Paper Reading #25: Tagsplanations: explaining recommendations using tags

Title:
Tagsplanations: explaining recommendations using tags

Comments:
Cindy Skach
Michael Atkinson

Reference:
Vig, J., Sen, S., and Riedl, J.  Tagsplanations: explaining recommendations using tags.  IUI '09.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1510000/1502661/p47-vig.pdf?key1=1502661&key2=6271472031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=165.91.4.169&CFID=16209705&CFTOKEN=47524431

Summary:
Tagsplanations is a design implemented on a movie recommender website that not only made recommendations to users but explained why the recommendation was made.  This is the novel point about this design.  It is split into both relevance of an item and preference of an item.  For instance, if an item is similar in feature, the relevance would be high, but if the user preferred a certain type of item or brand, the preference would be high.

An experiment was conducted in order to see how users responded to the different types of recommendations.  The conclusions were that tag preference was more important than tag relevance.  Concerning effectiveness, the two were about the same.  For mood compatibility, relevance was rated higher.

Discussion:The thought of telling people why an item was put on the "items you may enjoy" list in my opinion would be a very beneficial idea.  For books on Amazon I can usually understand why they place the items there because most of the books are about computer science.  However when it comes to other items sometimes I am oblivious to the reason they appear on my recommendations.  Thus, this design I see as benefiting users.  The paper was well organized and it was easy to track what they did and how they did it due to the nice section headings.

Future work could include testing this design in more than one domain.  Since they only tested it on a movie recommendation website, they could try a site that sells accessories.

Paper Reading #24: Have a say over what you see: evaluating interactive compression techniques

Title:
Have a say over what you see: evaluating interactive compression techniques

Comments:
Cindy Skach
Luke Roberts

Reference:
Tucker, S. and Whittaker, S.  Have a say over what you see: evaluating interactive compression techniques.  IUI '09.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1510000/1502659/p37-tucker.pdf?key1=1502659&key2=1951472031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=165.91.4.169&CFID=16209705&CFTOKEN=47524431

Summary:
This paper goes over the idea of interactive compression (IC).  This is the process seen in Figure 1 of reducing the amount of content.  This is able to be done at different levels of compression which is different than most summary software, hence one can choose the level of compression wanted.  IC controls the amount of information a user sees.  It is split into two types in this paper: Excision - removing unimportant words or transcripts from a sentence and highlighting - keeping all the text there but highlighting important words. 

The researches did an exploratory survey in order to test the design principles in which they were interested.  The survey basically featured ways in which people skim a document and asked whether each way was helpful.  The results showed that users had a preference for word over utterance techniques for IC and that highlighting was also liked. 

The second study tested these findings in an implementation backed by the control of a regular full document.  It was found that the IC techniques made users skip over more important information more easily, but also allowed them to view documents faster.  Users also preferred IC to unmodified text.  Excision allowed faster reading than highlighting, but highlighting allowed the user to skip over less information. 


Discussion:
This paper was interesting.  I am definitely a skimmer, and I think if I had this software to skim the papers that we are reading I would be in good shape and would appreciate it so much!  Where is my copy?  But I like that they did two surveys and based their implementation on an initial survey rather than just going out and thinking of a design themselves.

Future work could be to the effect of summarizing.  They were railing on summaries, however if they claim their way is so much better, they must have some insight in to why summaries are weak and revise it.

Paper Reading #23: Improving meeting summarization by focusing on user needs: a task-oriented evaluation

Title:
Improving meeting summarization by focusing on user needs: a task-oriented evaluation

Comments:
Cindy Skach
Luke Roberts

Reference:
Hsueh, P. and Moore, J.  Improving meeting summarization by focusing on user needs: a task-oriented evaluation.  IUI '09.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1510000/1502657/p17-hsueh.pdf?key1=1502657&key2=8161472031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=165.91.4.169&CFID=16209705&CFTOKEN=47524431

Summary:
This paper deals with the idea of summarizing meetings, but not simply the meetings themselves, but specifically the decisions made in the meetings.  There has been much work on meeting browsers and search structures that allow people to search for a specific part of the meeting, but often the most important part of the meeting is a decision that is made.  There was a pilot study in which participants witnessed four meetings and were asked to summarize the decisions made in these meetings for upper-management.  The end design attempts to automate this summary.  The summaries were reviewed and an implementation was made through a meeting browser.

The results found that a decision summary model of meetings was effective in increasing the effectiveness of people trying to get an overview of the decisions of a meeting.

Discussion:
The outcome of this model makes complete sense, that it is quicker to get an overview of the decisions made in a meeting by having a summary of the decisions themselves.  I think the novel part of this paper was the fact that they realized from previous work that it is, in fact, the decisions that are the important part of the meeting, while they only take up a brief portion of the meeting.  The technology seems like a good idea for people who need to quickly find the summaries of a meeting.

Paper Reading #22: User-oriented document summarization through vision-based eye-tracking

Title:
User-oriented document summarization through vision-based eye-tracking

Comments:
Cindy Skach
Luke Roberts

Reference:

Xu, S., Jiang, H., Lau, F.  User-oriented document summarization through vision-based eye-tracking.  IUI '10.  ACM, New York.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1510000/1502656/p7-xu.pdf?key1=1502656&key2=6714922031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=165.91.4.135&CFID=17152168&CFTOKEN=47763320

Summary:
The researchers seek to create an algorithm that allows eye-tracking to aid in summarizing documents for users.  They go about this by estimating the average time spent on a single word in the documents the user is reading and extrapolate that data into the likely-hood the user will find a whole sentence interesting in summing up the probability the user will be interested in the single words of that sentence (as well as similar words).  A regular web-cam is used and it is calibrated by their own document viewer they made.  Once this is done the user is off to reading.

The researchers compare their results of summarization to two popular methods of summarization - Microsoft Word AutoSummarize and the MEAD summerizer system.  The experiment involved using sets of literature from science and leisure.  The results showed that this algorithm tailors better to the users preferences as compared to the other two. 


Discussion:
After reading the abstract I was very excited to read this article.  I thought it interesting that they were doing the algorithm based on single word time rather than something else such as time over a sentence in order to summarize the context of something.  I also was unsure of how the summary would go: would it be in whole sentences or just keywords?  I then found that it was because of the personal aspect of the algorithm, it is implemented in order to list in order the sentences that would be most preferable for the user to read. 

Not only is the idea behind this paper really interesting, but the way in which they approached the problem was really cool.  Also the fact that users rated their algorithm above the other two popular ones is a bolster to the credit of this report.  The paper itself was not extremely thorough in explaining all of the details of it all, but I am satisfied with that if I can go over the article and not get bored to tears over every inch moved by their finger.

Future projects that I could envision for this research would be possible linking this algorithm across different avenues of software in order to gain a greater understanding of the user, similar to how Google knows everything about us by our searches.  Through our web-cams, maybe it could also know all about what we are looking at.

Paper Reading #21: Towards maximizing the accuracy of human-labeled sensor data

Title:
Towards maximizing the accuracy of human-labeled sensor data

Comments:
Cindy Skach
Luke Roberts


Reference:
Rosenthal, Stephanie, and Dey, Anind.  Towards maximizing the accuracy of human-labeled sensor data.  IUI '10.  ACM, New York.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1730000/1720006/p259-rosenthal.pdf?key1=1720006&key2=7883922031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=165.91.4.135&CFID=17152168&CFTOKEN=47763320

Summary:
This study was focused on researching seeing the factors that influence the way people label things.  More specifically the study was related to the labeling of online content.  Some websites attempt to label their content through computer generation while others rely on user to label the data for them.  When the latter is done, there are usually many users who do this in order to increase the accuracy of the label.  The investigation focuses on uncertainty, amount and level of context, prediction of an answer, and request for user feedback concerning labeling.

The study was done to see the relation between people labeling their own data and labeling strangers data.  The result of this experiment found there was little difference in the way these labelings occurred.  The results found that there there were combinations of the focus of the investigation (uncertainty, amount and level of context, prediction of an answer, and request for user feedback) that would aid the most in maximizing labeling accuracy among users.  It was found that all these were important and helpful to generate more accurate labels on data.  The limitation was that providing additional information did not have an effect on their accuracy.  This was seen as a result of the user going in with notions based upon the raw data and didn't need to formalize any other thoughts in his head about the situation.

Discussion:
The paper began in utter confusion for me as I had very little idea what the paper was actually talking about until I was almost done with the introduction.  The title and abstract did not give me near the amount of information needed in order to understand in any sort of what what the study was trying to accomplish.  


Aside from that, the idea of labeling and the accuracy to which people do so reminded me of a few things I have done in school.  In my ecology class we all had to grade each others assignments online.  In order to calibrate our grading, we were all given three sample papers to correct and grade and off of that a program would analyze our conclusions in order to grade we should get on our papers.

I don't think that this study was important at all.  I didn't understand why they were doing it as they did not have a good explanation in any part of the paper.  I couldn't follow it completely.  I would say that for future work, aside from writing a decent report, would be to try and make an algorithm to better label instead of just having people label.

Paper Reading #20: Designing a thesaurus-based comparison search interface for linked cultural heritage sources

Title:

Designing a thesaurus-based comparison search interface for linked cultural heritage sources

Comments:

Cindy Skach
Luke Roberts

Reference:

Amin, A., Hildebrand, M., Ossenbruggen, J., Hardman, L.  Designing a thesaurus-based comparison search interface for linked cultural heritage sources.  IUI '10.  ACM, New York, NY. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1720005&CFID=5889600&CFTOKEN=71833395

Summary:

This paper attempts to lay a foundation for a search comparison algorithm specifically in the cultural heritage domain.  The researchers do this by doing two studies.  The first study was in two parts: a) to get a grasp on problems experts have when doing comparison studies, and b) to determine the realistic use of comparisons.  The second study was to test a thesaurus-based comparison module that would be able to search, select, and compare different artifacts in cultural heritage.

The preliminary study found that the problems experts are having in this comparison domain are name aliases, multiple languages, multiple terms, comparing many sets of data, single and multiple property comparison.  This finding enforces the use of a thesaurus based algorithm in order to categorize data.  The uses found were learning about collections, planning exhibitions, museometry, qualitative comparison.  This was accounted for by the comparison at the end of the program.  They used a program called LISA in order facilitate this process.

The secondary study brought experts together to test the performance of the LISA component verses the standard system.  Results found that the search, selection, and comparison process were interdependent with each other. For searching and selecting artwork, the design gave faster results than the current systems.  However, for comparison, the time speed up was not significant. 

Future work stem from the improvements seen needed during the second study.  They include a better implementation of the auto-complete ability, supporting interactivity visualizations, and providing bookmarking and search history storage.

Discussion:
While the idea was not relevant to any study of my own, I can see it as a beneficial application for those part of the domain of interest.  The idea of using a Thesaurus to assist in search could be really useful.  I think it is a design that could be implemented in most searches if it is not already.  Those algorithms would need to already have a low running time though.  It was interesting to see that the researchers expected search, select, and compare to be completely separate.  One thing they could do for future projects would be to expand their domain to a different field.

Paper Reading #19: Local danger warnings for drivers: the effect of modality and level of assistance on driver reaction

Title:

Local danger warnings for drivers: the effect of modality and level of assistance on driver reaction

Comments:
Cindy Skach
Joshua Penick

Reference:

Cao, Y., Mahr, A., Castronovo, S., Theune, M., Stahl, C., Muller, C.  Local danger warnings for drivers: the effect of modality and level of assistance on driver reaction.  IUI '10.  ACM, New York, NY.  http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1720004&CFID=5889600&CFTOKEN=71833395

Summary:
The researchers sought to find out what are the most influential, and thus safe, ways to communicate to vehicle drivers using Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS).  The study was focused on both modality factors (speech warning, visual plus speech warning, visual warning with blinking, and visual warning without sound cue) as well as the level of assistance, or whether or not action was prescribed or not.  An experiment was designed in order to test these questions.

In the experiment, subject drivers were put in a car with a projected image on the front windshield (a digital projection of a road) and the ADAS was mounted on the dash.  Drivers were to respond as they normally would in a driving situation.  The ADAS would communicate to the driver before the actual obstacle entered the view in the windshield projection giving the subject time to adjust to the navigation system.  The researchers recorded the behavior of the drivers in terms of obeying the ADAS, response times, and unsafe behavior.  

In the control experiment, without ADAS, all but one subject showed unsafe behavior.  The percentage of unsafe behavior with ADAS reduced from 19.1% to 1.4%.  Thus safe driving could be enforced using this type of ADAS.  Concerning modality, the combination of blinking lights with obstacles as well as speech provided the most usability for the user.

Future work includes actually projecting the images on the windshield rather than in the peripheral view of the driver.

Discussion:
From the books that we have been reading for class, it seems as though all of these peripherals in vehicles could be causing more distraction than production.  It would be interesting to add other distractions to the driver outside of the main communication of this system.  Possibly a passenger to talk to would show different results.  The use of a projected view of a road on the windshield could be a poor way of representing actual situations.  I think further testing should be done on a closed obstacle course which simulated a similar situation.

Paper Reading #18: Speeding pointing in tiled widgets: understanding the effects of target expansion and misprediction

Title:
Speeding pointing in tiled widgets: understanding the effects of target expansion and misprediction

Comments:
Cindy Skach
Aaron Kirkes

Reference:
Ruiz, Jaime and Lank, Edward.  Speeding pointing in tiled widgets: understanding the effects of target expansion and misprediction.  IUI '10.  ACM, New York, NY.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1730000/1720002/p229-ruiz.pdf?key1=1720002&key2=7482431031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=165.91.4.174&CFID=14048121&CFTOKEN=85270824


Summary:

This paper focused on the thought of speeding up the time it takes for a user to correctly press an icon in a tiled set.  Such as these are found in many modern applications such as file menus, functions, and widgets.  The researchers tested two cases: they wanted to know if target expansion would increase the accuracy, and therefore time, of the user to click an icon, and if so could an endpoint prediction algorithm coupled with expansion further increase this accuracy.  They performed two separate experiments.  One was simply based on the expansion of icons with a simulated prediction algorithm.  As it turns out this was the case (also observed by previous researchers).  The results revealed that the possibility of and endpoint prediction increasing this accuracy was favorable.  However, upon the second experiment of the Kinematic Endpoint Prediction, a common prediction algorithm, it was found that this did not increase accuracy of the user significantly over the control group.


Discussion:
I have not thought much of the idea of expanding icons.  I have used my roommates mac on occasion which has that feature for his programs bar, but outside of that I have no interaction.  I suppose I like the idea if it increases accuracy.  I feel as though it would be kind of annoying for experienced computer users in the same way auto-aim is a nuisance for experienced gamers.

From their paper I did not understand the difference between the simulated and the actual algorithm to find the endpoint.  The distinction wasn't found clear to me.

Paper Reading #17: A code reuse interface for non-programmer middle school students

Title:
A code reuse interface for non-programmer middle school students

Comments:
Cindy Skach
Luke Roberts

Reference:
Gross, P., Herstand, M., Hodges, J., Kelleher, C.  A code reuse interface for non-programmer middle school students.  IUI '10.  ACM New York, NY. http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1730000/1720001/p219-gross.pdf?key1=1720001&key2=3067331031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=165.91.15.179&CFID=15500876&CFTOKEN=20687613

Summary:
This system is an interface specifically focused on middle school students.  It looks to allow them to reuse code without programming experience.  One of the motivations behind this work was to encourage math and science in earlier years (especially among girls).

The interface is set up in three parts:

1. Record the execution of the program containing the functionality of interest.
2. Identify the beginning and ending of the functionality of interest.
3. Abstract the code responsible for the functionality by describing the roles that each character in the functionality plays.

The interface name was Looking Glass which was similar to a flash animation.  The user could create, manipulate, and animate 3-D objects.  In order to capture the code for reuse, the interface allows the user to click a 'record' button in order to capture an object's movement during animation run-time.  The user can specify and also narrow this time.  Once the appropriate portion of the code is captured, a new program is created and the action is associated with a new object of the new program.

There was a user test of 47 sixth through eighth graders attending the Exxon Mobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp which was for students with potential but at some risk of not being able to use that potential.  The study took four two-hour sessions to see if students could successfully integrate copied code into a new program.  It was found that 46 of the 47 students successfully did so.  77% of the students' code was longer than 5 lines, showing that there was a fairly high level of functionality in their code, i.e. it was not trivial.  The level of integration and complexity varied.  The authors concluded that this could very well be beneficial in order to grow interest in new programmers in an easily explainable manner.

Future work includes customization and modification of the script used by the users.


Discussion:
This is an interesting idea to get people more comfortable about programming.  When I took my first CS class, it was not very hands on, it was abstract, and the teacher didn't know what he was doing.  Something as simple as this seems to allow for a much more friendly and comfortable environment.  I would be an interesting intro class for a middle school class as it is atypical for middle school students to be programming.

It didn't seem like their findings were very conclusive simply because of the special students who participated in the study.  The researchers commented on this, but that still doesn't validate the findings.

Future work also could include a study of a wider range of students and from that tweak the interface to allow for easier understandability.

Paper Reading #16: Using fNIRS brain sensing in realistic HCI settings: experiments and guidelines

Title:
Using fNIRS brain sensing in realistic HCI settings: experiments and guidelines

Comments:
Cindy Skach
Luke Roberts

Reference:
Solovey, E., Girouard, A., Chauncey, K., Hirshfield, L., Sassaroli, A., Zheng, F., Fantini, S., Jacob, R.  Using fNIRS brain sensing in realistic HCI settings: experiments and guidelines.  UIST '09.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1630000/1622207/p157-solovey.pdf?key1=1622207&key2=5715740031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=128.194.132.227&CFID=14252216&CFTOKEN=68607047

Summary:

The researchers were interested in using brain sensors for HCI, and therefore conducted 5 experiments in order to see how these sensors could be used for HCI.  They claim many brain sensing mechanisms would be inappropriate for HCI due to their operation and vulnerability to disturbances, therefore the researchers chose to use functional near-infrared spectroskopy (fNIRS).  Using fNIRS, they sought to test the effects of keyboard and mouse input, head movement, and facial movement of a user doing a cognitive task on the fNIRS results.

For the experiments, the user was given a time of rest as well as a time of a cognitive task on a computer.  This task consisted of looking at a 7-digit number, waiting 15 seconds, and then recalling that number.  The five experiments are as follows:

0. No artifacts - This was to test if there was a difference that the fNIRS could pick up from doing the cognitive task and not doing the task.  It was shown that there is an observed difference between these two states allowing the experimenters to continue their experiments.
1. Keyboard input - Here in addition to the rest time and cognitive task, the user would type random letters using the keyboard.  It was found that whether doing this continually or intermittently they were able to pinpoint the cognitive task.
2. Mouse input - Here the user pointed and clicked a target on the computer.  The results for this experiment were not as conclusive as the keyboard input.  If a user is constantly using the mouse through both rest and the cognitive task, then the cognitive task was able to be distinguished, however if there was only intermittent clicking it could not.
3. Head movement - The clicking and keyboard input here is replaced by head movement.  The results were found to be exactly the same as experiment 2.
4. Facial movement - Here the facial gesture of frowning was studied.  It was found that if there was constant frowning then the cognitive task could not be pinpointed, but if it was intermittent then it could.  They claim this to be an interesting finding.

They analyzed these results in order to extrapolate the possible use of fNIRS in HCI.  A brief summary of the results are shown in Table 1.  For mouse clicking, typing, hemodynamic-response, eye movement, and blinking it is acceptable to distinguish in between these tasks and a cognitive task using fNIRS.  For Respiration and heartbeat, minor head movement, ambient light, and ambient noise it is appropriate using a certain correction.  Forehead movement and major head movement need to be avoided or controlled.

Discussion:

This was an interesting paper being as I just finished Obedience to Authority.  I had not previously seen a paper that is simply performing an experiment to extrapolate data to a larger context, and this provided a nice break from test cases measuring user ability.  The idea of using brain sensing technology for computing is an area that I think has great potential but seems by the results of this study to be too constrained to be useful for anything as of right now.  Also I can see wearing an article on your head while computing isn't the most desirable thing either.  Something like this could however be incorporated into headphones or something like that.

As far as further study, since this paper in a way lays the groundwork for use with this system, anything involving this technology could be studied.  Concerning the constraints of the system, the researchers could further study more possible ways to control these artifacts.

Paper Reading #15: Interactions in the air: adding further depth to interactive tabletops

Title:
Interactions in the air: adding further depth to interactive tabletops

Comments:
Cindy Skach
Derek Landini

Reference:
Hilliges, O., Izadi, S., Wilson, A., Hodges, S., Garcia-Mendoza, A., Butz, A.  Interactions in the air: adding further depth to interactive tabletops.  UIST '09.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1630000/1622203/p139-hilliges.pdf?key1=1622203&key2=7815740031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=128.194.132.227&CFID=14252216&CFTOKEN=68607047

Summary:
Hilliges et. al. are researching interactions in the air.  Regular tabletop or touchpad systems allow you to interact in a 2D surface, but this research goes beyond 2D and into the space above the surface.  This is done by using two cameras, an IR camera and a camera to record hand gestures.  This allows the user to do things in 4DOF that could otherwise not be done such as placing a ball in a cup.  A pinch is the gesture that allows an object to be picked up.

There must be a layering system in place similar to the ones found in Adobe Photoshop.  These layers constrain what can be picked up and where it can be placed.

After implementing the system, the researches tested user feedback from over 100 colleagues.  Based upon their feedback, they found that their system was not precise enough and sought to change that.  They were able to accomplish this, but it required slower movement by the user as the camera and algorithm combination was only able to pick up 30 Hz and a lower resolution.


Discussion:
This concept is important if accurate modeling is to be easily modified using surface interaction.  I like the idea, but the thought of having cameras above the surface limits its portability.  I would be interested to see people go about this design in a way that allows a device such as the ipad to have this interactive capabilities as it stands; without need for extra cameras.  I think that this could be a further area of research they could inspect.

Paper Reading #14: Bonfire: a nomadic system for hybrid laptop-tabletop interaction

Title:
Bonfire: a nomadic system for hybrid laptop-tabletop interaction


Comments:
Pape Youm
Cindy Skach

Reference:
Kane, S., Avrahami, D., Wobbrock, J., Harrison, B., Rea, A., Philipose, M., LaMarca, A.  Bonfire: a nomadic system for hybrid laptop-tabletop interaction.  UIST '09.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1630000/1622202/p129-kane.pdf?key1=1622202&key2=9957069921&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=165.91.14.231&CFID=12937478&CFTOKEN=50707220


Summary:

Bonfire is a system of two cameras, two micro-projectors, and a MacBook.  These devices interact together to form an interactive desktop environment paired with the laptop.  This is done in order that a fuller experience can be felt.  The system, by use of the cameras, is able to observe objects in the laptops immediate vicinity and appropriately suggest to start and stop applications.  For instance if headphones are laid on the table it could pause the music that is playing.  If a coffee cup is placed next to it it could calculate and project your current budget and calorie intake.

While there has been study on tabletop environments, not much study has been done on the interaction between these and that of say a laptop.  This approach increases the laptops interaction space without significantly increasing size or weight.

The cameras recognize gestures done by the user in appropriation with the projections on the table allowing clicking and dragging on the tabletop.  Background subtraction along with skin recognition is used to pick up these movements.

Future development could be the use of more cameras in order to capture more of the surroundings as well as user interactions.

Discussion:

This is an interesting design but looks a tad bulky to me.  Carrying around more components means more to lose and more to break.  I don't have a neat bag to carry my netbook in, just a simple one, and if I were to increase that to micro-projectors and cameras I think that I would be carrying too much "heavy" equipment that I could break.  Other than that the system sounds like a great idea.  I like the fact that they are increasing the usable parts of the persons environment at a minimal cost.  Bulky laptops can be a pain, and this could be one way of avoiding that while offering a unique display.

Paper Reading #13: Grassroots heritage in the crisis context: a social media probes approach to studying heritage in a participatory age

Title:
Grassroots heritage in the crisis context: a social media probes approach to studying heritage in a participatory age


Comments:
Angel Narvaez
Alyssa Nabors

Reference:
Liu, Sophia.  Grassroots heritage in the crisis context: a social media probes approach to studying heritage in a participatory age.  UIST '09. http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1753899&type=pdf&CFID=11175862&CFTOKEN=42077103

Summary:

The author sees the current trend in social media to be neglected by HCI in terms of retaining cultural heritage.  Liu states that it is important to pass on the this generation and future generations the crises of our time.  As media is no longer simply in the form of newspaper articles, online archives are needed in order to preserve this data.  Liu seeks to be able to curate this data in meaningful ways using "social media probes" which are directed questions toward certain historical events that a participant can collect online and preserve.

Discussion:
I left the summary fairly vague as was the article itself.  It was difficult to understand just what her probes were.  From what it sounded like, she would focus on one event and tell the participant to grab a certain number of meaningful articles and sources and then maybe some program or network would gather the data for retrieval at a later date.

It seems to me that if people were interested in doing this they would take it upon themselves to do it and not need a mediator.  If this is a program, they so often go out of date and are unmaintainable as new technologies replace them.  Digital media is vary volatile and difficult to keep due to computer failures and carelessness.  This is a problem that I don't see an easy solution to.  I'm not quite sure if that is what Liu was trying to get at with her paper, but that is the main solution I found from her paper.

Paper Reading #12: Disappearing Mobile Devices

Title:
Disappearing Mobile Devices

Comments:
Pape Youm
Luke Roberts

Reference:
Ni, Tao and Baudisch, Patrick.  Disappearing Mobile Devices.  UIST '09. http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1630000/1622197/p101-ni.pdf?key1=1622197&key2=0513948921&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=165.91.15.87&CFID=11175862&CFTOKEN=42077103

Summary:

Disappearing Mobile Devices focuses on technology becoming so small that it all but disappears from the visible.  This could come in the form of sensors on the skin or in clothing to control both input and output.  This technology is only theoretical at this point, so the paper explores how this technology could be used.  It also explores different forms of gesture representation by which the user could communicate with the technology.


There is already technology that allows for wearing part of the technology such as Linux watches and different handsets.  Also there are many gesture programs that are already in use in notebooks and PDAs.

The paper discusses input and output.  Relying on keyboard and mouse for input, a notebook is limited to the size of the keyboard, and output limited to the viewing aspect of the user.  In order to go micro, the input and output must change.  This could come in the form of audio input and output as well as feeling (sensational) input and output.

For these sensors, a new input language would be needed.  The article discusses a variation of Morse code using multiple finger taps, marking (use of directional multi-touch), and unistroke which is using one stroke to a letter.

The authors designed prototypes by using different types of optical and laser mice in order to simulate one of these sensors of the future.  There was a user study in which they used a G5 mouse with the idea of marking to see if they could indeed simulate this technology.  The study found a 4.8% error rate in the 8 directions given.  The results found that using marking would be a sound input for these mobile devices.

Another study was conducted for unistroke.  Participants wore a glove and used their whole hand in order to make the strokes as otherwise there was an extremely high error rate.  They compared EdgeWrite and Graffiti expecting the former to have a lower error rate.  The studies showed that this was, in fact, the case.

The paper showed that both these ways of input have potential for upcoming technology.  Future research is said to be on single pixel display.

Discussion:
The idea of the computer becoming invisible is an interesting concept as we may not have to worry anymore about misplacing our beloved items.  It also allows for more secretive procedures taking place.  The most interesting thing I found in the article was its brief discussion on sound input and output.  In my opinion that would be the quickest form of input as you would just have to speak.

For future research I think they could also do a user study using voice input in a type of Wizard of Oz study.

Paper Reading #11: Activity analysis enabling real-time video communication on mobile phones for deaf users

Title:
Activity analysis enabling real-time video communication on mobile phones for deaf users

Comments:
Shena Hoffmann
Derek Landini

Reference:
Neva Cherniavsky, N., Chon, J., Wobbrock, J., Ladner, R., Riskin, E.  Activity analysis enabling real-time video communication on mobile phones for deaf users.  UIST '09.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1630000/1622192/p79-cherniavsky.pdf?key1=1622192&key2=7683797921&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=165.91.15.192&CFID=9231901&CFTOKEN=19689043

Summary:

Cherniovsky et. al developed MobileASL for the purpose of improving real-time video communication of the US phone network focused on ASL signers.  Deaf people obviously cannot hear over the phone, so the developers sought out to make it easier for them to communicate.

The constraints of this type of technology include low bandwidth, low processing speed, and limited battery life.  In order to overcome these obstacles the developers implemented two algorithms for this purpose: region-of-interest (ROI) and variable frame rate (VFR).  ROI is meant to recognize the skin of the participant and make those aspects of the video appear more clear while making everything else (background, clothing, etc.) less clear.  This allows for clearer images on the things that matter in signing with the same bandwidth costs.  VFR raises and lowers the frame rate according to whether or not the algorithm recognizes the user signing or not.  This would involve much movement by the users skin.

There findings were based off of a user study in which 15 participants were a part of a total of 8 phone conversations.

The quantitative results show that the implementation of ROI and VFR can save considerable resources "without sacrificing intelligibility".  The user study found that ROI increases intelligibility and decreases guessing at higher ROI levels.  Users said that VFR was more difficult to use and interpret, however these findings were not statistically significant when paired with the intelligible conversation.

Future work includes recognizing finger spelling.  With this the program would ideally be able to speed up frame rate because of this.

Discussion:
The idea behind this application sounds like a fairly good idea.  Many may think that deaf people should not have a mobile phone, but as the article points out it is a great way to communicate via text-messaging.  That is very limited though.  There were two questions that were brought to my mind:

1. Does the device need to be set down on a table in order to be used (I would assume so)?
2. What if the user has dark skin?

Paper Reading #10: A screen-space formulation for 2D and 3D direct manipulation

Title:
A screen-space formulation for 2D and 3D direct manipulation


Conference:
Cindy Skach
Felipe Othick

Reference:
Reisman, J., Davidson, P., Han, J.  A screen-space formulation for 2D and 3D direct manipulation.  UIST '09.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1630000/1622190/p69-reisman.pdf?key1=1622190&key2=4113797921&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=165.91.15.192&CFID=9231901&CFTOKEN=19689043

Summary:
This paper explores the area of the shift from 2D to 3D Rotate-Scale-Translate (RST).  RST is the idea that one can do these three aspects.  Current models involve using fingers on devices such as the iPad in order to manipulate the display.  In 2D manipulation, there are informal standards that are applied when using RST, but since 3D manipulation is rare, there are no standards for its use.  The researchers set out to explore possibilities of understanding 3D RST.

Some current implementations of visualizing 3D surfaces involve rotating a 3D space about a fixed axis.  This requires about the same techniques involved in 2D manipulation, however limits the scope to which one can manipulate an environment as it only uses 4 Degrees of Freedom (DOF) when there is a possible 6..  Another such constraint is the use of a physics engine where physics regulates the actions you can do within a 3D space.  Both of these attempts are limited.

In an attempt to overcome these current interaction constraints, the paper shows many calculations which are meant to implore a system in which 6 DOF will be possible.  The rest of the paper describes the system they built.

The researchers tested their design against the current 4 DOF systems by putting constraints on their own system in order to simulate the 4 DOF.  According to them, there were no differences between these systems.  Upon testing their system in 6 DOF, using finger interaction they noticed that the motions were not immediately clear to them as how to interact with their system.  They developed tools in the form as hand positions to interact.  They first used a two-handed three-finger implementation.  This they labeled as the "swivel interaction".  The swivel interaction allows the user to pin the object to an axis with one hand (two fingers) and with the other finger rotate around that axis.  They also show a two-handed four-finger interaction.  This because of the arm and wrist movement needed was awkward but enabled a greater deal of variability in the actions one could perform.

They enhanced the system based upon their initial tests which included biasing calculations based upon finger placement in order to disambiguate close finger proximity.  They also added a swirl function in which the three-finger implementation could be used to calculate the initial motion with the free finger and if it then moved along a different axis to rotate accordingly.  They also worked with putting in penalties, or manufactured constraints in order to perform specific actions in certain situations.  This allowed user interaction to map in a simpler way, but did limit actions.

Future goals are to explore ways to make the interactions more predictable with as little intervention (penalties) as possible.

Discussion:
Aside from going into math that I was not about to follow, this paper provided a basis in which I feel I have a good understanding of not only their goals but also their outcome which is better than the other paper from this conference I read.  I like the idea of interacting with 3D places.  It reminds me of seeing holograms on movies and how they interact with them.  It would be awesome if that's what technology was moving towards.  Based upon this presentation I appreciate their correction in order to make things simpler rather than simply leaving it the way it is because of some "superior mathematics".  I would like to see if 3D space interactions such as this is ported to things like the iPod Touch.  I have seen some 3D engines running on it, but it was more a console way of interacting with the space.

Paper Reading #9: EverybodyLovesSketch: 3D sketching for a broader audience

Title:
EverybodyLovesSketch: 3D sketching for a broader audience

Comments:
Keith Farinella
Adam Fridli

Reference:
Bae, S., Balakrishnan, R., Singh K.  EverybodyLovesSketch: 3D sketching for a broader audience.  UIST '09. http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1630000/1622189/p59-bae.pdf?key1=1622189&key2=0861637921&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=8482942&CFTOKEN=22626933

Summary:

This article discussed the performance of the 3D design software EverybodyLoveSketch which was based off of the ILoveSketch.  ILoveSketch is a program designed for professionals, but the researches wanted to develope a program that was more suitable for all audiences.  The basic concepts were taken from ILoveSketch and implemented in different ways in EverybodyLoveSketch.  To test their design, the researchers studied the interactions of 49 high school students who used the software for 11 days.

The article first looks at perspective drawing and studies the way professionals come about doing actual sketches.  They shadowed and interviewed a few in order to get an understanding of how it works.  They noticed that an important aspect of every designer were the idea of linear perspective, convergence, and measurement which all use lines that are not actually part of the drawing in order to make things as they actually are and not how we have mental models for them.

 After this study, they saw their design goals for EverybodyLovesSketch as follows:

• Easy 2D stroke drawing
• Easy 2D/3D navigation
• Easy scaffolding or sketch surface definition
• Dynamic visualization of a perspective scaffold
• Easy Syntax

They explain how scaffold lines and perspective measurements are often disregarded by novice users because they do not know the correct way to use or create them.  A major benefit of EverybodyLovesSketch according to the article is that the program automatically can figure these into the design.

The interaction with the sketch surface was fairly complex but able to do significant things fairly easily.  Ticks allow the creation of a plane based off of a curve.  the axis widget, a small lasso, allows for the rotation of a figure.  Surfaces can be defined using loops to define the edges of a surface.  In addition to this, the surfaces can be configured to have a grid overlay which aids in the recognition of the dimensions of the surface.

The user evaluation showed that 96% of the students were able to successfully create meaningful 3D objects.  The first few days were spent in instruction and after that the students were given projects to deign.  The students were split into three categories based upon their ability to sketch on paper.  At the end the students filled out a questionnaire which asked questions about the program.  The feedback was greatly positive.  Many students felt their 3D spacial understanding has improved because of the use of the program.  Based upon these results the authors looked at possible future corrections for this system.



Discussion:
This article was very detailed and good for the total feel of how the user interacted with the system.  It was difficult to get a feel for how it was in a short period of time however.  Skimming the article did not give a great synopses of what they were trying to accomplish.  It seems like their goal was to make this application easy for novice designers, and while these students do seem to be novice designers, they all had experience in many design programs which may have skewed the results on their ability to create objects.  Nonetheless I like the idea of bringing programs down to easy usability while keeping the functionality.

Paper Reading #8: Shadows no. 4: belly dance and interactive electroacoustic musical performance

Title:
Shadows no. 4: belly dance and interactive electroacoustic musical performance

Comments:
Bain Mullins
Felipe Othick

Reference:
Hsu, Aurie and Kemper, Steven.  Shadows no. 4: belly dance and interactive electroacoustic musical performance.  CHI EA 2010.  http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1760000/1753929/p3117-hsu.pdf?key1=1753929&key2=7507917921&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=8252508&CFTOKEN=84510896

Summary:
Hsu and Kemper explain the Shadows no. 4 system.  This is a mix of belly dancing and interactive electroacoustic musical performance.  They did this by using a wireless sensor network on dancers in order to track movements and gestures of the dancers.  These sensors are small and light as they are able to be sewn into the garments of the dancers as to not limit the dancers movements.  These wireless sensors translate the dancers gestures into variations in the music through beats and rhythms.

The sensors themselves are LilyPad sensors.  These pick up on variations of flex, FSR, vibration, and acceleration.  The wireless capability started out as Bluetooth but the range and connectivity is limited.  They switched to 1mW Xbee modules to correct this shortcoming.

The future design goals are to refine the sensor network in possibly biosensors and/or motion capture.

Discussion:
This article didn't describe much of how the variations of music actually came about, but it seems that it is suppose to give more of a complete feel to the whole experience of watching the dancers.  I took a wireless networks class that focussed on wireless sensor networks so it was interesting to me to read a paper focusing on this topic.  It is a powerful technology, but it doesn't seem like it was used to its full potential in this paper.  With more and different sensors, it could pick up on the body temperature of the dancers, and it seems like the motion capture could already be possible (just not explored by them).  This paper reminds me of the Dance.Draw system.

Paper Reading #7: Ben Neill and Bill Jones: Posthorn

Title:
Ben Neill and Bill Jones: Posthorn

Comments:
Felipe Othick
Paola Garza

Reference:
Neill, Ben and Jones, Bill. Ben Neill and Bill Jones: Posthorn. Chi EA 2010. http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1760000/1753927/p3107-neill.pdf?key1=1753927&key2=1040217921&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=9150391&CFTOKEN=53800146

Summary:
This paper describes the authors' posthorn production.  This is a two part system.  The first of which is the mutantrumpet which is three trumpet horns along with a trombone slide all rigged into one instrument.  This instrument has both a microphone on the end as well as a device that maps the acoustics to MIDI format.  The digital part of this system has three programs:

1.  It has a program that grabs samples from the MIDI and compares that sample to the history of the musical peace which allows the piece to evolve in real time.
2.  A program grabs the sample sequences and processes the audio output
3.  A program translates the MIDI into digital video control (creating visual effects) in real time.

The second part of this system is the visual creation and display.  Based upon the various factors that come along with music, the visual effects are dynamically changed in real time.

Discussion:
The paper was very difficult to see exactly why this was created and what purpose they were actually using it for.  I feel like I basically understood what was going on, but much of the article is ambiguous.  When it talked about the visual aspect of the system it did not expound upon any sort of way how this was done.  I also have no idea why they did not simply take a regular instrument.

Concerning future work, I would say focus on the visualization based upon the input.

Special Assignment: Dr. Celine Latulipe!

Title:
Special Assignment: Dr. Celine Latulipe!

Comments:
Zack Henkel
Shena Hoffmann

Reference:
Celine Latulipe and Sybil Huskey. Dance.Draw: Exquisite Interaction. In HCI 2008 Proceedings, pages 47-51, The British Computer Society, 2008. http://www.celinelatulipe.com/Home/Publications_files/Dance_Draw_Paper.pdf


Summary:
The authors work to show their findings with the Dance.Draw system.  It is an inexpensive performance base system in which dancers use air mice in their hands to control graphics projected on a screen while they dance.  The system was developed in C/C++ to be operated on OSX.  The cost of the system is right at $1000 including six air mice and two USB stations.

The paper tracks three performances that took place at three different venues.  The reception was positive from the attendees but mixed from the performers.  The performers were distracted by the visualizations themselves (as they did not necessarily get a chance to watch them prior to the performance) and having the mice in their hands limited their mobility.

Their future work could involve different or just more input devices as well as more attendee feedback.  The feedback could be a part of the visualization.

Discussion:
I have a friend who is a dancer but is not techy by any means.  I think she too would like the idea of adding more of an element to her dance, but would be hesitant about the technology.  She also doesn't like restrictions, so probably wouldn't like holding mice.

I found the performances intriguing even though I was not present at them!  It was refreshing seeing computer science come together with such an art as dancing.  It was funny how the authors seemed to criticize the computer scientist designing the visualization.


Future work or application I could see for this would just be along the lines of the author says in more or different sensors.  It makes me start to think what else could we use things such as air mice for?