Hishi, H. and Kobayashi, M. (1992). Clearboard: A seamless medium for shared drawing and conversation with eye contact. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 525–532, Monterey, CA, USA. ACM Press. [pdf]

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This paper present the design of ClearBoard, a system that allows users to collaboratively sketch on a shared display while maintaining eye-contact. The main point of the paper is that eye-contact is very important for interaction regulation: “eyes are as eloquent as the tongue”. Eye-contact allows the users to switch their focus smootly from one to the other according to the task content.

The transparent diplay allows the users drawing contemporarily and to indicate on points of the drawing (replicating features of face-to-face) interaction.

The paper also contains a nice task for collaborative work. It is called the “river crossing problem”.

Greenberg, S., Gutwin, C., and Roseman, M. (1996). Semantic telepointers for groupware. In Proceedings of OzCHI’96, Sixth Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, pages 54–61, Hamilton, New Zealand. IEEE Computer Society Press. [pdf]

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This paper present a seminal work on the use of telepointers in the relaxed-WYSIWIS framework. The authors lists a couple of factors that limit the use of telepointers when the shared screens are not kept identical. Their solution consists in overloading the telepointer with semantic information and/or mapping the telepointer absolute coordinates to relative coordinates to each participant’s display.

Real time groupware systems often display telepointers (multiple cursors) of all participants in the shared visual workspace. Through the simple mechanism of telepointers, participants can communicate their location, movement, and probable focus of attention within the document, and can gesture over the shared view. Yet telepointers can be improved. First, they can be applied to groupware where people’s view of the work surface differs—through viewport, object placement, or representation variation—by mapping telepointers to the underlying objects rather than to Cartesian coordinates. Second, telepointers can be overloaded with semantic information to provide participants a stronger sense of awareness of what is going on, with little consumption of screen real estate.

D. Gergle, R. E. Kraut, and S. R. Fussell. Action as language in a shared visual space. In Proceedings of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’04), pages 487–496, Chicago, IL, USA, November 6-10 2004. Association for Computing Machinery. [pdf]

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A shared visual workspace allows multiple people to see similar views of objects and environments. Prior empirical literature demonstrates that visual information helps collaborators understand the current state of their task and enables them to communicate and ground their conversations efficiently. We present an empirical study that demonstrates how action replaces explicit verbal instruction in a shared visual workspace. Pairs performed a referential communication task with and without a shared visual space. A detailed sequential analysis of the communicative content reveals that pairs with a shared workspace were less likely to explicitly verify their actions with speech. Rather, they relied on visual information to provide the necessary communicative and coordinative cues.

N. O. Bouvin, P. T. Zellweger, K. Grønbæk, and J. D. Mackinlay. Fluid annotations through open hypermedia: Using and extending emerging web standards. In Proceedings of WWW 2002, Honolulu, HI, USA, May 7-11 2002. Association for Computing Machinery. [pdf]

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This paper describe a system called Fluid Annotations that is used to annotate web pages. The authors report an extensive rationale of why they choose this particular interaction mechanism for their system. The paper contains no evaluation.

Typographic conventions such as footnotes and marginalia have long been used to place supporting information on a static page without disrupting the primary information. Computer-based documents have recently augmented these conventions with hypertext links to supporting documents. Compared to static typography, hypertext has fewer limits on the size or complexity of an annotation, but at the cost of removing the supporting information from its context on the page.

We are exploring a new technique for annotation, called Fluid Documents, which uses lightweight interactive animation to incorporate annotations in their context. Our approach initially uses the space on a page for primary information, indicating the presence of supporting material with small visual cues. When a user expresses interest in a cue, its annotation gradually expands nearby. Meanwhile, the surrounding information alters its typography and/or layout to create the needed visual space.

We have demonstrated the value of Fluid Documents in two prototype applications. Fluid Links use animated glosses to support informed and incremental hypertext browsing, and Fluid Spreadsheets use animated graphics to make formulas and cell dependencies visible in a spreadsheet. We have also developed a “negotiation architecture” to support Fluid Document applications. This architecture allows the primary and supporting information to adjust their typography and layout appropriately.

Results of a recent observational study of subjects using Fluid Links indicate that the basic concepts underlying fluid documents can be effective: users can process moving text even in a serious reading situation, and providing information close to the anchor seems to be beneficial. Subjective preferences were varied, which suggests that architectures like our negotiation architecture, which supports multiple fluid techniques, may be crucial to user acceptance.

More on the project web site.

Khashee is specially designed to assist Muslims all over the world to get accurate prayer time alerts through their mobile handsets and to keep the mobile mute during prayer time, irrespective of the location or time zones. Khashee also provides additional features like quibla direction, supplications, events scheduler, fatwa etc. All the features like mute delay, duration for each prayer, location and time zones etc. are fully customizable.

Premise: to have an idea of the experiment that I am currently analyzing, refer to this technical report.

Following my previous work on visualizing eye movements on a shared map during collaborative work at distance, I came out with another visualization that shows how gazes alternate across the different components of the interface. I divided the workspace in three functional areas: (1) the shared map, (2) the composition pane of the chat window; (3) the history pane of the chat window. Then I aggregated the gaze movements in sequences of two or more fixations (100ms or more in the same area) in the same functional areas.

A sequence of fixations in the map window was then colored in orange on the timeline below. A sequence of two or more fixations in the composition panel was colored in blue and finally a sequence of two or more fixations in the history pane was colored in red. As in the ShoutSpace condition (e.g., ss) there was no difference between the history and the composition pane (these two function share the same space in the interface), I used an alternative color: yellow. Little traits mark the posting of utterances with the relative coding information.

At macro level it is possible to see that in the MSN condition participants alternate interface components with a higher frequency than in the other two conditions. This is due to the fact that they need to rely on text to express positions in space and analyze their partner’s intention, while in the ss or the cc condition, participants work mostly inside the map space, with an immediacy of references and referent information. This has implications for the task performances.

Tags: Computer Supported Collaborative Work, human communication, human computer interaction, information visualization

On the last day of the conference I attended many interesting talks. The first session was kids and family. The first paper was presented by J. A. Kientz and was titled: “Grow and Know: Understanding Record-Keeping Needs for Tracking the Development of Young Children“. The main idea presented was a platform for supporting the parents and all the caregivers helping them to record relevant facts for the child, a sort of interactive baby book to store relevant information.

Jonas Landgren presented “A Study of Emergency Response Work: Patterns of Mobile Phone Interaction“. The author presented an ethnographic account of the role of mobile phones in time-critical organizing, with some inspiration for designers of systems and applications for time-critical settings. Mobile phones are the common technological denominator for crisis response actors. Instead of thinking about other pieces of technology to give to these workers we should think about designing better services that runs on mobile networks.

In the afternoon I attended the session on programming by and with end-users. Jeffrey Wong presented a system called Marmite that helped users to easily build mash-ups. There is much information on the web that is not always combined in a useful manner. The solution are mash-ups, but unfortunately these are difficult t build (e.g. programmableweb.org). Marmite is an environment for programming using examples.

In the same manner, J. Zimmerman presented “VIO: A Mixed-Initiative Approach to Learning and Automating Procedural Update Tasks“. The authors started from the same assumption: many mundane tasks are repetitive and learnable. Their system should learn these tasks and help the user perform them more efficiently. Their paper contained also a great literature review on forms and end-user programming.

Finally, I attended a session on social influence. Brooke Focault presented a paper titled “Provoking Sociability“. The authors’ point was that negative social behavior might provoke positive social outcomes. They built a system augmenting gossip to enhance bonding and community formation. Loki is an agent that likes to gossip about his coworkers.

Tags: chi2007, human computer interaction

D. D. Salvucci. Inferring intent in eye-based interfaces: Tracing eye movements with process models. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 254–261, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, May 15-20 1999. Association for Computing Machinery. [pdf]

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While current eye-based interfaces offer enormous potential for efficient human-computer interaction, they also manifest the difficulty of inferring intent from user eye movements.  This paper describes how fixation tracing facilitates the interpretation of eye movements and improves the flexibility and usability of eye-based interfaces.  Fixation tracing uses hidden Markov models to map user actions to the sequential predictions of a cognitive process model.  In a study of eye typing, results show that fixation tracing generates significantly more accurate interpretations than simpler methods and allows for more flexibility in designing usable interfaces.  Implications for future research in eye-based interfaces and multimodal interfaces are discussed.

The main argument of this paper is that fixation tracing facilitates the analysis of eye movements to the user intentions that produced them. Tracing is the process of inferring intent by mapping observed actions to the sequential predictions of a process model. Fixation tracing interprets protocols by means of hidden Markov models, probabilistic models that have been used estensively in handwriting recognition.

Fixation tracing, according to the author, can interpret eye-movement protocols as accurately as human experts and can help in the creation, evaluation and refinement of cognitive models.

The author concludes saying that greater potential arises in the integration of eye movements with other input modelities as for instance, an interface in shich eye movements provide pointer or cursor positioning while speech allows typing or directed commands.

Tags: eye-tracking, human communication, human computer interaction

R. Vertegaal, R. Slagter, G. van der Veer, and A. Nijholt. Eye gaze patterns in conversations: There is more to conversational agents than meets the eyes. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 301–308, Seattle, WA, USA, March 31-April 4 2001. Association for Computing Machinery. [pdf]

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In multi-agent, multi-user environments, users as well as agents should have a means of establishing who is talking to whom. In this paper, we present an experiment aimed at evaluating whether gaze directional cues of users could be used for this purpose. Using an eye tracker, we measured subject gaze at the faces of conversational partners during four-person conversations. Results indicate that when someone is listening or speaking to individuals, there is indeed a high probability that the person looked at is the person listened (p=88%) or spoken to (p=77%). We conclude that gaze is an excellent predictor of conversational attention in multiparty conversations. As such, it may form a reliable source of input for conversational systems that need to establish whom the user is speaking or listening to. We implemented our findings in FRED, a multi-agent conversational system that uses eye input to gauge which agent the user is listening or speaking to.

This paper contains interesting references of eye-tracking studies showing that gaze is used a communication mechanism to: (1) give/obtain visual feedback; (2) communicate of conversational attention; (3) regulate arousal.

Two other interesting ideas that I found in the paper:

1- When preparing their utterances, speakers need to look away to avoid being distracted by visual imput (such as prolonged eye contact with a listener). [Argye and Cook, 1976]

2- If a pair of subjects was asked to plan a European holiday and there was a map of Europe in between them, the amount of gaze dropped from 77 percent to 6.4 percent [Argyle and Graham, 1977].

Tags: eye-tracking, human communication, human computer interaction

I really enjoyed this discussion as I think we really need to talk about these issues. I personally consider myself as a pro-life person although I do not really like labels. Labels are made by politicians and always make extreme cases and opinions and help making statistics …

I subscribe to what many commenters said about what is to be considered as a central issue, that is when life begins! Depending on this we might talk about an object (a group of cells) or a human being.

I personally think that life begins when the egg is fertilized and from that point on we can consider that group of cells as a human being. Then everything else follows, like: who has the right to decide on that life?

I also agree to other opinions expressed in the comments like that of the ‘unwanted child’ but for which I think there are viable solutions (like giving the child to a couple that cannot have children).

Also I think that things are not always black and white as depicted in the original post. Although I am pro-life I also think that sex is a good thing and should be explored freely with “the courtesy” of not implying someone else’s life into play. I am in favor of anti-conception systems like condoms or women pills to avoid the union of the egg and the sperm (sorry for my poor language here but I lack some vocabulary).

As we do not want to be played in our own life, we should not do that with others’ lives. Conception should be a responsible choice. People should not be forced to be parents if they do not want to, but in the same way, fetus should not be killed because somebody said: “Oops!”.

Then all the corollary of extreme cases like: “the mother was risking her life to give birth to a sick child”, I think are just rhetorical cases taken by politicians to justify their point. If we really want to look at statistics then we should consider the fact that the majority of abortions are those of healthy fetus that are simply not wanted.

My two cents.

Tags: education, ethic, politics, religion