Some photos of Vienna :) Please let them load, as there are a slew.

Social dot net ..

Conference State Estimation by Biosignal Processing - Observation of Heart Rate Resonance NTT Cyber Solutions Laboratories, NTT Corporation; Masamichi Hosoda.

"entrainment" .. Resonance

goal of the project was to learn the relationship between the participants in meetings, utilize resonance. To effectively browse a meeting archive of video, it is important to automaticlaly estimate the meeting status or structure. Thinking about topic boundaries, highlights, participative state; developed "biosignals" in order to understand when people are excited about something. "entrainment" [watanabe 1996] - the synchronization of biosignals while people are communicating.

The frequency of the entrainment changes accroding to the strenvgth of the psychological connection .. When people have a storng connection, there are frequent entrainmnets; when there is a weaker connection, the entrainments are infrequent.

Less synchro between participants.

Defined resonance as a time-related phenomena where frequent or infrequent entrainments occur. The objective of the study was to measure the connection strength of a meeting!

** interesting; can actually be used to quickly flip through large quantities of visual data to determine which is most important and which is least by heartrate resonance.

Conference state analysis - focus on the scene where the connection strength changes ..

"Friendster"
UC Berkely

Online dating website. Create a profile.
Over 7 million registered participants.
Subcultures - gay men, burning man .. urban tribes, subcultures, queers and techies. Slowly moving towards Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines. People construct profile based on profile of known Friendsters thus perpetuating context.

data collection from Feb - Oct; participant observation, surveys and interviews. 250 peoples worth of data. Issues of performance [goffman], social networks. Feld, McPherson, Burt, Milgram.

Usage patterns. Ego / Friend Surfing. Capitalism. Play and Social Maintenance. Dating and Sex. Collapsed set of identities allows you to be a "Truer" self; is that true? People have lots of sets of identities. "None of this is 'real' " .. Different social networks discussed. A publically articulated social network. Structural Equivalence. If A and B have a lot of small things in common, they actually have a lot in common. www.danah.org/papers

Dealing with Mobile Conversations in Public Places.
Steve Love and Mark Perry, Brunel University.

Mobile technologies allow us to occupy multiple concurrent space with different codes of bhaviour and appropriateness. "Mobile etiquitte" begins to emerge
In what way does a mobile phone conversaytion influence the behaviour of a bystander in close proximity, and how do people manage and ameliorate tension from the use of socially intrusive technologies?

Bystander behaviour; orientation, posture, and focus. Visibly not attending to the call; makes a serious effort to visually not attend to the call. But not true reality - "I can tell you every word!" Checking caller status. Non intrusive policing - hurrying the caller.

Attitudes towards the caller - embarrassing and rude. People were embarrased for the caller to have to talk about something personal, and the caller was conidere rude and inconsiderate.

Design implications .. Train people about this, or build systems that simply dont infringe upon this.Social intrusiveness has broad implications for ubiquitous computing; need to understand that the intrusiveness cannot disrupt the overall social activity, which means we need to understand specific techniques people use to illustrate "closure".

All Together Now - visualizing local and remote actors of localized activity. Jeff Heer, Scott Lederer, Berkeley.

Modern networking technologies encourage rich remote participation and observation of gegraphically localized activity. For example, a webcast of a university class. To gain a sense of place, remote observers need access to physical and social context; unfortunately, this context may infringe upon the privacy of those physically present. Who is watching me?

Spatial position within a room dictates role, identity and other meaningful information. Localized activity can include remoate actors, not just spectators; this disrupts this socially relevant information - its non existant! Distance voids spatial arrangement.

SCAD's Industrial Design Team iVO, made up of Steve Aboud, Mike Albers and Tyler Nemes, ** WON FIRST PLACE ** in the Computer/Human Interaction 2004 Student Competition. This competition featured student work from schools all over the world. The team, represented here in Austria by both Mike and Steve, beat contestants from Carnegie mellon, Indiana, University of Illinois, Umea [Sweden], Ludwig-Maximilians in Germany, Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Vienna, and more; they received the highest overall results (from 26 teams) from judges representing Sony, Adobe, and other firms nationwide.

Congrats to Steve and Mike on an excellent job here in Austria.

Team iVo succesfully presented their materials, and so far seems to have a slight edge up on the other groups; two teams to go, and then the decision on the Student Competition!

Just talked briefly with Shelly Evenson, who (ironically, or not so ironically) knows Bob Fee; small world. She's now teaching at CMU Design.

Ubiquitous Computing Design Principles: Supporting Human-Human and Human-computer Interactions. Tony Salvador [Intel Coroporation]

Innovations drive retail experiences. Glass panes, steel beams, elevators ..
Ubiquitous computing is no exception. rfid, both for workers and store .. and consumers. "The most profound technologies are those that disappear" Mark Weiser (? who is that - early 1992 .. ) Disappearance is a major difference. Invisibility.

Influences & Methods. Ethnographic work in retail - spanning years, countries, experience types .. informed the focus on the transaction. "Ubicomp" systems ..

Informance. Informative Performance. Dramatic acting techniques to involve consumers in a made up scenario.

Compared current system (bar code) to "ubicomp ideal" (RFID) .. The ideal is - come into store, get your items, and leave.

You never pay - it's all automatically deducted from your payment materials, etc. Exceptions in the Ubicomp ideal turns out to illustrate just how "learned" a retail experience is .

Design Principles: Support apprpriate means of recourse, either accessability to data, tangibility, etc .. Support appropriate means of real-time process inspectability. Visibility, balanced exhchanges .. Increasingly support the profound disappearance of technologies as moderated by accrued trust in the system.

Invisibility may not be as profound as was traditionally expected.

In & Out : Perceiving invisible urban information through ambient media [MIT]

Buses are slow and unreliable, but Subways are disconnected between underground and reality. How can you merge the two,
through ambient media? Christian Moeller .. e-line .. displayed a motion picture outside of every window on the subway . .

bizzare, although don't really deal with ambiant media - instead, deal with movement of the train.

Bizzare; maps the movement of the train above ground through lighting .. Additionally, maps the above-ground exterior and

environment onto the screen of the windows ?!

How do users think about ubiquitous computing? Khai Truong - khai@cc.gatech.edu - [Georgia Tech]

Motivation. Has a variety of promising uses; allows people ot easily define their own users or services of the technology

Examined if people would actually want a ubicomp technology - utilize comic strip scenarios to expose participants to

ubicomp apps without biasing them; included an example of buffering audio conversations during dinner, as well as preserving random precious pictures. People desired three categories of items.
1. Providing peace of mind. Help users feel secure by allowing them to monitor their home or children.
2. Help users collect and keep track of objects and track when and where they were moved.
3. Help users capture memories of people during special events

Conceptual models:
system as effector => record all dinner conversations
system as assistant => help him to remember what they talked about
and system as effector-assistant hybrid => help me remember dinner conversations by recording audio when there are people in the room

Exploring the Design and Use of Peripheral Displays of Awareness Information .. Edward Guzeman. [U.California, Berkeley]

Awareness - the state of knowing about the environment in which you exist.
Peripheral Displays are "lightweight", in that they require minimal attention on behalf of the user. Focused on IM status as an information source. Over 250 million users worldwide. IM software without the "M" is still useful. Designed a family of tangible, aesthetic peripheral display of awareness

information from IM software. The focus is now on subtle notification and awareness of audience.

Remote Presence Lumitouch systems; Hubbub system; tangible peripheral displays with IM information as the data source. "

earcons" (!) .. PhysicalClients.

Z-Tiles: Building Blocks for Modular, Pressure-Sensing Floorspaces. Bruce Richardson. Ireland.
Successor to Litefoot (1998) and Magic Carpet (1997). Joe Paradiso.

Back from lunch with Chris, Kevin, Tom, and Marian; Why, it was almost a Trilogy reunion! We had all you can eat Sushi at some bizzare restaurant where the sushi moves around on a little cart. It was, needless to say, bizzare. Good time catching up on lost times; I didn't realize Tom is working on Outlook, but I certainly gave him a piece of my mind when I found out ;) Chris is at Nasa now, working on the Mars Rover. Whoa.

Unwinding now as the student competition goes on; the kids seem to be representing the school successfully, and SCAD has gotten extremelly good feedback and comments from everyone I've spoken with so far.

Afternoon session begins in thirty minutes, and should be a nice end to the day. I'm not sure if I'm going to make it to the reception - I'm pretty beat - but I certainly feel better than when I woke up this morning :)

Design Expo I

Ian Mclelland, Phillips Netherland - Chair

Ron Mendoza, Adobe Systems; From Tools to Tasks, Discoverability in Adobe Acrobat 6

"Help business users accomplish their critical document-centered work"
Group made up of User Research / UI Design / Visual Design / Technical Writing
Legacy | Acrobat 5.0 was designed by engineers, no dedicated user research.
Needed a way to reduce number of UI elements, help users understand how to use what they find to accomplish their goals
Customer interviews and "pain-point analyses"
Many business users are not interested in spending time actively exploring what's possible in a UI; many are accustomed to non-tool-based work processing tools
Talking about the email-based review system, allowing users to add comments to the page.
* Does anyone use this?
Intelligent Documents / Digital Imaging & Video / Creative Professionals Business Units
Marketing Requirements Document feeds the user experience team? Weird. Conducted customer interviews together with marketing, and then related specific features to customer needs

Ron Fernandez, Palm; The Palm Zire 71 Camera Interface
Senior Product Line Manager, User Experience - Sonim Technologies
Primary use that people would have for handhelds was about to shift from (personal management) => (entertainment); Zire 71 was designed to reflect the changes that people were expecting their handheld computers to do. The camera was never intended to be a replacement camera .. Marketing wanted to break Camera and Photos away; camera would take and review pictures, but Photos would allow you to scroll through photos. Users were forced to "export" something from Camera into Photos. Palm OS has no file system - uses databases; can only use one application at a time

The Industrial Design team decided that the camera would live under the cover! Where is the communication? So Ron decided to utilize the "opening" of the camera as the way of entering into the Photos idea. The Industrial Design teams sit next to the interaction design teams at Palm, but were not allowed to communicate and work together on the project; the software was driven by the hardware development timeline! Bizzare.

Anirudha Joshi - Industrial Design Centre - IIT Bombay
Keylekh: A keyboard for text entry in Indic Scripts
Cognitive load of entering Hindi characters; there are 1200 characters in the Hindi language.
Set out to create a typing system for anyone who can read, as compared to the 1% of typists in India right now ("professional typists").

"road show" - capture first reactions and first-time usability problems, recruit users for longer studies. Take the product to a crowded place and let many people utilize it

Design device around the "structure" of the language

* thought * there is no reason that we shouldn't be presenting lots of the senior projects as well as the masters student work here at CHI; they need to start submitting their work for entry.

Don Williams - Microsoft. MSN9, New User Centered Desirability Methods Produce Compelling Visual Design; used to be at Texas Instruments, is now the usability lead at MSN. Emotional response to design. "An diverse Team .... for a special challenge" (An?!) .. Diverse team that contributed greatly to creating the final design. "Make the look and feel for the MSn service more desirable". Poorly defined in scope; what does that mean? 3-4 weeks. "pace of design change" .. Lots of reference to how important Pace is. Desirability is something that can be forecasted? .. Of course it is, but their methodology is .. absent. Awful powerpoint .. random images, type cut off on all sides of the screen .. Is desire subjective? To some, all designs appear the same .. To others, design uniqueness is everything.

Opening Plenary

Jun Rekimoto, head of Interaction at Sony. Worked at sony since 1994; formed Interaction Lab in 1999.

Next Reality: The future of Connected Everyday

Connectivity - physical & digital .. Sketchpad, 1963. Allows us to interact with visual items with direct manipulation; but now we experience a shift, towards ubiquitous computing; people dynamically connect multiple types of devices, or even environments. Reality is not that easy; nightmare of connectivity - lots and lots of wires :(

"Mouse Jungle" - three computers means three mice, three keyboards

Working environment; showing a painter, working on a canvas; a brush, a reference, a screen .. Comparing traditional GUI environment with canvas / paintbrush environment.

Everything is on a single screen; limited input modality. Items are spatially distributed; natural dynamic combination of tools.

.. Pick & Drop, UIST97; extend the idea of drag and drop. Allows the movement and transfer of data from one computer to another. Handheld computer (in tablet form) becomes the pallette, similar to a painter. The people are physically connecting computers, but they can focus on the task rather than the integration of materials

Augmented Surfaces, CHI99
Placement of computers becomes important. If I place my computer on the table, it is then integrated into the environment. A "digital table" and a "Digital wall"

Hyperdragging; allows the user to utilize the physical desktop as an extension of their windows desktop. Mounted camera on the top of the room detremines boundaries of dragging capabilities. Users can create a layout on the table, and then introduce a camera; A VRML model is created based on the camera situation on the table.

Eek!

Direct Manipulation is proposed by Ben Shneiderman: Visual representation (metaphor) of the "world of action". Direct manipulation in the real world; pointing, place, proximity, touch.

Sony WEGA & AirTACT; bizzare! Throw, catch, swap.

TACT wireless voice over IP, nearfield computing, personal key device. Embedded Linux, 802.11b wifi .. Little USB looking thing, the "key" to access your materials on a public terminal is stored inside of this. Allows users to connect to any display and move materials back and forth

Connecting Place & People.

1917. Information flow is one directional in older educational systems; same in current educational systems. Interaction has not changed dramatically; the Presentor has the majority of the information flow, but the participants have only a minor response

Re-thinking the lecture / conference style. Introduce another communication layer in the classroom - chat augmented conference. Has existed since 1997; Augmented Conference, WISS: Workshop of Interaction Systems in Software. Utilizes microsoft ComicChat; Real-time voting; Chat Scape.

Conference becomes more live (session becomes "Session") ?
Sometimes chat gains too much attention

www.csl.sony.co.jp/project/memeChat

AugmentAble Reality, ISWC9; Post-IT on Situations; relaworld as a communication space.
ID-Camera .. NaviCAM2 - augmented reality camera

Traditionally, we have one box - one computer; the user interface is the connection between the person and the box. So if there are many computers, and many user interfaces, then the role of HCI must shift from improving individual boxes to redesigning environments and redefining reality

Arne Jacobsen, Le Corbusier, Mier van her rohe; total design - design the furniture and the building

Back from dinner with Susan. Had fun; now it's time for bed.

Back from a tour of the city. I went to the CHI venue, checked in and received my identification card, and then wandered around for a bit. Pleasant surprise - wireless at the conference! I'll be checking my mail in a few hours.

I met up with Steve sitting outside the venue, and no sign of Matt or Mike; Mike must be enjoying his free all-day tutorial! As we were discussing what to do, we bumped into Susan Wyche; I haven't seen her in years, so this was a bit of a throwback for me. We chatted and agreed to meet up tonight at 6:00pm for dinner.

Steve and I then went to eat at a silly little restaurant, where I was finally able to get something green into my body! Imagine - a real, American-style salad (topped, of course, with my choice of meats). After lunch we walked around; we stopped in several bookstores as well as Hugo Boss, Armani, and a cute little Scotish store that was selling, eep, 90 euro ties. So much for presents :) The Sothebe store was appointment only, how rude!, so we didn't get a chance ot peak in there.

I'm taking a breather at the hotel right now; at 4:30, there is a reception for the student teams, and at 6:00pm is dinner. I hope I have enough energy.

I felt horrdenous when I woke up; flu, or cold, or something, but I couldn't open my eyes and my body felt all achey. It's gotten a bit better, but I still don't feel great; the long flight mixed with the long day seems to have gotten the better of me. I did sleep for sixteen hours, and that seemed to be useful, but this bed isn't exactly my best friend.

In fact, Hotel Ananas seems to be a bit of a joke. Between the broken elevators (all three of them), the awful breakfast, the small rooms and the lack of a workout facility, I think I've been mislead.

That's ok, thought; I'm not here for the hotel. I am, however, here for the conference, and even thought I have an entire day to kill, I'm ready to begin. I've done the walking around, and while the city is beautiful with old architecture, the people aren't exactly friendly and the entire town seems to smell like urine. It may just be my lack of familiarity with Europe, but everything I've heard painted an entirely different picture than this. The reality of it is, the people here are impatient, judge me based on my earings, and can't seem to walk away fast enough. I guess living in liberal Savannah (?!) has tainted me?

I did, however, purchase a three euro bunny rabbit for Jess :)

Off to meet Mike, Steve and Matt around noon.

I'm totally beat. Between the being-up-24-hours, the time change, and the walking tour we just finished, I'm so happy to be lying in the bachelor-pad style bed in my hotel and just .. sitting.

When I first got in, I followed the herd through passport and customs, and it was a bit of a joke; the guy didn't even look at me, and he certainly didn't look very hard at my passport. I then got on the funny little green shuttle bus known as CAT, which cost upwards of 9 euros, and got deposited at Wien Mitte / LandstraBe. After fighting with the touch screen to get another ticket to ride the other shuttle (and I still don't understand the difference, except one is green and one is red and no one ever checks the tickets anyways), I got in a little bus that took me .. eek. To the wrong place. I figured I would hop out and double back, but somehow got lost, and experience the pleasure, pain and anxiety of my very first culturally dependant scenario. I had no idea what to do, and couldn't find anyone who spoke English. One very nice Austrian tried to explain the bus system to me, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it; finally, I found a girl who works in "telefones" who spoke English, and she directed me back towards Pilgramasse. By this time I was trading off amused with irritated, and when you through cold into the mix, I'm glad I found her when I did :)

After this I arrived at my hotel, checked in, and explored the surroundings; the hotel is nice, but is a far cry from the four stars that was promised. Their "gym" consists of a single room in the basement that was, when I went to view it, locked. The room is cute, but about the size of a dorm room. I had previously arranged to meet up with Mike, Matt & Steve at noon, so I found them soon after that and we went exploring the city. Our first order of business was food, and after we rode the underground back into Karisplotz, we found a bizzare restaurant that served a page of food in English and six pages in German. I ended up with a mediocre sausage, saurkraut, and potatos; the beer, however, was out of this world. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, but about four sips and I was feeling furry all over.

After lunch we surveyed the general area and found an exhibit of Pop Art and a special Rembrandt exhibition; we entered not knowing what to expect, and I was absolutely blown away to find over eighty original Rembrandts. The illicit picture taking was not to be extended to the Rembrandt room, but the Pop Art collection was less guarded, so please find several examples below :) The entire exhibition was fantastic; his work was arranged both chronologically as well as by subject matter, and his quick sketches of animals left me feeling absolutely inadequate. The Pop Art collection was quite strong as well, although their mix of minimalism seemed to disjoint the experience.

And now, being 4:44pm on a Sunday, and having been up for 28 hours _before_ the time change, I'm going to bed.

Almost there; awful flight, screaming children, and no fucking legroom, but almost there.

Watched Mona Lisa Something, quite good film; tried to grade some papers, but it just wasn't happening. The only thing I could find to do was sit and glare at the screaming baby and oblivious mother ..

Halfway there, and starting to get excited :) The trip to Washington was uneventful, and the trip to NYC was 45 minutes long and filled with a strange international audience; I was, in fact, one of the only Americans on board - a nice change of pace.

JFK is one of the most confusing airports I've ever been at, and that is only compounded by international travel; United operates with partnerships with various other airlines, and trying to figure out which is which is a nightmare. Ultimately, though, I found my way to Terminal 1, and I'm currently sitting at some little "Bistro" (read Yuppie for Starbucks style fastfood) waiting for a waitress to notice that I'm here. My wireless is picking up bagscanjfkt1, which I find amusing - I wonder if one can hack into the security station.

What a bad blogger I've been, simply not enough hours in the day to keep this thing up to date. The quarter is halfway over, and I'm quite exhausted; it's interesting how much of an impact Friday classes have on a soul used to a four day week! It's almost like the real world :)

It's been absolutely lovely recently, hitting the low 80s regularly and the sun has been shining and shining. Here's what our house looks like in the afternoon Sunday heat:

And of course, since the last time I wrote, we got new countertops! Here they are:

The backyard garden is starting to look alive, too:

Blue is hot.

And there's a pig.
Er, two pigs.

I'm off to Austria at the end of the week for CHI2004; it should be a great experience, and I'm excited to see Chris, Ellen, Lisa, Tom & Kevin, and who knows who else ..