Lightweight Material Detection for Placement-Aware Mobile Computing

Authors:

Chris Harrison

Scott E. Hudson

Both From Carnegie Melon

Comment:

Brett

Summary:

There are some devices such as mobile phones that will attempt to discover where they are located relative to the user, such as in the users home or car, and behave differently.  These sensing techniques such as using GPS are, as the paper describes, only sensing a small amount of the data available such as for example, whether the device is in the users hand or on the table.

While prior work has been done on this problem this paper describes a single sensor which uses the absorptive and reflective properties of the surrounding materials.  The sensor can be operated at around 94 percent accuracy and as they claim it can read in and decipher the data about the devices surroundings in 25 ms.

A user study was also gone which produced good results.  Although the technology is not yet perfect it shows some promise.  If this were to be implemented today the designer would still have to include an unlock button and could not rely solely on the sensor to know if the user is holding it or not.  I really liked this idea.  It only seems natural that humans act differently in different situations so why should devices not?  This doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to implement within a couple years.  I hope to see something like this soon.

Foldable Interactive Displays, UIST '08

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1450000/1449763/p287-lee.pdf?key1=1449763&key2=0408588621&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=76752576&CFTOKEN=55465958

Authors:

Johnny Chung Lee, Scott E. Hudson
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University

and


Edward Tse
Smart Technologies
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Comment:
Mike

This paper outlined the authors attempts to create flexible interactive displays.  This was done by placing tracking dots on the objects such as a scroll or umbrella.  The system would track the dots and adjust the image projected onto the surface accordingly.  The PixArt system was used to track the dots on the moving objects.  The image, as the paper described,  was created using an array of led's on the surface.  These led's would run for hours, powered by a small battery on the unit.

The older technologies such as LCD and OLED, while promising a small amount of flexibility, are still mostly rigid and rectangular.  This new system allows designers to create truly flexible materials.  With the tracking system built in a user could even use the surface similar to a touch screen.

I thought this was really cool.  I like the idea a lot.  It only makes sense that things would go towards being more flexible.  The idea of presenting an object with a changing display surrounding it seems really cool.  There are some worries though.  For example with these displays almost everything is now subject to advertising.  Do we want our coke bottle becoming an ad?  I feel like these ads could make the world begin to look like a giant ad.  It still remains to be seen whether or not this would be reality however.

Predictive text input in a mobile shopping assistant: methods and interface design, IUI '09

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1502650.1502714&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES823&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=IUI&CFID=76752576&CFTOKEN=55465958

Comment:
Patrick Webster

Authors:

Petteri Nurmi  Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Helsinki, Finland Andreas Forsblom  Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Helsinki, Finland Patrik Floréen  Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Helsinki, Finland Peter Peltonen  Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Helsinki, Finland Petri Saarikko  Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Helsinki, Finland The authors created a predictive text system for generating shopping lists on a mobile phone.  The system attempted to leverage the fact that people generally buy certain items together such as macaroni and cheese and ketchup, or peanut butter and jelly.  The system would look at what is already on the list and use these items to produce better suggestions for the user.  These suggestions were presented when the user pressed one key to start the word so if peanut butter is already present on the list when the user presses J, jelly will be presented at the top of the list instead of something else such as juice. A user study was done with the system where half the participants were given the predictive text system and the other half were given a standard system with no predictive text support.  The authors found that there was a significant increase in the speed using their predictive system, roughly five words per minute faster.  Some users were asked to user two hands to provide input while others were instructed on only use one hand.  This was to simulate the users at home, with two hands, and then in the store, with one hand.  They saw differences in speed between one handed and two handed use however these were both faster than the standard input method. I would like to see this application ported over to the Android and iPhone systems.  They were implementing it on a Nokia "dumb phone," but it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to port over.  I liked the concept.  Anything that helps me save time and do more is good by me.  Predictive text is alright as is but adding the extra contextual element seems like it would make a much more refined system.

A comparative user study on rating vs. personality quiz based preference elicitation methods, IUI 09

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1510000/1502702/p367-hu.pdf?key1=1502702&key2=9809528621&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=76752576&CFTOKEN=55465958

Authors:
Rong Hu - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Perl Pu - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)

This paper explained the differences between a ratings based approach to suggesting content and a personality quiz based approach to suggesting content to users.  A ratings based approach will rely on the user rating content that they had already seen.  For example if a user has seen movie X, they might rank movie X on a slider scale from 1 to 5.  The system will then react to the rating and attempt to show more or less movies similar to movie X.  In a personality based quiz method, the user will be asked many questions based on their personal likes or dislikes and suggestions will be provided based on these responses.

The authors chose two websites; MovieLens as the representative for the ratings based system, and WhatTorrent as the representative of the personality-based quiz approach.  They took these two sites and provided a similar interface into both sites.  Users were then put through the process on the sites and then took a survey on the users opinions about the suggestions given.

The researchers found that the personality-based quiz method generally yielded superior results.  The personality-based approach saw great strides in how interested the user was in the results(see below).  What was interesting to me however was that both system showed the same level of willingness to purchase.  The personality based system did see a stronger desire to show to friends however so from a business stand point the personality based system should still be seen as being superior.

I really liked this idea.  Now days there is so much content out there and I don't have time to sift through it all like I did back in High School so anything that helps me find content quickly is a positive for me.  I would like to see more work being done on this and hopefully it will result in better ratings systems.

IUI’09 Workshop Summary: Sketch Recognition, IUI 2009

In this paper Dr. Hammond describes the need for and the benefits of a sketch recognition workshop in IUI.  She outlines the fields and first points to a possible application of sketch recognition technology.  Her example, if implemented, would allow students to draw graphs or images in response to test questions and these images could then be graded automatically.  This would allow the teacher to give tests with more free response that could be graded in the same time it takes to grade scantron tests.

She also highlights the possibility of making a CAD program which would allow the user to directly draw their input into the program and CAD would parse that input producing a "pretty" image that takes advantage of all the features of CAD.

Programs and systems like these demonstrate the power of sketch recognition.  With many programs becoming very difficult to use with just a mouse and keyboard, harnessing the power of sketch recognition could help users get more done quicker.  I would no doubt support a workshop on sketch recognition.  As mentioned in the paper, the field should be further along than it is.  It seems like we almost never hear of anyone working on the problem even though the potential is limitless.  Hopefully the workshop gets accepted and we can see some greater successes from other sources as well.

Have A Say Over What You See: Evaluating Interactive Compression Techniques, IUI 2009

When presented with as many documents and written data as we are today, it becomes almost impossible for us to read everything line by line.  Many people are able to skim the document relatively quickly but in doing this much information could be lost.  Tools for what the paper calls Interactive Compression, IC, could greatly help the reader better identify important parts of the document on which to focus.  This paper highlights some functions and ideas from IC.

The paper attempts to identify effective principals for IC systems by looking at the following attributes; Comparisson with unmodiffied text, efficiency, accuracy, granularity, and interactivity.  Using these principals the authors identified the two best forms of IC, word excision and word highlighting.  Word excision will attempt to remove unimporatnt phrases and words where word highlighting attempts to hightlight the important words to aid a reader in skimming the document.

In a user study the word highlighting method was recieved better than the word excision method.  We can propose that while these methods are similiar it would be fair to say that a user would most likely desire to still have all the information presented to him or her so that they can read in more depth for certain sections.  This, while possible with word excision, is not as easy as with the word highlighting method.

The authors found that while some key elements were missed the systems as a whole were successful.  This was especially true when the users were looking for some element of text in a large document.  The scanning ability provided to them by IC allowed them to find it much faster.

I feel that systems like this could be tremendously usefull.  I am always behind on my reading partially because I have no time to get any of it done.  The ability to simply scan a document would be tremendously helpful to me.  I feel that the system could become greatly overused however and at times very key elements could be missed causing great losses to some people. 

You have to wonder, if these systems become popular, will they help the users by giving them more free time, or will people, thinking that we can now read more, just throw more documents at us causing us to be back where we started time wise.  Questions like this may make systems like this ineffective in their quest to give the user more free time.  With that being said, however, I would love to see an effective system like this come to frutition.  It seems like I could learn a lot more if I had these capabilities because I would be able to read much more and gain more usefull knowledge.  I would urge the authors to continue their work.

Emotional Design: Don Norman

Summary:
Emotional Design is a follow up to Don Norman's Design of Every Day Things.  The book takes a different turn where instead of focusing on the ease of use of a product it focuses on the emotional appeal of an object.  The emotion, Don argues, comes from many factors such as the visual appeal of an object.  He claims that visualy striking objects that invoke pleasent emotions in the user will be easier to use because the user will be more tolerant to faults in the system.  Systems without any visual appeal, on the other hand, will be less usefull because as using it the user will experience negative emotions causing them to notice and care about faults in the system much more.

Don argues that objects can also impose feelings beyond their visual appeal.  Some items can have emotional meaning because of a time they helped the user or for memories that the item invokes.  Items such as pictures serve no utliitarian purpose beyond looking nice and evoking memories but they are some of peoples most prized possesions.  He argues that even though they serve no apparent purpose these are the objects that people will run back into their burning homes to recover.

I personally didnt enjoy this book very much.  He made good points but it was difficult to refrain from comparing some of his statments to the previous book Design of Everyday Things and to observe how in many cases the books, both by Don Norman, contradicted themselves.  The lemon juicer on the front of the book is a great example.  In his first book Don would have argued that the juicer was not usefull because if it is actually used, the plating will get eaten away.  He would have most likely used his common derogatory phrase to indicate that it probably won a design award.  In this book however, the lemon juicer is praised for its visual appeal.

These contradictions seemed to cause a lot of trouble for me.  It felt like the credibility of the author was slipping.  While there were many good points made in the book it was hard to focus on them when it felt like he was routinely backing off on his main points from the first book.