Ubicomp Wednesday

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...feeling really low energy. I've had three shots of espresso today and I still can't quite focus.

Addendum: Notwithstanding my total exhaustion, I had pretty strong feelings about this session. I felt that it was misleadingly titled, since only one paper dealt critically with the social aspects of privacy. My comments are in brackets, to distinguish them from my summaries of the presenters' arguments.

Intellibadge
[ - undoubtedly useful, but I can't really get too excited about conference services

HOWEVER, there's something very nice, in a slow-tech way, about tracking the number of miles walked within a conference, in the same way that I enjoy the calculation of calories used by fidgeting. The presenter claims that this is a "competitive" app - that people wanted comparative mileages to see how they stand

It feels like there was no design process at all to this -- that the authors just came up with a few applications, tested them, and now are simply refining their previous results instead of coming up with different interactions based on the concerns of users in the first survey.

Addendum, harped on in conversation with Anne: Moreover, I think that applications designed for technology conferences simply set the bar too low. By designing for a conference setting, the authors have avoided the necessity of dealing with difficult social issues involved in location-tracking. If this were a purely systems-oriented paper, I would have fewer problems with the authors' assumptions about the identities of the users and social outcomes of an installed IntelliBadge system.]

UbiTable (MERL)
- support serendipitous meetings
- "scrap display" in coffee shops and airports for "walk-up" interaction
- issue: want to collaborate, but don't want to lose control of personal documents
-- shared direct touch system blurs public/private boundaries
--> does it matter?
- move graphics from laptop-table-laptop through dragging graphics
- connection of multiple devices on each person's side
- personal spaces denote user's area of control
- "portals" for import, copy, delete
- visibility (readability) should not equal accessibility
-- so that people can share w/o losing control
-- private (on device), personal (visible but not accessible), public (central)
--> multiperson interaction

[This is really more of a nice large shared display project then a "privacy" project. Whatever. The table-top drag and drop is still nice]

Q: Trevor Pering: what happens when people walk around the table?
A: well, you have to touch a pressure sensor the chair right now

Q: Jalal Al-Muhtadi
scalable? how does the system determine who's dragging the picture where?
A: up to 4 people. [no answer to the second]

Mining the human network
- pdas plus mics
- reality mining data capture
-- speech goes to server, location from wifi, id from speech waveform
- meetingminer: visualization of meeting behavior
-- tracking speaking behaviors and audience interest
-- speaking time: circle size, transition probability - width of link, average interest level: circle color, circle border
- mediator applications?
-- tracking normal and "negative" interacts using voice overlaps

Q: interpretation of graphs? use and misuse? social effects?

Home media space design
- video conferencing is increasingly available in homes
- want to preserve privacy while using tech
<-- casual interaction
[ I really liked this last presentation. I don't know whether video conferencing apps are really in use for telecommuters, but I like the attention to the real social embarrassments of mixing work and play space. Some of the interaction design was clunky (why does the user have to wear a special RFID badge within the office?) but there was a nice gestural "talk to the hand" motion built in to turn the camera to the wall. This is non-universalizing work. Modest, humble, and, dare I say it, Canadian?]

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