Congratulations to Frau Doktor Dagmar Kern for a great PhD defense (No. 5)

Dagmar Kern has successfully defended her PhD on “Supporting the Development Process of Multimodal and Natural Automotive User Interfaces” in Essen. External examiner was Antonio Krüger from University of Saarbrücken. Her dissertation will be available online soon. The core contribution of the thesis is the investigation of how to improve a user centered design process for automotive user interfaces. In order to systematically assess user interface designs in cars she developed a design space (inspired by Card et al [5]). In various cases studies she create novel in-car user interfaces and explored experimentally the implications on driver distraction.

Dagmar started working with me as a student of Media Informatics at the LMU Munich in 2005, then jointed my group at Fraunhofer IAIS/BIT in Bonn and move in 2007 with the group to Essen. She was for a short research stay in Saarbrücken and Milton Keynes and was extremely productive over the last years – 18 publications she co-authored are listed in DBLP and here are some highlights of here research:

  • exploration of how to present navigation information (e.g. vibra tactile steering wheel) [1]
  • gazemarks – an approach to aid attention switching between the road and an in car display using eye gaze date [2]
  • a multi-touch steering wheel, that reduced driver distraction [3]
  • a design space for automotive user interfaces [4]

Additionally to the publications one of the side products of here thesis is the CARS open source driving simulator. It is a configurable low cost simulator that can be used to measure driver distraction, e.g. as an alternative to LCT.

Dagmar’s defense brought us back to Essen and it was great to meet many colleagues again. We finally managed to have a group photo taken with nearly all the team (Elba is missing in the Photo).

The doctoral hat may look strange to non-Germans but it has some funny tradition. It is hand crafted by the colleagues and each of the items on the hat tells a story – usually known to the group but in the best case hard to guess for outsiders. Besides others Dagmar’s hat included a scrap heap of cars, a giraffe, a personal vibration device, a yoyo, a railway station building side, and a steering wheel cover.

[1] Dagmar Kern, Paul Marshall, Eva Hornecker, Yvonne Rogers, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2009. Enhancing Navigation Information with Tactile Output Embedded into the Steering Wheel. InProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive ’09). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 42-58. DOI=10.1007/978-3-642-01516-8_5 (free PDF)

[2] Dagmar Kern, Paul Marshall, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2010. Gazemarks: gaze-based visual placeholders to ease attention switching. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2093-2102. DOI=10.1145/1753326.1753646 (free PDF)

[3] Tanja Döring, Dagmar Kern, Paul Marshall, Max Pfeiffer, Johannes Schöning, Volker Gruhn, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2011. Gestural interaction on the steering wheel: reducing the visual demand. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 483-492. DOI=10.1145/1978942.1979010 (free PDF)

[4] Dagmar Kern and Albrecht Schmidt. 2009. Design space for driver-based automotive user interfaces. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI ’09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3-10. DOI=10.1145/1620509.1620511 (free PDF)

[5] Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, and George G. Robertson. 1991. A morphological analysis of the design space of input devices. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 9, 2 (April 1991), 99-122. DOI=10.1145/123078.128726

Doctoral Colloquium in Bommerholz

For the second time we organize a doctoral seminar for PhD students in CS from Bochum, Dortmund, Duisburg und Essen. The main purpose is to provide networking opportunities beyond the own subject area and to highlight to options for life after the PhD.

This year we had 4 invited speakers highlighting opportunities in academia, industry, and in SMEs:

The main take away message is be open with regard to career choices (bottom line: good students will be good and happy whatever they do after their PhD ;-). However if you are sure that you want to be in the management of a large enterprise than go for a top management consultancy job after your PhD and if you are sure academia in Germany is your only choice than go to one of the top Universities in the US as postdoc. This does not guarantee anything but puts you in the best position…

In the evening the tasks for the teams was to think 100 years ahead! This was inspired by the book “the world in 100 years” [2] and by a talk from Friedemann Mattern [2].

One essential reference on doing a PhD is [3] 🙂

[1] Arthur Brehmer (Herausgeber). Die Welt in 100 Jahren: Mit einer einführenden Essay “Zukunft von gestern” von Georg Ruppelt. Reprint der Auflage von 1910. (2010). ISBN-10: 3487083043.

[2] Friedemann Matter. Die Welt in 100 Jahren – Rückblick auf eine vergangene Zukunft. Kolloquium an der TU Darmstadt. 2006.

[3] PhD Comics. http://www.phdcomics.com

German Workshop on Tangible Interaction

Friday and Saturday we hosted the GI working groups on tangible interaction (GI Arbeitskreis Be-greifbare Interaction in gemischten Wirklichkeiten) for the second inventor’s workshop. We were positively surprised that more than 30 people took part. We started with a set of nice demos from our students and then Nicolas Villar presented an invited talk.

The concept of the workshop was to create ideas by looking more closely at different materials that may be used for interaction and by assessing novel interaction technologies. On Friday afternoon we had several tables with material (e.g. smart materials, conductive fabric, magnetic materials, etc.) and technologies (e.g. VoodooIO, EduWear kit, Physiological sensing based on the Nexus system). We bought a set of materials from MUTR Teaching Materials. In groups the participants create many design ideas by imagining a certain technology to be used in a specific context.

The social event was at the unperfekthaus.de in Essen – if you visit Essen this is a “must see”. The concept is unique!

On Saturday we started with an exercise to investigate the qualities of tangible UIs in comparison to traditional GUIs. For this we looked at different games (e.g. Space invaders, Super Mario, Sims, Halo) and though how we would make them more tangible and what pros and cons are there for the tangible and GUI version. In this context we also discussed the approach of exertion interfaces [1].

The rest of the morning was spent working on more concrete ideas for the concepts created on Friday afternoon – with remarkable results – see the Wiki for details.

[1] http://exertioninterfaces.com/

Open Lab Day in Essen

Today we had an open lab day – our first one in Essen. We invited colleagues, admin staff, students, friends, and family to have a look how we spent our days 😉 and what interesting systems we create with our students and in our research projects. We had several applications on our multi-touch table running, showed two prototypes in the automotive domain (text input while driving and vibration feedback in the steering wheel), demonstrated a new form of interaction with a public display and let people try an eye-tracking application.

What happens if Design meets Pervasive Computing?

This morning I met with Claudius Lazzeroni, a colleague from Folkwang Hochschule (they were part of our University till two years ago).
 
They have different study programs in design and art related subjects. He showed me some projects (http://www.shapingthings.net/ – in German but lots of pictures that give you the idea). Many of the ideas and prototypes related to our work and I hope we get some joint projects going. I think it could be really exciting to have projects with design and computer science students – looking forward to this!
When I was in the UK we collaborated in the equator project with designers – mainly Bill Gaver and his group – and the results were really exciting [1]. We build a table that reacted to load changes on the surfaces and allowed you to fly virtually over the UK. The paper is worthwhile to read – if you are in a hurry have a look at the movie about it on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRKOypmDDBM
There was a further project with a table –  a key table – and for this one there more funny (and less serious?) video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6e_R5q-Uf4
[1] Gaver, W. W., Bowers, J., Boucher, A., Gellerson, H., Pennington, S., Schmidt, A., Steed, A., Villars, N., and Walker, B. 2004. The drift table: designing for ludic engagement. In CHI ’04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vienna, Austria, April 24 – 29, 2004). CHI ’04. ACM, New York, NY, 885-900. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/985921.985947

Christmas market in Essen

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).

Moving again – finally in our new rooms

After several month of building work we could finally move into our new lab space. It is still largely empty but provides great opportunities for the research we have planed.

In order to conserve resources we decided to re-use furniture that was already used by another group within the university (which is not there anymore). This group apparently had a different approach in storing information (physical – real paper) and Florian and Ali had to get rid of several GB before they got their shelves 😉

Fraunhofer IAIS visiting Essen

Today former colleagues from Fraunhofer IAIS visited the faculty of economics and computer science here in Essen. It was amazing how many topical connections we found between the research at IAIS and the work that is going on here in business studies, information system, and computer science. We discussed different options for future cooperation – in research and teaching – and I am very hopeful that we create interesting opportunities.

Last year, while still in Bonn, I organized summer @ IAIS. For this year we may go more interdisciplinary and set ourselves high goals… lets see.

Central mechanical workshop

Currently we work in one of our courses on a specific multi-touch table. Students have already created a first version of an interesting application – and ideas for many more are there. However so far our prototype does not look like a table.

Learning that our university has central workshops we went there to talk about our project and to get the mechanical parts built. Our first meeting was really interesting – we got a tour and saw drilling and milling machines as well as a cutter that works with water (can cut glass precisely – extremely impressive). Best of all it seems (as they are at university) they find strange requirements in our prototypes not odd 😉

Our initial design is a welded metal table frame which leaves us a lot off options for experimenting with camera, projection, and surface. Looking really forward to see the first version!

Slowly settling in

Time is flying. We are nearly one month in Essen. Teaching started well and quite a number of students came to our course (see http://www.pervasive.wiwi.uni-due.de/en/teaching/). We have a reliable Internet connection and more furniture than we need 😉 Starting from scratch is a great experience – especially as everybody was very helpful.

Nevertheless it takes a lot of time and effort. I am extremly happy that I was able to start with a real team (Dagmar and Paul)!

Moving to the University of Duisburg-Essen

From Monday on I will be at the University of Duisburg-Essen. After a little less than a year in Bonn a new challenge is ahead: setting up a new group on Pervasive Computing and User Interface Engineering.

The lab will be situated at the campus in Essen (Schützenbahn 70) in the heart of the city. Our group will be in the Institute for Computer Science and Business Information Systems in the faculty of Economics. Teaching starts in the winter term with a lecture on User Interface Engineering and several project oriented courses.

The focus will be on systems, user interfaces and novel applications in the domain of pervasive and ubiquitous computing.