Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

An ergonomic user interface supporting information search and organization on a mobile device

by Korinna Bade

Effective Data Mining Support for Personal Information Management

by Korinna Bade

Using Kinect to emulate an Interactive Whiteboard

by Mattia Avancini

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

by Marco Lazzari

Bill Tomlinson, Paul, Eric P. S. Baumer, Donald J. Patterson, Joseph Corneli, Martin Mahaux, Syavash Nobarany, Marco Lazzari, Birgit Penzenstadler, Andrew W. Torrance, David J. Callele, Gary M. Olson, Six Silberman, Marcus Ständer, Fabio Romancini Palamedi, Albert Ali Salah, Eric Morrill, Xavier Franch, Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Rebecca W. Black, Marisa L. Cohn, Patrick C. Shih, Johanna Brewer, Nitesh Goyal, Pirjo Näkki, Jeff Huang, Nilufar Baghaei, Craig Saper
"Massively distributed authorship of academic papers"
Proceedings of Alt.Chi at the 30th ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI 2012), Austin, TX, USA, 2012

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques... more Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.

Making Ourselves Useful: The evolution of HCI from a Formal to Practical discipline

by Maurice McGinley

draft.

Published histories of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have presented the development of the discipline from many... more Published histories of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have presented the development of the discipline from many perspectives, including that of interaction technology, academic disciplines, professional entities, and models of the user. Starting from the constructivist epistemological premise that knowledge cannot be divorced from social context, this article analyses the practical concerns that formed the discipline of HCI and the social context in which the discipline continues to find its relevance.

A historical survey of the development of HCI considers the context within which the discipline of HCI is most frequently practiced: computer (software and hardware) projects. A key theme in this history is shown to be a need for responsiveness to changing understandings of user requirements. The scope of consideration is then expanded to include the contexts of application domains, technology, and society. It is proposed that, considered within these broader contexts, the trajectory of development of HCI can be discerned as a movement from Formal to Practical methods, and the implications for HCI practitioners are discussed.

Analysis in Practical Usability Evaluation: A Survey Study

by Asbjørn Følstad

Følstad, A., Law, E.L.-C., Hornbæk, K. (2012) Analysis in practical usability evaluation: A survey study. In: Proceedings of CHI '12 (p. 2127-2136), ACM Press, New York, NY. ISBN: 978-1-4503-1015-4.

Analysis is a key part of conducting usability evaluations, yet rarely systematically studied. Thus, we lack direction... more Analysis is a key part of conducting usability evaluations, yet rarely systematically studied. Thus, we lack direction on how to do research on supporting practitioners’ analysis and lose an opportunity for practitioners to learn from each other. We have surveyed 155 usability practitioners on the analysis in their latest usability evaluation. Analysis is typically flexible and light-weight. At the same time, practitioners see a need to strengthen reliability in evaluation. Redesign is closely integrated with analysis; more than half of the respondents provide visual redesign suggestions in their evaluation deliverables. Analysis support from academic research, including tools, forms and structured formats, does not seem to have direct impact on analysis practice. We provide six recommendations for future research to better support analysis.

The “One-Person Choir”: a multidisciplinary approach to the development of an embodied human–Computer interface

by Pieter-Jan Maes

The “One-Person Choir” is a human–computer interface for singers that facilitates gestural control over a digital... more The “One-Person Choir” is a human–computer interface for singers that facilitates gestural control over a digital signal processing (DSP) module for harmonizing the singing voice in real time (see Figure 1). Harmonization adds extra pitch-shifted voices that are tonally related to the input voice. The interface captures global movements of the upper limbs by means of an integrated network of inertial sensors attached to the upper body of a singer. From these data, gestural cues are extracted and compared with a preconfigured gestural model that has been trained with empirical data. When the gestures of the singer match the preconfigured model, it is possible to control the harmonization of the singing input voice captured by a microphone. Thus, the interface allows a singer to naturally enhance the expressive qualities of his or her voice with the assistance of expressive gestures connected to an electronic environment. The One-Person Choir can be integrated in interactive multimedia installations that exploit the expressive power of gestures in combination with singing. As will be argued in this article, installations illustrate, and elaborate on, an ongoing shift in contemporary electronic and electroacoustic music: the move from interactive systems (or hyperinstruments) to composing interactions (Di Scipio 2003).

Dragonfly: An Ecological Approach to Digital Architectural Design

by Michael J. Braund

Published in ACADIA 2011: Integration Through Computation, ed. by J.M. Taron, V. Parlac, B. Kolarevic and J.S. Johnson, pp.178-186. Stroughton, WI: The Printing House, 2011.

(Co-authored with Daniel Hambleton)

In his keynote address delivered to The American Society for Esthetics in 1976, James J. Gibson wrote, “Architecture... more In his keynote address delivered to The American Society for Esthetics in 1976, James J. Gibson wrote, “Architecture and design do not have a satisfactory theoretical basis.” He then asked, “Can an ecological approach to the psychology of perception and behavior provide it?” (1976, p. 413) We believe that it can, at least in part. In this paper, we expand upon Gibson’s insights into the nature of perceptual experience by applying the concept of “affordances” to the design of architectural objects in general, and to the domain of digital architectural design in particular. On our account, the affordance-concept supplies a useful theoretical basis for conceptualizing the relationship between environments and occupants with respect to the form and behavioral meaning of geometrically constructed layouts.

Donald Norman (1988) first introduced affordances to interaction design theorists, as a conceptual tool for predicting how agents will interact with a given product. The extensive body of literature that has since emerged, from human-computer-interaction studies (Ackerman, 1996; Conn, 1995; Moran, 1997; Norman, 1999) to architectural theory and practice (Koutamanis, 2006; Maier and Fadel, 2009), has followed Norman’s lead in defining affordances, somewhat amorphously, as whichever action-related properties of objects are sufficient to elicit the intended forms of behavioral interaction between the agent and object. However, while this is correct, it is only half the story. It leaves unexplained how human perceivers detect and “pair down” on the potentially vast range of possible affordances (at a given time), to select the ones that will be relevant to the coordination and guidance of the targeted actions. Call this the “selectivity problem,” a proper treatment of which is missing from the literature. This is no small matter. If the theory of affordances is to be useful to architects and designers, if it is to have explanatory and predictive power over how perceivers will interact with their surroundings, then some account of the cognitive procedure by which affordances are selected for the deployment of specific behaviors is necessary. Otherwise, it is unclear what the theory hopes to predict or explain.

To this end, we maintain that the couching of affordances in a framework of human intentionality is not only consistent with Gibson’s theoretical views (i.e., the action-oriented definition of the concept of affordances not only suggests an intentional perspective), indeed, such a perspective is necessary if we are to succeed in implementing the affordance-concept into an architectural design context in a way that addresses the selectivity problem. This is one of the goals of “Dragonfly,” a first attempt at implementing the affordance-based control of perceptually guided-action into a digital design simulation. Dragonfly enables human interaction with geometry by encoding the basic principles of ecological psychology (including a rudimentary form of intentionality) into an interactive CAD environment. New vistas for future research and interdisciplinary approaches to design are then discussed, with a special emphasis on their applicability to architecture.

From Guinea Pigs to Design Partners: Working with Older People in ICT Design

by Sarah Lewthwaite

Edlin-White, R., Cobb, S., Floyde, A., Lewthwaite, S., Wang, J. and Riedel, J. (2012) From Guinea Pigs to Design Partners: Working with Older People in ICT Design IN Langdon, et al. (eds.) Designing Inclusive Systems. Springer London.

Governments worldwide are recognising the reality and challenges of aging societies. Aging is often accompanied by... more Governments worldwide are recognising the reality and challenges of aging societies. Aging is often accompanied by increased incidence of impairments in the physio-motor, sensory and cognitive domains, as well as health problems, reduced socialisation, poorer finances, reduced sense of purpose and sometimes marginalisation from society. Technology can be very beneficial for older people but is too often problematical, sometimes creating digital exclusion

From Artificial Life to Artificial Embodiment: Using human-computer interfaces to investigate the embodied mind ‘as-it-could-be’ from the first-person perspective

by Tom Froese

DSL self installation: From impossibility to ubiquity.

by Rebecca Grier

Coauthored with Kortum, P., Grier, R.A., & Sullivan, M. Published in Interfaces, 80, p. 12-15.

An exploration of user engagement in HCI

by Christopher Edward Peters

Peters, C., Castellano, G. and de Freitas, S. "An exploration of user engagement in HCI", Proceedings of the Affect-Aware Virtual Agents and Social Robots (AFFINE) Workshop, International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction (ICMI-MLMI'09), Boston, MA, USA, November 6, 2009. ACM 978-1-60558-692-2-1/09/11
Bibtex available here: http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ec/~cpeters/bibtex/bibtex.html#AFFINE2009

Engagement is a concept of the utmost importance in human computer interaction, not only for informing the design and... more Engagement is a concept of the utmost importance in human computer interaction, not only for informing the design and implementation of interfaces, but also for enabling more sophisticated interfaces capable of adapting to users. While the notion of engagement is actively being studied in a diverse set of domains, the term has been used to refer to a number of related, but different concepts. This paper represents a first attempt at exploring a number of important concepts that the term has been used to refer to, of relevance to both human-human and human-machine interaction modelling.

Expressive copying behavior for socially interacting machines: A perceptual analysis

by Christopher Edward Peters

Castellano, G., Mancini, M., Peters, C., and McOwan, P. W. "Expressive copying behavior for socially interacting machines: A perceptual analysis", IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans, to appear: 2012 doi: 10.1109 / TSMCA.2011.2172415

Successful human interaction commonly involves prototypical exchanges where interactors are engaged, synchronized and... more Successful human interaction commonly involves prototypical exchanges where interactors are engaged, synchronized and harmonious in their behaviors. The copying of aspects of the other’s behavior, at different levels, seems central to establishing and maintaining such empathic connections. Yet many questions remain unanswered, in particular, how it is possible to reflect the same affective content back to the other when the actual motion itself is not exactly the same as theirs. This work presents a perceptual study in which emotional gestures conducted by an actor were mapped onto synthesized versions generated by an embodied virtual agent. Copying is at the expressive level, where qualities such as the fluidity or expansiveness of gestures are considered, rather than exact lowlevel motion matching. Participants were later asked to rate the emotional content of video recordings of both the original and the synthesized gestures. A statistical analysis shows that, in most cases, participants associated the emotional content of the agent’s gestures with that intended to be expressed by the original actor. The results suggest that a combination of the type of movement performed and its quality are important for successfully communicating emotions.

Investigating shared attention with a virtual agent using a gaze-based interface

by Christopher Edward Peters

Peters, C., Asteriadis, S. and Karpouzis, K.
Springer Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces (JMUI), Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2009  doi:10.1007/s12193-009-0029-1
Bibtex available here: http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ec/~cpeters/bibtex/bibtex.html#JMUI2009

This paper investigates the use of a gaze-based interface for testing simple shared attention behaviours during an... more This paper investigates the use of a gaze-based interface for testing simple shared attention behaviours during an interaction scenario with a virtual agent. The interface is non-intrusive, operating in real-time using a standard web-camera for input, monitoring users' head directions and processing them in real-time for resolution to screen coordinates. We use the interface to investigate user perception of the agent's behaviour during a shared attention scenario. Our aim is to elaborate important factors to be considered when constructing engagement models that must account not only for behaviour in isolation, but also for the context of the interaction, as is the case during shared attention situations.

iGesture: A Java Framework for the Development and Deployment of Stroke-Based Online Gesture Recognition Algorithms

by Beat Signer

Beat Signer, Moira C. Norrie and Ueli Kurmann, Technical Report ETH Zurich, TR561, September 2007

Existing gesture recognition tools and frameworks tend to focus on specific settings, gesture sets or algorithms.... more Existing gesture recognition tools and frameworks tend to focus on specific settings, gesture sets or algorithms. Further, they are often designed to support the developers of either applications or algorithms, but not both. Our goal was to develop a general and extensible framework that provides an integrated platform for the design and evaluation of algorithms, as well as for their deployment to a wide audience. The presented iGesture framework supports the definition and evaluation of new gesture sets. Furthermore, our gesture recognition framework enables an easy integration of new forms of input devices. We present the iGesture framework, show how it has been used to support the development of two new gesture recognition algorithms—an extension of Rubine called E-Rubine and SiGrid—and finally provide an evaluation of these algorithms.

Interactive Paper as a Reading Medium in Digital Libraries

by Beat Signer

Moira C. Norrie, Beat Signer and Nadir Weibel, Proceedings of ECDL 2008, 12th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Aarhus, Denmark, September 2008

In digital libraries, much of the reading activity is still done on printed copies of documents. We show how digital... more In digital libraries, much of the reading activity is still done on printed copies of documents. We show how digital pen and paper technologies can be used to support readers by automatically creating interactive paper versions of digital documents during the printing process that enable users to activate embedded hyperlinks to other documents and services from printed versions. The approach uses a special printer driver that allows information about hyperlinks to be extracted and stored at print time. Users can then activate hyperlinks in the printed document with a digital pen.

Mudra: A Unified Multimodal Interaction Framework

by Beat Signer

Lode Hoste, Bruno Dumas and Beat Signer, Proceedings of ICMI 2011, 13th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Alicante, Spain, November 2011

In recent years, multimodal interfaces have gained momentum as an alternative to traditional WIMP interaction styles.... more In recent years, multimodal interfaces have gained momentum as an alternative to traditional WIMP interaction styles. Existing multimodal fusion engines and frameworks range from low-level data stream-oriented approaches to high-level semantic in\-fer\-ence-based solutions. However, there is a lack of multimodal interaction engines offering native fusion support across different levels of abstractions to fully exploit the power of multimodal interactions. We present Mudra, a unified multimodal interaction framework supporting the integrated processing of low-level data streams as well as high-level semantic inferences. Our solution is based on a central fact base in combination with a declarative rule-based language to derive new facts at different abstraction levels. Our innovative architecture for multimodal interaction encourages the use of software engineering principles such as modularisation and composition to support a growing set of input modalities as well as to enable the integration of existing or novel multimodal fusion engines.

Privacy in Interaction: Exploring Disclosure and Social Capital in Facebook

by Jessica Vitak

Citation: Stutzman, F., Vitak, J., Ellison, N., Gray, R., & Lampe, C. (accepted). Privacy in interaction: Exploring disclosure and social capital in Facebook. In Proceedings of the 6th annual International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM).

In this paper, we explore the relationship between Facebook users’ privacy concerns, relationship maintenance... more In this paper, we explore the relationship between Facebook users’ privacy concerns, relationship maintenance strategies and social capital outcomes. Previous research has found a positive relationship between various measures of Facebook use and perceptions of social capital, i.e., one’s access to social and information-based resources. Other research has found that social network site users with high privacy concerns modify their disclosures on the site. However, no research to date has empirically tested how privacy concerns and disclosure strategies interact to influence social capital outcomes. To address this gap in the literature, we explored these questions with survey data (N=230). Findings indicate that privacy concerns and behaviors predict disclosures on Facebook, but not perceptions of social capital. In addition, when looking at predictors of social capital, we identify interaction effects between users’network composition and their use of privacy features.

Functional design of a menus-tree interface within structured system development

by Peretz Shoval

Author: Peretz Shoval
Int'l Journal of Man-Machine Studies (Human-Cmputer Interaction) (1990), Vol. 33, 537-556.

A systematic method for designing a menus-tree interface is presented. The method is part of ADISSA, a comprehensive... more A systematic method for designing a menus-tree interface is presented. The method is part of ADISSA, a comprehensive systems analysis and design methodology, which is based on the use of modified hierarchical data flow diagrams (DFD). Thus, the functional structure of the designed menus-tree is consistent with the functional structure and the user-model of the system. The method consists of several steps, beginning with an initial menus-tree derived automatically from DFDs, which is then improved and modified, taking into consideration factors other than functionality. MenusTree Designer, one of the software tools of ADISSA methodology, supports the designer in all stages of the interface design.

Design from the Everyday: Continuously evolving, embedded exploratory prototypes

by Margot Brereton

Published and Presented at the Designing Interavtive Systems Conference in Aarhus, Denmark 2010

ACM conference. 22% acceptance rate in the long paper track.

One of the major challenges in the design of social
technologies is the evaluation of their qualities of use... more One of the major challenges in the design of social
technologies is the evaluation of their qualities of use and
how they are appropriated over time. While the field of
HCI abounds in short-term exploratory design and studies
of use, relatively little attention has focused on the
continuous development of prototypes longitudinally and
studies of their emergent use. We ground the exploration
and analysis of use in the everyday world, embracing
contingency and open-ended use, through the use of a
continuously-available exploratory prototype. Through
examining use longitudinally, clearer insight can be gained
of realistic, non-novelty usage and appropriation into
everyday use.

This paper sketches out a framework for design that puts a
premium on immediate use and evolving the design in
response to use and user feedback. While such design
practices with continuously developing systems are common
in the design of social technologies, they are little
documented. We describe our approach and reflect upon its
key characteristics, based on our experiences from two case
studies. We also present five major patterns of long-term
usage which we found useful for design.