Comments:
Ross Peterson
Summary:
The first chapter we read from HCI remixed highlighted a music system. The paper, written by the musician that used the system, gave high praises to the system and its easy to user interface. The author was very explicit regarding his love for the system and even went so far as to say that the engineers who designed this system knew more about HCI than anyone would for the next 60 years.
The second essay was about Sutherland's light pen system. In the 60's a researcher named Sutherland designed a system that worked somewhat like a CAD program. Using constraint programming he provided a light pen that a user could point at something that they were trying to draw and the computer would record the input that the user gave and display it to the screen. The impressive part of this program was that it set the stage for so much work in the future.
The third and final essay we read was in regards to the creation of the mouse and its initial demo. Written by an MIT graduate, the essay marveled at how good the demonstration was and how simplistic the mouse was. The author gushed over the creation of such a simple device and how it was presented with such modesty.
Summary:
This book and the three chapters we read were pretty interesting. I really liked the one about the mouse, the way it was presented was pretty interesting. The music chapter was pretty cool as well. Initially when I started reading it, I was concerned that it was going to be very boring and I would just have to get through it. The further I got in however, I realized that he was actually talking about something quite revolutionary.
The essay about Sutherland, while impressive, was somewhat boring. I found it pretty impressive that they had a light pen as early as the 60's but I would have to question its usefulness. I highly doubt that even the best systems of the day would have been unable to run the light pen smoothly enough to be worth anything though. I guess having the jump start would have been helpful though.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Opening Skinners Box
Ross Peterson
Summary:
In Opening Skinners Box, the author, Lauren Slater, provides a summary of 10 of the most prolific psychology experiments done in the past century. The title, Opening Skinners Box, is very misleading because while she starts talking about Skinner and his boxes the book quickly diverges off this path and discusses other experiments.
In her presentation of the experiments, she uses a point-counter point system that helped motivate the experimenters. For example when Harlow "proved" that a real mother wasn't needed, the field began searching for evidence to the contrary and Slater presented it as such.
The experiments ranged from Skinner and his boxes, to why no one calls the police when witnessing a murder, to Milgram's shocking experiment. Covering a diverse range of topics, Slater gives a great introduction into the world of psychology in an easy to understand and easy to read format.
Discussion:
I thought this was by far the best book we read this semester. While it isn't the most directly applicable, it is still very relevant to the field and opened my eyes to a different way of thinking when it comes to interacting with the user.
I really liked how Slater presented the experiments but at times I had to question her own sanity. For example when describing the experiment where the experimenter got a lot of people to purposely get themselves institutionalized, Slater decides to do this herself. Luckily she got turned away every time but it seemed like a few times she really took it too far.
Obedience to Authority
Comments:
Aaron Loveall
Summary:
The book was an ethnography on Milgram's shock experiments. Written by Milgram himself, the book goes into great detail regarding the experiments and their results.
For more than half the book, Milgram goes into great detail regarding his alterations of the experiment. From including more teachers, to more students, there were many variations off from the initial experiment. Each variation, of course, included some analysis from Milgram about what they might ahve meant and why they might have happened like they did.
The rest of the book was spent attempting to explain why the results came out as they did. He explained a few theories and put a considerable amount of effort countering some theories that would have disproved his results
Discussion:
I generally liked the book even though at times it was very bland. The variations of the experiments were pretty interesting to read about because it was cool to see how slight adjustments could result in drastically different results. The last part involving the thick psychological analysis, however, was not very interesting.
Near the end of the book, when Milgram was defending the ethics behind his study, I sensed that Milgram felt tired and just beaten down. It was as if so many people had questioned him that he was tired of giving the answer. His explanation just didn't seem to lack the fire that I am sure it once had.
Aaron Loveall
Summary:
The book was an ethnography on Milgram's shock experiments. Written by Milgram himself, the book goes into great detail regarding the experiments and their results.
For more than half the book, Milgram goes into great detail regarding his alterations of the experiment. From including more teachers, to more students, there were many variations off from the initial experiment. Each variation, of course, included some analysis from Milgram about what they might ahve meant and why they might have happened like they did.
The rest of the book was spent attempting to explain why the results came out as they did. He explained a few theories and put a considerable amount of effort countering some theories that would have disproved his results
Discussion:
I generally liked the book even though at times it was very bland. The variations of the experiments were pretty interesting to read about because it was cool to see how slight adjustments could result in drastically different results. The last part involving the thick psychological analysis, however, was not very interesting.
Near the end of the book, when Milgram was defending the ethics behind his study, I sensed that Milgram felt tired and just beaten down. It was as if so many people had questioned him that he was tired of giving the answer. His explanation just didn't seem to lack the fire that I am sure it once had.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Emotion Rating from Short Blog Texts
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1360000/1357229/p1121-gill.pdf?key1=1357229&key2=3377561721&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=86785888&CFTOKEN=56499296
Comments:
none yet
Summary:
The article presented a study done on how well people can perceive emotion with just plain text. The researchers recruited subjects to analyze some text and mark which emotions were put into the text. Some subjects were naive and some were considered experts at examining the text. The goal was to determine what qualities in the text would help the naive reader analyze it closer to what the expert reader may see.
They found that the best indicator of how close the naive reader would be is the length of the text. Shorter texts presented more challenges to the naive reader, presumably due to the smaller amount of clues about the writers emotions. The researchers also noted that naive readers also were better suited to matching with the experts on joyful emotions.
Discussion:
This study seemed a little boring to read however I get the feeling that it was only boring because it was clearly a preliminary study. The researchers are most likely looking at creating an automated system to analyze texts form for example the blogosphere, twitter, Facebook, or any other social application. To this end, this study would be very useful. An automated system would provide some of the best feedback to companies they could wish to get.
If I am right in guessing that the goal is to eventually create such a service I would be very supportive of their goal. I feel that something like this, while difficult, is somewhat overdue. It would be really nice to see this as a solved problem.
Comments:
none yet
Summary:
The article presented a study done on how well people can perceive emotion with just plain text. The researchers recruited subjects to analyze some text and mark which emotions were put into the text. Some subjects were naive and some were considered experts at examining the text. The goal was to determine what qualities in the text would help the naive reader analyze it closer to what the expert reader may see.
They found that the best indicator of how close the naive reader would be is the length of the text. Shorter texts presented more challenges to the naive reader, presumably due to the smaller amount of clues about the writers emotions. The researchers also noted that naive readers also were better suited to matching with the experts on joyful emotions.
Discussion:
This study seemed a little boring to read however I get the feeling that it was only boring because it was clearly a preliminary study. The researchers are most likely looking at creating an automated system to analyze texts form for example the blogosphere, twitter, Facebook, or any other social application. To this end, this study would be very useful. An automated system would provide some of the best feedback to companies they could wish to get.
If I am right in guessing that the goal is to eventually create such a service I would be very supportive of their goal. I feel that something like this, while difficult, is somewhat overdue. It would be really nice to see this as a solved problem.
Friday, April 16, 2010
“Human-Currency Interaction”: Learning from Virtual Currency Use in China, Assigned CHI '08
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1360000/1357059/p25-wang.pdf?key1=1357059&key2=4052441721&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=84571263&CFTOKEN=98591662
Yang Wang, University of California
Scott D. Mainwaring, Intel Research
Comments:
Nate Brown
Summary:
This paper outlined a study conducted on virtual money in China. The researchers interviewed 50 gamers about their experiences with virtual money. They wanted to explore the relations between virtual money and real life money and get a better insight into how people perceived virtual money.
With virtual money, eg WOW money, Q points, xbox live marketplace points, gaining a significant foothold into the gaming community it is important to understand the impacts that it has on the culture of the gaming community. In China a service called QQ is very large and offers things called Q points. The researchers, when interviewing their subjects, found that many young gamers regard Q points to be just as high as the standard real life currency. Some however, had a varied view. One respondent mentioned that while online money attempts to distance itself from real money, there is no real difference. When we spend virtual money we are still spending real money.
The researchers also looked into how gamers transfer this virtual money from one player to another. They found that many players didn't trust the internet infrastructure and therefore preferred face to face character transactions. The players would meet in real life and then sitting next to each other they would conduct the avatar transfer. While this may seem to be a negative side effect of an poor internet infrastructure, the researchers found that many gamers found this to be fun and exciting.
Discussion:
I think the study brought up some valid points but on a whole it didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know. I was really shocked at the story of the man who went to meet with a gamer to buy some stuff from him for 400 USD and was shocked to find that the other gamer was an 11 or 12 year old. I just find it hard to believe that people can get into these games that much. The feeling I got from this paper was that with these self contained virtual currencies it just makes it easier for MMO addicts to further withdraw themselves from the real world.
The paper only mentioned once that the community needed to make sure that a lot of care was taken to ensure that people were not being taken advantage of however I think more research should go into that sort of field. Many people fail to see that when they spend virtual currency they are really spending real money with a different label. We need to find some way to make this more apparent to gamers as a whole.
Yang Wang, University of California
Scott D. Mainwaring, Intel Research
Comments:
Nate Brown
Summary:
This paper outlined a study conducted on virtual money in China. The researchers interviewed 50 gamers about their experiences with virtual money. They wanted to explore the relations between virtual money and real life money and get a better insight into how people perceived virtual money.
With virtual money, eg WOW money, Q points, xbox live marketplace points, gaining a significant foothold into the gaming community it is important to understand the impacts that it has on the culture of the gaming community. In China a service called QQ is very large and offers things called Q points. The researchers, when interviewing their subjects, found that many young gamers regard Q points to be just as high as the standard real life currency. Some however, had a varied view. One respondent mentioned that while online money attempts to distance itself from real money, there is no real difference. When we spend virtual money we are still spending real money.
The researchers also looked into how gamers transfer this virtual money from one player to another. They found that many players didn't trust the internet infrastructure and therefore preferred face to face character transactions. The players would meet in real life and then sitting next to each other they would conduct the avatar transfer. While this may seem to be a negative side effect of an poor internet infrastructure, the researchers found that many gamers found this to be fun and exciting.
Discussion:
I think the study brought up some valid points but on a whole it didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know. I was really shocked at the story of the man who went to meet with a gamer to buy some stuff from him for 400 USD and was shocked to find that the other gamer was an 11 or 12 year old. I just find it hard to believe that people can get into these games that much. The feeling I got from this paper was that with these self contained virtual currencies it just makes it easier for MMO addicts to further withdraw themselves from the real world.
The paper only mentioned once that the community needed to make sure that a lot of care was taken to ensure that people were not being taken advantage of however I think more research should go into that sort of field. Many people fail to see that when they spend virtual currency they are really spending real money with a different label. We need to find some way to make this more apparent to gamers as a whole.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Relating Documents via User Activity: The Missing Link, IUI '08
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1380000/1378837/p389-pedersen.pdf?key1=1378837&key2=3852731721&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=81639924&CFTOKEN=12013848
Comments:
Aaron Loveall
Summary:
The researchers created a desktop sidebar tool that they called Ivan. The goal of Ivan was to help a user better access documents and files that were related to the one they were currently viewing. Living on a desktop sidebar Ivan monitors which windows are open at the current time and will display suggested documents that might be similar or somehow associated.
The idea is that many users often have trouble figuring out the proper location to put a file in and many times, when they hastily stow it away somewhere, they have trouble relocating the file. With Ivan this becomes irrelevant because the system should know that when a user opens a certain file they might also want another one and suggest these elusive files to the user.
Ivan operates by spying on the interactions between the file system and the individual open windows. This data allows Ivan to compile a list of related views for future display. Ivan doesn't know about anything that is going on inside the windows however.
Conclusion:
Personally I don't feel that I would get a tremendous amount of use from Ivan. I, and I would assume most other Computer Scientists, take great pains to keep out file systems very neatly organized. For many of our less technical peers however, Ivan could be of great assistance. I see it being the most useful in a business setting where for example you are on the phone speaking about a specific topic and need to open a document on the topic quickly. If you have something else about that topic open Ivan should already have the information in front of you.
This would be a good feature to include with an operating system. It would integrate well and be a nice selling point feature. I would encourage the researchers to see if Microsoft would want to include this in Windows 8.
Comments:
Aaron Loveall
Summary:
The researchers created a desktop sidebar tool that they called Ivan. The goal of Ivan was to help a user better access documents and files that were related to the one they were currently viewing. Living on a desktop sidebar Ivan monitors which windows are open at the current time and will display suggested documents that might be similar or somehow associated.
The idea is that many users often have trouble figuring out the proper location to put a file in and many times, when they hastily stow it away somewhere, they have trouble relocating the file. With Ivan this becomes irrelevant because the system should know that when a user opens a certain file they might also want another one and suggest these elusive files to the user.
Ivan operates by spying on the interactions between the file system and the individual open windows. This data allows Ivan to compile a list of related views for future display. Ivan doesn't know about anything that is going on inside the windows however.
Conclusion:
Personally I don't feel that I would get a tremendous amount of use from Ivan. I, and I would assume most other Computer Scientists, take great pains to keep out file systems very neatly organized. For many of our less technical peers however, Ivan could be of great assistance. I see it being the most useful in a business setting where for example you are on the phone speaking about a specific topic and need to open a document on the topic quickly. If you have something else about that topic open Ivan should already have the information in front of you.
This would be a good feature to include with an operating system. It would integrate well and be a nice selling point feature. I would encourage the researchers to see if Microsoft would want to include this in Windows 8.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Who, What, Where & When: A New Approach to Mobile Search, IUI '08
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1380000/1378817/p309-church.pdf?key1=1378817&key2=3643821721&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=81639924&CFTOKEN=12013848
Comments:
Summary:
The paper talks about a prototype for a new form of a mobile search engine. It argues that mobile device users, due to typing difficulties, will always provide short and vague search terms on their mobile devices. This means that the old searching model will become less capable of returning desired results. To rectify this issue, the researchers explain that more context sensitive data should be included with the search. Currently Google and Yahoo's mobile search takes into account the users location however, much more can be done.
The researchers created their own prototype for a search engine which takes into account more context sensitive data. Their search engine utilizes past queries to help make generalizations about the users preferences. The results page is a dynamic display based on this information.
Comments:
Summary:
The paper talks about a prototype for a new form of a mobile search engine. It argues that mobile device users, due to typing difficulties, will always provide short and vague search terms on their mobile devices. This means that the old searching model will become less capable of returning desired results. To rectify this issue, the researchers explain that more context sensitive data should be included with the search. Currently Google and Yahoo's mobile search takes into account the users location however, much more can be done.
The researchers created their own prototype for a search engine which takes into account more context sensitive data. Their search engine utilizes past queries to help make generalizations about the users preferences. The results page is a dynamic display based on this information.
As the figure shows the results are very dependent on physical location and previous searches. The queries are shown by yellow markers where the results are shown by red markers. The two sliders at the bottom will also affect the results of the qurery. The top slider is based on time going from earlier to now. This will base results on when queires were made. The second slider goes from broad to specific, modifying how much the results are affected by past queries and the search engines guesses as to the users preferences.
Discussion:
I think something like this could either be really cool or really annoying. The biggest problem with it is that it will guess wrong so many times people will always only use the now and specific slider positions, essentially rendering the added features useless.
I have noticed a little bit of difficulty in getting good results from broad terms on my phone and do see a need for some improvement. The locational features used by Google is really nice and I have seen a lot of use from that. It only seems natural to add more context sensitive data to the results we currently recieve. Hopefully this will be translated into something great and usefull.
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