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 one-year 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 user-oriented perspective. Already enjoying myself and it’s only been my second day

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.  Not only should such a system be capable of communicating via a wide variety of mobile devices; it especially needs to communicate with different people and the wide variety of situations they might be in. The system’s goals in gathering information might differ from users’ own, immediate goals. On the one hand, the system requires unbiased information from users to determine the likelihood and location of an incident. On the other hand, users would like to get information as well, express concerns, complain about unfavourable smells, or receive instructions in the (unlikely) event of a hazardous incident. In many cases, detected anomalies will not be indicative of a serious problem, but the system will have interrupted users anyway. Such a system needs to build a long-term relationship that motivates users to provide unbiased information. It should also react in a socially acceptable manner that takes into account the nuisance of interruptions, users’ other activities and their emotional state.

The project is still in its early stages, but there’s a lot going on already. This summer we’ve completed our first lab study investigating the effects of social system behaviour on user trust and behaviour. Our first findings indicate that getting social behaviour of a system wrong can have serious consequences on people’s reactions to system advice. The results of another study, investigating communicating with the general public during crisis situations, indicate that adaptation to the user’s affective state and information processing style can significantly improve interaction. In the mean time, we’re also conducting a longitudinal field study collecting smell descriptions and testing a first prototype of an intelligent mobile (phone) agent and its ’stench classification dialogue’ (for which we might need a somewhat more charming working title ). Beyond the interaction scenario sketched above, we’re also developing other interaction concepts that utilise ’semi-free’ sources of information (information offered on the users’ own initiative, social network status updates).

The MobileHCI paper can be found here. Do come round our poster if you happen to be at MobileHCI yourself!

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 .

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.

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.

Participation is individual and takes about 35 minutes. You can set you own date and time for an appointment on June 12, 15, or 16th, Science Park 904. We guarantee a fun task (you won’t spend your whole session sitting behind a computer, that’s for sure) + a bar of chocolate. Depending on what happens during your session you also could be entered in a prize draw.

If you’d like to participate or would like to know more, please contact me via hcramer (at) uva.nl.

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.

While we often focus on evaluating the effects of individual agents’ (social) behaviours, we found that a combination of agent behaviours can have a profound effect on user responses. By focusing on the design of one type of behaviour (like touch) or one specific interaction feature, designers and developers may put less emphasis on other aspects of the interaction. How different behaviours are combined can however affect for example user trust. For social agents, this means we should take into account the interplay of behaviours with social meaning such as politeness, empathy, gestures and physical contact.

The corrected proofs of the paper have been returned to the publisher, so I’ll hopefully be able to post a link to the full paper soon. (Henriette Cramer, Nicander Kemper, Alia Amin, Vanessa Evers, Bob Wielinga (to appear), `Give me a hug’: the effects of touch and autonomy on people’s responses to embodied social agents, Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, special issue on CASA 2009)

Other local activities on the agenda:

• Arduino courses at Mediamatic: I’ll be joining the workshops on RFIDuino (June 19th)  and generating VGA signals  (July 10th).
• Mobile Monday (June 1st). After enjoying their Mobile Widget event, even though it was quite geared to entrepreneurs and small developers, I’m hoping this will live up to its local hype

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.

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!

My recent UMUAI article on recommender transparency and user acceptance was selected as the winner of the 2008 James Chen Annual Award for Best UMUAI Paper!

The award commemorates of James R. Chen, a researcher in the area of user modeling and information retrieval and is awarded yearly to one selected article from that year’s User-Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction journal volume.

The study described in the paper investigated the effects of offering explanations of personalised recommendations on trust and acceptance. Results show that explaining to the user why a recommendation was made increased acceptance of recommendations, but that it might not necessarily improve overall trust in the system itself. We also provided a number of design guidelines for user-adaptive systems based on our observations, concerning gradual adaptation, users’ mental models, identification of possible misconceptions and integration of recommendation features in the complete interaction design. Free access to the full paper here

This weekend I’ll give a talk on trends in mobile HCI at the Amsterdam MobileDevCamp on 29 + 30 November. It will be an intro talk trying to get coders to not only focus on novel interaction methods and all things techie, but also into considering social interaction with mobile systems and areas such as mobile persuasion.

Check out www.mobiledevcamp.nl. “A full weekend devoted to developing mobile applications for the iPhone, Android and Symbian platforms. Organised by the Bubble Foundry and hosted at Mediamatic” The sign up procedure is somewhat cumbersome (uses upcoming.org), but it’s free and there’s lots to learn. It’s good to see these type of open events are being organized. Amsterdam needs more of them.

More research-related, I’ll also be participating in the workshop on mobile user interaction at CHI next spring. Still waiting for notifications on the rest of the stuff we sent off to CHI. Already read some quite favourable reviews, so fingers crossed for the final notification [update dec 2008: accepted. I've got a note  on interaction with adaptive spam filters and two workshop papers; one on human-robot interaction, one on mobile interaction].

Meanwhile I’m also working on our experiment on human interaction with autonomous mobile systems. The experiment context will be an environmental hazard monitoring system that uses information from both a sensor network and human users via mobile devices/phones. The overarching project aims to prevent catastrophic chemical incidents and reduce pollution through quick detection of harmful gasses and identification of pollution sources. If a potential hazard is detected or reported, the system will use human observation in and around the affected area to gather more information. Participating users will be asked by their mobile agent (e.g. application or service on phone/PDA) to self-report their observations. If necessary, the system provides location-based warnings. I’ll be carrying out a controlled experiment on effects of social behaviour of the system and its positioning as a distant entity that both caters to users but also ‘uses’ them as sensors for its own means.