Paper Reading #9: Jogging over a Distance

Jogging over a Distance between Europe and Australia

by: Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Frank Vetere, Martin R. Gibbs, Darren Edge, Stefan Agamanolis, Jennifer G. Sheridan


Authors
Mueller has affiliations with each of the institutions the other authors are affiliated with.  Vetere and Gibbs (Mr. Gibbs! He got off Jack's ship!) both do research with the Interaction Design Group at the University of Melbourne in Australia.  Edge is a Microsoft researcher in Beijing.  Agamanolis did his research at the Institute of Technology in Massachusetts and now does research at the Distance Lab in the UK.  Sheridan does research at the London Knowledge Lab in London.

Presentation Venue
"UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology" as per the document specs from the ACM digital library, dl.acm.org. The presentation took place in New York City, NY, 2010. (Yay!)

Summary


As restated in this paper several, several, SEVERAL times, it is about the social experience shared between people engaged in similar physical exertion activities and how technological design can enhance this experience.

Hypothesis
Their hypothesis was basically that a system could be designed that enhanced the social experience between two people during physical activity involving technology.

Methods
The technology already existed, so Mueller just conducted research with 17 participants running different paths, and sometimes in different countries, and monitoring how they interacted with one another.  Afterwards, the participants were interviewed for qualitative research with open ended questions about their experience.

Results
Mueller recorded mostly positive results about the experience, albeit with a couple of hiccups.  The participants enjoyed feeling like they were running with one another and found that the exertion and social experience were nicely balanced because they were both running at their own pace. One participant pair noted that the exertion monitoring made a new way for them to look at competing with one another, but eventually decided that a standard "finish line" was still better for comparing competition.

Discussion


I cannot believe that I just read ten pages of the same thing.  The hypothesis and results were rather obvious to me.  It's cool that there are systems for people to jog together across the world.  And, it's cool that the said system allows for people of different fitness levels to exercise together at their own desired paces.  But, seriously.  OF COURSE systems can be designed to do this!  Asking if technology can solve the problem of people interacting while exercising is like asking of email will really change how people communicate with each other.  The obvious solution (given that you are ABLE to be co-located): treadmills right next to each other!  Need fresh air? Stick them outside!  Still... they set out to say it's possible, and they successfully did that... many MANY times.  Think this blog was redundant?  Go read the paper. THAT's redundant.  Stick a fork in my thigh while I'm running, why don't you...

Ethnography: Muggle Quidditch! #0

My preliminary thoughts before visiting the Quidditch intramural gathering:

Going into this, I had only a vague idea of what to expect.  I imagined it would be silly to watch people running around with brooms between their legs.  A couple of Youtube videos confirmed this for me.  I considered that maybe there would be a lot of hardcore Harry Potter fans into the game, and maybe the few stragglers who came in because of their friends.  I was interested to know how they managed the rules to accommodate the lack of magical enchantments.   Beyond that, I expected it to be just like any other outdoor sports gathering – just with the slight nerdy twist.  I did not expect any sort of specific behavior from the people as individuals; just average college-age humans with a love for the wizarding world.

The Aftermath:

After going to visit one of their scrimmages to see how they operate, one thing caught my attention very quickly.  The people are VERY NICE!  I counted four different people get offered a broom and a chance to play when they paused to watch.  Oddly, this did not extend to me.  I got the impression it was because of my blue jeans which are clearly not suitable for running; or perhaps because I didn’t have a completely confused look on my face.  I took the time to speak with different players who had been on the team in years past.  I discovered that because the game is relatively new, the players are particularly fond of finding loopholes to make the game more fun (such as the Snitch riding off in the bed of a truck).  After the first fifteen minutes of relatively nonspecific chatter, I got my first reminder that essentially everyone around me was a Harry Potter fan.  A couple of people started talking about Rupert Grint, actor for Ron Weasley in the movies, showing up at a Quidditch game.  What struck me the most was the fact everyone present knew the actor by name as if he had turned up at their own practice.  This led to two comments that sent my mind reeling at the notion of just how deep this fan group went.  This was a retelling of a comment made by Daniel Radcliffe, actor for Harry Potter, when asked if he would go to any Quidditch games to which he responded (according to this speaker talking to me), “Do you have any idea what would happen to me if I did that?”  The other comment was along the lines of, “Just imagine if Emma Watson walked onto the field right now and how quickly she’d be dog piled by like 30 guys.”  This was such a brief exchange, but it so completely opened my eyes that I remembered I wasn’t simply at another athletic meet (albeit a slightly silly one).  I look forward to seeing how this common knowledge base among the players influences their behaviors, jokes, etc.

As curious as the Harry Potter culture underneath Quidditch is, I’m actually more interested in the game itself and the mentality of its players.  Specifically, I’m extremely interested in the mentality and relationship between the Snitch and Seekers in a game.  Much of the remainder of the game I can vaguely wave off as a combination of rugby and dodge ball.  Watching the Seekers try to catch the Snitch is more like watching a one vs. one vs. one capture the flag game where the flag is moving and pushing back.  To research this, I plan to join the Quidditch practices (and perhaps travel to some intercollegiate tournaments with the team) and train as a Seeker, then play as the Snitch in several games.  These are the “personal experience” approach, but I will also spend more time around Snitches and Seekers, investigating their thoughts on the interactions.  Since, being a full-contact sport, Quidditch requires a waiver to play, I contented myself with just talking to the charismatic Snitch who was on the field.  Multiple games were played, so he was taking a rest while new players took turns being the Snitch.  This taught me some of the most important things about the Snitch.  In Harry Potter, the Snitch is what ends the game.  It is all about finding that Snitch.  In real life, that’s not practical.  The players get tired running around in the heat while the Snitch is way out of the way minding its own business.  Having the Snitch on the field, where Seekers actively try to catch it, is when the most fun occurs because the excitement of the end of the game is near.  New Snitches tended to be gone for 20+ minutes with the game just rushing along at its fast pace, whereas the Snitch I was talking to would normally come back in around 10 or maybe 15 minutes.  I understood this Snitch to enjoy pushing the Seekers around when they tried to catch him (that is, the black sock with a tennis ball in it that hung from his waist).  He was a fit long distance runner and very agile, so he could continue to do so for extended periods of time.  Of course, being on the team will also lead me to the “insider’s” point of view for the ethnography, and I hope will provide me with additions “ins” to the team.  I greatly anticipate this research project.

Paper Reading #8: Gesture Search

Gesture Search: A Tool for Fast Mobile Data Access

by: Yang Li


Authors
Yang Li is a senior research scientist working for Google, and used to do research in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington.

Presentation Venue
"UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology" as per the document specs from the ACM digital library, dl.acm.org. The presentation took place in New York City, NY, 2010. (Yep. Again)

Summary


Gesture Search uses gesture inputs to search data on mobile devices.  The idea stemmed from a desire to combine the convenience of a "Search All" option with the ease of gesture input on a mobile device.  The idea is that by using a learning algorithm and short gestures, it would be possible to greatly enhance the speed and experience of users interacting with their mobile devices.

Hypothesis
A couple of different hypotheses were investigated.  The obvious was that Li supposed he would be able to implement a design which allowed users to search the data in their phones with the ease of gestures.  He also had to determine if it was possible to distinguish with relatively high accuracy whether an input was intended as a GUI touch or a gesture.  He also hypothesized that the average length of queries a user would need to use would vary based on the volume and complexity of data on the mobile device.

Methods
The search was implemented on Android devices with decent success.  It was made available by download to a large audience for testing, and after a month, data was collected to determine the frequency of use, the accuracy of gestures, the average gestures required, and the types of information most frequently sought.

Results
After successfully implementing Gesture Search, the data from initial test users was collected and showed that 66% of all gesture searches were made for contacts, and average query length needed as time progressed stayed consistently rather small (less than 5 letters, 80% less than 2).  This was especially true as the optimization allowed frequent queries to be returned sooner so individual gestures were more closely associated with specific searches.

Discussion


I really liked this idea.  In the first couple of paragraphs where it was talking about gestures, I was already thinking: "Great. Another attempt to make us learn lots of vague gestures that somehow map to some application that I may or may not have on my phone.  Why doesn't someone just implement the ability to stroke out a letter by hand, so we don't have to click through lots of interfaces to find our contacts or applications?" A couple of paragraphs later, I was grinning broadly at the realization that the paper had read my mind and altered its content for me!  Even if this new application didn't receive any positive feedback from testing users, it'd still be a success in my mind due to my own conceptual bias for the idea.  I was worried about conflicts with ordinary GUI touch interactions, but the application addresses those - albeit I cannot be sure how robust it is.  I am curious to know how the gesture recognition can learn the user better. I understand that some machine learning could be applied, and that handwriting recognition software isn't all THAT bad, but do our mobile devices come equipped with the space and computation power to continuously learn from its users, or will this cause the phone to crash in 3 months of regular use?  That's the sort of thing that would have me waiting 6 months to see what others think about it.  I find the idea of using gestures that we already recognize ( i.e. letters of the alphabet and similar symbols ) severely more appetizing than mapping abstract gestures that people can create on their own.  Perhaps this will lead people to the desire to create their own gestures, and then later it'll be more feasible.  But, for now I feel like branching out into the new frontier should have some explicit ties back to home to help people get on board.

Paper Reading #7: Stroke-Based Text Entry

Performance Optimizations of Virtual Keyboards for Stroke-Based Text Entry on a Touch-Based Tabletop

by: Jochen Rick


Authors
Jochen Rick is a faculty at Saarland University where he does computer research in "new media" for learning purposes.  He completed his PhD in Comp Sci at Georgia Tech.

Presentation Venue
"UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology" as per the document specs from the ACM digital library, dl.acm.org. The presentation took place in New York City, NY, 2010. (Just like every single other paper thus far).

Summary


This paper with such a long-winded name is actually for increasing optimization (or shortening...terrible name) in text entry on surfaces where a standard keyboard is no longer preferred.  Standard "tapping" style virtual keyboards are compared by key arrangement and then compared to the stroke input with the same virtual keyboard layouts.

Hypothesis
Stroke-Based Text Entry with the proper virtual keyboard layout is a strong potential substitute for tapping keyboards and may increase typing speed.

Methods
A user study was conducted to compare virtual keyboards based on standard tap typing.  Measurements were made in WPM (actually just CPM/5).  The study was also conducted on the same virtual keyboards to compare stroke typing.  Finally, two new virtual keyboards were constructed with stroke typing optimization in mind, and the stroke typing results were compared to the tap typing results.

Results
Rick found that there was a definite increase in typing efficiency for stroke typing compared to tap typing, however novice users had a preference for the Qwerty keyboard due to familiarity, even though the fastest layout proved to be as much as 50% faster.  Rick did suggest that moving to a new design with a 50% increase in efficiency might be enough to persuade people to make the transition from Qwerty keyboards though.

Discussion


I am glad to see new approaches to keyboards, though I am skeptical about this stroke typing.  It was hard for me to understand all of the information presented in this paper, but as I understood it, creating these strokes would be similar to writing with a pen again.  I understand how it can be faster in a testing situation, but I still wonder if it would be more efficient than a method that allows us to make full use of our hands and fingers.  This similar to the fact that typing is considerably faster than writing by hand.  Of course, you're not actually WRITING by hand with stroke typing, but you're still moving basically your whole hand across a little screen to the letter you want to choose.  To me, this seems like it would be difficult to conceptualize where to move hands quickly for extended typing (and in my particular case, programming).  Accenting this problem is the issue of ambiguity.  What differentiates 'to' from 'too'?  That question is asked in the paper, so it wasn't left in the open, but I want to take the question one step further.  What extra cost is there to us as users to learn that typing 'o' is not always the same, because some words have 'o' in it more than one time?  The statistical analysis of this paper suggests that it was a success - which it is from an empirical data point of view.  It IS considered more efficient than typing on a Qwerty board (but so are most of the other keyboards listed).  But, I still don't think I can call the research a resounding success, HOWEVER! I do think its direction to lean away from the standard keyboard is the right idea.

Paper Reading #6: TurKit

TurKit

by: Greg Little, Lydia B. Chilton, Max Goldman, and Robert C. Miller


Authors
Greg Little and Max Goldman are both graduate students doing research at MIT in the CSAIL along with Robert Miller, an associate professor.  Lydia Chilton is a graduate student at the University of Washington.

Presentation Venue
"UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology" as per the document specs from the ACM digital library, dl.acm.org. The presentation took place in New York City, NY, 2010.

Summary


TurKit introduces a programming model called Crash-and-rerun for algorithms that require human computation.  It is intended to allow developers to avoid rerunning high cost operations when developing.  The technology for this already exists, but was developed as a wrapper to facilitate usability.

Hypothesis
Algorithms which require human computation are hard to fit into a standard algorithm.  TurKit was designed as a wrapper for MTurk that will store expensive operations so that the program can crash, be altered, and rerun without needing to redo things such as ask users for an answer to some problem.  In essence, this means their hypothesis was to make this system usable.

Methods
TurKit uses a database and a new primitive to store expensive operations.  This means that an expensive function is wrapped by the once primitive which stores the value to the database and simply uses that value in the future.  Then, when the program crashes, it automatically restarts and avoids recalculating the values by using their stored values in the database.  There were a couple of examples of people using TurKit in their applications with moderate success.

Results
There is little indication concerning preference for TurKit and its Crash-and-rerun model over some other model, and there was indication of confusion with using TurKit.  They were successful in creating a wrapper system that could store expensive items, however at some scalability costs.  TurKit sacrificed scalability for program usability.

Discussion


I have mixed feelings about this toolkit and programming model.  On the one hand, I really love the idea of being able to save pieces of a program but allow debug printing and altering along the way for on-the-fly iterative development.  But, up until the end of the report I was wondering what sort of performance TurKit would actually be able to handle since size was limited.  I was skeptical at best, and their declaration that it was done for usability didn't really smooth my ruffled feathers.  Their testing numbers of "1000 HITs" suggested to me that it would be feasible only for relatively small individual research programs, but would not be usable for larger projects at all.  Since I consider most worthwhile projects, aside from small apps and games, that require user input to be quite large and complex, I don't think it's useful for that.  I hope that it's a leap board for similar programming models in the future - although I do still acknowledge that storing individual expensive operations does not solve asymptotically expensive algorithms.

Paper Reading #3: Pen + Touch = New Tools

Pen + Touch = New Tools

by: Ken Hinckley, Koji Yatani, Michel Pahud, Nicole Coddington, Jenny Rodenhouse, Andy Wilson, Hrvoje Benko, and Bill Buxton


Authors
Due to the sheer quantity of individuals involved in this project, I can only assume that they were all Microsoft research employees at the time of this research, and perhaps are all still working with Microsoft.  Perhaps some have moved on to new research areas of graphics while others specialized in multi-touch surfaces.  Maybe one retired and spends his days reading the newspaper to his Cocker Spaniel by the fireplace and playing croquet. Use your imagination (it's what I did!).

Presentation Venue
"UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology" as per the document specs from the ACM digital library, dl.acm.org. The presentation took place in New York City, NY, 2010.

Summary


Pen + Touch = New Tools is exactly that: a research endeavor to discover natural interactions involving a pen, touch, and combinations of the two for new input methods in systems.  The study was more or less localized to working with images and text in a notebook to create some sort of timeline for a short film or commercial.

Hypothesis
Hinckley and crew (fortunate his name is not Motley!) tried to realize a set of gestures and interactions based on preliminary research that mimicked the most natural course of action for people to assume when handling systems that involve multi-touch and stylus pens.

Methods
The research began with a user study to observe people creating a storyboard using "standard" items - a notebook, pen, scissors, glue, etc.  After categorizing the observed behaviors and designing features to account for these behaviors, their system was created with a basic emphasis on the pen for writing, and the hand for manipulation, while some combination of the two allowed for new types of interaction.  The new system was then tested with users.

Results
Some of the basic functionality was immediately obvious to the users, and the lack of a need for switching input modes created an opportunity for fluidity between actions.  This acquired their desired "same as with the notebook" sense on the computer screen.

Discussion


Alright, I thought this presentation was going to be exactly  like the Hands-on Math approach.  GREAT!  Another attempt at this?  Well, I was pleasantly surprised.  The in depth observations and studies made before designing the project really caught my attention.  They attempted to see what users wanted to do before trying to implement what they deemed "the best way for users to do something."  When one is trying to create a system to meet the needs of a user, where else should one look than to that user - preferably before one has some preconceived notions about how to "best" implement the idea.  I believe performing this background research before diving into the project enabled them to succeed in creating a system that smoothly transitioned as if users were actually just using a notebook and magazines.  They even addressed known pitfalls such as the user's palm touching the screen while writing with the pen.   This project is still on a somewhat narrow scope, so I'm not positive it will be very useful by itself.  I am eager to see if it creates a stepping stone for future interactions that mimic common human gestures.

+

=

Paper Reading #2: Hands-on Math

Hands-on Math

by: Robert Zeleznik, Andrew Bragdon, Ferdi Adeputra, and Hsu-Sheng Ko


Authors
The authors conducted this application research at Brown University as Ph. D. students, and are all still attending Brown University today.

Presentation Venue
"UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology" as per the document specs from the ACM digital library, dl.acm.org. The presentation took place in New York City, NY, 2010.

Summary


The Hands-on Math research strove to combine free form pen and paper techniques with the power of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS).  By combining muti-touch capabilities with a stylus pen, some core mathematics functionality was implemented to create a more flexible, powerful system without the pitfalls of simply "hitting the solve button" nor working out trivial math by hand (and consequent possible errors).

Hypothesis
Zeleznik sought to combine free form pen and paper techniques with the power of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS).  The project was intended as a technique for students and mathematicians to be more readily equipped to "see" the problem without making small mistakes.

Methods
The Hands-on Math project used multi-touch capabilities combined with a stylus pen to achieve a variety of gestures on a Microsoft Surface.  The stylus could do basic things such as write expressions, while the hand was reserved for manipulation purposes such as factoring expressions and creating new work space.  A study using students from the Brown University had the users attempting to use the system.  The users' experiences with the system were split up by page interaction, mathematics, and gestures.

Results
The observations from the user studies revealed that some of the gestures were not natural, such as the different finger poses.  It was reported that users tried to adopt awkward arm positions and exaggerated finger positions to obtain functionality that was intended to be simple.  However, once these were demonstrated, better grace did ensue.

Discussion


At first, I believed this approach could reap some real benefits.  I still believe that it succeeded in combining the elementary portions of pen-and-paper and CAS, however I am less certain about the execution.  The paper does mention that the users were asked to ignore minor glitches because the implementation was not their main concern, but I am inclined to believe that the proper implementation will make all the difference in the final deliverable.  With some more studying, perhaps more testing (and the outside input incurred therein), I believe the team would have been more successful in their findings.  Awkward positions when trying to execute basic actions is a red flag for re-design attention in my mind.  I did really enjoy the non-dominant hand used as a menu bar where ever it was positioned on the screen, however I am very concerned about how maintainable such a position is during heavy use.  Nevertheless, in as far as basic mathematics are concerned, I think this would be an amazing device to be able to carry around (not that you could right now. I can wish, aye?) and whip out when that overzealous math-friend tries to best you in a contest of differentials.  Let the contests BEGIN!