INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ADVANCES IN COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY 2006:

ACM SIGCHI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ADVANCES IN COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY 2006 is going to happen in June, 14-16 in Hollywood, CA:

The field of computer entertainment technology has aroused great interest recently amongst researchers and developers in both academic and industrial / business fields as it is duly recognized as showing high promise of bringing on exciting new forms of human computer interaction. Now deemed deserving of both serious academic research, as well as major industry and business uptake, techniques used in computer entertainment are also seen to translate into advances in research work ranging from industrial training, collaborative work, novel interfaces, novel multimedia, network computing and ubiquitous computing. 

The purpose of this conference is to bring together academic and industry researchers, artists and designers and computer entertainment developers and practitioners, to address and advance the research and development issues related to computer entertainment. 

Prospective authors are now invited to submit Papers/Posters/Demos electronically via the conference website: 
http://www.ace2006.org by 15th February 2006

Why do I blog this? this conference is a very good event in the sphere of innovative gaming technology

Noise sensitive project at the lab

At the lab, JB Haué and Guillaume Raymondon are working on a very interesting project: a noise-sensitive table. There is a blog about the project there. The table is meant to perceive nearby users' noise and diplay various things based on it (by LEDs or a beamer). Currently the prototypes are really ROUGH (but nice from my point of view, maybe it's because I like this sort of 'bricolage picture'):

Why do I blog this? We will ask students of our Computer Supported Collaboration Work course to test various configurations with it, that's why I follow the project closely. I am looking forward to see what will happen

Free and open source tool to analyse video/audio data

I'm currently testing Transana, a free and open-source software for qualitative analysis, developed at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

Transana is software for professional researchers who want to analyze digital video or audio data. Transana lets you analyze and manage your data in very sophisticated ways. Transcribe it, identify analytically interesting clips, assign keywords to clips, arrange and rearrange clips, create complex collections of interrelated clips, explore relationships between applied keywords, and share your analysis with colleagues. The result is a new way to focus on your data, and a new way to manage large collections of video and audio files and clips.

Transana runs on Windows in both single-user and multi-user versions. A Macintosh version is in development.

The beta version for Mac OS X I am testing seems to be pretty good.

An account of location-based games multiple play

A good read: Barkhuus, L., Chalmers, M., Tennent, P., Hall, M., Bell, M. and Brown, B. Picking Pockets on the Lawn: The Development of Tactics and Strategies in a Mobile Game. Proceedings of UbiComp 2005, Tokyo, Japan. The paper tackles the issue of how the experience of multiple games changed they way users played with a location-based game and how this led to more complex form of collaboration and competition over time.

Abstract: This paper presents Treasure, an outdoor mobile multiplayer game inspired by Weiser’s notion of seams, gaps and breaks in different media. Playing Treasure involves movement in and out of a wi-fi network, using PDAs to pick up virtual ‘coins’ that may be scattered outside network coverage. Coins have to be uploaded to a server to gain game points, and players can collaborate with teammates to double the points given for an upload. Players can also steal coins from opponents. As they move around, players’ PDAs sample network signal strength and update coverage maps. Reporting on a study of players taking part in multiple games, we discuss how their tactics and strategies developed as their experience grew with successive games. We suggest that meaningful play arises in just this way, and that repeated play is vital when evaluating such games.

Why do I blog this? this is really close to what we do with our location-based games experiments (the methodology is quite similar, we just put more emphasis on quantitative data lately but we're also focusing on more qualitative insights). The strength of this paper lays in the multiple play: how repeated trials can be used to inform practitioners of a good game design.

Applications of ontologies in the field of pervasive computing

"Smart Artifacts as a Key Component of Pervasive Games" by Michal Roj (workshop paper for the Workshop on Gaming Applications in Pervasive Computing Environments 2004).

In this paper we present how smart artifacts can become a crucial element in pervasive games. In our vision, ‘magical’ artifacts play two roles: first, they are very attractive game gadgets (such as magic wands), second, they are able to handle the game (implementing the main game logic). We claim that in some cases no infrastructure would be needed to play a game. Artifacts, as we present here, are carried by players (or lying somewhere in the game area) and communicating through a wireless network. The vision has been inspired by a number of ideas and ongoing projects on smart devices and middleware platforms.

Why do I blog this? Michal is interested in by applications of ontologies in the field of pervasive computing, and, in a wider view, applications of ontologies in telecommunications. The topic of his PhD thesis is: “A methodology for ontology-driven programming artifacts in pervasive computing”. Even though his research is more related to architectural concerns

Games, technical limits and users' acceptation

Next week, there will be the NetGame conference/4th workshop on Network System Support for Games at the TJ Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. It's going to be more technical than user-centered. However, one of the track stroke me as interesting because it can have relevant impacts on how users play: 'Network Effects on Games':

• Influence of Network Latency and Packet Loss on Consistency in Networked Racing Games by Takahiro Yasui, Yutaka Ishibashi, Tomohito Ikedo (Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan)
• The Effect of Latency and Network Limitations on MMORPGs - (A Field Study of Everquest2) by Tobias Fritsch, Hartmut Ritter, Jochen Schiller (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) [some thoughts about technical limits in mobile games too]
• Analysis of Factors Affecting Players' Performance and Perception in Multiplayer Games by Matthias Dick, Oliver Wellnitz, Lars Wolf (TU Braunschweig, Germany)

The last one is maybe the most interesting since it takes into account both users' subjective points and technical limits:

In this paper we analyse different factors affecting players’ perception and performance in multiplayer games. We introduce a mean opinion score metric borrowed from the subjective analysis of audio and video content to classify the player’s perceived game quality. With a survey we investigated the player’s view on network latency for a variety of games. Furthermore, we examine four different games under different network conditions and collect data on game score and sub jective perception from every player. During the evaluation, we investigate the effect of latency and jitter on multiplayer games. We use regression analysis methods to identify coherences between delay, jitter, skill, game score, and the sub jective impression of the player. Finally, we compare the results from the survey and the experiments.

Why do I blog this? with Fabien we're working on a paper about how mobile game players deal with uncertainties/technical limits while collaborating to achieve the game goal. We want to explore the findings of Chalmers' team + Benford's team.

Computer Supported Collaborative Work course at EPFL (2005-2006)

I am currently working on the web platform for the course we gave (with Pierre) about Computer Supported Collaborative Work. The syllabus as well as the project step are described here. There is a guest account to visit the website, you just have to click on the guest access.

The goal of this course is that students become able to analyze the impact of a computer-supported collaborative environment. This requires constructing an experiment and analyzing team interactions with both qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques. This will be done through the design of an interactive table meant to support collaboration among small groups of users.

Each Tuesday, the course will be divided in a lecture phase and a project phase. Students will work in teams to apply the concepts and method related to the interactive table project. The presentation and discussion about projects' deliverable will also occupy a small part of the class period.

This year too, we choose a project based on interactive furnitures: student will have to design a simple prototypes and then to analyse how people collaborate while using it.

A context-awareness framework

Today at the lab seminar, we had a presentation from Andreas Zimmermann (Fraunhofer Institute of Sankt Augustin, Germany). Andreas presented the architecture of his 'context management' framework:

Context Management Framework De-contextualization is death for any information. Context-awareness is the key asset in future information services for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing. In ubiquitous computing, the user will be interrupted in performing a task only if the information is relevant to the task or highly important in the situation to justify the interrupt. The information selection and presentation therefore should be adapted to the user and his current context of use. Nowadays, uncounted Content-Management Systems provide access to a large amount of information, but without context, information is just data. Indeed, contextualization currently lacks a few properties making it transparent and applicable for everyone. Context-Management as a novel and unified framework will hide complex technical details from developers and end users while developing context-aware systems. This framework provides software packages to support developers in integrating context-awareness in ubiquitous computing environments and tools for the management of content combined with context information.

Then he exemplified it with 3 applications: an intelligent advertisement board, a museum guide and a treasure-hunt game.

A good summary of this can be found in this paper: Applications of a Context-Management System by Andreas Zimmermann, Andreas Lorenz and Marcus Specht (proceedings of Context'05).

People's representation of Ubiquitous Computing

Now that Ubiquitous Computing is somehow becoming a reality (somehow because applications are still at the prototype level), it's interesting to find a paper about how people's preconception about it: How do users think about ubiquitous computing? by K. Truong, E. Huang, M.M. Stevens and G.D. Abowd (all from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta) taken from the CHI2004 proceedings:

As ubiquitous computing technology migrates into the home environment, there has been a concurrent effort to allow users to build and customize such technologies to suit their own specific needs. Many tools have been built to enable users with little or no programming knowledge to build such applications. Despite the de-emphasis on programming, however, these tools are often device-centric, rather than user-centric. In this paper, we investigate how people describe and conceptualize ubiquitous computing applications and technology. We examine how people naturally express ideas for novel applications to build conceptual models upon which to base future interfaces for creating ubiquitous computing applications. (...) In this paper, we present a study that examines how users express their ideas about ubicomp applications, specifically for the purposes of capturing events and information in the home for future access. Our study results include a breadth of ideas for ubiquitous capture and access applications suggested by potential users of ubicomp application design interfaces. Based on the content and expressions of these ideas, we derive a set of conceptual models to inform the future design of interfaces that enable end-user ubicomp application design and creation.

Why do I blog this? I like this conclusion:

we believe that most people tend to conceptualize ubicomp in terms of human needs, situations, and tasks rather than devices and interactions between devices.

Besides, we're thinking about writing something about this issue with Fabien, like how CatchBob! users dealt with the uncertainty due to some problems with the game (location accuracy, drawing issues...). It's an issue also addresses by teams like Benford's or Chalmers'.

Design and analysis of social-interaction research

Mirweis recently pointed me on this paper: THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL-INTERACTION RESEARCH by David A. Kenny taken from the Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 47: 59-86 (Volume publication date February 1996) .

Static models of interacting persons measured at the interval level are reviewed. A discussion of the fundamental sources of variance and key design decisions in social-interaction research is presented. Outlined are the basic designs for social-interaction research and their proper analysis. Multilevel modeling is likely to become the most common data analysis method. Critical issues unique to social-interaction research are examined, particularly the effect of the partner on the interaction actor. Finally, illustrations of analyses from four extended examples are presented.

Why do I blog this? I believe that social psychology methodologies like the one described in this paper cn be fruitfully applied to research about interaction analysis in HCI. This paper is also interesting in the sense that it deal with triad analysis which is the case of CatchBob!

When the group has three or more members, there are several important complications to consider beyond the scope of dyadic research. These complications are only sketched here. The first concerns whether the measurement is triadic. When persons i, j, and k are in a group, does person i separately interact with or rate both j and k, and is i's behavior measured for all of those interactions?

A second issue in triadic research is the meaning of the group effect. In dyadic research, the group effect is defined as the effect over and above individual-level effects of actor and partner. In triadic research, a group effect can be defined as an effect beyond both individual and dyadic effects. In triadic research, there are then three levels of effects: the person, the dyad, and the triad.

A third issue concerns design. Does person i interact with person j only when k is a member of the group, or does person i interact with j, k, m, and so on? The issue is whether all possible triads or just a subset is formed.

Journal paper about Can You See Me Now?

A paper to be published in Transactions of CHI:Can You See Me Now? by Steve Benford, Andy Crabtree, Martin Flintham, Adam Drozd, Rob Anastasi and Mark Paxton + Nick Tandavanitj, Matt Adams and Ju Row-Farr.

This article is a very good milestone, it's a journal paper that accounts the experience they had with the game Can You See Me Now?.

We present a study of a mobile mixed reality game called Can You See Me Now? in which online players are chased through a virtual model of a city by ‘runners’ (i.e., professional performers equipped with GPS and WiFi technologies) who have to run through the actual city streets in order to catch the players. We present an ethnographic study of the game as it toured through two different cities that draws upon video recordings of online players, runners, technical support crew, and also on system logs of text communication. Our study reveals the diverse ways in which online players experienced the uncertainties inherent in GPS and WiFi, including being mostly unaware of them, but sometimes seeing them as problems, or treating the as a designed feature of the game, and even occasionally exploiting them within gameplay. In contrast, the runners and technical crew were fully aware of these uncertainties and continually battled against them through an ongoing and distributed process of orchestration. As a result, we encourage designers to deal with such uncertainties as a fundamental characteristic of location-based experiences rather than treating them as exceptions or bugs that might be ironed out in the future. We argue that designers should explicitly consider four potential states of being of a mobile participant – connected and tracked, connected but not tracked, tracked but not connected, and neither connected nor tracked. We then introduce five strategies that might be used to deal with uncertainty in these different states for different kinds of participant: remove it, hide it, manage it, reveal it and exploit it. Finally, we present proposals for new orchestration interfaces that reveal the ‘seams’ in the underlying technical infrastructure by visualizing the recent performance of GPS and WiFi and predicting the likely future performance of GPS.

Why do I blog this? It think that this paper should be considered as a seminal article about ethnographical analysis of a location-based game. Besides, after research projects like Pirates!, AR Quake and BotFighters, it's one of the most important early example in the field. It also describes interesting aspects about uncertainty arising from the use of GPS and WiFi, which is a topic we are working on with Fabien. They somehow use some quantitative indexes like packet loss intervals + periods loss; we're considering to move further by using other measures and correlate them with task performance or communication frequency/quality in CatchBob!

Publications

Publications, installations, presentations & workshop papers Books and thesis

Bleecker, J & Nova, N. (2009). A synchronicity: design fictions for asynchronous urban computing. Situated Technologies: NY.

Nova, N.. (2009) Les Médias géolocalisés: comprendre les nouveaux paysages numériques. FYP Editions.

Nova, N. (2007). The influences of location awareness on computer-supported collaboration', I&C Faculty Ph.D dissertation, under the supervision of Pierre Dillenbourg.

Journal papers

Nova, N. (2010). Relying on Failures in Design Research, ACM interactions, September+October issue.

Nova, N., Girardin, F., Dillenbourg, P. (2010). The Effects of Mutual Location-Awareness on Group Coordination. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.

Girardin, F., Nova, N., and Dillenbourg, P. (2009). Detecting air travel to survey passengers on a worldwide scale. Journal of Location-Based Services, 3(3).

Girardin, F. and Nova, N. (2006). Getting Real with Ubiquitous Computing: the Impact of Discrepancies on Collaboration, eMinds, 1

Nova, N. (2005). A Review of How Space Affords Socio-Cognitive Processes during Collaboration. Psychnology, Vol. 3, No 2, pp. 118-148.

Nova N., Wehrle, T., Goslin, J., Bourquin, Y. & Dillenbourg, P. (2007): Collaboration in a Video Game : Impacts of Location Awareness. Journal of Multimedia, Tools and Applications, 32:161-183.

Conference full and short papers

Nova, N. & Jobert, T. (2011). User-Centered Design in Video Games: Investigating Gestural Interfaces Appropriation, Proceedings of ACM DPPI 2011 (June 22-25), Milano, Italy.

Nova, N. (2010). ARcetate: Augmented Reality with Acetate Paper. Papercomp workshop at 12th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Sep 26, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Dabic, S., Lund, K, & Nova N. (2010). Effects of Expertise, Mapping and Tutorial Format on User Experience when Gesturing with the Nintendo Wii. Conférence IHM 2010, Luxembourg.

Nova, N. & Jobert, T. (2009). Intuitivité et incorporation des interactions gestuelles chez les utilisateurs de jeux vidéo. IHM 2009, Grenoble: France.

Nova. N., Sangin, M. & Dillenbourg, P. (2008). Reconsidering Clark’s Theory in CSCW, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP'08), Carry-le-Rouet, May 20-23, 2008.

Sangin, M., Nova, N., Molinari, G. & Dillenbourg, P. (2007). Partner Modeling is Mutual, Proceedings of the 8th iternational conference on Computer supported collaborative learning, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, pp. 625-632

Nova, N., Girardin, F., Dillenbourg, P. (2006) "Investigating How Automatic Disclosure of Partners' Location Influences Mobile Coordination", Poster at Ubicomp 2006, Orange County, CA.

Girardin, F., Nova, N., Blat, J. (2006) "Towards Design Strategies to Deal with Spatial Uncertainty in Location-Aware Systems" , Poster at Ubicomp 2006, Orange County, CA.

Nova, N., Girardin, F., Molinari, G. & Dillenbourg, P. (2006): The Underwhelming Effects of Automatic Location-Awareness on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game, International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (May 9-12, 2006, Carry-le-Rouet, Provence, France).

Nova, N., Girardin, F. & Dillenbourg, P. (2005): â"Location is not enough!": an Empirical Study of Location-Awareness in Mobile Collaboration. Proceedings of the third IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education, November 28-30, 2005, Tokushima, Japan, pp. 21-28, IEEE Press: Los Alamitos, California (Acceptance rate: 11.6%)

Nova, N., Girardin, F. & Dillenbourg, P. (2005) Etude empirique de l'utilisation de la géolocalisation en collaboration mobile, Short Paper for IHM 2005, Toulouse, France.

Nova, N., Girardin, F. & Dillenbourg, P. (2005) A Mobile Game to Explore the Use of Location Awareness on Collaboration. HCI International 2005, Las Vegas, USA.

Nova, N. & Ortelli, R. (2004). Web-Based Syndication Enhanced with Social Navigation, 1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the Semantic Web, Galway, Ireland. [Had to cancel the presentation but the paper is there]

Nova N., Wehrle, T., Goslin, J., Bourquin, Y. & Dillenbourg, P. (2003). The Impacts of Awareness Tools on Mutual Modelling in a Collaborative Video-Game. In J. Favela and D. Decouchant (Eds.). Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Groupware, Autrans France, September 2003., pp. 99-108.

Nova N., Wehrle, T., Goslin, J., Bourquin, Y. & Dillenbourg, P. (2003). Awareness Tools and Mutual Modelling in a Collaborative Game. In Proceedings of International Conference on New Education Environments, pp. 83-88. Edited by C. Jutz, F. Fluckiger & Karin Wafler, Lucerne, May 26-28.

Nova N. (2002). Awareness Tools : Lessons from Quake-Like. In Proceedings of "Playing with the Future Conference" Manchester, UK.

Guin-Duclosson Nathalie & Nova Nicolas : Utiliser des connaissances abstraites ou contextualisees pour proposer differents types d'aide Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication dans les Enseignements d'ingénieurs et dans l'industrie, TICE2002, INSA de Lyon, 13-15 novembre 2002.

Guin-Duclosson N. & Nova N. (2001). Adapter l'aide à l'apprenant : utilisation de connaissances abstraites ou contextualiséees. In Sciences et techniques Educatives Vol. 1-2 (avril 2001). Hermàs : Paris.

Chapters in books

Nova, N. (2012). Question your game controllers!?, Playtime — Videogame mythologies, Maison d’Ailleurs, Yverdon, Switzerland.

Nova, N. (2010). Snapshots from a fictional asynchronous city. Catalogue for the HABITAR: Bending the Urban Frame exhibit, Laboral, Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial, Gijon, Spain.

Nova, N. and Girardin, F. (2009). Framing the Issues for the Design of Location-Based Games, In Digital Cityscapes: Merging digital and urban playspaces. Peter Lang Publishers.

Huang, J., Cherubini, M.. Nova, N. & Dillenbourg, P. (2008). Why Would Furniture Be Relevant For Collaborative Learning? In Dillenbourg, P., Huang, J. & Cherubini, M. (Eds.) Collaborative Artefacts and Interactive Furniture Supporting Collaborative Work/ Learning. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Nova, N. and Labrune, J.B. (in press, 2007). Des jeux vidéo au LifeGames: Perspectives tangibles et sociales des nouvelles formes d'interactions ludiques. In Franck Beau (Ed): "Le futur des MMORPG"

Nova, N. and Girardin, F. (in press, 2007). CatchBob! A Collaborative Treasure Hunt: Experimenting on Debord's Dérive with Pervasive Computing. In on Borries, Friedrich, Walz, Steffen P., Brinkmann, Ulrich, and Matthias Bottger (eds.), Space Time Play. Games, Architecture, and Urbanism. Birkhauser: Basel / Berlin / Boston.

Nova, N. (2006). La R&D en Game Design. In Genvo, S. (Ed.) Le game design de jeux vidéo : Approches de l'expression vidéoludique.

Workshop papers

Girardin, F., Nova, N. and Blackstock, M. (2007). Issues from Deploying and Maintaining a Pervasive Game on Multiple Sites. Workshop Common Models and Patterns for Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2007).

Nova, N., Molinari, G. and Dillenbourg, P. (2007). Evaluating Mutual Modeling in CSCW environments. Workshop "Mutual Model in collaborative task", CSCL Alpine Rendezvous, Villars.

Dillenbourg, P. & Nova, N. (2006): The RoadForum: Sharing informal knowledge in a distributed team through a mobile audio environment. Workshop about Knowledge Sharing in Organizations, at the International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems., (May 9-12, 2006, Carry-le-Rouet, Provence, France).

Nova, N. and Dillenbourg, P. (2004). Impacts of Location-Awareness on Group Collaboration. Position paper for the workshop "Spatial Awareness in Collaboration and Group Interaction", 7th October EPFL.

Nova, N. and Girardin, F. (2004). Analysis of a Location-Based Multi-Player Game, Position paper for "Games and Social Networks: A Workshop on Multiplayer Games", 6th September University of Leeds, UK, British HCI conference.

Other writings

Nova, N., Girardin, F. & Dillenbourg, P. (2008). A Descriptive Framework to Design for Mutual Location- Awareness in Ubiquitous Computing. EPFL Technical Report LDM-REPORT-2008-001.

Nova, N., Traum, D., Montandon, L., Ott, D. and Dillenbourg, P. (2005), Do Partners Care about their Mutual Locations? Spatial awareness in virtual environments, EPFL Technical Report IC/2005/038

Nova, N. (2004). Socio-cognitive functions of space in collaborative settings : a literature review about Space, Cognition and Collaboration, EPFL Technical Report IC/2004/81.

Nova N. & Guin-Duclosson N. (2000). Liens entre l'apprentissage à partir d'exemples et le Raisonnement à Partir de Cas - Apports pour les Environnements Informatiques pour l'Apprentissage Humain. Rapport Interne du LISI RR2000-2

Press

De Super Mario à eBay, les mécaniques ludiques sortent du jeu vidéo, Amusement #5

Situation-awareness between drivers of ground surface vehicules in airports

I met people from Intuilab here in Toulouse who are working on a European project called Airnet about 'Airport Network for Mobiles, Surveillance and Alerting'. The relevant point for my research here is the tool they developed:

IntuiKit is a cross platform development environment (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X). It can be used with shuttle computers to be embedded in vehicles. The application below (Airnet European project) is used to augment awareness between drivers of ground surface vehicules in airports. Its user interface displays maps with real time positioning of vehicules and message boards. It is used with a 7 inches touch screen input device.

Why do I blog this? I am interested in the airport ground as a field of study in which drivers NEEDS information about others' whereabouts. The tool described here provide then with this information. I'd be delighted to have more data about its usage/inferences about others on the field.

Remarks and notes after my paper presentation

Yesterday I presented the results of the CatchBob! experiment at the french HCI conference. Afterwards I had a relevant discussion with Pascal Salembier about it. His main remarks/questions were:

• Apart from the low reliability (+ high subjectivity) of the NASA-TLX method (evaluation of task load), why do I need this kind of index for my study? He was quite skeptical/dubious about using this sort of information and found it was not really relevant in that context. My answer is that I found it interesting to know how the player evaluates the task load in mobile activities + as a verification that not using the location awareness tool is not detrimental in terms of physical/cognitive load.
• What would be a field/task I could use to generalize my findings? air-net from intuilab seems to be interesting (displays of all the persons on the airport roads, no studies about how it's used)
• Some graphics displays some dispersions that might be explained by the articulation of my qualitative/quantitative data: it's the case: the number and the content of strategy message is an important factor

Human Robots Interaction

It's been a while I was wondering about the emerging field of human-robots interaction. It seems that not it exists as attested by this conference: HRI 2006:

The theme of HRI 06, Toward Human-Robot Collaboration, highlights the importance of creating robot capabilities and interfaces that address human concerns such as social appropriateness, safety, and quality of service.

Who Should Attend: Researchers in robotics, human-factors, ergonomics, and human-computer interaction are invited to attend.

Why do I blog this? I an interested in this because of my research interests in HCI. Moreover, there is now a trend: robots are no longer an engineering domain and some folks are beginning to study more deeply the issues related to user experience, which I found relevant. I am particularly interested in:

• User evaluations • HRI metrics • HRI applications • HRI foundations • Case studies • Multi-modal interaction • Adjustable autonomy • Human-Robot Dialog

Off to conference

I'm heading to Toulouse, France for the french conference of human computer interaction called IHM 2005. I hope I will visit the Airbus facilities up there!

Enhanced Social Interaction in Traffic, Ph.D thesis

Enhanced Social Interaction in Traffic, a PhD Thesis, by Mattias Esbjörnsson.

We investigate social and interactional aspects of driving among groups of road users, where the roads and road use have the double qualities of means as well as ends, in order to generate meaningful and interesting mobile services. Based on ethnographic studies of groups of road users which all spend a lot of time on the roads for various purposes, ranging from work to leisure and fun, we explore how mobile services can be designed and accommodated to enhance social interaction in traffic.

The empirical data originate from three ethnographic studies of road users. The studies range from salespeople handling their work while driving and infrastructure managers taking care of the roads, to motorcyclists enjoying the company of other bikers while travelling along the roads. The studies display the specific conditions of road use, such as the speed, the focus on driving, the vast area, the need to be at certain geographical locations, the amount of other road users, or being closed in by the body of the vehicle, etc. These are prerequisites for performing work and/or socialising along the roads, as well as hampering factors. To bring forward the characteristics of road use, and the possibilities to develop mobile and innovative services benefiting from, and supporting road use, the dissertation discusses the road users’ relationships with the roadside passing by, with others far remote, and with road users met along the highway. These aspects of road use have played an important role in the design of two prototypes. PlaceMemo, developed to facilitate infrastructure management tasks. Hocman, designed to support the social aspects of motorcycling. These prototypes are designed to fit with the conditions of driving, and they have been brought back and evaluated in their intended setting, i.e. on the roads. Based on the findings from the field studies, as well as the evaluations of the prototypes, we argue that increased social interaction among road users is a promising way to proceed with traffic-related research. Seeing that road use contains a variety of social and interactional aspects, there is a potential in developing mobile services benefiting from the circumstances around road use, and enhancing social interaction among road users.

Why do I blog this? first because it shows the whole process of studying an activity (ethnographical data) that can lead to the design of new services. Second, because it raises interesting concerns linked to my research (geographical locations and this sort of things).

Research practices changed by free access to scientific results

Another good effect of free access is that scientific research is reshuffling its publishing model (or at least starting to) as attested by this article in The Economist:

IT USED to be so straightforward. A team of researchers working together in the laboratory would submit the results of their research to a journal. A journal editor would then remove the authors' names and affiliations from the paper and send it to their peers for review. Depending on the comments received, the editor would accept the paper for publication or decline it. Copyright rested with the journal publisher, and researchers seeking knowledge of the results would have to subscribe to the journal. No longer. The internet—and pressure from funding agencies, who are questioning why commercial publishers are making money from government-funded research by restricting access to it—is making free access to scientific results a reality. (...) The advantages afforded by the internet mean that primary data is becoming available freely online. Indeed, quite often the online paper has a direct link to it. This means that reported findings are more readily replicable and checkable by other teams of researchers. Moreover, online publication offers the opportunity for others to comment on the research. Research is also becoming more collaborative so that, before they have been finalised, papers have been reviewed by several authors. This central tenet of scholarly publishing is changing, too.

Why do I blog this? because I believe in this change and I am happy that things evolves (smoothly but...)

Phillip Jeffrey visit

Today, Phillip Jeffrey visited our lab in Lausanne. The point was to discuss potential avenues of collaboration with him and his group at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. One of the issue we raised is their future use of CatchBob! (yep they will re-use our CatchBob game their!). Some of the questions they want to tackle are really close to what we do; that's why I asked Philip if he could come visit us (taking advantage of the fact that he was at the European CSCW conference in Paris few days ago).

What's interesting is what they want to study (with regard to what we did/will do):

• What differences in collaboration and task success exist when location position is requested versus provided automatically? (eg. A player must hit a refresh button in order to receive location information versus the information being refreshed automatically)




• Do people employ different strategies for the "chase bob" (moving Bob) when compared to "Catch Bob!" tasks? How do strategies differ with location-awareness availability and obstacles within the environment?




• Does the type of communication used influence the level of collaboration and the usefulness of location-awareness?
• how does repeted play modify players'/groups' strategies?

We also presented him what we're currently working on:

• management of uncertainties in CatchBob (latency, location accuracy, annotations, impacts on collaboration/task performance/division of labor, how this relates to players' preconceptions)
• impacts of location awareness on collaborative strategies in the different phases of the game
• usage of various 'coordination keys/devices' while collaborating
• analysis of strategy messages (so that we can have a 'grammar' of 'intention awareness' acts)
• impacts of asychronous awareness (showing players their partners' trails)

Finally, we agreed to collaborate on avrious issues: papers / data analysis / workshop.

Weekly research meeting

In my weekly research meeting with my Ph.D. advisor this afternoon today, which should be considered as the first achievement of my thesis (or second if we take the literature review into account). In this first experiment, we found that an information about spatial position explicitly communicated by the participants is more powerful than an automatic location-awareness tool in terms of the representation of the partners' intents (aka mutual model) and with regard to collaboration. Furthermore, we also found that communication about strategy was more important than automatic location for building a good mutual model.

Then we thought about the following milestones for the thesis. The point would be design specifications for an 'intention-awareness' tool to would allow users to: - communicate explicitly - be structured to provide specific features based on the analysis of strategy messages drawn from the first experiment. I would have to discriminate some dimensions that would make sense for such a tool. It would be a sort of visual grammar that will define a spatial annotation tool.

The second experiment would then be to test such a tool in the CatchBob environment in 2 conditions: with it and with a version without information about position (since we saw that the giving of the partners' position is not useful we may want to control this).

todo:

- write a report with ALL the CatchBob1 results ( include post-hoc on MM, performance and strategy messages) - write the questionnaire/replay tool, in a chronological order - find people for the catchbob test - analyse strategy messages (and how players answered/replied), discriminate categories, figure out whether there are differences with regard to various variables: drawings or textual, onsite annotations or not) + see whether they are manifest or explicit agreements -> connection with my analysis based on Clark's theory of coordination devices! - figure out a visual grammar that would be based on this analysis, and which may define an 'intention awareness tool' explicitly written by the players usable in mobile collaboration.