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Auto-UI 2012 in the US, looking for hosts for 2013

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The next and 4rd international conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Vehicular Applications (AutoUI 2012) will be in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in the USA. The dates for the conference are 17-19 of October 2012. The first day for workshops and tutorials and 2 days for the main conference. Portsmouth is about an 1 hour drive from Boston and the timing is great (fall foliage – the photos of the colorful forests looked good 😉

The steering committee (sc@auto-ui.org) is inviting proposals for Auto-UI 2013 from the community of researchers in the field. The conference was 2009 in Essen (Germany), 2010 in Pittsburgh (USA), 2011 in Salzburg (Austria), and it will be in 2012 in Portsmouth (USA). Keeping this cycle between Europe and North America 2013 should be in Europe.

Paper and demo in Salzburg at Auto-UI-2011

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At the automotive user interface conference in Salzburg we presented some of our research. Salzburg is a really nice place and Manfred and his team did a great job organizing the conference!

Based on the Bachelor Thesis of Stefan Schneegaß and some follow-up work we published a full paper [1] that describes a KLM-Model for the car and a prototyping tools that makes use of the model. In the model we look at the specific needs in the car, model rotary controllers, and cater for the limited attention while driving. The prototyping tool provides means to quickly estimate interaction times. It supports visual prototyping using images of the UI and tangible prototyping using Nic Villar´s VoodooIO. Looking forward to having Stefan on our team full-time 🙂

We additionally had a demo on a recently completed thesis by Michael Kienast. Here we looked at how speech and gestures can be combined for controlling functions, such as mirror adjustments or windscreen wipers, in the car. This multimodal approach combines the strength of gestural interaction and speech interaction [2].

The evening event of the conference was at Festung Hohensalzburg – with a magnificent view over the twon!

[1] Stefan Schneegaß, Bastian Pfleging, Dagmar Kern, Albrecht Schmidt. Support for modeling interaction with in-vehicle interfaces. (PDF) Proceedings of 3rd international conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Vehicular Applications 2011 (http://auto-ui.org). Salzburg. 30.11-2.12.2011

[2] Bastian Pfleging, Michael Kienast, Albrecht Schmidt. DEMO: A Multimodal Interaction Style Combining Speech and Touch Interaction in Automotive Environments. Adjunct proceedings of 3rd international conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Vehicular Applications 2011 (http://auto-ui.org). Salzburg. 30.11-2.12.2011

Bryan Reimer: Opening keynote at Auto-UI 2011 in Salzburg

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Bryan started his keynote talk the automotive user interface conference (auto-ui.org) in Salzburg with reminding us that having controversial discussions about the HMI in the car is not new. Quoting a newspaper article from the 1930s on the introduction of the radio in the car and its impact on the driver he picked an interesting example, that can be seen as the root of many issues we have now with infotainment systems in the car.

The central question he raised is: how to create user interface that fit human users? He made an important point: humans are not “designed” to drive at high speed in complex environments; perception has evolved for walking and running in natural environment. Additionally to the basic limitations of human cognition, there is a great variety of capabilities of drivers, their skills and cognitive ability (e.g. influence of age). A implication of the global change is demographics is that the average capabilities of a drivers will be reduced – basically as many older people will be drivers…

Over the last 100 years cars have changes significantly! Looking more closely Bryan argues that much of the chance happened in the last 10 years. There has been little change from the 1950s to the 1990s with regard to the car user interface.

It is apparent that secondary tasks are becoming more important to the user. Users will interact more while driving because the can. It is however not obvious that they are capable of it.

Even given these developments it is apparent that driving has become safer. Passive safety has been improved massively and this made driving much safer. There seems to be a drawback to this as well, as people may take greater risks as they feel safer. The next step is really to avoid accidence in the first place. Bryan argues that the interaction between driver, environment, and vehicles is very important in that. He suggests that we should make more of an effort to create systems that fit the drivers.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law helps to understand how to design systems that keep peoples attention in the optimal performance. He made an important point: there are certain issues that cannot be solved, e.g. if someone is tired we can do only very little – the driver will need to rest. We should make sure that we take these things into account when designing systems.

Visual distraction is an obvious factor and much discussed in the papers at the conference – but Bryan argued that “eyes on the road” is not equal to “mind on the road”. I think this is really a very important point. Ensuring that people keep their eyes on the road, seeing things is not enough. The big resulting question is how to keep or get people focused on the street and environment. It seems there is some more research to do…

The variety of interfaces and interaction metaphors build into cars opens more choices but at the same time creates problems, as people need to learn and understand them. A simple question such as: How do you switch the car off? may be hard to answer (Bryan had the example of a car with a push button starter, where you cannot remove the key). I think there are simple questions that can be learned from industry and production machines… add an emergency stop button and make it mandatory 😉

If you are interested more about Bryan’s work look at his webpage or his page at the MIT agelab or one of his recent publications [1] in the IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine’s special issue on automotive computing, see [2] for an introduction to the special issue.

Sorry for the poor quality photos … back row and an iPhone…

[1] Joseph F. Coughlin, Bryan Reimer, and Bruce Mehler. 2011. Monitoring, Managing, and Motivating Driver Safety and Well-Being. IEEE Pervasive Computing 10, 3 (July 2011), 14-21. DOI=10.1109/MPRV.2011.54 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2011.54

[2] Albrecht Schmidt, Joseph Paradiso, and Brian Noble. 2011. Automotive Pervasive Computing. IEEE Pervasive Computing 10, 3 (July 2011), 12-13. DOI=10.1109/MPRV.2011.45 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2011.45

Guests in my multimodal interaction class

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Today I had brought 3 more professors with me to teach the class on multimodal interaction (I learned from Hans). As we have the pd-net project meeting Nigel Davies, Marc Langheirich, and Rui Jose were in Stuttgart and ‘volunteered’ to give a talk.

Nigel talked about the work in Lancaster on the use of mobile computing technology to support sustainable travel. He explained the experiments they conducted for collecting and sharing travel related information. In the 6th Sense Transport project they look beyond looking at understanding the current context into predictions and eventually ‘time travel’ 😉

Marc presented a one hour version of his tutorial on privacy introducing the terminology and explaining the many facets this topic has. We discussed the ‘NTHNTF’ argument (Nothing To Hide Nothing To Fear) and Marc used an example of AOLstalker.com to show the weaknesses of this argument. Marc suggested some reading if you want to dive into the topic, see [1,2,3,4].

Rui focused in his lecture on pervasive public displays. He gave an overview of typical architectures for digital signage systems and the resulting limitation. The pd-net approach aims at creating an open platform that allows many different applications and use cased. He showed once concept of using virtual pin-badges to trigger content and to express interest in a certain topic.

There is more information on the pd-net project on http://pd-net.org

[1] David Brin. The Transparent Society. Perseus Publishing, 1999.
[2] Simson Garfinkel: Database Nation – The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. O’Reilly, 2001.
[3] Lawrence Lessig: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books, 2006. http://codev2.cc/
[4] Waldo, Lin, Millett (eds.): Engaging Privacy and Information Technologygy in a Digital Age. National Academies Press, 2007.

Call for Papers: Symposium on Pervasive Display Networks

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Rui José and Elaine Huang are chairing an international symposium on pervasive displays in Portugal. The conference will be held June 4-5 2012 in Porto. The submission deadline for full papers is January 16th, 2012.

With our research in the PD-net project we encounter many interesting research questions and met with many other researchers interested in the topic. It seems that the many real deployments of electronic displays is fueling ideas and makes it obvious that research is required to understand the properties of this new upcoming media. The call states: “As digital displays become pervasive, they become increasingly relevant in many areas, including advertising, art, sociology, engineering, computer science, interaction design, and entertainment.”

We hope with this symposium we will bring together researchers and practitioners as well as users to share research results and generate new ideas.

Submissions that report on cutting-edge research in the broad spectrum of pervasive digital displays are invited, ranging from large interactive walls to personal projection, from tablets and mobile phone screens to 3-D displays and tabletops. Topics include:

  • Novel technologies
  • Architecture
  • Applications
  • Domains and formative studies studies
  • Evaluations and deployments
  • Interfaces and interaction techniques
  • Content design

Have a look at the webpage and the call for paper at http://pervasivedisplays.org/cfp.php

Closing Keynote at AMI2011, Beyond Ubicomp – Computing is Changing the Way we Live

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On Friday afternoon I had the privilege to present the closing keynote at AMI2011 in Amsterdam with the title ‘Beyond Ubicomp – Computing is Changing the Way we Live’. The conference featured research in Ambient Intelligence ranging from networking and system architecture to interfaces and ethnography. It brought an interesting set of people together and it was good to see many students and young researchers presenting their work.

In my closing keynote at talked about my experience of the last 13 years in this field and about a vision of the future. My vision is based on a basic technology assessment – basically looking what technologies will (in my view) definitely come over the next 20 years and looking at the implications of this. I stared out with a short reference to Mark Weiser’s now 20 year old article [1]. The upcoming issue of IEEE Pervasive Magazine will have a in-depth analysis of the last 20 years since Weiser’ article – we have also an article in there on how interaction evolved.

The vision part of the talk looked “Perception beyond there here and now” [2] from 3 different angles:

  • Paradigm Shift in Communication
    Here I argue that the default communication in the future will be public communication and only if something is secret we will try to use non public channel. First indicators of this are a switch from email to twitter and facebook. I used a cake baking example to highlight the positive points of this shift.
  • Steep Increase in media capture
    The second angle is just observing and extrapolating the increase in capture of media information. If you go already now on youtube you will information about many things (backing a cake, repairing a bike, etc.). The implication of this increase in media capture will be virtually unlimited access to experience other people share
  • Transformation of experienced perception
    The final angle is that this creates a new way of perceiving the world. We will extent perception beyond the here and now and this is bringing a completely new way of creating and accessing information. I used the example of enquiring about buying an international train ticket at the station in Amsterdam. If you can look there through other people’s eyes the question becomes trivial.

My overall argument is that we are in for a major transformation of our knowledge and information culture. I would expect that this shift is as radical as the shift from an oral tradition to the written societies – but the transition will be much quicker and in the context of a globalized and competitive world.

The main conclusion from this is: Ethics and values are the central design material of this century.

Looking at twitter it seems it got across to some in the audience 😉 If your are interested, too have a look at the slides from the keynote.

[1] Mark Weiser. The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American, Vol. 265, No. 3. (1991)
[2] Albrecht Schmidt, Marc Langheinrich, and Kritian Kersting. 2011. Perception beyond the Here and Now. Computer 44, 2 (February 2011), 86-88. DOI=10.1109/MC.2011.54 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MC.2011.54

hci4schools

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Angefangen hat der Tag um 9 Uhr mit einer Besprechung. Dabei wurde über mehrere Projekte gesprochen und auch darüber was ich die Woche lang machen darf. Das hörte sich sehr vielversprechend an. Read More

Keynote: Steve Benford talking on “Designing Trajectories Through Entertainment Experiences”

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On Tuesday morning Steve Benford presented the entertainment interfaces keynote. He is interested in how to use computer technology to support performances. Steve works a lot with artist group, where the University is involved in implementing, running and studying the experiences. The studies are typically done by means of ethnography. The goal of this research is to uncover the basic mechanisms that make these performances work and potentially transfer the findings to human computer interaction in more general.

I particularly liked the example of “Day of the figurines“. Steve showed the video of experiences they created and discussed the observations and findings in detail. He related this work to the notion of trajectories [1], [2]. He made the point that historic trajectory are especially well suited to support spectators.

Some years back I worked with Steve in the Equator and we even have a jointed publication [3] 🙂 When looking for these references I came across another interesting paper – related to thrill and excitement, which he discussed in the final part of the talk [4].

PS: we had a great party on Monday night but the attendance was extremly good 🙂

[1] Benford, S. and Giannachi, G. 2008. Temporal trajectories in shared interactive narratives. 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, 73-82. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357067

[2] Benford, S., Giannachi, G., Koleva, B., and Rodden, T. 2009. From interaction to trajectories: designing coherent journeys through user experiences. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 – 09, 2009). CHI ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 709-718. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518812

[3] Benford, S., Schnädelbach, H., Koleva, B., Anastasi, R., Greenhalgh, C., Rodden, T., Green, J., Ghali, A., Pridmore, T., Gaver, B., Boucher, A., Walker, B., Pennington, S., Schmidt, A., Gellersen, H., and Steed, A. 2005. Expected, sensed, and desired: A framework for designing sensing-based interaction. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 12, 1 (Mar. 2005), 3-30. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1057237.1057239

[4] Schnädelbach, H., Rennick Egglestone, S., Reeves, S., Benford, S., Walker, B., and Wright, M. 2008. Performing thrill: designing telemetry systems and spectator interfaces for amusement rides. 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, 1167-1176. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357238

Opening Keynote of Mensch&Computer 2010 by Ed H. Chi

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Ed H. Chi from PARC presented the opening keynote for Mensch&Computer 2010. In the motivation of the talk he showed a document on “Applied Information processing psychology” from 1971 – probably very few had seen this before. It makes an argument for an experimental science that is related to augmented cognition. The basic idea is very similar to Vannevar Bush’s Memex – to extend the human cognitive power by machines (and especially computer technology). It is apparent that these ideas became the backdrop of the many innovations that happened at PARC in the early days.

Ed stressed that there is still a lot of potential for the application of psychological phenomena and models to human computer interaction research. As an example he used the idea that speech output in a navigation system could use your name in an important situation making use of the attenuation theory of attention (the cocktail party effect). By hearing your name you are more likely to listen – even if you are yourself in a conversation. The effect may be stronger if the voice is your mother’s voice 😉

The main part of the talk centered on model driven research in HCI. Using the ScentHighlights [1] examples he outlined the process. I liked very much the broad view Ed has on models and the various uses of models he suggested, e.g. generative models that generate ideas; or behavioral models that lead to additional functionalities (as example he used: people are sharing search results in google, hence sharing should be a basic function in a search tool). Taking the example of Wikipedia he showed how models can be used to predict interaction and growth. I found the question on the growth of knowledge very exciting. I think it is defiantly not finite 😉 otherwise research is a bad career choice. Looking at the Wikipedia example it is easy to imagine that the carrying capacity is a linear function and hence one could use a predictive function where a logistic growth curve is overlayed with a linear function.

Random link from the talk: http://mrtaggy.com/

Ed discussed yahoo’s social pattern library:
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/social/people/reputation/
This pattern library is pretty interesting. I found the reputation pattern pretty comprehensive. It seems that this library is now comprehensive enough for using it for real and in teaching.

[1] Chi, E. H., Hong, L., Gumbrecht, M., and Card, S. K. 2005. ScentHighlights: highlighting conceptually-related sentences during reading. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on intelligent User interfaces (San Diego, California, USA, January 10 – 13, 2005). IUI ’05. ACM, New York, NY, 272-274. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1040830.1040895

Talk at the University of New Hampshire, Durham

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Andrew Kun invited me to give a talk at the Univeristy of New Hampshire in Durham on my way back from CHI. The talk was on “Embedding Interaction – Human Computer Interaction in the Real World”. In the afternoon I got to see interesting projects in the automotive domain as well as an application on a multi-touch table. At CHI we ran a SIG on Automotive User Interfaces [1].

Seeing the implementation of Project54 live was very exciting. I came across the project first at Pervasive 2005 in Munich [2]. This project is an interesting example of how fast research can become deployed on a large scale.

Andrew chairs together with Susanne Boll the 2nd Int. Conf. on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications – check out the call for papers on http://auto-ui.org/! (deadline 2nd of July 2010)

PS: if you ever stay in Durham – here is my favorite hotel: Three Chimneys Inn Durham.

[1] Schmidt, A., Dey, A. K., Kun, A. L., and Spiessl, W. 2010. Automotive user interfaces: human computer interaction in the car. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI EA ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 3177-3180. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1753949

[2] Laslo Turner and Andrew L. Kun, “Evaluating the Project54 speech user interface,” Third International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Adjunct Proceedings), Munich, Germany, May 8-13, 2005

Our Paper and Note at CHI 2010

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Over the last year we looked more closely into the potential of eye-gaze for implicit interaction. Gazemarks is an approach where the users’ gaze is continuously monitored and when leaving a screen or display the last active gaze area is determined and store [1]. When the user looks back at this display this region is highlighted. By this the time for attention switching between displays was in our study reduced from about 2000ms to about 700ms. See the slides or paper for details. This could make the difference that we enable people to safely read in the car… but before this more studies are needed 🙂

Together with Nokia Research Center in Finland we looked at how we can convey the basic message of an incoming SMS already with the notification tone [2]. Try the Emodetector application for yourself or see the previous post.

[1] Kern, D., Marshall, P., and Schmidt, A. 2010. Gazemarks: gaze-based visual placeholders to ease attention switching. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 2093-2102. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753646

[2] Sahami Shirazi, A., Sarjanoja, A., Alt, F., Schmidt, A., and Hkkilä, J. 2010. Understanding the impact of abstracted audio preview of SMS. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 1735-1738. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753585

PS: the social event was at the aquarium in Atlanta – amazing creatures! Again supprised how well the N95 camera works even under difficult light conditions…

Work in Progress at CHI 2010

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It seems we have a lot of work in progress 🙂 and CHI is a great place to get feedback an talk to people about it.

Florian Alt and others from the summer school in Haifa pushed one of the ideas the developed there further. It is about interactions and technologies to motivate a more thoughtful handling of trash in urban areas [1].

Tanja Döring and Bastian Pfleging developed with Chris Kray in Nottingham the idea of tangible devices that have a functional core and a passive shell [2]. By this we image that future tangible products can be created by designers and developers with no need for the production of electronics. As a side effect this approach could make consumer electronics more sustainable – even if you like often new gadgets.

Together with people from DFKI Saarbrücken we explored the potential of a multi-touch steering wheel [3]. What gestures would you do to switch on your radio? How to interact with the navigation system? Such questions are empirically explored and presented in this paper.

How many people have a phone? How many people have a PC? It very clear more people have a phone than a PC and in particular in the non-industrial part of the world for many people the only computing technology available is the phone. We think there are ways to efficiently develop software using a phone for the phone. In the paper we explored a paper and computer vision based approach for software development on the phone [4].

Elba did field studies in Panama to assess the access of phones as educational tool to children [5]. She compared different parts of the country and did interviews with teachers.

[1] Reif, I., Alt, F., Hincapié Ramos, J., Poteriaykina, K., and Wagner, J. 2010. Cleanly: trashducation urban system. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI EA ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 3511-3516. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754010

[2] Doering, T., Pfleging, B., Kray, C., and Schmidt, A. 2010. Design by physical composition for complex tangible user interfaces. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI EA ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 3541-3546. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754015

[3] Pfeiffer, M., Kern, D., Schöning, J., Döring, T., Krüger, A., and Schmidt, A. 2010. A multi-touch enabled steering wheel: exploring the design space. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI EA ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 3355-3360. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1753984

[4] Pfleging, B., Valderrama Bahamondez, E. d., Schmidt, A., Hermes, M., and Nolte, J. 2010. MobiDev: a mobile development kit for combined paper-based and in-situ programming on the mobile phone. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI EA ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 3733-3738. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754047

[5] Valderrama Bahamóndez, E. d. and Schmidt, A. 2010. A survey to assess the potential of mobile phones as a learning platform for panama. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI EA ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 3667-3672. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754036

CHI 2010 – My Random Pick of the Day

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Harrison, C., Tan, D., and Morris, D. 2010. Skinput: appropriating the body as an input surface. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 453-462. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753394

Kramer, A. D. 2010. An unobtrusive behavioral model of “gross national happiness”. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 287-290. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753369

Brandt, J., Dontcheva, M., Weskamp, M., and Klemmer, S. R. 2010. Example-centric programming: integrating web search into the development environment. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 513-522. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753402

Sheng, S., Holbrook, M., Kumaraguru, P., Cranor, L. F., and Downs, J. 2010. Who falls for phish?: a demographic analysis of phishing susceptibility and effectiveness of interventions. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 – 15, 2010). CHI ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 373-382. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753383

EmoDetector App is online – Hear The Feeling of SMS

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EmoDetector, by University of Duisburg-Essen and Nokia Research Center, is an application that provides auditory cues in addition to the notification tone upon receiving an SMS based on a real-time analysis of a message’s contents, see [1].The application responds currently to the following characters sets:

  • 🙂 or 🙂
  • 🙁 or 🙁
  • 😉 or 😉
  • ok (case insensitive)
  • ?

There is a version for Nokia Series 60 phones and for Android, see the download site. Have a look at the http://www.emodetector.tom-lab.de/ website for more information.

[1] Sahami Shirazi, A., Sarjanoja, A., Alt, F., Schmidt, A.,Häkkilä, J.: Understanding the Impact of Abstracted Audio Preview of SMS. In Proceeding of CHI 2010, April 10-15, Atlanta, GA, USA

CHI 2010 – Opening and Keynote

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2343 attendees came to CHI 2010 this year to Atlanta. Participants are from 43 countries and the colored map suggested that a good number came from Germany. Outside it really feels like spring 🙂

Overall CHI 2010 received 2220 submission across 13 categories of which 699 were accepted. In the paper and nodes categories there were 1345 submissions of which 302 were accepted (22% acceptance rate).

Genevieve Bell from Intel is a cultural anthropologist and she presented the CHI opening keynote with the title: “Messy Futures: culture, technology and research”. She is a great story teller and showed exemplarily the value of ethnography and anthropology research. One very graphical example was the picture of what are the real consumers – typically not living in a perfect environment, but rather living clutter and mess …

A further issue she briefly addressed was the demographic shifts and urbanization (soon three quarter of people will live in cities). This followed on to an argument for designing for the real people and for their real needs (in contrast to the idea of designing for women by “shrinking and pinking it”).

Genevieve Bell discussed critical domains that drive technology: politics, religion, sex, and sports. She argued that CHI and Ubicomp has not really looked at these topics – or at least they did not publish it in CHI 😉 Here examples were quite entertaining and fun to listen to the keynote – but it created little controversy.

Zeitgeist, GNOME Activity Journal etc. – Workshop at CHI

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On Saturday there was a workshop on monitoring, logging and reflecting. Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One’s Life. In the workshop we discussed technologies and concepts for monitoring and using personal information. I started out with asking the question who knows what about you? The list is quickly growing (e.g. telecom provider, travel agent, super market, bank, mail provider, facebook, etc.) and so is the set of information they know about you. And it becomes clear that these entities keep a better record about an individual that the individuals themselves. Hence our central suggestion is that the user who is the one who could have easy access to all this information should make more of it and benefit from this information, for more see the paper [1] and the slides from the talk.

Zeitgeist Magic from Seif Lotfy on Vimeo.

There is more information about the workshop and the topic in general:

My pick of the contributions is the Dunbar email mining system from Stanford.

PS: CHI is good for your health 🙂

[1] Thorsten Prante, Jens Sauer, Seif Lotfy, Albrecht Schmidt. Personal Experience Trace: Orienting Oneself in One’s Activities and Experiences. CHI 2010 workshop on Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One’s Life.

Full Paper and Work in Progress at Percom 2010

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Together with Matthias Kranz and Carl Fisher we had a full paper at Percom 2010 – and I had the honor to present it [1]. The paper reports work that explored using the existing DECT (the wireless phone standard) infrastructure (available especially in Europe) as basic technology for localization. We compared DECT and Wifi and it is interesting that in most places you see more DECT based stations than Wifi. Overall it is a really interesting alternative to WLAN location.

From the joint work with Docomo-Eurolabs in Munich in the project AmbiVis we presented a work in progress poster. In the project we look at different options for visualizing context information – especially in ambient ways [2]. As display technologies we employed the Nabaztag and a digital picture frame.

[1] Matthias Kranz, Carl Fischer, Albrecht Schmidt: A Comparative Study of DECT and WLAN Signals for Indoor Localization. In: 8th Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (Percom 2010). IEEE Mannheim 2010, S. 235-243.

[2] Florian Alt, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Andreas Kaiser, Ken Pfeuffer, Emre Gürkan, Albrecht Schmidt, Paul Holleis, Matthias Wagner: Exploring Ambient Visualizations of Context Information (Work in Progress). In: WIP, Proceedings of the Eighth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, PerCom 2010. IEEE, Mannheim, Germany 2010

Keynote by Pertti Huuskonen: Ten Views to Context Awareness

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Pertti Huuskonen from Nokia presented his keynote at Percom in Mannheim. I worked with Pertti in 1999 on a European Project TEA – creating context-aware phones [1].

After telling us about CERN and some achievements in physics he raised the issue that an essential skill of humans is that they are context-aware. Basically culture is context-awareness – learning how to appropriately behave in life is essential to be accepted. We do this by looking at other people and by learning how how they act and how others react. “Knowing how to behave” we become fit for social life and this questions the notion of intuitive use as it seems that most of it is learned or copied from others.

He gave a nice overview of how we can context-awareness is useful. One very simple example he showed is that people typically create context at the start of a phone call.

One example of a future to come may be ubiquitous spam – where context may be the enabler but also the enabler for blogging adverts. He also showed the potential of context in the large, see Nokoscope. His keynote was refreshing – and as clearly visible he has a good sense of humor 😉

[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.

Opening of Percom, Keynote by Kurt Rothermel

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About 300 people are at Percom 2010, which is held in the palace in Mannheim – and amazing location! The conference had 233 submission and is truly international (1/3 of the papers come from Europe, 1/3 from America, and 1/3 from Asia/pacific) and highly competitive (acceptance rate of about 12%).

Kurt Rothermel from the University of Stuttgart presented the opening Keynote on Large-scale Context Management. He presented a set of interesting example from Nexus (Collaborative Research Center 627, Spatial World Models for Mobile Context-Aware Applications) that showed the challenge in large scale systems. The size of the problem is can be easily seen when considering that half the population of the planet is using a mobile device and hence needs to be located… Now imagine everyone is contributing sensor data at a rate of one update per minute… For more details on their work see their 2009 percom paper [1]. In his talk he gave also some references to other interesting research platforms in this space: SensorWeb/SensorMap by Microsoft [2] and SensorPlanet by Nokia [3].

[1] Lange, R., Cipriani, N., Geiger, L., Grossmann, M., Weinschrott, H., Brodt, A., Wieland, M., Rizou, S., and Rothermel, K. 2009. Making the World Wide Space happen: New challenges for the Nexus context platform. In Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (March 09 – 13, 2009). PERCOM. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 1-4. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PERCOM.2009.4912782

[2] Kansal, A., Nath, S., Liu, J., and Zhao, F. 2007. SenseWeb: An Infrastructure for Shared Sensing. IEEE MultiMedia 14, 4 (Oct. 2007), 8-13. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2007.82

[3] Abdelzaher, T., Anokwa, Y., Boda, P., Burke, J., Estrin, D., Guibas, L., Kansal, A., Madden, S., and Reich, J. 2007. Mobiscopes for Human Spaces. IEEE Pervasive Computing 6, 2 (Apr. 2007), 20-29. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2007.38

NSF/EU workshop in Mannheim

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Mohan Kumar and Marco Conti organized an EU/NSF workshop on Future Directions in Pervasive Computing and Social Networking for Emerging Applications. They managed to get together an interesting set of people and the discussion in the break out session were very enjoyable and I got a number of ideas what really are the challenges to come.

There are the position statements on the web page and at some point the identified grand challenges will be available.

PS: blackboards are still highly effective 😉

CFP: 2nd Int. Conf. on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

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The call for the 2nd International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications is online – see http://auto-ui.org – AutomotiveUI’10.

The conference will be in Pittsburgh on 11-12 Nov 2010.

Do not miss the submission deadline: 02 July 2010.

The call includes a wide range of topics, including:

  • new concepts for in-car user interfaces
  • multi-modal in-car user interfaces
  • in-car speech user interfaces
  • text input and output while driving
  • multimedia interfaces and in-car entertainment
  • evaluation of in-car user interfaces
  • methods and tools for automotive user interface research
  • development tools and methods for automotive user interfaces
  • automotive user interface frameworks and toolkits
  • detecting and estimating user intentions
  • detecting user distraction and estimating cognitive load
  • user interfaces for assistive functionality
  • biometrics and physiological sensors as a user interface component
  • using sensors and context for interactive experiences in the car
  • user interfaces for information access while driving
  • user interfaces for navigation systems
  • applications and user interfaces for inter-vehicle communication
  • in-car gaming

We enjoyed last years conference in Essen 🙂 There are several posts online in my blog and we had a conference report in IEEE Pervasive Magazine [1]. Last years proceedings are online in the ACM DL and on the 2009 conference website.

The full call for papers is online at: http://auto-ui.org.

[1] Albrecht Schmidt, Wolfgang Spiessl, Dagmar Kern, “Driving Automotive User Interface Research,” IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 85-88, Jan.-Mar. 2010, doi:10.1109/MPRV.2010.3.

Poker surface on youtube – 5000 hits in a day :-)

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A video describing the poker surface is available in youtube. It is an implementation of a poker game on a combination of a multi-touch table and mobile phones, for details see [1].

It is amazing how quickly it is picked up. It gained about 5000 views in a single day and it is already features in engadget.com, gizmodo.com, ubergizmo.com and on recombu.com. But as the comments on pokerolymp.com show the real poker players are hard to impress…

This really makes me think how research, publishing, and public perception of research is changing – rapidly…

[1] Shirazi, A. S., Döring, T., Parvahan, P., Ahrens, B., and Schmidt, A. 2009. Poker surface: combining a multi-touch table and mobile phones in interactive card games. 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, 1-2. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1613858.1613945

Heiko Drewes defended his PhD – Congratulations! (No. 4)

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Heiko worked the last 6 years towards his PhD. He did a lot of things during this time – and even though not everything was on his PhD topic – I think the time was well spent, e.g. some visually interesting things came out [1].

The core of his PhD was on eye gaze as an additional modality for human computer interaction and it is worthwhile to read the thesis (which will be available in a few weeks) – till than you can have a look at the following papers. [2] describes a system that positions the mouse pointer on touching the mouse to the location on the screen where look at; [3] introduces the concept of gaze gestures – gestures done with the eyes. There is an interesting alt.chi paper coming on Fitts’ law (don’t start Heiko on this ;-).

In the evening Raphael showed me his interactive surface prototype [4] – it is really big :-). He is also co-organizing a course on Sketching with Hardware.

[1] Heiko Drewes. Yara – Yet Another Random Art.

[2] Drewes, H. and Schmidt, A. 2009. The MAGIC Touch: Combining MAGIC-Pointing with a Touch-Sensitive Mouse. In Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC 13 international Conference on Human-Computer interaction: Part II (Uppsala, Sweden, August 24 – 28, 2009). Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 5727. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 415-428. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03658-3_46

[3] Heiko Drewes, Albrecht Schmidt. 2007. Interacting with the Computer using Gaze Gestures. In Proceedings of the 11th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September 2007, ISBN 978-3-540-74794-9, DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74800-7_43

[4] Raphael Wimmer, Florian Schulz, Fabian Hennecke, Sebastian Boring, Heinrich Hussmann. Curve: Blending Horizontal and Vertical Interactive Surfaces. Adjunct Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Workshop on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces (IEEE Tabletop 2009), Banff, Canada, Nov. 2009

Doctoral Colloquium in Bommerholz

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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

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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/

Invited Talk by Nicolas Villar

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Nicolas visited us in Essen to give the opening talk of our German meeting on tangible interaction. In his talk he first showed some examples of the hardware and sensors group at Microsoft research in Cambridge, most notably the SenseCam (which we learned is licensed and will be soon commercially available).

In the main part of the talk Nicolas presented a modular embedded architecture that allows developers to create custom made digital systems with fairly little effort. By integrating physical development (3D printing), functional blocks and software development the approach aims at empowering developers to create entirely new devices. His examples were impressive, e.g. creating a fully functional game console in a few hours.

Assuming that electronics become really small and cheap and that displays can be directly printed I can see that this approach makes a lot of sense – the question is just how long will it take before we rather use a (nowadays) powerful ARM processor, instead of a logic circuit with 10 gates. I would imagine that from a economic perspective it will less than 20 years before this makes sense.

We talked about energy harvesting and hier is a link to a potential interesting component: LTC3108.

Cloud Computing Reading List

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I recently got more often used about cloud computing and what my take on it is. So far I have not had time to write up my view but I can share at least my reading list on the topic:

Hayes, B. 2008. Cloud computing. Commun. ACM 51, 7 (Jul. 2008), 9-11. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1364782.1364786

Vaquero, L. M., Rodero-Merino, L., Caceres, J., and Lindner, M. 2008. A break in the clouds: towards a cloud definition. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 39, 1 (Dec. 2008), 50-55. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1496091.1496100

John Viega, “Cloud Computing and the Common Man,” Computer, vol. 42, no. 8, pp. 106-108, Aug. 2009, doi:10.1109/MC.2009.252

Lin, G., Fu, D., Zhu, J., and Dasmalchi, G. 2009. Cloud Computing: IT as a Service. IT Professional 11, 2 (Mar. 2009), 10-13. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2009.22

Voas, J. and Zhang, J. 2009. Cloud Computing: New Wine or Just a New Bottle?. IT Professional 11, 2 (Mar. 2009), 15-17. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2009.23

Grossman, R. L. 2009. The Case for Cloud Computing. IT Professional 11, 2 (Mar. 2009), 23-27. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2009.40

Weinhardt, C., Anandasivam, A., Blau, B., and Stößer, J. 2009. Business Models in the Service World. IT Professional 11, 2 (Mar. 2009), 28-33. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2009.21

Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Andy Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, and Matei Zaharia
Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing. 2009. UC Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory. http://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/publication/285