Shoogle: interface for sensing data
Shoogle: "Shoogle is a novel, intuitive interface for sensing data within a mobile device, such as presence and properties of text messages or remaining resources. It is based around active exploration: devices are shaken, revealing the contents rattling around 'inside'."
Shoogle: Excitatory Multimodal Interaction
on Mobile Devices. pdf
Devices as Interactive Physical Containers:
The Shoogle System. pdf
Movie showing experiment here
Electric cars and the problem of infrasturcture
A very interesting blog about electric cars and the problems behind the power structure that would support the general use of power.
by Technical Editor Paul Rako.
We’ve got electric cars but no infrastructure to charge them
An interesting fact about electric cars came up yesterday in Bill Schweber’s coffee talk about the smart grid. There was a fellow in the audience there who worked at Southern California Edison. He pointed out that if a bunch of neighbors in a cul-de-sac all bought electric cars, the power line transformer on the pole would blow up at night from the excessive load of charging all those cars. He reminded us we have a 50-year-old infrastructure here in the USA. I have a friend in the semiconductor industry who has seen newsgroup postings that point out a related problem. Those power pole transformers also need to cool off at night when they are under no load. With even a few electric cars charging off the transformer, it will stay nice and warm overnight, and then on a hot summer day, the transformer will blow up due to overheating.
Finally I remind you this is all related to the crappy efficiency of distributing power. I heard Samuel J. Palmisano, The CEO of IBM give a speech bragging about how IBM can help power companies improve the 67% efficiency of the distribution of power. He was not talking about the thermal and mechanical inefficiencies of generating the power, he was just talking about the distribution losses to your wall outlet.
So this demonstrates that in all political battles, and electric cars are a social and political battle, not a technical one, you have to look at the source of information. Regarding pure-electric cars, the sources are: fans of electric cars, who are really people who hate oil companies and capitalism in general. Another source is scientists, not engineers. Scientists do not care about the true costs of things, they just want to publish and get grants. Then there are the politicians, always willing to say anything to get votes. Finally there are desperate car companies like GM, who pass off a series hybrid, the Volt as an electric car, when it is really a hybrid. GM recently went on record saying the Volt will get 50 mpg in hybrid mode. If that is the case, I will be the first to buy one, rip out the 300 pounds of batteries so I can get 60 mpg and then I won’t even have to remember to charge it up every night,. Maybe the final group of people pushing electric cars is the “entrepreneurs” just trying to get rich quick making promises that they can’t keep.
On the other side, one competent engineer from the power company reminding us that if everybody uses electric cars we will have to rewire every pole and transmission tower to handle the load, even if all the load is off-peak.
This makes me think the real hope for fully electric cars would be using local solar power on your roof to charge it up, but then you have to store the power somewhere since the solar will tend to make the power when you have the car at work. OK, so I guess the only proactive way is to have solar charging stations at work where you park the car. Geez, this it getting kludgy. One thing I find amazing is people that claim that electric cars will help greenhouse gasses, and that is just nonsense since most electric power is made with coal and natural gas. And then lets remember that you can’t move all these kilowatts of power around with perfect efficiency. I am going to make some rough guesses on the overall efficiency of an electric vehicle:
95% Turning coal and gas to heat.
89% Heat to electricity
67% Distribution losses
80% Charging losses
97% Battery losses, especially Li-ion
75% Drive losses
When you run those efficiencies sequentially, you get 33% efficiency from fossil fuels to motive power. That is still way better than the 7 to 10% from an internal combustion engine operating over an average drive cycle, but it is far from the 100% that electric car acolytes imply. Now you can see why auto companies like hybrids. They allow the internal combustion engine to operate in a 30 or even 40% efficient regime and then let the electric system run over entire operating range of the drive cycle. This eliminates the first four inefficiencies I cited, and maybe even the battery losses, since the battery is not storing charge over long periods.
So a pure electric vehicle looks great on paper, but that is marketing paper or acolyte paper or politicians’ paper. When you run the numbers on engineer’s paper, things are less rosy. I say we keep up the research but remember, China owns most of the exotic metal like neodymium we need for the motor magnets and a good chunk of the lithium we need for the batteries. Our government is going around fighting wars like it is 1943 and the Panzer divisions are ruining out of oil. It is really these noble metals and rare earths that are the commodities that are worth fighting over. Typically, politicians and Generals always fight the last war.
Meanwhile, just like radio spectrum should be used for mobile applications, liquid fuels are best suited to cars for now. That liquid might be alcohol or some synthetic brew, but don’t think fully electric vehicles are a practical alternative for the whole country' http://www.edn.com/blog/1700000170/post/1840054184.html?rid=#reg_visitor_id_10#&nid=3351.
original link
IRB Training
Consent form form Project testing.
Certificate of IRB training for the ECS598 Class.
Labels:
consent form,
hci,
IRB,
testing
Book: Self Theories: their role in motivational, personality and development
Great book from author Carol Dweck.
Labels:
learned,
motivational
Data from project using Many eyes tool
This link is the graphic showing the MPG vs cost and CO2 of two different vehicles in a one year range. Very nice tool and allowed me to gather data from different sources and present the data in a more appealing manner.
Many eyes link
Cost of fuel economy
Labels:
group project,
hci,
pollution
Many eyes tool
Experimenting with data from HCI class project. Very good tool for visualization of data in multiple unique ways. Give it a try!!
Check my uploaded data here.
Beliefs Influence Green Behavior: Lessons from Guatemala
http://marketinggreen.wordpress.com/2006/07/25/beliefs-influence-green-behavior-lessons-from-guatemala/
http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/satran/files/the_cultural_mind.pdf#search="The Cultural Minds atran"
Green Consumer Behavior– Part I: Information Paradox | Futurelab – An international marketing strategy consultancy
Green Consumer Behavior Part I: Information paradox
by: David Wigder
Understanding consumer behavior is critical for any marketer, and is especially important in regard to environmental products and services.
More than one hundred years of consumption theory – across a wide range of academic disciplines including economics, psychology and sociology - makes it clear that there are many different motivations and influences that drive consumer behavior. Professor Tim Jackson at the Centre for Environmental Strategy at the University of Surrey (Guildford, UK) provides a comprehensive summary of this history in his Motivating Sustainable Consumption, a report to the Sustainable Development Research Network, a Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (UK)-funded initiative designed to link research and policymaking in the area of sustainable development.
Papero The robot nanny from NEC
Papero is an amazing Japanese robot that can take care of your kids, it is mainly used as a research tool for HCI.
Check this video and some of its capabilities.
mms://ucan.wmt.biglobe.ne.jp/ucan_wf/robo/high/paperochild_eng.wmv
It's capabilities video link:
mms://ucan.wmt.biglobe.ne.jp/ucan_wf/robo/high/papero04kino_eng.wmv
General web page for videos and description of Papero.
http://www.nec.co.jp/products/robot/en/video/index.html
Class blog
I never had a online portfolio before, so it is an interesting experience to apply myself and write down my thoughts as different topics cross my mind or everyday observations occur. We'll see how this evolves in time, hopefully it will become a more natural task and ideas will flow freely.
Networks and existing video needs as bandwidth needs increased
While planning the goals for this year at work, it cross my mind the quantity of applications that can be created if a) video analytics required low resolution for its algorithms to work or HD video would be easy to remotely stream using internet ( I mean 1080p resolution) and b) if there was a smarter way to define or detect the video buffer or frame where the information to analyze resides. The overall direction of technology shows that it is a matter of time for this to become a reality and as a trend analytics are starting to move to the client side, within the camera guts, next to the encoding system.
Change of human values and interaction as technology evolves
This previous week I tried to pay close attention to people and their computer interactions. First, it is amazing the levels computers permeate everyday actions. Allow me to explain myself. Today my gas tank was low, at least that is what my vehicle showed me, so I decided to head towards the gas station and after pulling in front of the pump I used my credit card to pay for the transaction, filled the tank and headed to work. After reflecting a little about this, I realized my interaction with nearly 100 little computers. My vehicle has at least 50 small microcontrollers that monitor, control and provide multiple UI for personal comfort, to mention a few (tire pressure, gas, airbags, stereo, passenger's seat, antilock brakes, steering wheel, speed sensors, etc) the pump also has multiple computers, at least for credit card network transactions, the database computer for my credit card data, the fuel measurement system, the computer of the pump, the internal cash register in case I use cash. If I take a closer look, my watch, the soda machine, the traffic light, my cell phone, they are everywhere.
After realizing how this invisible invasion of computers makes my life so easy, I started to wonder about the underlying effects this has on people. This issue is better reflected in the paper “reflecting human values in the digital age” and “fogies at 20's”. All this was become clearer when I observed a couple next to the table my friends and I sat while lunch. The interesting thing was that human interaction was gone and each one was one hundred percent immerse in a different computer, one was using his net-book and the other was reading her nook. This made me wonder if this phenomenon was caused by technology (maybe it is easier to interact with a computer) or our culture drives us to always feel in a rush to keep up with something and we can share “it” better after our devices keep an eye for us and just interrupt us when necessary.
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Problems as opportunities
Mostly new developments are been used in the area of technology been along the mentality of faster and less power. So far, it seems that HCI needs to catch up and in order for this to happen our understanding of Human interaction with computer needs to be better understood.
However, more applications (music instruments, gadgets, gesture detection) and lack of a framework to understand the interactions leads to gadgets that are cool but do not survive in time.
It seems however that no understanding of the application or lack of human motive is further develop (which means it is a verge of development and a cool area to work on).
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Writing about my thoughts has never been easy, I always found reason why I could not write or when I would try it would be hard to describe, it was better to draw or to paraphrase it in another way. I am eager to see what results from this e-diary.
Stanford lectures
Personally there were two things that I felt were very applicable to myself. One is to take the chance to be fabulous and talk to people, I guess that I tend to get entangled in my own thoughts that even when walking do not pay much attention around me. By taking the chance to be fabulous I force myself to be aware, to express what I think and to think more about what is going on around me, this also allows me to talk to other people more and discuss about the same topic from a different perspective. All that has been fascinating and an eye opener about who you can meet if you are in the right place.
The other topic from this talk I felt was appealing was the envelope with five dollars, this part made me think about how limited we can be sometimes if we do not look at things from a different perspective. There can be multiple solutions to the same problem and sometimes we also develop a deaf ear because we think we heard everything before. This seems to be the case because of been in the industry for long, it shapes the way I think. Since I started this class, I tend to think lees of cost or technology available and more about the new concepts and if it would be acceptable or change the way we perform certain tasks. It creates a new level of thinking, more freedom I guess.
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I received today the book of the Universal Traveler. It is a very interesting book, it provides different sets of tools for problem solving and creative thinking, it will be very useful in creative thinking which is an area I want to develop further before I apply any problem solving skills.
Hopefully not like Susumu Yokota’s song titles
Some very cool TED talks
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=as-luck-would-have-it
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Computers helping us to become aware of our behaviors and dealing with other people’s behaviors
Links to explore:
http://ict.usc.edu/projects/elect_bilat1/
http://ict.usc.edu/projects/full_spectrum_command/
inspiring
http://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html
Group Project
Behaviors and what impact they can have in our society and environment
Smart house and power consumption awareness
Use for monitoring behavior today, this can have a great impact. First step is to realize that we as a group or global culture have a sometimes terrible effect in nature, and natural or human resources.
Use this data to show it:
http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html
Energy logistics
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/gapcasts/gapcast-10-energy/
Brink and Lard Games
Larp games: Live action role play game. Allows real life experiences to be portrayed as games. This is the realm of role play games such as:
Brink Games:
Mission for Project
Labels:
group project,
missions,
project
HCI 3-3-2010
Java tools africa enterprenourship using and developing applets. Gromming Fromm (novel price). Keva.
Creativity and societal problems ( HCI and email, concentration).
Mindset of right now!!! affect their behaviour NOW!
Develop tools to allow the change of the tomorrow, not the right now.
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Eliminate boundary between education and research
Check slides online
Knowing the person's context and responding to their motivations.
kids room media la 1996 be aware of this research and its findings
As long as heararchy structure its fairly easy to remove responsability. Mallgrams experiments.
Two things
IAN BOGOST
Persuasive and Reflective Computing
Goals for the next meeting for the HCI group
As a HCI team we have been looking at the different resources we have been using.
Internal resources
review: Issues in Designing Agents for Long Term Behavior Change
Introduction
Some people are not ready to change their health
behavior, such as stopping smoking, or improving
exercising or dieting, even though they may know all of
the reasons for change. Such individuals will not likely
take the first step toward change, even when asked to
do so by a counselor or therapist. These individuals,
who admit to no plans or willingness to change, are
referred to as “precontemplators” within the framework
of the transtheoretical (stages of change) model of
health behavior change [20]. They represent a
particular challenge for human and automated health
counselors alike, and have not received much attention
in the literature on automated health behavior change
to date.
Challenges
Minimizing Repetitiveness
One surprising finding from prior longitudinal studies of
health counseling agents we have conducted was that,
even though dialogue scripts had been authored to
provide significant variability in each days' interaction,
most participants found the conversations repetitive at
some point during the month, and because of this
many lost motivation to follow the agent’s advice [4,5].
As one participant put it, “It would be great if Laura
could just change her clothes sometimes.” This
repetitiveness was more than an annoyance; some
subjects indicated that it negatively impacted their
motivation to exercise (e.g., “In the beginning I was
extremely motivated to do whatever Laura asked of
me, because I thought that every response was a new
response.”). The amount of behavioral, linguistic and
visual variability required to avoid the perception of
robotic repetitiveness remains an open research
question.
Establishing Therapeutic Alliance
The therapeutic alliance – the strength of the bond
between counselor and patient, and their mutual
agreement on the goals and tasks of therapy – is a key
component of successful change across a wide variety
of different counseling methods and strategies [6]. We
believe that establishing a strong therapeutic alliance
between an agent and its user will, similarly, be a key
requirement in maintaining engagement through the
course of a long-term behavior change intervention.
The patient’s assessment of the therapeutic alliance
tends to be established early, within the first few
sessions; this early assessment is relatively stable over
time, and predictive of successful outcomes [17]. The
behavior of the agent within the first few interactions
with the user must be carefully designed, as a failure to
develop a strong alliance may be difficult to correct
later. The alliance also tends to develop through a
cycle of short-term ruptures and repairs [21]; a
successful agent must be able to assess and respond to
these variations in its working relationship with users.
Maintaining Persistence Across Counseling Sessions
In order to perform counseling actions that span more
than one session, in addition to demonstrating
continuity in the working relationship [10], the agent
must remember something about its past encounters
with users. Many schools of psychotherapy involve
giving patients some form of “homework” to do in
between counseling sessions, and most behavioral
techniques (e.g., shaping and positive reinforcement)
require that patients’ past behavior and/or goals be
remembered for comparison purposes. At a minimum,
the fact that the agent has interacted with a given user
before, and perhaps the number and/or duration of
such interactions must be remembered between
sessions. Persistent memory should ultimately be
represented as an episodic store recording details of all
past interactions with users. A useful middle ground is
to record specific facts that can be referenced in future
conversations. Examples in the physical activity
coaching domain include remembering the name of a
user’s walking buddy or favorite walking location, as
well as purely social (off-task) facts, such as the user’s
favorite television program and whether they had any
big plans for the upcoming weekend. In our system, a
user model is loaded from a relational database at the
start of each counseling session, and saved back out at
the end of the session, in order to provide persistence
across sessions.
Authoring Counseling Dialogue
Devising an efficient and effective process for authoring
large quantities of dialogue for longitudinal interaction
is a significant challenge of this project. We must
provide sufficient content for up to 30 conversations
per user, encompassing as large a range of user
situations as possible. The content should be reviewed
by experienced counselors or other domain experts.
Finally, the content should be modular and reusable, to
ease the implementation effort of future systems. In
previous work [5], we have used dialogue systems
based on augmented transition networks. This simple
formalism has been usable by domain experts with
relatively little training. Thus far we have found that
our current hierarchical task modeling approach is
significantly more difficult to understand and author.
Whether these increases in authoring difficulty result in
commensurate improvements in reusability remains to
be seen.
Eliciting Open-Ended Responses
Open-ended questions and continuation prompts (“tell
me more about that”) are used extensively in
motivational interviewing to get clients talking about
their own motivations for change. Eliciting this kind of
information through multiple-choice menus represents
one of the biggest hurdles to our use of hierarchical
task models to emulate this style of counseling.
Approaches we have taken include: keeping user
responses very abstract; providing “drill down” trees to
index desired statements from general categories to
specific responses; and using knowledge about users
gleaned from other sources (e.g., enrollment web
forms) that they can simply endorse during a
counseling session. None of these approaches is
entirely satisfactory, and this remains an open area of
research.
Conclusion
We have described many challenges and open research
problems in building a re-usable health counseling
system for longitudinal health behavior change
interventions. We plan to conduct initial testing of an
exercise promotion intervention based on this
framework early in 2009 and then proceed to porting
the framework for use in a diet intervention (fruit and
vegetable.
From:
Timothy Bickmore
Daniel Schulman
Northeastern University
College of Computer and
Information Science
360 Huntington Ave, WVH202
Boston, MA 02115
bickmore@ccs.neu.edu
laurap@ccs.neu.edu
schulman@ccs.neu.edu
Social interruption and the loss of productivity
E-mail Isn't Dead, But It Is Broken - Reviews by PC Magazine
Phoenix Grand Challenges Summit 2010
Arizona State University’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering will host the Phoenix Summit on the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges in Phoenix, Arizona on April 8-9, 2010. This two-day event will focus on the grand challenges of engineering better medicines, managing the nitrogen cycle, making solar energy economical and advancing personalized learning.
Here is more information: Phoenix Grand Challenge Summit 2010
Interacting with computers
It was at elementary school, I started using the XT PC because computers started to become popular at professional areas. After playing with my first computer my father realized I was quite good using them and it was fun for me because I could write a first Basic program which would play music on a speaker. Later I was capable to create simple graphics using texts/symbols.
My worst experience with a computer is whenever I install something and it does not work as it is supposed to, which creates a lot of work to make sure it is installed correctly and no other parts of the system stop working. It feels like interacting with someone who is working against you.
Best experience with any computer or technology is creating an application that runs smoothly, adding video, sounds or new interfaces in order to create new sensations and simulate a new environments.
My favorite activity: Developing new embedded toys to control remotely using wireless networks. Several computers have been involved with this, due to the different programs and the network interface. The ease to acquire/view and control devices from another location, data that is possible to use to enable other applications, takes away the tediousness of writing everything and analyzing data at a faster rate.
