If you’re a student interested in mobile interaction, social connectedness, social and affective aspects of design & interaction, urban computing, location-aware apps, interactive ‘things’ or human-robot interaction, let us know.
We have projects available on location-based mobile services, Research in the Large: using widely distributed apps for research, recognizing ‘things’ and connecting ‘invisible data’ with the physical world around us.
As an example, I advised Sebastian Büttner from the German Darmstadt University of Technology, who finished his ‘diploma thesis’ at the Mobile Life Centre. Sebastian has just graduated on his work on new concepts for location-based services, in particular by integrating objects, tagged with barcodes or RFIDs into location based services to explore user perceptions of ‘checking-in’ and places. Results include the φ² app and an extended abstract at UbiComp’10.
My current interns are Miguel Pais, who is working on a study observing people interacting with a Nao robot within the Lirec project, and Gail Tabtim, who is working with hand-drawn maps within the Drawing the City project.
Also interested? If your skills and interests are a match with our plans, we might have a nice project for you at the Mobile Life Centre. Contact me.
Past teaching & advising at the University of Amsterdam
In the past I have been an co-adviser on a number of student bachelor and master projects within the Human- Centred Multimedia degree program at the University of Amsterdam (supporting Vanessa Evers). Past projects include: the effects of explanations on perceptions of a user-adaptive recommender (MSc. Satyan Ramlal, BSc. Sam Besselink), the effects of transparency on trust in a recommender on an e-government site (MSc. Eddy Bruin), social aspects of human-robot interaction (MSc. Nicander Kemper), creativity and physical interaction in electronic music composition (MSc. Anne Zwijnenburg), effects of system empathy and adapting to users’ affective state (BSc. Jorrit Goddijn, MSc. Ron Kok) and interaction with mobile phones.
Past courses
From March-May 2009 I was teaching research methods to information science & HCI students.
From 2005 -2008, I was teaching the undergraduate course ‘Applied Knowledge and Communication Systems’ together with Jacobijn Sandberg within the ‘Information Science’ program of the University of Amsterdam. Themes have included cultural heritage, human-robot interaction, visualisation, industrial design and user-adaptivity. The course description (in Dutch) can be found here.
Other teaching activities I’ve been involved in, include courses on Knowledge Engineering, Introduction to Java programming and Human-Computer Interaction and Multimedia.
