number of interesting topics and I learned to value his technical skills and insightful reflection – hope he stays in academia 😉 
Our experiments with remote usability assessment and effectively fine-grain user tracking on web pages [1] created a number of ideas for follow-up projects. The overall concept is really simple yet powerful: people use a proxy server (willingly or transparent) and by these means Javascript code is included in the html-source of arbitrary web pages to add new functionality [2]. Florian Alt extended this concept to an annotation system and currently we look into more general implication of this approach.
While writing his theses Richard countered our routine question “how is progress?”  with a dynamically generated graph on his webpage. Each time he checked his document in SVN the graph was updated with the current number of words and pages … but we still kept asking 😉 
 [1] Atterer, R. and Schmidt, A. 2007. Tracking the interaction of users with AJAX applications for usability testing. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 ? May 03, 2007). CHI ’07. ACM, New York, NY, 1347?1350. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240828
[2] Atterer, R., Wnuk, M., and Schmidt, A. 2006. Knowing the user’s every move: user activity tracking for website usability evaluation and implicit interaction. In Proceedings of the 15th international Conference on World Wide Web (Edinburgh, Scotland, May 23 ? 26, 2006). WWW ’06. ACM, New York, NY, 203?212. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1135777.1135811 

Article on Tangible UIs in the c’t-Magazine

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The current issue of the ct-Magazine (one of the largest computing magazines in Germany) features an introductory article on tangible user interfaces (in German).

The article is based on three interviews (Eva Hornecker, Reto Wettach, Albrecht Schmidt) and provides a good overview on this topic for a general audience. The article is in c’t no 21, 2007, p86-88 (no online version yet).

Mobile images / video as proof

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While waiting for my conneting flight a saw a women posting a letter and filming this as she did it. She created some sort of proof. Thinking a little more and having further information in the background (e.g. a clock, the schedule display, people waiting) this this has some potential to replace registered mail for certain domains? This gives me an idea for a small weekend project…

Closing Panel at Ubicomp 2008

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The closing panel at Ubicomp dicussed the last 10 years of ubicomp and potential future direction (with regard to community and technology). On the panel were Gregory Abowd, Hide Tokuda, Lars Eric Holmquist, Eric Paulos, and Albrecht Schmidt. In the following I will just describe some of the points I raised in my short statement. 
For me the first observation is that many ideas that were discussed at the first HUC99 (the first ubicomp conference started by Hans Gellsersen) – and were considered very speculative ideas have become common products and services by now (e.g. pocket bargain finder, predictive text input, mobile collaboration tool, mobile photo-sharing, location aware technologies). Here it is apparent that with regard to envisioning applications the conference has made impact. But there is a curious phenomenon: at the moment a device or service is available in the shop we do not recognize it as ubicomp anymore.
In some areas the complexity of the problems (when moving from the lab to the real world) has been underestimated – here context and context-awareness is a good example. If you realize the full vision it is basically solving AI. But nevertheless we progressed – there are applications for commercial mobile devices that do context and activity recognition – and it is just 10 years that we discussed this in a HUC99 in our paper on advanced interaction in context [1] – which was at that time really innovative! Context-awareness will happen – be patient 🙂 but its has to take into account: humans are adaptive, too. 
The papers which had a large impact (based on citations e.g. check [1] on google scholar) seem more the papers that score high on novelty, even if the may lack scientific rigor.
 
For future directions I hinted some general directions (not necessarily my research directions): 
  • Implanted activity recognition and interaction (put the sensing and actuation into the body solves a lot of the problems … obviously it creates many new ones, too) 
  • Implantable persuasion and amplifying bodily experiences. Here I gave the example that we would be able to create a device to motivate you do sports by making your back hurt. I used this to emphasise that ethics will play a large role in the future…
  • Prediction technologies (e.g. the weather forecast as an inspiration, forecasting traffic conditions, parking situation, restaurant business, costs, …) we will create systems that allo us to look up predictions (cost, quality of the experience, stress, time needed, etc.) for future activities (e.g. when choosing a restaurants, booking a travel, deciding on dating a person, making a business deal, accepting a position, …)
  • And finally I suggested that we will have fun with papers on privacy published now when reading them in 20 years 🙂 because our perception of this topic will change massively.
With regard to the community I made the statement that Ubicomp became the Starbucks of ubiquitous computing research – premium but based on the US idea of quality. Have you ever been in a Vienna coffee house, in an Italian espresso bar, or had tea in the middle east – it is very different. We lost some of the international spirit and we stopped arguing what good research in ubicomp is – this discurse should be started again!. Looking at the countries where ubicomp technologies come from (e.g. a lot from Aisia and Europe) we should again make a effort to more value the international diversity and the different styles and approaches in ubicomp research – scientific rigor is not the only axis to consider. 
[1] Schmidt, A., Aidoo, K. A., Takaluoma, A., Tuomela, U., Laerhoven, K. V., and Velde, W. V. 1999. Advanced Interaction in Context. In Proceedings of the 1st international Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27 – 29, 1999). H. Gellersen, Ed. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 1707. Springer-Verlag, London, 89-101. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48157-5_10

My Random Papers Selection from Ubicomp 2008

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Over the last days there were a number of interesting papers presented and so it is not easy to pick a selection… Here is my random paper selection from Ubicomp 2008 that link to our work (the conference papers link into the ubicomp 2008 proceedings in the ACM DL, our references are below):

Don Patterson presented a survey on using IM. One of the finding surprised me: people seem to ignore “busy” settings. In some work we did in 2000 on mobile availability and sharing context users indicated that they would respect this or at least explain when interrupt someone who is busy [1,2] – perhaps it is a cultural difference or people have changed. It may be interesting to run a similar study in Germany.

Woodman and Harle from Cambridge presented a pedestrian localization system for large indoor environments. Using a XSens device they combine dead reckoning with knowledge gained from a 2.5D map. In the experiment they seem to get similar results as with a active bat system – by only putting the device on the user (which is for large buildings much cheaper than putting up infrastructure).
Andreas Bulling presented work where he explored the use EOG goggles for context awareness and interaction. The EOG approach is complementary to video based systems. The use of gesturest for context-awarenes follows a similar idea as our work on eye gestures [3]. We had an interesting discussion about further ideas and perhaps there is chance in the future to directly compare the approaches and work together.
In one paper “on using existing time-use study data for ubiquitous computing applications” links to interesting public data sets were given (e.g the US time-use survey). The time-use surevey data covers the US and gives detailed data on how people use their data.
University of Salzburg presented initial work on an augmented shopping system that builds on the idea of implicit interaction [4]. In the note they report a study where they used 2 cameras to observe a shopping area and they calculated the “busy spots” in the area. Additional they used sales data to get best selling products. Everything was displayed on a public screen; and an interesting result was that it seems people where not really interesting in other shoppers behavior… (in contrast to what we observe in e-commerce systems).
Researchers from Hitachi presented a new idea for browsing and navigating content based on the metaphor of using a book. In is based on the concept to have a bendable surface. In complements interestingly previous work in this domain called Gummi presented in CHI 2004 by Schwesig et al.
[1] Schmidt, A., Takaluoma, A., and Mäntyjärvi, J. 2000. Context-Aware Telephony Over WAP. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 4, 4 (Jan. 2000), 225-229. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s007790070008
[2] Albrecht Schmidt, Tanjev Stuhr, Hans Gellersen. Context-Phonebook – Extending Mobile Phone Applications with Context. Proceedings of Third Mobile HCI Workshop, September 2001, Lille, France.
[3] Heiko Drewes, Albrecht Schmidt. Interacting with the Computer using Gaze Gestures. Proceedings of INTERACT 2007.
[4] Albrecht Schmidt. Implicit Human Computer Interaction Through Context. Personal Technologies, Vol 4(2), June 2000