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Home > Research > Themes > Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
HCI studies how computer systems can be better designed to support users' need. At SI we study HCI at many different scales and from many different viewpoints. Our research includes studying how people adopt and use technologies as well as building new systems to augment the capabilities of individuals, groups, and communities. Areas of particular interest at SI include social computing, computer-supported cooperative work, collaboratories, information visualization, and pervasive computing. (Also see Technology-Mediated Collaboration)
Researchers
Current Projects
III-Small: Manipulation-Resistant Recommender Systems
Online recommender systems are already widely deployed as tools to guide users towards items they will like, and the space of potential applications of this technology is even larger. However, there is a growing concern that recommender systems may be manipulated by people with a vested interest in having certain items recommended (or not recommended). This is exacerbated by the fact that it is often easy for a manipulator to create multiple online accounts in order to carryout an attack. We seek to develop general techniques for the design of manipulation-resistant recommender systems, as well as specific solutions for applications in which such a recommender could have a significant impact.
eKidney
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is the ninth leading cause of death in the U.S., affecting the lives of more than 30 million Americans. To empower patients and their families, the National Kidney Foundation Michigan (NKFM) has developed several successful peer-driven support and education programs. We are working with NKFM to design, develop, deploy, and evaluate technology-enhanced, peer-driven patient empowerment programs. Currently, we are undertaking a broad-based ethnographic study of CKD sufferers to explore the opportunities for web-based, mobile, and ubiquitous computing technology to improve quality of life and health outcomes. In addition, we are developing a web-based community to allow young adults with CKD to find information and social support during the challenging process of adapting to life with a chronic disease.
Talking Points
Talking Points is an urban orientation system for the visually impaired. It combines positioning and tagging technology with community-generated descriptions of points of interest that are accessed via a speech interface. A mobile prototype has been developed based on studies of the urban navigation strategies of both sighted and visually impaired users, and a field deployment is currently being planned.
Publications:
- Escobar, M., Newman, M.W., Stewart, J., Hilden, J., Bihani, K., and Bauman, S., Talking-Points: A Mobile, Context-based Information System for Urban Orientation of Sighted and Visually-Impaired Users. In Proceedings of Accessible Design for the Digital World (ADDW 2008), York, UK (2008)
- Stewart, J., Bauman, S., Escobar, M., Hilden, J., Bihani, K. and Newman, M.W. Accessible Contextual Information for Urban Orientation (Note). In Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Ubiquitous computing (UbiComp 2008), Seoul, Korea (2008)
Towards a Virtual Organization for Data Cyberinfrastructure
Social science research on cyberinfrastructure (CI) has relied upon piecemeal, project specific approaches to studying how social, technical, organizational, and cultural features intertwine. We propose research that will move CI studies to the next level: large-scale, integrative approaches that will create comparable, reusable datasets across a range of research areas, collaboration methods, project scales, and project goals. Our long-term goal is to establish a CI Virtual Observatory for the study of data, data analysis, and visualization.
Virtual Space Interaction Test Bed (VISIT)
This initiative seeks to reduce dependence on physical facilities to collocate people by designing, developing, deploying, using, and evaluating highly realistic virtual spaces for collaboration. We seek to combine high-definition video with large-scale, multi-megapixel displays and stereo audio to connect people who are distant from each other in as realistic a setting as possible today.
VOSS: Delegating Organizational Work to Virtual Organization Technologies
Virtual organizations (VOs) play a significant and growing role in scientific discovery, innovation, and teaching. Tools for supporting VOs have traditionally sought to facilitate communication and coordination at a distance and across institutional barriers. This project undertakes the most rigorous comparative study of the dynamics of VO formation and maintenance to date.
Past Projects
Arkose
Online discussions such as a large-scale community brainstorming often end up with an unorganized bramble of ideas and topics that are difficult to reuse. A process of distillation is needed to boil down a large information space into information that is concise and organized. Arkose is a system-augmented approach to the problem - a set of tools with which human editors can collaboratively distill a large amount of informal information.
Collaborative Configuration
As personal computing environments become ever more complex, it becomes challenging to for end-users to create, understand, and maintain the hardware and software configurations that allow them to carry out the activities that matter to them. In this project, we are develop techniques that will allow users to help each other create and maintain configurations. Specifically, we are developing the Collaborative Configuration Service (CCS)—-a facility that collects configuration information from various users and matches similar users with each other for the purpose of diagnosing problems, providing help, and recommending new functionality.
CommunityNetworkSimulator
Help-seeking communities play an increasingly critical role in how people seek and share information online, forming the basis for knowledge dissemination and accumulation. We would like to find mechanisms to use the social network characteristics of these communities design new systems and algorithms. However, differing network structures and dynamics will affect possible algorithms that attempt to make use of these networks, and little is known of these impacts. We developed a CommunityNetSimulator (CNS), a simulator that combines various network models, as well as various new social network analysis techniques that are useful to study online community (or virtual organization) network formation and dynamics.
The Designers' Ubiquitous Computing Testbed (DUCT)
Interaction designers have found that the only reliable way to build systems that people can actually use is to prototype early and often, and to get your prototypes in front of real users at every opportunity. For desktop and web-based systems, the interaction designer's toolkit is now somewhat mature--but things look very different for emerging application types such as mobile, ubiquitous, and context-aware systems. We are working to develop tools to support rapid iterative prototyping of ubicomp applications, including the Virtually Ubiquitous 3-D ubicomp environment simulator and the Replay system for capture and playback of sensor data streams.
D-Sense
We are exploring the potential of mobile sensing technology to assist with the diagnosis and management of chronic mental illness, specifically depression. By collecting wearable sensor traces from individuals' behavior as they go about their daily activities, and comparing these with experience sampling mood reports, we seek to gain insight into the links between behavior and mood for specific people. From this, we hope to be able to develop tools to stimulate reflection with informed self-analysis, empowering people to be more self-aware and able to make smarter choices about their own psychological trajectories. In addition, such information may be able to assist with clinical interventions such as psychotherapy and pharmacological treatment. Currently, we are carrying out preliminary studies to explor the links between sensed behavior and mood for both depressed and non-depressed individuals.
Dynamics of Data and Knowledge in Scientific Cyberinfrastructures
If cyberinfrastructure(CI)-enabled science is to deliver on its transformative potential, we must understand the dynamics of data and knowledge production, and we must establish criteria for success and best practices. This project investigates practices of monitoring, modeling, and memory across four leading CI projects targeting three critical domain areas: ecology and environment, hydrology and water management, and earth systems science, areas united through their relevance to climate change concerns. Our research will lay groundwork for an inclusive, theoretically rich, and practically engaged social science of cyberinfrastructure.
Pangmangi
In this project, we wanted to examine the role of art in information systems beyond its traditional design implications (such as effective communication and aesthetical decoration). We used the Pangmangi information display prototype to conduct group interviews with people from diverse backgrounds about how they viewed the use of art in the system. Our analysis uncovered ways that art is a versatile design medium due to its being socially, culturally, and contextually constructed.
The ProD Framework
A proactive display is an application that selects content to display based on the set of users who have been detected nearby. In this project, we are developing Proactive Display (ProD) Framework, which allows for the easy construction of pro-active display applications which supports a range of proactive display applications and also enlarges the design space of proactive display systems by allowing a variety of new applications that incorporate different views of social life and community.
Publications:
- Congleton, B., Ackerman, M.S. and Mark W. Newman. The ProD Framework for Proactive Displays. To appear in Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '08), Monterrey, CA, USA (2008)
QuME
Expertise finders are an important class of collaborative recommendation systems, but they suffer from a general problem: Current expertise finders, both commercial and research, cannot infer expertise levels very well. Traditionally, expertise finders have relied on the standard information similarity measures (such as term vector comparisons). However, in general, knowing level of expertise for a potential information source is very important. The classical example is medical: If you are sick, you want to find a doctor with expertise, not merely someone interested in the topic.
QuME is a prototype middleware system that contains a number of mechanisms to facilitate expertise finding, expertise exchange, and social interaction for online communities and organizations. QuME includes novel mechanisms to infer expertise levels, making a larger range of social interaction possible.
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