Methods for Studying Technology in the Home

Patient-Clinician Communication

Many People, Many Eyes

Chinese CHI

Work in Progress Poster

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Guest Speaker: Julie Kientz from the University of Washington

Tuesday (April 16) the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing group is hosting Julie Kientz from the University of Washington.

Date/time/location:
Tues. April 16, 2013 at Noon in 1255 North Quad

Title:
Understanding and Reducing the User Burdens Associated with Interactive Technologies for Health and Wellbeing

Abstract:
The use of interactive technologies to improve health and wellbeing has grown dramatically over the last two decades. However, there are many reasons why people still do not adopt different types of health technologies, including physical, mental, time, emotional, financial, and privacy demands. In my research, I have been seeking to understand and characterize these user burdens and design novel applications that can help to reduce them and improve access to healthcare. In this talk, I will first give an overview of studies seeking to understand the emotional, physical, and privacy burdens of interactive technologies. I will then describe the design and evaluation of three wellness applications my lab has developed in conjunction with health experts in which we have sought to reduce these burdens: 1) ShutEye, a mobile awareness display for promoting healthy sleep behaviors; 2) Lullaby, an at home capture and access system for monitoring the sleep environment; and 3) Baby Steps, an ecosystem of interactive tools for helping parents track developmental progress in young children. Finally, I will discuss future directions in helping to understand and reduce the user burden of health technologies.

Bio:
Julie A. Kientz is an Assistant Professor in the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in The Information School and Computer Science & Engineering and is active in the Design, Use, Build (dub) alliance. Dr. Kientz's primary research areas are in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, and Health Informatics. She directs the Computing for Healthy Living & Learning Lab, which focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating future computing applications in the domains of health and education. In particular, Dr. Kientz has worked on designing and evaluating mobile, sensor, and collaborative applications for people with sleep disorders, parents of young children, and individuals with autism. Her primary research methods involve human-centered design, technology development, and a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. Dr. Kientz received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008, was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2009, and was named her department’s Junior Faculty Innovator in 2012.

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Guest Speaker: Jason Hong from Carnegie Mellon University

Tuesday (April 9) the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing group is hosting Jason Hong from Carnegie Mellon University.

Date/time/location:
Tues. April 9, 2013 at Noon in 1255 North Quad

Title:
HCI and Smartphone Data at Scale

Abstract:
Today's smartphones have an incredible wealth of data about us: they know who we know, who we communicate with, what apps we run, where we go, and more. Altogether, these new capabilities offer us the opportunity to analyze real-world social networks and human behaviors at a fidelity and scale that previously was not possible. As such, mobile devices can be thought of as a new scientific tool for capturing and understanding real-world interactions, activities, and behaviors.

In this talk, I discuss three threads of work my colleagues and I have been investigating. The first is using smartphones to infer depression in people, by using smartphone data to infer social relationships, sleep patterns, and physical activities.

The second thread is using geotag social media data from thousands of people for urban analytics, to help people understand the character, structure, and dynamics of cities.

The third thread is understanding how to protect the privacy of individuals. I will discuss some of our work in using crowdsourcing to dissect the behaviors of apps and to build better summaries that emphasize unexpected behaviors.

Bio:
Jason Hong is an associate professor in the Human Computer Interaction Institute, part of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He works in the areas of ubiquitous computing and usable privacy and security. He is also an author of the book The Design of Sites, a popular book on web design using web design patterns. Jason is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, which focuses on the human side of computer security. Jason received his PhD from Berkeley and his undergraduate degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology. Jason has participated in DARPA's Computer Science Study panel, is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and a Kavli Fellow.

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Guest Speaker: Elijah Mayfield from Carnegie Mellon University

Friday (April 5) the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing group is hosting Elijah Mayfield from Carnegie Mellon University.

Date/time/location:
Fri. April 5, 2013 at Noon in 2255 North Quad

Title:
Analyzing Authoritative Conversational Language with Machine Learning

Abstract:
We constantly interpret social cues in our daily life - from members of other cultures, in new environments, and discussing complex topics. As common as these interactions are, it is no surprise that judging the authoritativeness of others is intuitive, almost automatic, for humans. For computational modeling, however, these cues are not so easy. My research builds sociolinguistic insight into machine learning, streamlining their theories when necessary and automating them when possible, to allow for patterns of authoritative behavior to emerge from large collections of conversational data. This talk demonstrates that authoritative language in conversation can be defined in a reliable way; that those cues can be reliably recognized using machine learning, matching human accuracy in judgment of authority and annotation of social behavior; and that the output of that prediction correlates with diverse outcomes, such as interpersonal trust, task success, and cross-cultural communication effectiveness. These results range across conversational domains, from controlled lab studies to the high stakes domains of healthcare and education.

Bio:
Elijah Mayfield is a Ph.D. student at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and a recipient of the 2011 Siebel Scholarship and the 2013 IBM Ph.D. Fellowship. His research focuses on using machine learning to better understand and recognize social cues in language, with an emphasis on authoritativeness, expertise, and empowerment. In practice, he is using these insights to improve understanding of real-world problems in education and healthcare. Elijah is also the founder of LightSIDE Labs, a startup in Pittsburgh, PA building platforms for automated assessment of student-written texts using machine learning. In 2012, LightSIDE was invited to participate in the ASAP Competition, held by the Hewlett Foundation and Kaggle.com, where those vendors demonstrated that the state-of-the-art in automated assessment matches human reliability. His work with LightSIDE has been highlighted across a variety of news sources including NPR Morning Edition, Education Week, and Science.

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Guest Speaker: Jodi Forlizzi from Carnegie Mellon University

Tuesday (March 26) the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing group is hosting Jodi Forlizzi from Carnegie Mellon University.

Date/time/location:
Tues. March 26, 2013 at Noon in 1255 North Quad

Title:
The Death of User-Centered Design

Abstract:
In this talk, I will share some nascent ideas about why and how the the field of HCI should move beyond user-centered design in framing problems and creating solutions. In the past three decades, topics of interest within HCI have migrated from usability of desktop computers for office workers to complex, societal problems including healthcare and sustainability. I believe that current HCI approaches, inspired by user-centered design, are insufficient to appropriately take on these new challenges. I propose, instead, that we take a service design approach and conceive of product service systems to look at problems holistically, and to consider the implications of what we might design.

Bio:
Jodi Forlizzi is an Associate Professor of Design and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, PA. She also leads the Human-Systems Interaction Group of the Quality of Life Technology Center, an NSF Engineering Research Center. Jodi is an interaction designer who examines theories of experience, emotion, and social product use as they relate to interaction design. Other research and practice centers on notification systems ranging from peripheral displays to embodied robots, with a special focus on the social behavior evoked by these systems. One recent system is Snackbot, a robot that delivers snacks and encourages people to make healthy choices.

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Guest Speaker: Dawn Nafus from Intel Research

Friday (March 1) the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing group is hosting Dawn Nafus from Intel Research.

Date/time/location:
Fri. March 1, 2013 at 11:00 AM (Space 2435 North Quad)

Title:
The Ethnomathematics of Algorithms: Sensors and the Problem of Little Big Data

Abstract:
Big data is a discourse that enables people imagine new ways that digital information can travel, connect people, and make meanings. The discourse brings together notions of the found object with a notion of the infinitely recombinable, as if all data were related to all other data if thrown into a cloud-like space and stirred around. In this discourse, data is assumed to lack boundaries, and meaning is assumed to be ready-to-hand, just round the corner with enough stirring. Yet it seems that just before the technology industry gets to that corner,it invariably calls for more context, as if adding “more context” were as simple as adding more data. Using an ethnography of home energy monitoring and health monitoring enthusiasts, I show how the cultural imagination of data's infinite recombinability encounters people’s practical experiences with sensor data. The anthropology of number shows that human sensemaking has much to do with sensor data’s linguistic properties. In Peircian terms, it is designed to generate “indexical” forms of meaning. For home energy and health monitoring, data’s indexicality both betrays too much and yet is never sufficient. Sensor data is both very big and very little at the same time. This expansive and yet myopic quality is the source of much consternation, as it forces users to encounter just how complex their own constructs of what constitutes a “healthy body” or an “energy efficient home” really are.

Bio:
Dawn Nafus is an anthropologist Intel, where she conducts social science research to inform new products and strategies. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Cambridge University, and was previously a research fellow at University of Essex. She has research interests in temporality and technology, innovation policy as belief system, and global processes of consumerization. Her areas of regional expertise are Russia and the UK.

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Guest Speaker: Rebecca Rhodes from University of Michigan

Tuesday (Feb 19) the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing group is hosting Rebecca Rhodes, a doctoral candidate in the cognition and cognitive neuroscience area of the department of psychology.

Date/time/location:
Tues. February 19, 2013 at Noon in 1255 North Quad

Title:
The role of prior beliefs and alluring information in everyday scientific reasoning

Abstract:
In this age of information, new research is reported to the general public on a daily basis. Whether it is an article about drinking red wine to lose weight or a friend telling us who we should vote for, we constantly encounter new claims that aim to influence our behavior. Research has suggested that vivid, anecdotal information may make claims more persuasive and may have an influence on our decisions. This body of research has yielded mixed results, however, and the conditions under which anecdotes exert an influence are unclear. My work examines whether anecdotes affect our ability to think critically about a claim and whether the influence of anecdotes depends on certain dispositional factors such as our prior beliefs.

Bio:
Rebecca Rhodes is a doctoral candidate in the cognition and cognitive neuroscience area of the department of psychology as well as a Master's student in statistics. She received her bachelor's degree from Texas A&M university in 2010.

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Guest Speaker: Jeff Bigham from University of Rochester

Tuesday (Dec 4) the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing group is hosting Jeff Bigham from University of Rochester.

Date/time/location:
Tues. Dec 4, 2012 at Noon in 1255 North Quad

Title:
Crowd Agents: Interactive Crowd-Powered Systems in the Real World

Abstract:
Over the past few years, I have been developing and deploying interactive crowd-powered systems. For instance, VizWiz has the crowd answer visual questions for blind people in less than a minute, Legion allows outsourcing of desktop tasks to the crowd, and Scribe allows the crowd to caption audio in real-time. Overall, thousands of people have engaged with these systems, providing an interesting look at how end users interact with crowd work in their everyday lives. Collectively, these systems illustrate a new approach to human computation in which the diverse and changing crowd is provided the computational support necessary to act as a single, high-quality actor. The classic advantage of the crowd has been its wisdom, but our systems are beginning to show how crowd agents can surpass even expert individuals on difficult real-time motor and cognitive performance tasks.

Bio:
Jeffrey P. Bigham is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester where he heads the ROC HCI Group. His work is at the intersection of human-computer interaction, human computation, and artificial intelligence, with a focus on developing innovative technology that serves people with disabilities in their everyday lives. Jeffrey received his B.S.E degree in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2003. He received his M.Sc. degree in 2005 and his Ph.D. in 2009, both in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington working with Richard E. Ladner. Dr. Bigham has won a number of awards, including the Microsoft Imagine Cup Accessible Technology Award, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award for Technology Collaboration, the MIT Technology Review Top 35 Innovators Under 35 Award, and Best Paper Awards at UIST, WSDM, and ASSETS. In 2012, he received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

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Guest Speaker: Jaime Teevan from Microsoft

Tuesday (Nov 6) the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing group is hosting Jaime Teevan from Microsoft.

Date/time/location:
Tues. Nov 6, 2012 at Noon in 1255 North Quad

Title:
Using Mobile Phones to Augment Face-to-Face Social Interaction

Abstract:
We see technology as hindering our face-to-face social interactions. Individuals feel isolated by their devices even when surrounded by other people. This happens despite the fact that many of the devices we have in social settings, such as smartphones, are explicitly designed to support social connections. Such devices focus on remote connections at the cost of our immediate social interactions. We try to mitigate the cost of technology in social settings by not using it when with others (“No phones at the dinner table!”). However, rather than fight the creep of technology into our face-to-face interactions, there is an opportunity to build solutions that embrace it. I will present what we have learned through the deployment of several mobile phone applications intended to make you happy when the person you are with pulls out their phone, rather than annoyed. Bring your phone with you to try one of these applications out during the talk.

Bio:
Jaime Teevan is a Senior Researcher in the Context, Learning, and User Experience for Search (CLUES) Group at Microsoft Research, and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. She studies how people use digital information, particularly as related to their social and temporal context, and builds tools to help better support these information interactions. Jaime was named a Technology Review (TR35) 2009 Young Innovator for her research on personalized search. She co-authored the first book on collaborative Web search, and was Chair of the Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2012 conference. Jaime also edited a book on Personal Information Management (PIM), edited a special issue of Communications of the ACM on the topic, and organized workshops on PIM and query log analysis. She has published numerous technical papers, including several best papers, and received a Ph.D. and S.M. from MIT and a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University.

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Guest Speaker: Prof. James Landay from University of Washington

Next Monday (Oct 15) the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing group is hosting James Landay from University of Washington.

Date/time/location:
Mon. Oct 15, 2012 at 10 am in 3100 North Quad

Title:
Balancing Design and Technology to Tackle Global Grand Challenges

Abstract:
There are many urgent problems facing the planet: a degrading environment, a healthcare system in crisis, and educational systems that are failing to produce creative, innovative thinkers to solve tomorrow’s problems. A balanced approach is required to solve these problems: a balance between design and technology, a balance between government policy and individual behavior change, and a balance between Western and Eastern ways of thinking. Technology influences behavior, and I believe when balanced with revolutionary design, we can reduce a family’s energy and water use by 50%, double most people’s daily physical activity, and educate any child anywhere in the world to a level of proficiency on par with the planet’s best students. My research program tackles these grand challenges by using a new model of interdisciplinary research that takes a long view and encourages risk-taking and creativity. I will illustrate how we are addressing these grand challenges in our research by building systems that balance innovative user interfaces with novel activity inference technology. These systems have helped individuals stay fit, led families to be more sustainable in their everyday lives, and supported learners in acquiring second languages. I will also introduce the World Lab, a cross-cultural institute that embodies my balanced approach to attack the world’s biggest problems today, while preparing the technology and design leaders of tomorrow.

Bio:
James Landay is the Short-Dooley Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, specializing in human-computer interaction. He is the founder and co-director of the World Lab, a joint research and educational effort with Tsinghua University in Beijing. Prof. Landay is also the co-founder of the dub group at the University of Washington. From 2003 through 2006 he was also the Laboratory Director of Intel Labs Seattle, a university affiliated research lab exploring ubiquitous computing. His current research interests include Technology to Support Behavior Change, Demonstrational Interfaces, Mobile & Ubiquitous Computing, and User Interface Design Tools. He spent his 2009-2011 sabbatical at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, where he was also a Visiting Professor in the Computer Science Department of Tsinghua University.

Landay received his BS in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1990 and MS and PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993 and 1996, respectively. His PhD dissertation was the first to demonstrate the use of sketching in user interface design tools. He was also the chief scientist and co-founder of NetRaker. In 1997 he joined the faculty in EECS at UC Berkeley, leaving as an Associate Professor in 2003. He was named to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2011. He currently serves on the NSF Engineering CISE Advisory Board. More information can be found at https://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/landay or by following landay on Twitter.

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Guest Speaker: Dan Cosley from Cornell University

Next Tuesday (Oct 9) the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing group is hosting Dan Cosley from Cornell University.

Date/time/location:
Tues. Oct 9, 2012 at 12 pm in 2255 North Quad

Title:
Big data as both a window and a mirror

Abstract:
People create enormous amounts of content in social media such as Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger -- and because these media focus on awareness and current activity, most of this content disappears under the sea of the new, never to be seen again. In this talk we'll explore how systems can re-use these data to help create computational, social science, and personal knowledge. We'll use case studies around collaboration in Wikipedia, making sense of relationships in Facebook, and supporting personal reflection using social media to illuminate major themes around re-using these past data, including the value of multi-method approaches, the need to consider what is left out in online contexts, the potential of helping people use these data to better understand themselves, and the value of doing work that combines research, commercial, and personal interests.

Bio:
Dan Cosley is an assistant professor in information science at Cornell University who does research around human-computer interaction and social media. His high-level research goal is to build systems that leverage people's pre-existing behavior in digital media to create new individual and social goods. These include SuggestBot, a recommender system that uses Wikipedia editing behavior and link structure to help contributors find articles they are interested in and that the community has marked as needing work, and Pensieve, a system that reminds people to reminisce and write about the past by sending them prompts based on content they have created in social media. This work is supported by a 2009 NSF CAREER grant. Along the way, he has studied a number of domains, including recommender systems, tagging, mobile interaction, museum informatics, and online communities. He values interdisciplinary research, sees research experience as a core component of undergraduate as well as graduate education, and prefers work that makes contributions both to academia and to society more broadly. He received his PhD in computer science in 2006 from the University of Minnesota under the guidance of advisors John Riedl and Loren Terveen.

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Guest Speaker: Oded Nov from NYU-Poly

Next Thursday (Oct 4) the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing group is hosting Oded Nov from Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

Date/time/location:
Thurs. Oct 4, 2012 at 12 pm in 1255 North Quad

Title:
Personality-Targeted Design: Theory, Experimental Procedure, and Preliminary Results

Abstract:
We introduce a framework for personality-targeted design, much like a medical treatment applied to a person based on her specific genetic profile. In a series of studies we examine the effect of the interaction between personality traits and theory-driven UI features on users’ online behavior, and demonstrate the effectiveness of interactionist design.

Bio:
Oded Nov is an Assistant Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He received his PhD from Cambridge University. His research focuses on motivational, dispositional and social aspects of information systems and social media. Dr. Nov is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

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MISC at CHI 2012

MISC members contributed to nine CHI papers and notes this year, and will also be participating in several workshops, three courses, and one SIG meeting in Austin, Texas. We also have two teams in the Student Design Contribution; come cheer them on!

Papers & Notes

Student Design Competition

Workshop papers

Courses

SIG Meeting

Book signing

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MISC End of Year Barbecue

MISC members had a wonderful end of year party, before many of us were leaving town for the CHI conference in Austin, TX. Thanks to Paul Resnick for hosting, and Jessica Hullman for organizing!

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MISC helps launch Coursera online courses

Two professors from MISC are among the first to offer free courses through a groundbreaking new service, U-M and Coursera announced April 18.

Clinical Associate Professor Charles (Chuck) Severance will present a class on the origins and technology of the Internet, while Associate Professor of Information Lada Adamic will present a course on social network analysis.

"A lot of the battles of our society will be played out over the Internet. It empowers people. If we have no idea what it is, how can we participate?” Severance said. “This course is hopefully going to make the average person far more curious, to want to make themselves more involved and a better network citizen. I want people to look at the Internet from the inside out."

An introduction to Severance’s course can be viewed below.

Adamic will focus on the analysis of social networks. "In this course, you will learn about the structure and evolution of networks, drawing on knowledge from disciplines as diverse as sociology, mathematics, computer science, economics, and physics," she wrote. "Online interactive demonstrations and hands-on analysis of real-world data sets will focus on a range of tasks: from identifying important nodes in the network, to detecting communities, to tracing information diffusion and opinion formation."

In the coming months, a total of seven University of Michigan faculty will offer courses on the site, covering topics ranging from finance to fantasy and science fiction. Coursera’s educational approach includes video lectures with interactive quizzes, mastery-building interactive assignments and collaborative online forums.

One U-M course already offered through Coursera is Model Thinking, taught by Scott Page, Professor of Political Science, Complex Systems and Economics. More than 50,000 people signed up for the class, which launched in February. So far, Page’s students have logged more than 1.2 million views of videos developed for the class. Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering J. Alex Halderman will also offer a course on Securing Digital Democracy.

"Our faculty members are eager to share their knowledge globally and our students are equally excited about experimenting with this new approach to learning,” U-M President Mary Sue Coleman said in a statement.

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SI Professor Paul Resnick releases Book on Building Online Communities

School of Information Professor Paul Resnick and co-author Robert Kraut, along with contributors Sara Kiesler, Yuqing Ren, Yan Chen, Moira Burke, Niki Kittur, John Riedl, and Joseph Konstan, has published Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design.

This book offers lessons from theory and empirical research in the social sciences that can help improve the design of online communities. The social sciences can tell us much about how to make online communities thrive, offering theories of individual motivation and human behavior that, properly interpreted, can inform particular design choices for online communities. The authors draw on the literature in psychology, economics, and other social sciences, as well as their own research, translating general findings into useful design claims.

The design claims follow a format familiar to former SI529 (and the prior SI684) students: Alternative X leads to Goal Y under Conditions Z or the comparative format Alternative X₁ is more effective than Alternative X₂ at achieving Goal Y under Conditions Z

For each design claim, the authors offer supporting evidence from theory, experiments, or observational studies.The book focuses on five high-level design challenges: starting a new community, attracting new members, encouraging commitment, encouraging contribution, and regulating misbehavior and conflict. By organizing their presentation around these fundamental design features, the authors encourage practitioners to consider alternatives rather than simply adapting a feature seen on other sites.

Jennifer Preece, Professor and Dean of the University of Maryland’s iSchool, says this is "the book we’ve all been waiting for. Students, faculty, and professional developers will learn how online communities function. There’s something for everyone--empirical findings framed in theory, and gems of advice. The authors are remarkable researchers, teachers, and leaders in the field."

View pre-print chapters on Robert Kraut's website or order the book on Amazon.

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Guest Lecture by Tawanna Dillahunt: "Engaging and Connecting Stakeholders around Sensed Data to Support Environmental Sustainable Behaviors"

Tawanna Dillahunt, a soon-to-graduate PhD student from Carnegie-Mellon University will give a guest lecture on “Engaging and Connecting Stakeholders around Sensed Data to Support Environmental Sustainable Behaviors.”

Tuesday, 24 April, 12-1 pm · North Quad 2245 · Light lunch will be served.

Abstract: According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Americans consumed 100 quadrillion BTUs of energy in 2008, with personal, individual activities accounting for much of this consumption. Over the past few years, I have designed, implemented, and studied interfaces that reward conservation behavior by sensing and presenting positive feedback about green transportation choices and home energy consumption. I will give an overview of this work and discuss details of two projects: (1) Ubigreen: a mobile tool for tracking and supporting “green” transportation habits and (2) Community Monitor: a home-energy monitoring application that allows community members to engage with one another to share knowledge and information; to compare electricity consumption; and to build community. My results demonstrate the impact of engagement around social sharing, specifically around community energy monitoring in residential communities.

I have also researched barriers and opportunities for saving energy in low-income communities and explored the impact of multi-stakeholder relationships, and socioeconomic factors on conservation behavior.

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Guest Lecture: "Does it matter where we test? Asynchronous remote user studies of digital libraries in natural environments"

Date and time: 02/14/2012 - 12:00pm
Location: 2245 North Quad
Speaker: Elke Greifeneder

Bio:

Elke Greifeneder is a researcher at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In her research she investigates the adaption and the validity of quantitative and qualitative methods for user behavior studies in remote environments, especially in the user’s natural environment. She has a strong interest in user-centered design of digital libraries and has carried out several user studies. She is associate editor of Library Hi Tech. Elke holds a Magister degree in Library and Information Science and French studies from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and will finish her dissertation this spring.

Abstract for talk:

Users access digital libraries from all over the world and at a time of their choosing. A methodological approach that allows researchers to create evaluations where participants can easily take part without being forced to come to a laboratory is desirable. In her talk, Elke discusses whether the data in a participant’s natural environment are similar to data from the same test in a laboratory.

Recent studies in Computer and Information Science compared data from laboratory tests with remote usability test data and discovered no significant difference between the two settings. But these studies created remote test settings that resembled virtual laboratories; they did not consider remote tests in natural environments. In a natural environment, people are accustomed to multi-tasking and, in consequence, are highly distracted. That means the assumption that laboratory data are similar to asynchronous remote test data might not be true for tests in a user’s natural environment, where researchers have no control over a participant’s other activities during the test period.

The talk discusses the validity of indicators like duration, success of task completion and ratings in a natural environment by showing the hard numbers researchers usually collect, and then illustrates these numbers with context information about what (really) happened in the test situation.

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MISC meetings in Winter 2012

We plan to keep the same day and time for MISC meetings (Tuesdays at 12 pm) as well as the same room (NQ2245). Stay tuned for information about events and talks!

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Guest Lecture by Amy Schwartz from IDEO

Lessons from the Field: What I've Learned from 25 Years of Usability Research.

Location: 2245 NQ

Time & Date: 12-1 PM, Nov 15th.

A cognitive psychologist, founder of IDEO Chicago’s User Research Group, and senior thought-leader in the company’s Health & Wellness domain, Amy Schwartz has over 25 years of professional experience in research, design, and innovation – 14 of them at IDEO. Working for a diverse set of clients—from small, not-for-profit start-ups to industry leaders like Baxter, Medtronic, Abbott, and Geisinger—Amy has contributed her innovative research methodologies and human insights to award-winning projects ranging from the design of surgical instruments and consumer health products to adherence strategies for the treatment of chronic illnesses, new services for retail-based health clinics, and the design of a medical simulation center for a major medical school. She excels in helping clients frame problems in new ways to inspire innovative design solutions.

Because Amy has worked closely with everyone from consumers, patients and their families, providers and their care teams, pharmacists, pharmaceutical companies, and payers, she has an empathic, holistic understanding of the entire modern healthcare ecosystem and the needs, desires, fears, and real- life contexts of a multitude of stakeholders. Amy’s current challenge: how to bring human-centered design-thinking to big, systemic health and wellness problems in the era of healthcare reform.

An engaging speaker, Amy has presented strategies for transforming healthcare and empowering both patients and care teams to the IHI Forum, ESOMAR Global Healthcare Conference, and AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting. She has also lectured on design research, health trends, and behavior change and adherence at Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, and the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation. Amy holds a PhD degree in cognitive psychology from Yale University and a BA in psychology from Columbia University.

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MISC at ACM ASSETS 2011

School of Information doctoral student Rayoung Yang will give a presentation at the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility in Dundee, Scotland on Monday, October 24th. Here is the information of the paper being presented:

Title: Supporting Spatial Awareness and Independent Wayfinding for Pedestrians with Visual Impairments

Authors: Rayoung Yang, Sangmi Park, Sonali Mishra, Zhenan Hong, Clint Newsom, Erik Hofer, Hyeon Joo and Mark Newman

Abstract: Much of the information designed to help people navigate the built environment is conveyed through visual channels, which means it is not accessible to people with visual impairments. Due to this limitation, travelers with visual impairments often have difficulty navigating and discovering locations in unfamiliar environments, which reduces their sense of independence with respect to traveling by foot. In this paper, we examine how mobile location-based computing systems can be used to increase the feeling of independence in travelers with visual impairments. A set of formative interviews with people with visual impairments showed that increasing one’s general spatial awareness is the key to greater independence. This insight guided the design of Talking Points 3 (TP3), a mobile location-aware system for people with visual impairments that seeks to increase the legibility of the environment for its users in order to facilitate navigating to desired locations, exploration, serendipitous discovery, and improvisation. We conducted studies with eight legally blind participants in three campus buildings in order to explore how and to what extent TP3 helps promote spatial awareness for its users. The results shed light on how TP3 helped users find destinations in unfamiliar environments, but also allowed them to discover new points of interest, improvise solutions to problems encountered, develop personalized strategies for navigating, and, in general, enjoy a greater sense of independence.

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Guest Speaker: David Millen from IBM Research

This Wednesday (10/12) the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing group is hosting David Millen from IBM Research.

Date/time/location: Wed. Oct 12, 2011 at 4 pm in 2255 North Quad

Title: Social Mechanics and the Social Business

Abstract: In recent years, we have seen a very rapid and widespread growth in the use of social software in enterprise settings. Increasingly, both large and small companies are using this social media technology to manage and influence relationships with partners, customers and employees. Social networking applications are increasingly being tailored for enterprise use: social bookmarking is combined with enterprise search to improve information seeking, social file sharing applications are improving resource sharing, and enhanced personal profiles are helping to locate experts and improve social interaction as a result of enhanced people sensemaking. In this talk, the lessons learned from several social software research projects sponsored by the IBM Center for Social Software will be discussed. In each case study, a venture research approach was employed in which an innovative new social application was designed and deployed at scale. Three main questions will be explored. How can we harness the power of “social recommenders” to simultaneously boost information visibility and allow personalized monitoring and filtering? How can we use social applications to better support a more global organization? And finally, how can we design socially synergistic systems to support innovation?

Bio: David Millen is a senior researcher at IBM Research and the Center for Social Software in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In his research he designs and builds new social software services, and explores the social, business, and technological implications of these new tools through large-scale field studies of use. Important projects include the Dogear Social Bookmarking System, the Beehive Social Networking Service, and the Cattail Social File Sharing System, which were all pioneering examples of social software designed for enterprise settings. Prior to joining IBM, David worked at AT&T Research and Bell Laboratories, where he explored how new technologies changed employee work activities, organizational roles, and patterns of communication. David has been an adjunct faculty member at Rutgers University and at Tufts University, where he recently taught a class on The Social Web. David holds a BA from Columbia University and a PhD. in Cognitive Psychology from Rutgers University.

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MISC at ICWSM 2011

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MISC at CHI 2011

Papers and Notes

Panels

Works in Progress

alt.CHI

Student Design Competition

SIG

Course

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GroupLens wins ACM Software System Award

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced that School of Information Professor Paul Resnick and his collaborators have won the 2010 Software System Award for their GroupLens Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems, which showed how a distributed set of users could receive personalized recommendations by sharing ratings, leading to both commercial products and extensive research.

The Software System Award is given annually to an institution or individuals recognized for developing software systems that have had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts and/or commercial acceptance. The award is based on work that Resnick and his group produced in the early to mid-1990s.

The GroupLens systems show how a distributed set of users could receive personalized recommendations by sharing ratings, leading to both commercial products and extensive research. Based on automated collaborative filtering, these recommender systems were introduced, refined, and commercialized by the team at GroupLens. They then brought automation to the process, enabling wide-ranging research and commercial applications. The team founded Net Perceptions, which provided recommender systems to leading retail and information companies around the world.

Recommender systems draw on machine learning, human computer interaction, ecommerce, information retrieval, databases, and other computer science fields.

Past winners of this prestigious award, which has been presented since 1983, include developers at Apache, Java, Mosaic, and Postscript. The first award was made to the developers of generic operating systems that led to the implementation of UNIX.

ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, providing resources that advance computing as a science and a profession.

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MISC at CSCW 2011

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MISC at GROUP 2010

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MISC students win first-ever Yahoo! Boost Award

Three School of Information students and their teammate from the School of Art & Design have won the first-ever Yahoo! Boost Award to continue the development of a custom multi-touch table and “Chance-It!” — an application that uses the table to explore aspects of the creative process.

SI master’s students Yi Wei Chia and Stan Lin, SI Ph.D. student Jessica Hullman, and their teammate Zhang Zhang were tapped to receive this unique award.

Their project was one of six GROCS (Grant Opportunities [Collaborative Spaces]) 2010 projects supported by the University’s Digital Media Commons this year. GROCS provides collaborative space, equipment, and funding for students to engage in interdisciplinary research of their own design. Approximately 50 projects are proposed to GROCS each fall, of which four to six are selected for funding. Another project selected by GROCS for development was Zydeco, which has one SI team member, Alex Pompe and one Computer Science and Engineering team member, Alex Kuhn.

The Yahoo! Boost award was created specifically to further the development of a GROCS project, according to Don McGillen, Yahoo! senior manager for campus relations. Most Yahoo! awards are for best projects; this is the only Yahoo! award to help develop a promising project.

The award will allow the team to move the project toward their goal to make both the table and the application accessible beyond the U-M community. Chia’s work this summer will include publishing construction drawings for the table and improving its software interface so that novice programmers can more easily develop custom applications for it.

“Conceivably, tables modeled after this one could become resources for schools or museums with relatively small budgets,” says Linda Knox, GROCS program manager.

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Night Beacon wins CHI Student Design Competition!

Team Night Beacon (Mike Harmala, Taeho Ko, Anna Jonsson, Garima Garg, and Yi-Wei Chia) won the CHI Student Design Competition in Atlanta, Georgia.

Over 90 teams entered the competition from around the world and Michigan was the only school with two teams selected for semifinals, Night Beacon and Mibo (Malhar Gupta, Katie McCurdy, Honor Potvin, Kimberly Eunkyoung Song, and Xiaowen Zhang). These two teams have been displaying their posters at CHI, the world's most prominent human computer interaction conference, along with 10 other teams. Night Beacon was among four teams selected for the finals, consisting of a short presentation from each team today.

MISC has historically had a very good showing in the CHI student design competition.

• 2009: SI students won first place with TreasureHunter, a project by Sang Koh, Amy Kuo, Debra Lauterbach, Noah Liebman, and Andrea McVittie. A second project, MIFresh, with members Maureen Hanratty, Geoff Ho, Jiang Yang, and Xiao Wei, took second. Three other MISC teams - WantKnot, LocalBuy, and eXtend - were semifinalists.
• 2008: doGooder came in second, and teams Portalis and Duando were semifinalists.
• 2007: altVerto won first place, and teams TxtBus and Carloop were also seminfinalists.
• 2006: Fitster placed third.

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Professor David Kieras Inducted into the CHI Academy

Prof. David Kieras has been recognized by the HCI community through his election into the CHI Academy by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). SIGCHI identifies and honors leaders and shapers of the field of human-computer interaction; its CHI Academy members are an honorary group of individuals who have made extensive contributions to the study of HCI and who have led the shaping of the field. Prof. Kieras will be inducted into the CHI Academy at the CHI 2010 Conference in Atlanta, GA.

David Kieras is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and of Psychology. His primary general research field is applied and theoretical cognitive psychology, with specific interests in human-computer interaction, cognitive simulation modeling, human performance, complex human learning, and natural language processing.

Prof. Kieras' most prominent contributions to HCI have come in the form of computational models of human performance, starting with his work with Peter Polson on the Cognitive Complexity Theory, epitomized by the classic 1985 International Journal of Man-Machine Studies paper, which provided a seminal application of production systems to produce quantitative accounts of performance time and knowledge transfer from one interface task to another. Viewing production systems as an implementation of GOMS models, he developed NGOMSL as a practical predictive notation to for GOMS models. With Scott Wood, he created the GLEAN system for computational simulations of GOMS models, and with Ruven Brooks he developed an approach to task analysis and the design of functionality based on higher-level GOMS models. With David Meyer, he developed the EPIC cognitive architecture to integrate perceptual, motor, and cognitive performance, pioneering the rigorous application of cognitive architectures to the fine-grain modeling of multimodal user interaction and multitasking performance.

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MISC at CHI 2010

MISC will be well-represented at CHI 2010, with 22 Michigan attendees presenting 4 full papers, 1 TOCHI paper, 2 notes, 2 student design competition entries, 2 works-in-progress, and 5 workshop papers, as well as organizing one workshop. We're looking forward to seeing many friends and alumni in Atlanta!

Full papers

TOCHI Paper

Notes

CHI Student Design Competition

Works in Progress

Workshop organizing

Workshop papers

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