Cool workshop: “Abuse: the darker side of human-computer interaction”

This workshop for Interact 2005 sounds great! “Abuse: the darker side of human-computer interaction” (on a personal note, they use this nice picture that I also took in Roma):

Computers are often the subject of our wrath and often, we feel, with good reason. There seems to be something intrinsic to this medium which brings out the darker side of human nature. This may be due to the computer complexity which induces errors and frustrations in the user (bad interface design), to the human tendency to respond socially to computers (media equation), or to a disinhibition effect induced by the interaction with a different form of information processor, perceived as inferior (master/slave relationship).

As software is evolving from the tool metaphor to the agent one, understanding the role of abusive behaviour in HCI and its effect on the task-at-hand becomes increasingly important.

Relevant topics include but are not limited to * determinants and correlates of end user frustration * emotional reactions to computing technology * emotional interfaces – how to deal with negative emotions * conversational agents and abusive language * conflict resolution in face-to-face communication and CMC * flaming and disinhibition in HCI and CMC * art on the edge * relationship of the virtual and the real, the literal and metaphor * outing, passing, hiding, covering -- how are agents designed to seem "normal" and what are the assumptions about "being human" that inform design?

Why do I blog this? I find this topic compelling, it seems to be a natural attitude to bullshit to IM agents for instance. Are there any studies about such kind of behavior? Or people trying to "social engineer" virtual agents to get benefits?

Mobile phones data mining

(via), the reality mining project:

The Reality Mining experiment is one of the largest academic mobile phone projects in the US. Our research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging recent advances in machine learning we are building generative models that can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations.

We are currently capturing communication, proximity, location, and activity information from 100 subjects at MIT over the course of this academic year. To date, we have collected approximately 350,000 hours (~40 years) of continious data on human behavior. Such rich data on complex social systems have implications for a variety of fields. It is our hope that this research will help us explore research questions including:

• How do incoming students' social networks evolve over time?
• How entropic (predictable) are most people's lives?
• Can the topology of a social network be inferred from only proximity data?

How can we change a group's interactions to promote better functioning? If you have a Symbian Series 60 Phone (such as the Nokia 6600) with a data plan, you can participate.

Close to this SmartFriend project 8a tool that compute statistics on your mobile phone about social things like with whom are you spending the largest amount of time on the phone? bet on your next call or gender stats).

They wrote more about their methodology in this paper (Personal and Ubiquitous Computing). Nathan Eagle, one of the researcher in charge of this reality ming project is interviewed in the Feature. Here are relevant excerpts:

Eagle: I primarily look at mobile phone data that can be broken down into three types: location, communication and proximity patterns. We use cell tower IDs to get approximate locations within a few blocks. Communication logs reveal who is calling and texting whom and how often. And Bluetooth scans every five minutes show who is proximate to you.

Eagle: We can do behavior prediction. Depending on the life you lead, I can predict what you're going to do next based on very limited information. Whether it's your morning Starbucks fix or your Saturday afternoon softball game, everyone lives life in routines. One of our algorithms extracts these routine patterns from everyone's daily lives.

Eagle: There has been a lot of work on building more user-centric interfaces. So the kind of data we gather could automatically change the phone functionality according to a certain demographic. For example, Nokia, one of the sponsors of this research, is selling the same phone to soccer moms, power executives and texting teenagers. With just a few days worth of data, we can characterize the user and their usage. Once we do that, we can customize how the phone looks and operates for specific groups of people.

France Telecom is also working on that topic, using neural network to discriminate social patterns. And their "social serendipity" tool is close to Jamie Lawrence's research project.

A cell phone stun gun

Vow! a cell phone stun gun for $79.95 at tbotech:

This Cell Phone Stun Gun incorporates its unique design to give you a tactical advantage. Personal Alarm and 180,000 volt stungun with case. Cellphones are carried by almost everyone these days. No one will think that yours is actually a non lethal self defense weapon. Choose from either navy blue or pearl silver and the cell phone stun gun comes with a free genuine leather carrying case. It also has a safety switch to prevent accidental discharge. Uniquely designed right into a regular cellphone body so there's no question of how it looks. It's authentic! Just don't let anyone make a phone call!

An history of social bookmarking tools

A very relevant history of social bookmarking tools in D-Lib by Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott.

We are here going to remind you of hyperlinks in all their glory, sell you on the idea of bookmarking hyperlinks, point you at other folks who are doing the same, and tell you why this is a good thing. Just as long as those hyperlinks (or let's call them plain old links) are managed, tagged, commented upon, and published onto the Web, they represent a user's own personal library placed on public record, which – when aggregated with other personal libraries – allows for rich, social networking opportunities. Why spill any ink (digital or not) in rewriting what someone else has already written about instead of just pointing at the original story and adding the merest of titles, descriptions and tags for future reference? More importantly, why not make these personal 'link playlists' available to oneself and to others from whatever browser or computer one happens to be using at the time?

There is also an interesting second part which is a case study of Connotea (reference management service for scientists). Thoses papers have been written by the Nature Publishing Group, the guys behind Connotea.

Another cell phone controlled robot

Bluetooth™ Motion Cam ROB-1 is a video camera you can control with your Bluetooth™ mobile phone:

Use your phone to drive ROB-1 around and check out the surroundings with the built-in video camera. When you see something interesting, take a snapshot. You can tilt the camera so it’s easy to get a frog’s perspective – no more crawling around on your stomach to take those hard-to-get pictures.

ROB-1 streams video at fifteen frames per second directly to your mobile phone. So now ROB-1 can patrol the corridor and look out for your boss while you’re in your room trying to break your Tetris high score.

Is this a based on a user-centered design?

Cool robots

LOEIL is a research lab focused on robots. It's derived from Aix en Provence school of Art. They carried out several workshops about it. Their robots are great:Le mulot is funky: Yoyo is stunning:

The use of social software and activity theory

I really appreciate zengestrom's take about sociale software. He adresses the use of thos services. This question always bugged me. The starting point of his discussion is the fact that some people (like russell beattie are linking out of such services.

the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That's why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about 'socio-material networks', or just 'activities' or 'practices' (like I do) instead of social networks.

It's indeed very relevant to connect this to the activity theory since it underline the very notion of 'objects' or goals that people want to achive by performing an activity (in this context, registering, logging and linking). He quotes examples of object-oriented social software that are obviously successful like:

Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs. EVDB, Upcoming.org, and evnt focus on events as objects.

He also points the problem with FOAF:

Sometimes the 'social just means people' fallacy gets built into technology, like in the case of FOAF, which is unworkable because it provides a format for representing people and links, but no way to represent the objects that connect people together.

And even though I agree with this from the activity theory point of view, I would argue that FOAF should not be seen as a service but instead as an architecture on which designers can rely to design services. It might be possible to design object-based social software using the FOAF XML grammar. Other interesting things about this in his post!

The bluetooth rifle

(via), the bluetooth rifle by USC student John Hering:

John Hering, a student at the University of Southern California, has developed the BlueSniper rifle, a tool that looks like a big gun which can "attack" a wireless device from more than a mile away -- several times the 328-foot maximum range of Bluetooth.

Hering, cofounder of a wireless security think tank called Flexilis, says he uses the "rifle" only to determine security vulnerabilities, not to actually hack wireless devices to obtain personal information. (...) Hering says his goal is to boost awareness of the vulnerabilities in Bluetooth. But in laboratory testing, Hering says, his company has been able to access SMS messages, passwords, phonebook contacts and camera phone photos from Bluetooth-enabled phones.

And now... old devices like the first mobile telephone

Of course my favorite part concerned the devices, especially with regard to the design POV: how earlier designers thought about the affordances, the design, the forms, the colors... Here area few devices:Bell's phone: Adler's phone: the first mobile phone: The first Minitel (1983): The first Matra visophone (1982): A Radiocom 2000, a famous french portable phone (not mobile because you cannot put it in your pocket) :

Watching different types of radio waves

There was also a spectrometer to see a concrete representation of radio waves depending on their wavelength (FM - TV - GSM 900 - DAB - GSM 1800 - UMTS): It reminded me this "Tuneable city" project where people could see a concrete representation of the radio waves in a certain are (here in the exhibit it' just the spectrum at a certain location) but I though it could be nice to have a device to see colored forms (depending on their type (= wavelength). Like for instance red forms for WiFi and blue for UMTS. This might be useful for not so common waves (I don't care to have a representation of FM or GSM which are everywhere).

A dosimeter guy called SAM

This dummy head is used to calculate dosimetry (according to wikipedia: the measurement of doses in matter and tissue from ionizing radiation); this head is called SAM (acronym of something I forgot). It's made up to measure the SAR = energy absorbed by a body receiving mobile phone emissions. This head adopts the morphology of the human head and is filled with a gel that "possesses the electrical characteristics of the human brain" (vow our head is filled with gel, isn' it?).

Yes it\'s called \"Leaky Feeders\"

The most interesting part of the exhibit is all the artifacts presented there. The point of this show is to explain to clarify the infrastructure of mobile telephony, explaining to people what are the 'backbones' and the functions of all the devices (from the phone mass to the cell phone as well as radio waves). I am not so much a technofreak with regard to infrastructure concerns (for instance I do not really care about otpic fibers, servers or computer chips). However sometimes it's refreshing to see our technology works. And on which concrete artifacts mobile services rely on. For instance, it's the first time I see this: Also known as "leaky feeders", those antennas are radiating cables intented to improve covergae in confined spaces such as roads; railway tunnels or car parks. They covers frequencies including GSM 900/1800, UMTS, energency services and FM broadcast (no tv :( ).

Yes it's called "Leaky Feeders"

The most interesting part of the exhibit is all the artifacts presented there. The point of this show is to explain to clarify the infrastructure of mobile telephony, explaining to people what are the 'backbones' and the functions of all the devices (from the phone mass to the cell phone as well as radio waves). I am not so much a technofreak with regard to infrastructure concerns (for instance I do not really care about otpic fibers, servers or computer chips). However sometimes it's refreshing to see our technology works. And on which concrete artifacts mobile services rely on. For instance, it's the first time I see this: Also known as "leaky feeders", those antennas are radiating cables intented to improve covergae in confined spaces such as roads; railway tunnels or car parks. They covers frequencies including GSM 900/1800, UMTS, energency services and FM broadcast (no tv :( ).

Blogging experiment

I am currently participating to an experiment/ergo-ethnological study for a big telephone company in France. I am in Paris at la cité des sciences et de l'industrie. I attented the exhibit about mobile telephony which is an interesting account of how radiotelephony evolved from the beginning to nowaday's UMTS terminal. The following posts will show various stuff I found relevant here.

ipod to ipod connection

icopulate is a new tool for ipod fans:

Now your iPod® can get some action and do direct data transfers at the same time! Here's how it works. Simply apply a dab of the included iLube© onto the dock connector of your iPod® and slip it into one end of the iCopulate's™ latex sleeve. Find another consenting iPod® in the vicinity and deftly insert it into the opposite end of the sleeve.

Once the two iPods® are joined the real fun begins. Using the easy to navigate menu system of your iCopulate™, you can transfer music from one iPod® to the other; single tracks, albums, all songs, or even whole playlists. Since the iCopulate™ uses the dock connector for fast file transfers you can transfer several dozen tracks in less than 30 seconds. Now that's a quickie you can write home to mom about!

Playshop: an open-access laboratory to create botanical gameboys

Playshop is described as an "an open-access laboratory which encourages the free flow of ideas. It presents projects, workshops, seminars, art installations and a web site that collectively question or challenge the role of technology and propose alternatives to the cultural social and economic systems we live in. Playshop is where the energy of art production, education, curatorial practice and social interaction fuse to create a vital public space and an environment of exchange. "I like some of their projects:

The projects include: the Fingerprint Maze, a physical interface turns individual fingerprints into a 3D maze to wander through on screen; Community Connectivity, a workshop which presents instructions for building one's own wireless antennae; Botanical Gameboy, an installation of custom Nintendo gameboys powered by a network of lemon trees; and an interactive installation centered on the video game paradigm created by the student collective Artech. Transport, the online component of Playshop, will serve as a resource and window to the events and projects within the space consisting of a mailing list, database and gallery.

My favorite is definetely the gameboys powered by a network of lemon trees: the Botanical gameboy:

You Are What You Listen to

According to researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Co-workers sharing digital music in the workplace via Apple Computer’s popular iTunes® software form impressions of each other based on their musical libraries

“People sharing music in our study were aware of the comings and goings of others in the office because they noticed the appearance and disappearance of others’ music on the network,” said Amy Voida, lead author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech. “They imagined what other people might think about their music collections, and they were aware of the musical holes left when someone left the company…. What once was an individual jukebox became a music community.” (...) “One of the greatest challenges for technical innovation in music sharing may be in allowing designers to make the leap between treating music sharing technologies as personal music listening utilities and treating music sharing technologies as online communities. Although music sharing has traditionally been a strong indicator of group identity and has reflected shared musical taste, our study of iTunes music sharing has demonstrated that even groups with disparate musical tastes can form strong group identities.”

More about this, in the following paper: Voida, A., Grinter, R.E., Ducheneaut, N., Edwards, W.K., & Newman, M.W. (to appear). Listening in: Practices surrounding iTunes music sharing. To appear in proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005). Portland, Oregon, April 2-7.

A micro-jet engine in your cell phone

A bit old season (fall 2004), but still stunning: Miniature jet engines could power cellphones:

Engineers have moved a step closer to batch producing miniaturised, jet engine-based generators from a single stack of bonded silicon wafers. These chip-based “microengines” could one day power mobile electronic devices.

By spinning a tiny magnet above a mesh of interleaved coils etched into a wafer, David Arnold and Mark Allen of the Georgia Institute of Technology, US, have built the first silicon-compatible device capable of converting mechanical energy - produced by a rotating microturbine - into usable amounts of electrical energy. The key advantage of microengines is that they pack in at least 10 times more energy per volume of fuel than conventional lithium batteries, take up less space and work more smoothly than much-touted fuel cells. (...) The US Army expects that soldiers - who currently rely on battery-powered laptops, night-vision goggles and GPS systems - will be the first to use the microengines.

An Autogrill Monument to remenber

The autogrill monument located on an Autogrill. A project by Zeo-th and Ivar Lyngve, Luther Thie.

AutoGrill Monument is a sublime ambient display of real-time highway fatalities integrated into the popular Italian roadside restaurant AutoGrill in Novara, Italy. Each time a highway fatality occurs on the Italian Autostrada, an integrated alert system activates a jet of blue liquid that shoots 20 meters high to fill the water-filled column that pierces the roadside restaurant. Viewing of the Memorial Cloud is available both inside AutoGrill and from a distance of 2 KM.

AutoGrill Monument serves two purposes: 1) To remember those who have lost their lives on Europe's most dangerous highways. 2) To alert and possibly cause speeding motorists to decelerate.

How do people share information

(via) A report I had a quick glance today: Toward Understanding Preferences for Sharing and Privacy (.pdf) by Judith Olson, Jonathan Grudin and Eric Horvitz (Microsoft). It's about how people share information. This is based on survey conducted on 30 persons working in small and medium size companies.

We report on studies of preferences about privacy and sharing aimed at identifying fundamental concerns with privacy and at understanding how people might abstract the details of sharing into higher-level classes of recipients and information that people tend to treat in a similar manner. To characterize such classes, we collected information about sharing preferences, recruiting 30 people to specify what information they are willing to share with whom. Although people vary in their overall level of comfort in sharing, we discovered key classes of recipients and information. Such abstractions highlight the promise of developing simpler, more expressive controls for sharing and privacy.(...) Overall, participants in our study were unwilling to share most things with the public. Not everyone is comfortable sharing everything with their spouse. The pattern of information our participants are willing to share with their managers and trusted co-workers tracks those that they are willing to share with their families, except that work-related items are rated higher.

The paper provides a nice cluster analysis of the different kinfs of sharing.