Location-based services study – We need you!

For a research project at the Mobile Life Centre we’re looking for users of mobile applications that focus on your location such as foursquare, gowalla, brightkite, Google latitude, loopt or glympse for short interviews.

Are you using an application like that? We want to talk to you about your experiences! We are interested in all types of use and both people who just occasionally use mobile services and people who use them all the time, so don’t worry about being ‘exactly the type of user we’re looking for’.

An interview would take about 15 – 30 minutes. We would either meet up face-to-face in Stockholm or Amsterdam, or talk via video chat (e.g. Skype). We would like to conduct the interviews between 21 Jan and 10 Feb, but you of course get to set the time and place.

I (Henriette) will be conducting the interviews. We’ve included a short description of Mobile Life below, please check out mobilelifecentre.org if you want to know more about our work.

Comment on this post, or send me an email at henriette (at) mobilelifecentre.org or tweet via @hsmcramer and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. If you know other people who would be interested in participating, feel free to forward this message.

Thanks from me, Nicolas Belloni and Mattias Rost

About Mobile Life
*The Mobile Life Centre at Stockholm University in Kista (Stockholm), Sweden, revolves around research in mobile services and ubiquitous computing. The topic of the Centre includes research on consumer-oriented mobile and ubiquitous services spanning all areas from entertainment and socialization to work and society. The Centre joins forces with local research organization such as SICS and Interactive Institute. Its partners from the IT and telecom industry include Ericsson Research, TeliaSonera, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and Microsoft Research Ltd.

Serious about playfulness

From now on, fun will be mandatory at the Mobile Life Centre!

This January we’re starting a new project, all about playfulness – and the little quirks that make our lives better. Beyond our intense exploratory research (aka playing Wii Band Hero), we (=me, Helena Mentis, Ylva Fernaeus) have also produced a Very Serious Position paper outlining some challenges when trying to design for playfulness and fun in the workplace. People do appear to have the strange tendency not to enjoy enforced fun and not even to enjoy the same things, so what is ‘designing’ for playful experiences really about?

The paper has resulted in a nice trip to Savannah, GA for CSCW 2010 where we’ll participate in the ‘Fun, seriously?’ workshop.  All workshop papers can be found here. Do check out the paper of Marleigh Norton and Philip Tan of the MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in Singapore on their work as game developers and on how Bill & Ted’s excellent adventures can guide your professional life. It’s both awesome and excellent really – and they’re bravely trashing the conference paper formatting guidelines too, chapeau!

Fun, seriously? A CSCW 2010 Workshop

Moved to Sweden

As of November 2nd I’m a post-doc researcher at SICS and the Mobile Life Centre in Kista (Stockholm), Sweden!

I’m very happy to be on the receiving end of an ERCIM post-doc fellowship and will be working closely with a.o. Lars Erik Holmquist and his excellent (and fun!) group of researchers. The research here revolves around  mobile interaction, human-robot interaction,  ubiquitous computing and physical and affective experiences, all from a user-oriented design perspective.

Diadem project at MobileHCI’09

This week we’ll be at MobileHCI’09 in Bonn, presenting a poster on our research within the Diadem project. One of the main goals of the Diadem project is to detect potentially hazardous airborne pollutants in urban-industrial areas using input from both a distributed sensor network and people through their mobile phones. In the proposed interaction model, a semi-autonomous system will use sensor data to detect abnormal situations, while people in the affected area will be requested by a mobile service to report additional observations, such as chemical smells (which may not be the easiest to describe).

This raises quite some interesting issues. 

Radio

Tomorrow morning, Saturday the 20th, I’m going to be talking about how people react to intelligent systems and robots in a short interview on radio 2. NCRV Cappuccino, Radio 2, 9.00-12.00, I’ll be on around 10.30. It’s going to be quite relaxed & casual, looking forward to it – and to my coffee, considering it is a Saturday morning .

Monday evening: human-robot interaction ‘kenniscafé’ in De Balie

This Monday, the 15th, I’ll be participating in a discussion on human-robot interaction in culture & debate centre ‘De Balie’ here in Amsterdam. The evening is part of the ‘Kenniscafé’ series of discussions on current themes in science and technology. Themes will include social consequences of developments in robotics, requirements for interaction design and bonding with machines. Stefano Stramigioli (Twente) and Martijntje Smits (Rathenau Institute) will also participate in the discussion. Noel Sharkey and roboseal Paro’s developer Takanori Shibata will contribute to the event as well. Quite a nice way to spend a Monday evening, rsvp here.

Mobile experiment in full swing.

We’re currently conducting a quite exciting study on people’s interaction with mobile hazard monitoring systems. A dedicated room in the new UvA Science Park building has been converted to an industrial setting in which a potential crisis may or may not occur… We’ve got a pretty big set-up (>60 square meters) and it’s been been quite the hands-on build!

We’re currently about halfway through our experiment and are looking for a small number of additional participants.

New paper: robots & touch

New paper! June 18th we’ll present our work on touch and human-robot interaction at CASA 2009 here in Amsterdam. The full paper will appear in a special issue of the Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds. Our paper discusses an experiment on the effects of (observing) touch and proactivity on attitudes towards embodied social agents. Based on our results we think a holistic approach to interaction design for embodied characters’ social behaviour is the way to go.

CHI: from nomination to award!

My CHI’09 note on Interaction with Adaptive Spam Filters which was nominated for a best note award (see post below) has been chosen as one of the winners!

“Your paper has been chosen for a best of CHI 2009 Award. An award for best note indicates that the reviewers and the award jury judged your note to be one of four notes at CHI 2009 demonstrating work of the highest quality.”

Apart from presenting my note, I’ll also present a paper on the effects of touch at the human-robot interaction at the Workshop on The Reign of Catz and Dogz and we’ll be participating in the Mobile User Experience Research: Challenges, Methods & Tools workshop as well.

Best note nomination for CHI’09 note on user interaction with spam filters!

One of the studies I did here at Human-Computer Studies on people’s interaction with adaptive and autonomous systems investigated user interaction with spam filters. While spam filters might not appear the most exciting subject, exploring users’ interaction with them actually offers quite some interesting insights for developers of adaptive and autonomous systems. Spam filters are one of the few types of systems that take semi-autonomous decisions on the user’s behalf AND are actually used in a real-life context by many, many people. They often can also be trained and sometimes operate on somewhat nontransparent criteria.

In this study, I investigated interaction with both adaptive (trainable) and non-adaptive, rule-based filters. Turns out that while many of our participants who used an adaptive filter invested a lot of effort in training, this didn’t increase their trust, nor the level of autonomy they granted their filters; investment doesn’t always translate into acceptance. Additionally, small, sub-optimal interface design features such as filters icons caused many participants to not understand interface items, induced ‘incorrect’ training behaviour and uncertainty about filter activity. It’s interesting that while research on developing adaptive and autonomous systems is on the rise, we haven’t as a community solved some of the seemingly ‘mundane’ interface design issues on less complex systems such as spam filters.

Paper will be available as: Henriette Cramer, Vanessa Evers, Maarten van Someren, Bob Wielinga, Awareness, Training and Trust in Interaction with Adaptive Spam Filters, CHI’09.  Will post link to the paper as soon as it’s available.

Not only has the note been accepted, it’s also been nominated for a best note award!