In Traction

Although it’s a bit late (almost a month after the facts), I finally found some time to blog about Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) 2008 in Naples, where Jan presented our paper about Gummy.

I liked it very much: the conference had good quality papers but was still reasonably small (around 150 attendants), and of course the weather and the Italian food were great We arrived on Tuesday which gave us some time to explore the city and take the ferry to Capri (a great suggestion by Robbie).

I am not going to discuss the conference program into detail this time, but will just highlight a couple of interesting papers. Possibly one of the coolest papers was “Exploring Video Streams using Slit-Tear Visualizations” by Anthony Tang (video). Another presentation I enjoyed was “TapTap and MagStick: Improving One-Handed Target Acquisition on Small Touch-screens” by Anne Roudaut (video). It seems there is lots of related work in this area (e.g. Shift, ThumbSpace, etc.). Peter Brandl presented two interesting papers: Bridging the Gap between Real Printouts and Digital Whiteboards and Combining and Measuring the Benefits of Bimanual Pen and Direct-Touch Interaction on Horizontal Interfaces. He was brave enough to do an impressive live demo for the first paper Oh, and he also covered the conference in a blog post.

The first paper in our session, titled “A Mixed-Fidelity Prototyping Tool for Mobile Devices” by Marco de Sá, introduced a tool to easily design prototypes and evaluate them in real-life situations. The system was well thought out and serves a real need. I can imagine that we could use this kind of tool in a user-centered UI design course. The second paper in our session was “Model-based Layout Generation” by Sebastian Feuerstack. I already met Sebastian at CADUI 2006. They presented a generic layout model based on constraints. It reminded me a bit of the layout model Yves worked on for our EIS 2007 paper. They used the Cassowary constraint solver, which I also used for my MSc thesis on constraint-based layouts for UIML. Sebastian told me he got the idea from my demo at CADUI 2006. I forgot to add a certain constraint (the layout of the UI was thus underconstrained), which by coincidence had no effect on the user interface everytime I tested it. Of course, when I showed the demo it did have an effect This clearly illustrated that constraint solvers are sometimes unpredictable (see Past, present, and future of user interface software tools by Myers et al.). Sebastian’s solution to this problem was to hide the constraints from the designer and generate them automatically from a graphical layout model.

Juan Manuel Gonzalez Calleros — who I met at CADUI 2006, TAMODIA 2006 and a few other occasions — presented a poster and a paper at the workshop on haptics. He took a few pictures while Jan was presenting (thanks again Juan!). Here are Juan and Jan discussing UsiXML vs UIML

Overall, the comments on our work were positive, although of course one of the biggest problems is still the lack of support for multi-screen interfaces. As Jan is actively hacking on Gummy these days, I don’t think it will take very long for this to be included in the tool

I finally found some time to go through my notes from Ubicomp 2007. Since I already blogged about the first day I’m going to start this overview on Tuesday. This is not a complete overview, but just a list of talks that I found interesting.

The first session had a nice talk titled “My Roomba is Rambo” which studied why people got emotional about their appliances, and why we should care. This is similar to what Philips did with the iCat. Apparantly people seemed to forgive their appliances when they made mistakes, given that they were emotionally attached to them (e.g. helping a Roomba that got stuck).

The next session on location featured an interesting talk by David Dearman on a method to predict location errors. They evaluated their system by letting people locate posters as fast as possible, while varying the location error and using different algorithms to estimate the error, including their own. There were a lot of talks on security, including one in this session on security by spatial reference by Rene Mayrhofer. He made an interesting point, that the methods of security and authentication we use today (e.g. passwords) are inpractical for ubicomp environments.

Shwetak Patel presented his work on Tuesday as well. He received the best paper and best talk award. His idea was very innovative, namely to check for noise on the power lines in a house to detect activity (e.g. opening the microwave would turn on a light which could be detected). The system is quite accurate, although portable devices could be more difficult to support since a training period is required. In the same session there was another security talk on shaking two devices together and thereby generating a unique key for authentication. This illustrates that there were definitely a lot of creative ideas at Ubicomp.

Tuesday evening we had the conference dinner up in the mountains which was quite nice (with an Austrian traditional band that played all kinds of music, including Tom Jones), but it was very cold up there

Wednesday started with a talk by Tim Kindberg (of Cooltown fame) titled “Merolyn the Phone: a study of Bluetooth naming practices”. He started off with a slide that showed a list of names of detected Bluetooth phones in the conference room. Apparently, the people that featured in his study were more creative than we were (I was guilty as well with the not very original name “Jo’s K750i”). The story behind the name Merolyn the phone was pretty funny as well.

Next was a talk by Yvonne Rogers, of whom I read a very interesting article last year (after it was mentioned on Fabien’s blog). The talk was basically about how Ubicomp technology cannot be evaluated in a lab setting, and needs real-world testing.

Another interesting talk in this session discussed the Whereabouts clock, which reminded me vaguely of the AmbientClock. In the session on privacy Karen P. Tang (if I’m not mistaken) presented privacy controls in IMBuddy, a contextual instant messenger. They allowed people to disclose information at different levels of granularity and get notified when someone queried their presence.

In my opinion, the best presentation was given by Scott Davidoff, who presented speed dating as a method to quickly evaluate different design decisions. His slides are online at Slideshare.net.

The final talk by David Molyneaux showcased an impressive steerable projector system. The innovative part (according to my understanding) was that objects stored and controlled their data (e.g. sensor readings) and metadata (e.g. 3D model) themselves, and decided when to send this to the projector. For example, when two objects with the same appearance are in a room, and one is moving and the other one isn’t (detected with accelerometers), they notify the projector which can then distinguish between them. When an object’s geometry is changed (e.g. when a book is opened), it detects this through sensors and accordingly sends its updated 3D model to the projector.

All in all, the conference was very interesting as was the workshop.

I’m at Ubicomp 2007 in Innsbruck at the moment. On Sunday, I presented our paper on Making Bits and Atoms Talk Today at the DIPSO 2007 workshop. The workshop was great with a lot of interesting discussions.

Today we had a session on Health, one on Networking, the late-breaking results, videos and demos, and of course the 1-Minute-Madness. The latter featured some funny moments when presenters still wanted to get noticed and stand out between the rest of the participants when their presentations failed. Unfortunately I did not take pictures, but I’m sure others did. Considering the content of the talks, both at the workshop and at the main conference it seemed that persuasive games are becoming a popular research topic.

A really impressive and useful system I saw today was Haggle. It tries to abstract the lower-level network protocols, allowing you for example to send an email to someone sitting next to you without requiring an internet connection (falling back on Bluetooth or ad-hoc P2P networking).

During the poster and demo session, there was one cool demo stand that almost constantly had about ten people standing around it: VoodooSketch. The authors presented a drawing program on an interactive table that allows you to draw your own user interface widgets, combined with tangible controls (buttons, knobs, etc.). You can attach these to a function by writing a label next to it. So you could for example write the label opacity next to a line you drew, which would then turn into a slider to control the opacity of the drawing.

The city of Innsbruck is very beautiful and offers you some of the most amazing views. The room the DIPSO workshop was held in had a large window looking out to the mountains which made it hard to stay concentrated

A preliminary program for EIS 2007 is online. I will be presenting in the session on Models for Reasoning from 09:00 to 13:00 on Saturday, March 24.

We sent in the camera-ready version of our paper yesterday, after an unpleasant experience with trying to convert our original LaTeX version to a Word document. Fortunately, it took us less time than expected thanks to Yves who wrote a few Word macros to help with the conversion.

I’m looking forward to the conference. The list of accepted papers seems interesting.

This week, I was in Bucharest for CADUI 2006. I presented the demo paper Kris, Kristof and I submitted for the conference (A Generic Approach for Multi-Device User Interface Rendering with UIML). Actually I am still in Bucharest at the moment, tomorrow I’m flying back to Belgium.

CADUI was the first conference I ever attended. At first, I didn’t really know what to expect, but it turned out to be a very pleasant experience. I met a lot of nice people, and saw interesting talks. CADUI is a very friendly conference, which resulted in a comfortable atmosphere that only further fueled the interaction.

After the last presentation today, there were books handed out from Springer-Verlag for the best paper and best talk, and also a lottery giving away another four books amongst the participants of the conference. The best paper was A Generic Approach for Pen-based User Interface Development by S. Mancé and E. Anquetil, which describes a pretty impressive system.

First I won a book from the lottery, and then I also got the best talk award! So my backpack is going to be a bit heavier on the way back I guess