General

Rudeness in intelligent tutoring systems

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Intelligent tutoring system is not a domain that I am interested in but sometimes there are some good elements to draw from other field. Especially, when it's about the behavior artificial agents (like tutors). As opposed to some research that assess the need to have polite intelligent tutor for effective learning gains, some researchers came up with this notion of a "rude tutor" (Natalie Person in here talk "Understanding User Emotion and Answer Quality In Dialogue Systems"):

Why Build a Rude Tutor? 1) Human tutors adhere to the cooperative principle and are polite Attend to students’ needs Minimize imposition on the student Speak off-record 2) Tutoring is Face-Threatening Social distance is great Power differential between tutor and student Tutor imposes on the student to provide information 3) Being too polite can interfere with effective tutoring 4) Some students may like it better

Some examples of the RT (Rude Tutor):

RT: I know that you know more than that. Say more. RT: Did you pay attention in class? How does Newton’s third law of motion apply to this situation? RT: No. Go back and answer the question completely. Can’t you add anything?

In one of her experiment (see powerpoint slides), she showed the differences between a polite and rude tutor in terms of various factors (learning gains, user acceptance...). It's difficult to generalize though. Why do I blog this? I am impressed by this notion of unpolite agents (or objects). Playing with bots or Nabaztags, it's very intriguing to see the disruptions that can be created by the utterance (or behavior) those technological artifacts can have (or are programmed to have). There is a lot to do here.

Design principles for tangible interactions?

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The case of sculpting atmospheres: towards design principles for expressive tangible interaction in control of ambient systems by Philip Ross and David V. Keyson (Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(2), 2007, pp.69-79). The paper addresses an important issue in the field of tangible interactions: the lack of proper design methodologies/principles/knowledge. The authors derived some principles from the literature, which they applied in a case study about a living-room interface:

  1. Consider the context of interaction: An interface that is always present in the home environments should be considered an integral part of home life. (...) the ambient device may become a part of the daily rituals and thus should fit into daily home activities.
  2. Map and relate human expressiveness to physical interaction possibilities: Understand what a person may wish to express via the interface, Devise a model that allows a computational system to describe the human expressiveness, Design physical interaction possibilities that allow a person to express the relevant expressive dimensions, Design a model to interpret the expressive behaviour elicited by the physical device.
  3. Capitalize on the expressiveness of form, materials and movement expression: use of form, materials and movement of physical objects can serve as a strong means to convey expression and offer a rich palette that can be used to elicit expressive actions and create meaning in interaction.
  4. Make actual experience pivotal in the design process: Real-life ‘experiential’ testing is crucial to learn how design decisions may influence the interaction experience of people... A ‘Wizard of Oz’ approach
  5. Consider the subjective nature of expression: each individual may interpret the expressiveness of a system or device differently. Secondly, the physical actions of a person have an individual nature since every individual has a different perceptual-motor system. Even within a particular person differences in expression may occur over time due to factors such as refinement of motor skills, mood changes and motivation. Thus it is important that the expressive interface allows for individual creativity and fluctuations in expression.

The principles they consider aims at providing "guidance" to both design decisions and conception of the design process as well as creating a context for an interaction experience (rather than focusing on technological/ergonomica issues).

It's also interesting to see how they deal with the design of gesturing interactions: they carried out a "gesturing workshop" with designers asked to make gestures corresponding to the living room interactions (expressing activities, warmth or attention). They then translated those gestures into mock-up interaction possibilities that they tested.

Why do I blog this? this sort of design principles are interesting starting points; I use them in discussion with game designers for some private projects. The crux issue in tangible interaction is that there is really a lack of methods (think about designing games for the Wii or the DS), especially when it comes to gestures. This paper is a good step towards what I am looking for but the literature about gesturing interfaces/guidelines is still scarce.

A whole semiotics of heard events

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As a follow-up on my earlier post about how human beings experience space by listening, Paul Dourish sent me a very interesting paper that goes even further. It suggests that the aural component goes beyond just the localized issues of timbre and echos from surface materials, but into a whole semiotics of heard events. What is intriguing is how the paper described the change over time that lead to reduce the significance of the urban soundscape as a semiotic system. D. Garrioch, “Sounds of the City: The Soundscape of Early. Modern European Towns,” Urban History, vol. 30, 2003, pp. 5-25. 12.

Some excerpts I considered pertinent (though the whole paper is a must-read): In European towns of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sounds people heard were very different from those of today. Yet the difference goes much deeper: whereas today we try to escape city noise, for the inhabitants of early modern towns sound served as a crucial source of information. It formed a semiotic system, conveying news, helping people to locate themselves in time and in space, and making them part of an ‘auditory community’. Sound helped to construct identity and to structure relationships. The evolution of this information system reflects changes in social and political organization and in attitudes towards time and urban space. (...) The carrying quality of the human voice in towns was exploited by the street sellers, who like preachers developed appropriate vocal techniques, using pitch, projection and repetition to achieve a high level of audibility. (...) Town criers were also an integral part of the city scene, calling laws, criminal convictions, or in some places funerals and objects lost or for sale. (...) Along with the diffuse sense of belonging created by familiarity with local noises, sound created bonds between those for whom they had meaning. Participation in religious services and processions marked by bells and singing helped shape a spiritual community that was also a local one. (...) Personal sounds also helped to determine how people saw themselves and how others treated them. Clogs marked the peasant; pattens (in early eighteenth-century London) a working woman; rustling silk the noblewoman

Why do I blog this? because it's interesting to see how things evolved and how spatiality is perceived with various senses.

Keeping up with the zeitgeist

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On the State of the World 2007 discussion on the WELL, there is a very interesting discussion that started with a question from Jamais Cascio to Bruce Sterling about "what you regularly read to keep up with the zeitgeist".

I used to have "sources." I can't say I do that much any more. These days it seems to be mostly about Sphere, Technorati, Feedster, Digg, Reddit and Google. I've joined the people and machines who are boiling it all down to an insidious algorithmic flow of liquid chunksof deep-linked micromedia. And even below that, it's tags. I use search engines to look methodically for words. Neologisms, commonly. I learn a lot from using machines to track jargon. (...) I spend a lot of my time doing the work that editors and publishers used to do: trying to invest the slushpile with some credibility. "I found this stuff pronto: but is it all a pack of lies?"

That's where it helps to have friends: but even if you've got 'em, on the Net they tend to agglomerate into echo-chambers and whispering campaigns. The Internet is really coming into its own now, and it's scary how intrinsically different it is from previous forms of media. The deeper you dig into what it's really good at, the more alien it becomes.

Why do I blog this? it's always interesting to know how people keep track of stuff and make sense of the word, whatever lifehacks and strategies are in place.

Rules of engagement

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For potential readers of Pasta and Vinegar, short hints about how things work here:

  • I started this blog 4 years ago as a repository for stuff I find interesting, pertinent, relevant and weird with regards to: my research, my interest and my projects. It started from a daily muse about issues I wanted to address in my PhD research. It slowly evolved and is now a less often updated description of what I find curious in my work. The topics depend upon the projects I am working on (sometimes it's more gaming than ubiquitous computing or foresight/innovation).
  • The first purpose of this is to keep track of stuff I encounter, it's a personal tool for me. And I find interesting to share stuff with to others, because it creates connections and conversations. I don't "spend" time on blogging, I use it as a tool for my work practice. Though, it might troublesome to define what I do: user experience research/foresight covers both my academic research and more concrete work (consultancy or user experience research for video game companies).
  • The topic of this blog is mostly about my interests: how certain technologies are used, how they are designed, what they will be in the near future. It's hence a super-messy list of posts that can be described as trends or weak signals of what happen today that might unveil the near-future.
  • Yes there are odd things posted here, both professional and weird. Why? because I do think there's a coherence between all the things I am interested in. This mix is made of pasta (research/science/serious material) and vinegar (awkward stories/artifacts/things). If there is a word to describe this blog, it would surely be hirsute (a french word that means... check it here), and it's on purpose because the world is like that.
  • No ads? besides, I am hosted by a university server.
  • I may have the worse url in the world but mmh I started like this and it's good to have stability on the information super-highways.
  • The "why do I blog this?" is really a personal thing, I try to describe why the stuff I blog about has implications to what I do, so if you're not familiar with what I do, it might seems cryptic.
  • Sometimes I may do interview, I am not a journalist but I like to gather thoughts/ideas.
  • People do comment here, there are conversations, private and public. And yes comments are filtered, mostly because there is way too much spam (and sometimes rudeness, which is not accepted. However, it's OK (and good) to disagree on issues.
  • Conversations can also be held by emails or offline - people phone or chat.
  • I am quite active - there will be times when I don't post. Conversely, I read every email but I cannot answer every email.

(Inspired or based on David's rules).

(Mis)adventures in Field Research

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In the last issue of ambidextrous, there is a 2-pages paper by Genevieve Bell and Brian David Johnson entitled Picking Up Insights... and Bugs: (Mis)adventures in Field Research, which is bascially a description of how ethnographers bring back more from the field than "informations". The article gives some highlights.

"Our medical records give a very different picture of those cultural encounters. Food poisoning, allergies, tropical ulcers, dysentery, colds, eye infections, a brush with the plague — you name it, we’ve had it. Seeking local cures for some of them, we’ve picked up boiled Coca-Cola with shaved ginger, and Hainan chicken rice (good for the soul?) along the way. (...) The very depth of field research that gives us insight also exposes us to messy, unexpected surprises. But dealing with that messiness — getting injured, taking care of ourselves, and finding help in an unfamiliar place — deepens our understanding of our surroundings."

Why do I blog this sometimes it's good to see the "behind the curtain" view of research methods :)

L-systems

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A concept I just ran across: L-System:

An L-system or Lindenmayer system is a formal grammar (a set of rules and symbols) most famously used to model the growth processes of plant development, though able to model the morphology of a variety of organisms. L-systems can also be used to generate self-similar fractals such as iterated function systems. L-systems were introduced and developed in 1968 by the Hungarian theoretical biologist and botanist from the University of Utrecht, Aristid Lindenmayer (1925–1989).

Why do I blog this? a friend of mine in the game design industry used it today in a presentation about successful transfer from the academic world to the industry (especially game designers).

About urban playgrounds

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Urbanism magazine Metropolis featured an article about city recreational space interestingly entitled "The Politics of Play (by Linda Baker). It starts from the observation that "The playground is the McDonald’s of landscape design" since it is the same flat surface everywhere:

(picture taken by myself in Lyon, France)

Some excerpts I found relevant below. First some reasons about this low innovation:

Much of the design momentum originates in Denmark, Holland, and Germany, where children are increasingly viewed as an indicator group for successful urban planning. (...) “The whole space becomes a play element” (...) Over the past 15 years international play-safety guidelines have spawned a ubiquitous crop of red, yellow, and blue structures rooted in “impact-attenuating” surfaces. (...) Eliminating spontaneity and risk from children’s play not only discourages physical activity, critics claim, but deprives young people of the experiences they need to grow and develop as individuals.

But some people came up with interesting ideas:

At the Nature Playground, which opened in Valbyparken—Copenhagen’s largest park—several years ago, steep hills and felled branches share space with a sand-and-gravel pit and a village of woven willow huts and fences. There are wildflower meadows, a large snail-shaped mound with a spiral path, and five whimsical towers crafted from wood, metal, and Plexiglas (...) a ten-foot “mountain” fronted by a boulder climbing wall, a stream (or “leaping chasm”), and winding paths with fairy-tale-like arbors. “The play is not prescribed, so the kids have more opportunities to problem solve and use their imaginations,” says Leslie Fredette, a second-grade teacher.

This raises relevant questions about urbanism:

“We need not only new types of playgrounds but also an urban environment that makes it possible for children to participate in urban life,” Blinkert says. Freiburg’s next step is to reclaim the street as a safe place for children’s play, where kids can kick a ball, meet new people, or simply watch the world go by.

Why do I blog this? because I am interested in how space (and its infrastructures) shape people's behavior (ranging from physical to social or cognitive processes). There is a lot to think about here and this is very important questions lately addressed as "the architecture as the interface". This is then bound to my interest towards both urban computing and social science research.

Also to keep an eye on about this topic: PlayITSound, a danish company that work on how to enhance/improve playground to be more creative and playful. I don't know what Kompan (one the world’s largest manufacturers of playground equipment) thinks about that.

Extremely playful game space

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Via, this incredibly nice and real Donkey-Kong environment. Anyway, I can't find the name of who did this.

Why do I blog this? The guy metaphorically overlayed the digital character but effect is compelling. Le Parkour at its best? Is it the equivalent of Survival Research Labs for Alternate Reality Games? like dangerous environment for playing?

RSS feed reader with pattern analyzer

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Excerpts from Attensa: RSS meets knowledge management:

Start-up Attensa has developed a Microsoft Outlook RSS reader with a twist: it analyzes patterns in RSS feeds to see how information inside companies is being consumed. (...) The software has "attention analytics" which prioritize feeds for individuals based on previous patterns (...) For example, reports analyzing tags and forwarded information could indicate that a handful of people are experts in a specific topic and serve as conduits of information to others. In addition, the software can show the feeds which people or groups are reading.

Why do I blog this? I am tremendously interested by this sort of tool; my feeling is that RSS aggregator could be really pushed further than current interfaces. In terms of pattern analysis, informaiton visualization, social sharing, I am sort of dubious about why there aren't more projects about that (no web2.0 rush on this issue?).

ubicomp

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I'm heading to California for a week end in San Francisco and a week in Los Angeles area (Orange County) for Ubicomp 2006, to present my research on CatchBob!.

Ubicomp 2006, the Eighth International Conference of Ubiquitous Computing, will be held in Orange County, California, September 17-21, 2006, hosted by the University of California, Irvine. Ubicomp is the premier international forum for research in ubiquitous computing, bringing together designers, computer scientists, social scientists, and artists, to discuss recent developments and future advance.

Anyone in SF or OC area ping me on email if you'd like to have a coffee or sth.

Relevance in telling the time

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In Truthfulness and relevance in telling the time, Jean-Baptiste Van der Henst, Laure Carles, and Dan Sperber (Mind and Language, vol 17, No 5, November 2002, pp 457-466) examined an intriguing phenomenon: "Someone approached in the street and asked "What time is it?" at a point when her watch reads (for instance) 3:08 is likely to answer "It is 3:10"".

We argue that a fundamental factor that explains such rounding is a psychological disposition to give an answer that, while not necessarily strictly truthful or accurate, is an optimally relevant one (in the sense of relevance theory) i.e. an answer from which hearers can derive the consequences they care about with minimal effort. A rounded answer is easier to process and may carry the same consequences as one that is accurate to the minute. Hence rounding is often a way of optimising relevance. Three simple, near-"natural" experiments, which involve approaching people in public places and asking the time, give support and greater precision to the view that relevance is more important than strict truthfulness in verbal communication. (...) To determine what is relevant to someone, it is necessary to attend to his or her states of mind. There is an extensive psychological literature on "theory of mind" or "mindreading" abilities, exploring how humans are capable of attending to one another's states of mind (e.g. Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg & Cohen, 2000; Carruthers & Smith 1996; Davis & Stone, 1995). There is also a rich literature on perspective taking in communication which has shown that speakers take into account the point of view of hearers in a way that facilitates comprehension (see Krauss & Fussell 1996 for a recent review). The present study shows that such a mindreading ability and attention to the point of view of the hearer is at work even in the simplest forms of everyday communication between strangers. Speakers tend to make the effort of inferring what information may be relevant, i.e. be both consequential and easy to process, for the hearer. In so doing, they go beyond facilitating comprehension, and attend to the interests that make comprehension desirable to the hearer in the first place. Helpful speakers aim at relevance rather than accuracy (and hence strict truthfulness) in what they say. They spontaneously adjust the level of accuracy of their utterances - up or down as the context requires - so as to optimise relevance.

Why do I blog this? because I am currently writing the theoretical framework part of my PhD dissertation and I used Sperber and Wilson's Relevance theory. Even though this telling time conversation issue is simple, it involves mechanisms that are also at stake in other interactional contexts (such as Catchbob coordination).

IEEE Computing on Urban Computing

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The last issue of IEEE Computer is a special edition about urban computing. Here is the stance of the editors (Irina Shklovski from Carnegie Mellon University and Michele F. Chang, from ReD Associates):

This special issue focuses on the topic of urban computing because we feel it is important to consider public spaces as potential sites for the development of computing. The articles presented here point to issues of theoretical understanding of these spaces, as well as the technical feasibility of technology design and development. We are not calling for technology designers to become urban planners and social scientists, but we do suggest that there is a wealth of research in these areas that needs to be taken into account when designing new technologies. Collaborations are crucial to understanding social life and creating technologies that can augment it in positive ways. We believe that research in urban computing can be useful for augmenting and extending existing theories in relevant fields and for greater blending of these fields to develop a coherent understanding of public social life.

The articles seem to be very promising, as attested by the editorial summary:

In “Imagining the City: The Cultural Dimensions of Urban Computing,” Amanda Williams and Paul Dourish (...) point out that understanding the aspects of public spaces that make them legible to the inhabitants is critical to understanding the diverse needs of their inhabitants. (...) In “Facilitating Social Networking in Inner-City Neighborhoods,” Marcus Foth explores the friends and strangers component of public spaces (...) The article suggests that there is a need—indeed, a market—for collaborative systems, which will be difficult to provide if we rely on existing ideas about “communities.” In contrast, Vassilis Kostakos, Eamonn O’Neill, and Alan Penn further explore the concept of legibility in “Designing Urban Pervasive Systems.” (...) Both propose usable analytical frameworks for designing and evaluating urban environments. (...) In “Public Pervasive Computing: Making the Invisible Visible,” Jesper Kjeldskov and Jeni Paay address a com- bination of sociality, mobility, and legibility issues as they describe lessons learned from testing an interactive prototype system for use in a public space. (...) One of Kjeldskov and Paay’s observations is that when people spend leisure time in a public space, they do not necessarily desire to meet everyone in that space. They are comfortable with the space being populated by strangers (familiar strangers concept) (...) “Simulations for Urban Planning: Designing for Human Values” by Janet Davis and colleagues (...) describe a full-scale system that has been piloted and used to support public participation in developing policies in urban communities around the world.

Why do I blog this? because the issue gives a very clear overview of currently identified problems related with urban computing.

Partystrands

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Fabien pointed me on Partystrands:

PartyStrands is a music service launching next month that will bring together aggregated recommendations, voting and photos synchronized on location by mobile phone. (...) People who have downloaded the MyStrands desktop application at home can take their playlists and recommendations with them by signing in to by SMS at participating locations. MyStrands monitors your playlists in iTunes or Windows Media Player and suggests songs based on similar playlists from other users.

When a number of people are logged into Partystrands, the service will aggregate their playlists and recommendations, display which song is playing on a video projector (with cover art) and let users vote songs on the list up and down by SMS. Users will also be able to send photos they take at the bar to their MyStrands profile to record the evening and to the projection screen in the venue for sharing with everyone.

Why do I blog this? what I found interesting here is this notion of aggregation of content bound to specific locations. How will this shape a new experience of cultural consumption? Would it be so important that it would change spatial behavior?

User experience of computer games

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Clarke, D.W. and Duimering, P.R. (2006), “How computer gamers experience the game situation: A behavioral study,”, ACM Computers in Entertainment, 4(3). The article describes an exploratory interview-based study of FPS game play; it aimed at deepening the understanding of computer games as "complex, context-dependent, goal-directed activity". Some excerpts I found relevant:

Gamers’ perceptions and evaluations of several aspects of FPS game design and game play were documented, including positive and negative aspects of game interfaces, maps, weapons, bots, multiplayer gaming on LANs and the internet, and single player gaming.

The study results also contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive and perceptual processes involved in FPS gaming, which may generalize to other game genres and have implications for the analysis of human behavior in socio-technical contexts beyond games. FPS gaming is a fast-paced form of goal-directed activity, taking place in complex, dynamic behavioral environments where players must quickly make sense of changes in their immediate situation and respond with appropriate actions. Little is known about the cognitive and perceptual processes associated with such complex, dynamic behavioral phenomena. In general, the gamers interviewed in the study seem to have attended preferentially to aspects of the gaming situation that were most behaviorally relevant to goal attainment and drew meaningful distinctions at a level of detail appropriate to the perceived demands of their goal-directed activity. It has been argued that gaming goals influenced how players made sense of the complexity of the FPS gaming situation by filtering perceptual stimuli based on behavioral relevance. Specifically, it is proposed that aspects of the game most salient to gamers were those perceived to be most behaviorally relevant to goal attainment, and that the evaluation of various situational stimuli depended on the extent to which they were perceived either to support or to hinder goal attainment.

Why do I blog this? even though I am looking forward to see how these results could be generalized to different environements (for instance in "non game games" a la Animal Crossing with fuzzier goals), the results detailed in this paper are quite interesting, when looking at the players' verbalizations. This kind of cognitive preferences (aspects of the gaming situation that were most behaviorally relevant to goal attainment) are good markers for certain games and maybe for a certain audience.

Stairway to nothing

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A curious assemblage between two buildings close to my appartment: Stuff

Why do I blog this? I find those Chaotic Escher-ian stairs that lead to nothing quite intriguing. It reminds me how architecture could afford curious behavior: if this was an interface, what would it afford?