In Traction

Quite a few things happened since I last posted about my research. Here is a (not so short) summary of what happened during my blogging leave of absence

Ubicomp 2009

Our work on supporting why and why not questions to improve end-user understanding in Ubicomp environments was accepted as a poster to Ubicomp 2009

Jo Vermeulen, Geert Vanderhulst, Kris Luyten, and Karin Coninx. Answering Why and Why Not Questions in Ubiquitous Computing. To appear in the Ubicomp ‘09 Conference Supplement (Poster), Orlando, Florida, US, September 30th – October 3rd, 2009, 3 pages.

Abstract: Users often find it hard to understand and control the behavior of a Ubicomp system. This can lead to loss of user trust, which may hamper the acceptance of these systems. We are extending an existing Ubicomp framework to allow users to pose why and why not questions about its behavior. Initial experiments suggest that these questions are easy to use and could help users in understanding how Ubicomp systems work.

There is a separate page for the poster on my homepage, including a PDF version of the poster and the extended abstract.

Mario Romero has an excellent Ubicomp 2009 photo set on Flickr.

Here’s a picture of me explaining the poster:

And here I am presenting in the One Minute Madness session:

Karel Robert helped me create a video for the One Minute Madness session that would stand out. Although it might have been a bit too attention-grabbing, I certainly had fun making it and presenting in the Madness session.

Here is the video:

Next to presenting my poster, I also served as a Ubicomp 2009 student volunteer, which earned me a place in Joe McCarthy’s opening slides for the conference (slide 6)

Being a student volunteer was lots of fun! I got to meet a lot of interesting people, and still had the opportunity to follow most of the sessions. I also explored the parks together with a few of the other volunteers (Ubicomp 2009 was held in Disney World), and we even played beach volley on the last day

When we went to the Magic Kingdom, I had to see Randy Pausch’s plaque at the Mad Tea Party:

The plaque contains a quote from Randy’s Last Lecture:

If you haven’t watched the Last Lecture yet, I strongly recommend you do! It will be an hour well-spent.

Full paper accepted to AmI 2009

The full paper that we submitted to the third international conference on Ambient Intelligence 2009, was accepted as well. This work was a collaboration with Jonathan Slenders, one of our Master’s students.

Jo Vermeulen, Jonathan Slenders, Kris Luyten, and Karin Coninx. To appear in the Proceedings of AmI ‘09, the Third European Conference on Ambient Intelligence, Salzburg, Austria, November 18th – 21st, 2009, Springer LNCS, 10 pages.

Abstract: The design ideal of the invisible computer, prevalent in the vision of ambient intelligence (AmI), has led to a number of interaction challenges. The complex nature of AmI environments together with limited feedback and insufficient means to override the system can result in users who feel frustrated and out of control. In this paper, we explore the potential of visualizing the system state to improve user understanding. We use projectors to overlay the environment with a graphical representation that connects sensors and devices with the actions they trigger and the effects those actions produce. We also provided users with a simple voice-controlled command to cancel the last action. A small first-use study suggested that our technique could indeed improve understanding and support users in forming a reliable mental model..

There is again a separate page for the paper on my homepage, together with a PDF version.

Basically, our technique visualizes the different events that occur in a Ubicomp environment, and shows how these events can lead to the system taking actions on behalf of the user and what effects these actions have. Here is a video of the technique:

The AmI 2009 conference takes place in Salzburg in about three weeks.

Talk at SIGCHI.be

I also submitted a paper to SIGCHI.be’s (the Belgian SIGCHI chapter) 2009 Fall Conference on New Communities. The paper was titled Improving Intelligibility and Control in Ubicomp Environments, and motivated the need for intelligibility and control in Ubicomp while also giving a short summary of the Ubicomp 2009 poster and AmI 2009 paper.

Here are the slides:

Thanks to everyone at our lab who contributed in one way or another (either by participating in user studies, or by reviewing drafts of the papers)

Specials thanks to:

• Karel Robert for designing the visualizations we used in the AmI 2009 paper and for helping me with the Ubicomp 2009 One Minute Madness video.
• Daniël Teunkens for drawing the why question storyboards that were used in the SIGCHI.be presentation.
• Mieke Haesen for being a great actress in the AmI 2009 movie
• Kris Gabriëls for posing in the picture we used for the Ubicomp 2009 poster abstract.

Apparantely, there’s a Communications of the ACM group blog now, called blog@CACM. There is also a blog roll that includes the blog of Daniel Lemire, which happens to be one of my favorite research blogs. Although Daniel works in a different subdiscipline of computer science, I enjoy reading his research advice and interesting viewpoints on the process of doing research.

The group blog features an interesting post by Tessa Lau, titled Three Misconceptions About Human-Computer Interaction, which raises a few interesting points. In my opinion, HCI is much more fundamental to creating interactive systems than people usually believe. In this context, I would like to refer to an interview with Patrick Baudisch that I recently read, in which he explains how he got started in HCI:

Doantam: How did you get started working on human-computer interaction?

Patrick: Without knowing it. I was a Ph.D. student in Darmstadt, Germany and worked on user interfaces for information filtering systems. A friend of mine saw my work and said “oh, I did not know you were in HCI, too”.

That was the first time I heard of that field.

Just read an interesting post on Albrecht Schmidt’s blog about the Australian conference and journal rankings.

No big surprises in the list of course, but nevertheless interesting to have a look at. The problem (at least in Belgium) seems to be that the rankings used for university funding are focused mostly on journals. The top conferences are often only ranked slightly higher than average conferences, meaning that two or three papers at a mid-level conference will be better in terms of funding than one paper at a top conference. Of course, there is always the prestige and international recognition you receive when getting a paper accepted at a top conference

Lode pointed me to an interesting article on Wired about research done at the Fluid Interfaces group of MIT Media Lab. The article was based on the recent TED Talk by Prof. dr. Pattie Maes (who is a Belgian by the way ).

In their prototype, the user carries a wearable projector that projects information on physical surfaces or objects. This is essentially augmented reality but without having to use VR helmets/goggles or other devices (e.g. mobile phones) to view digital annotations. Although there are already systems that use wall-mounted projectors to augment rooms with digital annotations (Jonathan Slenders also looked into this for his Master’s thesis), in this prototype the projector is mobile as it is simply worn around the user’s neck. The device could project useful annotations on physical objects, such as Amazon reviews on books or flight information on boarding passes:

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This reminds me of the topics that my student Ruben Thys explored for his Master’s thesis (paper, video). Our solution was a bit more clumsy than this one though (it required a mobile device to view information attached to physical objects). I also remember reading a related UIST’06 paper that described multi-user interaction techniques with handheld projectors.

Wearable projectors seem to be a promising approach to provide feedback in ubiquitous computing, and might help to further bridge the physical and virtual worlds.

Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.
– Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (Hungarian Biochemist, 1937 Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1893-1986)

I got the idea to document the way I read papers from a discussion with Lode (he uses mostly the same approach as I do). I’m pretty certain this is obvious for many people, but I hope it may still be useful for others.

In this post I focus on processing lots of (related) papers in the least amount of time. I will not discuss how you find interesting papers, since this is fairly easy. Reading prestigious conference proceedings or journals in your field usually allows you to end up with a couple of seed papers that are representative for your specific area of interest. If you do research in ubiquitous computing, reading the proceedings of Ubicomp, Pervasive or Percom, and journals such as Personal and Ubiquitous Computing will get you along quite nicely. If you focus on the human-computer interaction aspects of ubiquitous computing, throw in the proceedings of CHI and UIST, together with the TOCHI and Human-Computer Interaction journals. The papers you find here will be stepping stones to related papers (and conferences) using the simple technique I will discuss in this post.

I estimate that of all papers I read, I only process 1 out of 5 in full detail. Most of the time when I find a paper that seems interesting, I start with skimming the paper briefly. I focus mostly on the abstract, the last part of the introduction (which should list the contributions), relevant pictures in the main matter, and the conclusion/discussion. I do several passes over the paper to validate my early understanding of what the authors did. I also go through the related work and references. This allows me to see if the authors refer to work that I don’t know but which could be interesting (which I mark for later processing). This will usually take little more than 5 minutes.

Now I have a pretty good idea whether the paper is interesting to me. If it’s not, I just go through the interesting references (if any) using the same process and stop there. If it is interesting, I go one step further, treating the paper as a seed paper that allows me to find other relevant work.

If the paper is not too recent, there will probably be (lots of) other articles that refer to this paper. Even if the paper is fairly new, it is still worth looking up papers that already refer to it. Looking up these articles allows me to discover relevant related work and to see how others critically describe this paper. A critical review could contradict of the results of the paper (e.g. through replication, such as Shumin Zhai’s work on target expansion), or might offer new insights (such as suggesting a new direction for research related to the original paper, as Yvonne Roger’s Ubicomp’06 paper did for Mark Weiser’s original Ubicomp paper). Both types of critical reviews are very useful for your own understanding of the paper.

I usually use Google Scholar to find citations (and downloadable versions of articles), since it indexes the major publisher databases (e.g. the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore or SpringerLink):

After entering a title in Google Scholar, it presents you with a list of matching papers. Below each item, there is a link with the number of papers that cite it (indicated in orange in the figure below). In this case there are 118 citations:

After clicking on this link, Google Scholar shows all articles that cite the previous one, sorted by their relevance (in other words, the number of times these articles are themselves cited):

This approach to reading papers has one disadvantage: your reading list will quickly grow. You can end up with 30 more papers to read starting from just 1 interesting seed paper (which is what happened to me when I looked for papers that cited Intelligibility and Accountability: Human Considerations in Context-Aware Systems by Victoria Bellotti and Keith Edwards). In my opinion, this is actually an advantage as it allows you to quickly find many related (and hopefully interesting) papers. Furthermore, because you’re skimming papers, you never spend more than 5 minutes on papers that are not relevant or interesting.

After I have found a significant number of papers that I want to read, I of course will go through them in more detail. Papers that are very relevant for my work or give me the feeling they deserve a more thorough reading (e.g. because they provide many new insights), will be read from beginning to end. A few examples that I also discussed in my blog are: Range: Exploring Implicit Interaction through Electronic Whiteboard Design, Evaluating User Interface Systems Research and two chapters from Beyond the Desktop Metaphor: Designing Integrated Digital Work Environments.

A few related guides:
* Research Techniques by Alan Dix (especially the slides about gathering information)
* Reading AI from How to do Research At the MIT AI Lab

Thanks to Lode for having a look at an early draft of this post, and for providing the example of replication in HCI by Shumin Zhai.