A full day workshop on April 17, 2008
The two perhaps most significant trends in present-day ICT are mobile phones and social networking. The number of mobile phones is estimated to be over 3.3 billion, and the number social network sites in the Internet has reached a user base measured in hundreds of millions. However, the potentials at the intersection of the two are by and large underexploited at the moment. The few social network services for mobile phones have not gained significant popularity, and the more popular web-based applications treat mobile phones mainly as extensions. One may ask if these are due to technical problems or if there are more fundamental problems in "translating" the thinking behind social network sites to mobile use. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together researchers in mobile human-computer interaction and social networking to adress these questions and to discuss new opportunities. The presentations shall approach the issue either from the perspective of mobility or social networking, or both, and put forward a constructive position statement for discussion.
Participants: Berkeley Institute of Design (BID) and Ubiquitous Interaction (UIx) of HIIT, Finland
Place: At BID's premises (directions)
Schedule:
- 8.45-9.00 Introduction: Mobility and Social Networking
- 9.00- 10.30 1st session: New uses of technology
- Keng-hao Chang
- Antti Oulasvirta
- Risto Sarvas
- Marko Turpeinen
- Matthew Kam
- 10.30-11.00 Break
- 11.00-12.30 2nd session: Social structures and contexts
- Divya Ramachandran
- Jeffrey Nichols
- Airi Lampinen
- Omar Khan
- Antti Lindqvist
- 12.30-13.00 Lunch break
- 13.00-14.30 3rd session: From private to public
- Giulio Jacucci
- Rodolfo Samperio
- Peter Peltonen
- Martti Mäntylä
- 14.30-15.00 Break
- 15.00-16.30 4th session: Toward new forms of connectivity
- Jingtao Wang
- Timo Saari
- Tero Hasu
- Petri Saarikko
- Antti Nurminen
Speakers and Abstracts:
Towards emotion awareness: Exploring long-term monitor and support in mental health area
Keng-hao Chang
Suicide resulted from depression is one of the major causes of death among young adults in the U.S.. HIV patients often become depressed so that they stop the necessary medication and make the medication ineffective. In this project, we are exploring possible technologies that contribute to the area of mental health. We are currently investigation speech signals to classify mental states. We expect to build several applications based on the the recognition module, such as community support by emotional awareness cues, psychological research by incorporating with computerized experience sampling methods, and prodrome detection and intervention.
Language-oriented programming for mobile phones
Tero Hasu
We look at a semi-portable lightweight web server for S60, intended to provide otherwise sandboxed web browser based applications with access to any local services that they require. We particularly focus on the programming language technology used in the implementation. We consider the possibility of mixing and matching languages for a higher degree of abstraction in a situation where little language support infrastructure is in place.
Mobile media for collective experiences
Giulio Jacucci
Prototypes and field evaluation demonstrate that mobile and ubiquitous applications can contribute to sustain performative actions (embodied, expressive and experiential) and collective experiences. Conceptual work aimed at better articulating these actions and experiences could provide a more conscious, critical and grounded constructive research.
MILLEE: Mobile and immersive learning for literacy in emerging economies
Matthew Kam
Literacy levels in most poor countries remain shockingly low and formal education is making little progress. MILLEE improves literacy through language learning games on cellphones – the “Personal Computers of the developing world” – which are a perfect vehicle for new kinds of out-of-school language learning. Games bring children into rich, immersive environments where they can acquire and use language
naturally, while encouraging them to transfer their language skills outside the game.
Promoting environmental sustainability on social networking sites: Leveraging social influence and competition
Omar Khan
The most widely adopted applications on Facebook are social applications that enrich and encourage interactions between friends. The most actively used applications are games. Building on some of our previous work looking at the power of social influence and competition to promote certain behaviors, we propose a way of incorporating these ideas to transform a Facebook application that attempts to promote environmentally sustainable behaviors into a learning game. We may
also discuss how to generalize these ideas.
Role of groups and and group identification in social media: The case of Facebook
Airi Lampinen
On social network sites, multiple groups relevant to an individual are
present simultaneously. The presentation reviews the results of a study
investigating the role of different types of groups on Facebook and the
strategies individuals use to prevent and cope with potentially problematic
situations arising from this co-presence. Special attention is being paid to
how "a group" can be conceptualized both in theoretical and empirical terms.
Mobile vs PC: Two sides of a group awareness system
Antti Lindqvist
An overview of the PASION collaborative knowledge work application, and the current status of the research project. The two parts of the application, the email client and the mobile client, are explored. Data collection is still in progress.
Socializing the design of the mobile web by re-authoring existing web sites
Jeffrey Nichols (IBM)
The Highlight project is creating tools that allow end users to create
mobile versions of existing web sites. There is an inherent social aspect
to this creation process, because today's web sites tend to be complex and
different groups of people need to use a different subset of the features
of an existing site. Our current tools focus on the individual user,
however we are interested in expanding the mobile editing process to
support multi-user, social-oriented design of mobile web sites. There are a
number of challenges to socializing interface design however, such as how
do users understand the impact of others' changes and how does a user
determine which of a number of mobile designs for an existing site are most
relevant?
Location-based messaging and mobile 3D maps
Antti Nurminen
Mobile 3D maps can portray the environment in a realistic fashion. They can be used as an accurate background for near real time updated annotation displays (location based messages) and visualizaiton of positioned users. Latent annotation displays could emerge and display messages context sensitively. We present such a platform and the features facilitated by the technology.
Large-scale experimentation of mobile social media applications: The OtaSizzle project
Martti Mäntylä
Our accumulated experience in designing digital customer services, such as Jaiku.com, www.kuvaboxi.fi, and comeks.com, suggest design principles dealing with the service life-cycle. They include: how to gain the interest of the user at first encounter; how to hold it during the process of service appropriation; and how to make the contact durable. However, even though the evidence towards these principles is clear, and comes from several parallel sources, a number of open lines of research remain: 1) How do the principles scale with the size of the user population? Are some further design rules needed to deal with larger crowds? 2) Just how general are these rules? Are there also domain-specific rules (and if yes, which distinct domains are identifiable)? 3) The successful services are also characterised by continuous contact with users and very rapid evolution (daily builds). Is there some larger principle behind this? The recently started OtaSizzle project is designed to study these issues. We plan to build services following the above principles, focusing on service initiation; hooking the user; and building a durable relation. We will test the services with sufficiently large user populations and over sufficiently long time to see the dynamics of service diffusion and the impact of various principles. To achieve this, we will involve partners with access to large user populations and service infrastructures for reaching the users and deploy multi-disciplinary researcher resources for really studying, understanding and explaining the phenomena taking place.
How mobile phones may transform blogging: The case of Jaiku
Antti Oulasvirta
Microblogging is a new service category that enables pub-lishing brief blog-like postings from mobile terminals and PC to the web. However, the emerging practices and communities are poorly understood, despite the fact that microblogging is a key candidate in visions of “mobile Web 2.0.” To shed light on this new phenomenon, we analyzed a dataset comprising 10 months of public messaging in Jaiku
Interactions at a large interactive display in a city center
Peter Peltonen
CityWall is a large multi-touch display installed in a central location in Helsinki, Finland. Our study presents results from an analysis of 1199 social envounters at the display"
Helping community health workers utilize information
Divya Ramachandran
In developing regions, there is a need to disseminate information about health whose value is not immediately recognized by local communities. In India, individuals are appointed in communities as health promoters, but fail to perform due to lack of training, access to information, accountability and acceptance as credible sources within the community. We believe that using mobile phones, we can connect health workers with necessary resources and networks to increase their ability and effectiveness as community health promoters.
User engagement in large display interactive installations
Rodolfo Samperio
A brief view into challenges in the current interface development of Puppet Wall and CityWall, regarding user to user cooperation and the ability of the systems to create useful engagement.
Emotions and moods in mobile interaction
Timo Saari
The talk will address the role of emotions and moods in influencing users in mobile interaction situations. Example studies in mobile emotional awareness tools for knowledge work groups and emotional mapping of tourist attractions in Philadelphia will be discussed.
Designing aggregate level social media
Petri Saarikko
Concept and demonstration of the 'Funnelry' social media aggregator: Web-based mobile application combining hand written digitized pen strokes
from Atwink server and common social media services such as Facebook & Flickr.
Self-made media: 120 years of mobile media and socializing
Risto Sarvas
In 1888 Eastman Kodak launched a mobile media creation device for consumer use - a simple filmroll camera. What can user-generated content and social media learn from over a century of snapshot photography? What has really changed after the internet and camera phones?
Digital content communities
Marko Turpeinen
Our research focuses on participatory media production, social media services, applied gaming, and adaptive systems based on biofeedback. To develop successful new technologies, and bear responsibility of design decisions, we as developers should understand and anticipate the dynamics of technology-society interaction. This requires multi disciplinary end-to-end research from technological platforms to various viewpoints to their impact on the use environment
GLAZE - A system for supporting end-user generated location aware applications on cell phones
Jingtao Wang
Location-aware applications are experiencing tremendous growth with the
popularization of GPS-enabled cell phones. However, building these
applications still requires a long time and a high level of technical
expertise, making it difficult to address those countless location-centered
activities in our daily lives. To address this problem, we propose a system
for creating location-aware mini-applications, GLAZE (Generalized Location
Aware modelZ for End-users), which enables the average end-user to create everyday location-aware applications by themselves and on their cell phones. The GLAZE system provides a set of location-aware primitives named REWIND (READ, WRITE and FIND) to help end-users model and generate their intended applications though the help of a set of form-style smart templates. The GLAZE system is designed to lower the floor of location-aware application creation and encourage both expertise sharing and group interactions in a community.
Expected outcomes: Notes from group sessions are later written as a position paper that will be submitted to a workshop in an HCI conference.
Organizers: Antti Oulasvirta and John Canny |