Categories
Innovation

Finding a human need

I’ve been reading over old ubicomp papers in preparation for a new project at NICTA. So it was that I found myself reading “Charting Past, Present, and Future Research in Ubiquitous Computing“, by Gregory Abowd and Elizabeth Mynatt (whom, incidentally, should surely be listed among those ubiquitous computing researchers who inspire me – particularly Abowd, whose work I’ve followed since my Honours year in 2000, and whose books were often referenced in the HCI course I took a couple of years before that). One of the most important passages in that paper, to my mind, was tucked away in section 6.1.1, Finding a Human Need (the emphasis is mine):

It is important in doing ubicomp research that a researcher build a compelling story, from the end-user’s perspective, on how any system or infrastructure to be built will be used. The technology must serve a real or perceived human need, because, as Weiser [1993] noted, the whole purpose of ubicomp is to provide applications that serve the humans. The purpose of the compelling story is not simply to provide a demonstration vehicle for research results. It is to provide the basis for evaluating the impact of a system on the everyday life of its intended population. The best situation is to build the compelling story around activities that you are exposed to on a continuous basis. In this way, you can create a living laboratory for your work that continually motivates you to “support the story” and provides constant feedback that leads to better understanding of the use.

Designers of a system are not perfect, and mistakes will be made. Since it is already a difficult challenge to build robust ubicomp systems, you should not pay the price of building a sophisticated infrastructure only to find that it falls far short of addressing the goals set forth in the compelling story. You must do some sort of feasibility study of cutting-edge applications before sinking substantial effort into engineering a robust system that can be scrutinized with deeper evaluation. However, these feasibility evaluations must still be driven from an informed, user-centric perspective—the goal is to determine how a system is being used, what kinds of activities users are engaging in with the system, and whether the overall reactions are positive or negative. Answers to these questions will both inform future design as well as future evaluation plans. It is important to understand how a new system is used by its intended population before performing more quantitative studies on its impact.

It strikes me that too few ubicomp research groups heed this, seemingly obvious, advice, including our own. Though we might occasionally attempt to build a story, it is not often compelling, and I’ve read far too many papers that suffer from the same problem (caveat: I specifically exclude Karen‘s work from this blunt introspective analysis because her work is typically very well motivated, and compelling; and she read the paper I’ve just quoted early on in her Ph.D. and took note of it). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most successful ubiquitous computing researchers have taken this advice to heart. I want to make sure that the new project at NICTA does do these things properly.

Categories
Innovation

Cool projects by Johnny Lee

Johnny Lee from CMU’s HCI Institute has done some pretty cool things with the Wiimote. His Ph.D. project has also yielded some way cool stuff. Here’s just a few of the things he’s done on his own and with his colleagues.

Truly inspiring.

Categories
My family and me

No computer weekend

I love my MacBook Pro, but this weekend I’m leaving it at the office.

Categories
Innovation

Bowl: token-based media for children

Ben delicioused me a link to an interesting paper called “Bowl: token-based media for children“. It describes a media player that is controlled by placing various objects (tokens) into a bowl. The idea was to create a control interface that is easy for children to use and which establishes links between particular physical objects and digital media. Aside from being a really cool means for interacting with a media player, it would have to be one of the neatest uses of RFID that I’ve come across so far. The bowl (or rather the platform that the bowl sits on) is augmented with an RFID reader. The various objects are augmented with RFID tags. When an object is placed in the bowl, an associated piece of media plays on the screen. For example, when a Mickey Mouse doll is put into the bowl, a Mickey Mouse cartoon plays. In theory, various combinations of objects might also have meaning. The system might be configured so that if Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are placed in the bowl, a cartoon featuring both these characters starts playing. The system becomes very social and conversational when homemade objects are augmented with RFID and linked to, say, home video clips or family photos, as demonstrated by the experiment reported in the paper.

I wonder what sorts of casual, natural interactions such as those induced by Bowl might make sense in the domain I’m working in? What are the relevant artefacts that could be augmented to create new meanings for the people who interact with them?

Categories
Innovation

MapReduce

Last week I read a 2004 paper called MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. It was written by a couple of Google researchers, and details a simple programming model and library for processing large datasets in parallel. MapReduce is used by Google under the hood for lots of different things, from indexing to machine learning to graph computation. Very handy indeed.

So imagine my surprise to find in last Friday’s edition of ACM TechNews that this paper has been republished in Communications of the ACM this month, albeit in a slightly shorter form. Aside from a few cosmetic changes (updated figure and table), the content of the papers is the same. That is, you don’t gain any knowledge from reading one of the papers that you wouldn’t gain from reading the other. There is no indication in the more recent publication that so much content has been duplicated from an earlier paper, though there is a citation to the older paper. In short, this is not new material, having been first published more than three years ago. Communications of the ACM seems to be trialling a new model, whereby the best articles from conferences are modified and republished for the ACM audience. But seriously, the modifications in the republished MapReduce article are negligible. What gives?

Categories
My family and me

Xander 0.5

Today marks six months since Xander was born. We marked the occasion by dashing off to South Bank as soon as the sun broke out from behind the clouds. It was a nice break from the dramas of the last couple of weeks and a nice way to spend the last day of holidays for me, too.

Xander at South Bank

Categories
My family and me

Trip to Tamborine Mountain aborted

On Saturday we had planned to take Xander to Tamborine Mountain for a walk in the rainforest. Little did we know that most of the routes (if not all the routes) up to the mountain were closed due to flooding. The photos below show the flooded Clutha Creek near the small town of Tamborine. We had to do a U-turn and head someplace else. Of all places we ended up at the cafe by Springfield Lake.

The flooded Clutha Creek

The flooded Clutha Creek

Categories
My family and me

Goodbye 7, hello 8

2007 was a huge year for my family and me. The main event was, of course, the birth of our son, Xander, on 07/07/07. For that reason, 2007 is one of the best years on record, but also one of the most challenging. Karen’s done a wonderful job and made some pretty big sacrifices…

Unfortunately the year didn’t end quite as well as it might have. Xander had an anaphylactic reaction when we tried to feed him some formula for the first time. He’s probably allergic to cow’s milk protein, we’ve been told. Within five to ten minutes of beginning his feed, he’d developed dark red blotches on his face, little white welts appeared in his elbow and knee creases and around his ankles, and his eyeballs went red and swollen. He was howling and trying to scratch his eyes out.

That was all pretty scary, but the hospital fixed him up pretty quickly with a dose of antihistamines and steroids. There’s a good chance he’ll grow out of this allergy in a few years, but there’s also a chance he’s allergic to nuts (among other things). We’ll find out when he has some allergy testing conducted.

This year is set to be another big one on a number of fronts. I extend to all the readers of The Thin Line my very best wishes for 2008; may it be joyful and prosperous. Happy New Year everyone!