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 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

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. 

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.

Mobiles mobiles mobiles.

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.