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.
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