We explore the metaphorical "daily memory pill"concept - a brief pictorial lifelog recap aimed at reviving and preserving memories. Leveraging psychological strategies, we explore the potential of such summaries to boost autobiographical memory. We developed an automated lifelogging memory prosthesis and a research protocol (Automated Memory Validation "AMV") for conducting privacy-aware, in-situ evaluations. We conducted a real-world lifelogging experiment for a month (n=11). We also designed a browser "Pixel Memories"for browsing one-week worth of lifelogs. The results suggest that daily timelapse summaries, while not yielding significant memory augmentation effects, also do not lead to memory degradation. Participants' confidence in recalled content remains unaltered, but the study highlights the challenge of users' overestimation of memory accuracy. Our core contributions, the AMV protocol and "Pixel Memories"browser, advance our understanding of memory augmentations and offer a privacy-preserving method for evaluating future ubicomp systems.

Queer Joy is conceptualised as a form of resistance to oppression by celebrating queerness in the face of adversity. This research aimed to centre queer joy and understand how it is expressed and may be facilitated in online spaces. To do this we conducted a survey with 100 UK participants who indicated they identified as LGBTQ+ on the online recruitment platform Prolific. We asked a series of open and closed questions in an online survey to investigate 1) what queer joy looks like on social media 2) how queer joy content is engaged with on social media 3) which platforms are perceived to facilitate queer joy and 4) how queer people protect their privacy online. The results suggested that to facilitate queer joy online, platforms should allow flexible self expression and community engagement, while allowing for granular control over privacy and the audience such content is shown to.

Social media platforms have transformed the way individuals document and revisit personal experiences. We conducted a study of Instagram, one of the most popular mobile social media platforms (about 95 million images are uploaded daily) to investigates the impact of reviewing Instagram posts on episodic memory—the ability to recall specific events and details. Fifty Instagram users participated in a questionnaire-based study, where they were prompted to recall memories associated with three of their posted images across six prompts: story (the story of the event), location, time, people, before/after events, and order. Results revealed significant variations in recall accuracy: participants were better at recalling the story of the events and associated people compared to the temporal details (the timing) of the event (H = 157.04, p < 0.000). A weak but statistically significant correlation (r = 0.66, p < 0.001) was observed between the number of likes a post received and participants’ ability to recall event details. Higher social engagement thus appears to enhance recall accuracy, highlighting the role of social reinforcement in memory processes. To our knowledge, this study is the first to examine the effect of the non-ephemeral platform "Instagram" use on episodic memory. While the study offers promising evidence of Instagram’s cognitive benefits, further research is needed to explore long-term implications and the interplay between social engagement and episodic memory.

Information presentation problems on interactive dashboards are known to hinder decision-making. Since a traditional user-centred approach to designing usable dashboards cannot fully satisfy user demands, needs and skills, we isolate behavioural indicators of usability when users conduct typical information-seeking and comparison tasks. In a first study (N = 50), we identified strategies derived from 486,435 interaction events logged in a controlled setting with synthetic dashboards. User models consisting of these user strategies and graph literacy produced strong signals indicating that usability was predictable. In a second study (N = 65), we tested the initial insights on real-world dashboards. While most of our hypotheses were confirmed, graph literacy emerged as the best predictor of usability. Usability was better predicted in dashboards with problems, suggesting promising opportunities for automated usability evaluation and real-time support for users struggling with visual analytics dashboards.

Reminiscence is known to play an important part in helping to mitigate the effects of dementia. Within the HCI community, work has typically focused on supporting reminiscence at an individual or social level but less attention has been given to supporting reminiscence in residential care settings. This lack of research became particularly apparent during the COVID pandemic when traditional forms of reminiscence involving physical artefacts and face-to-face interactions became especially challenging. In this paper we report on the design, development and evaluation of a reminiscence system, deployed in a residential care home over a two-year-period that included the pandemic. Mnemosyne comprises a pervasive display network and a browser-based application whose adoption and use we explored using a mixed methods approach. Our findings offer insights that will help shape the development and evaluation of future systems, particularly those that use pervasive displays to support unsupervised reminiscence.

Websites are frequently used by programmers to support the development process. This paper investigates programmer-Web interactions when coding, and combines observations of behaviour with assessments of the resulting source code. We report on an online observational study with ten undergraduate student programmers as they engaged in programming tasks of varying complexity. Screens were recorded of participants’ activities, and each participated in an interview. Videos and interviews were thematically analysed. Novice programmers employed various strategies for seeking and utilising online knowledge. The resulting source code was examined to determine the extent to which it met requirements and whether it contained errors. The source code analysis revealed that coding with the websites involved more coding time and effort, but increased the possibility of producing correct code. However, coding with websites also introduced instances of either incorrect or non-executable source code.

A significant proportion of smartphone notifications are indicative of human behaviour (e.g. delivery updates for purchased items, physical activity summaries, and notification of updates to subscribed content). However, present attempts to understand human behaviour from smartphone traces typically focus on sensors such as location, accelerometer and proximity, overlooking the potential for notifications as a valuable data source. In this paper, we propose a general framework that provides end-to-end processing of notifications to understand behavioural aspects. We realise the framework with an implementation that tackles the specific use case of establishing prior buying behaviour from associated notifications. To evaluate the framework and implementation, we conduct a longitudinal user study in which we collect more than 250, 000 notifications, from twelve users, over an average of three months. We apply knowledge-based and machine learning techniques to those notifications to assess the tasks of the proposed framework. The results show a substantial difference in the performance between the methods used to extract behavioural features from the collected notifications.

Websites are frequently used to support the development process. This paper investigates how websites are used when writing code and programmers’ perceptions of the potential impact of this on their behaviour and the quality of the resulting software. We interviewed 18 programmers (13 students enrolled in undergraduate computer science courses, and 5 experienced professionals), and analysed the data thematically. The findings were used to develop a survey, which was distributed to 276 programmers (251 students, 25 experienced professionals). The results indicate that use of websites, especially Stack Overflow, is viewed as an essential part of programming by both students completing coursework and professionals developing code in industry. We also found that developers have experience of encountering a diverse set of problematic code snippets online, that copying code from websites without checking its quality or understanding how it worked is common, and that using online resources in this way had a potentially counter-productive effect on learning. Based on these findings, we make a number of recommendations, including better consideration of online code reuse in taught programmes, co-development and code-reuse practices in professional settings, and software licensing training for professional developers. Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board.

As Augmented Reality Television (ARTV) transitions out of the feasibility phase, it is crucial to understand the impact of design decisions on the viewers’ ARTV experiences. In a previous study, six ARTV design dimensions were identified by relying on insights from existing prototypes. However, the set of possible dimensions is likely to be broader. Building on top of previous work, we create an ARTV design space and present it in a textual cheat sheet. We subsequently evaluate the cheat sheet in a between-subject study (n = 10), with participants with wide-ranging expertise. We identified six new dimensions (genre, broadcast mode, audience demographics, cartoonish vs. photoreal representation, modality, and privacy), and a new aspect (360°) for the display dimension. In light of our observations, we provide an updated ARTV design space and observe that asking participants to write ARTV scenarios can be an effective method for harvesting novel design dimensions.

While augmented reality television (ARTV) is being investigated in research labs, the high cost of AR headsets makes it difficult for audiences to benefit from the research. However, the relative affordability of virtual reality (VR) headsets provides ARTV researchers with opportunities to test their prototypes in VR. Additionally, as VR becomes an acceptable medium for watching conventional TV, augmenting such viewing experiences in VR creates new opportunities. We prototype a nature documentary ARTV experience in VR and conduct a remote user study (n = 10) to investigate six points on the visual display design dimension of presenting a lifelike programme-related hologram. We manipulated the starting point and the movement behaviour of the hologram to gain insight into viewer preferences. Our findings highlight the importance of personal preferences and that of the perceived role of a hologram in relation to the underlying TV content; suggesting there may not be a single way to augment a TV programme. Instead, creators may need to provide the audiences with capabilities to customise ARTV content.

Interacting with and making sense of information dashboards is often problematic. Typically, users develop strategies to go around and overcome these problems. These strategies can be conceived as behavioural markers of cognitive processes that indicate problematic interactions. Consequently, if we were able to computationally model these strategies, we could detect if users are encountering problems in real time (and act accordingly). We conducted an experiment (N=63) to identify the interaction strategies users employ on problematic dashboards. We found that while existing challenges impact significantly on user performance, interventions to mitigate such challenges were especially beneficial for those with lower graph literacy. We identified the strategies employed by users when encountering problems: extensive page exploration as a reaction to information overload and use of customisation functionalities when understanding data is problematic. We also found that some strategies are indicators of performance in terms of task completion time and effectiveness: extensive exploration strategies were indicators of lower performance, while the exhibition of customisation strategies is associated with higher effectiveness.

Widespread sensing devices enable a world in which physical spaces become personalised in the presence of mobile users. An important example of such personalisation is the use of pervasive displays to show content that matches the requirements of proximate viewers. Despite prior work on prototype systems that use mobile devices to personalise displays, no significant attempts to trial such systems have been carried out. In this article, we report on our experiences of designing, developing and operating the world’s first comprehensive display personalisation service for mobile users. Through a set of rigorous quantitative measures and 11 potential user/stakeholder interviews, we demonstrate the success of the platform in realising display personalisation, and offer a series of reflections to inform the design of future systems.

Self-harm is a prevalent issue amongst young people, yet it is thought around 40% will never seek professional help due to stigma surrounding it. It is generally a way of coping with emotional distress and can have a range of triggers which are highly heterogeneous to the individual. In a move towards enhancing the accessibility of personalized interventions for self-harm, we undertook a three-stage study. We first conducted interviews with 4 counsellors in self-harm to understand how they clinically respond to self-harm triggers. We then ran a survey with 37 young people, to explore perceptions of mobile sensing, and current and future uses for smartphone-based interventions. Finally, we ran a workshop with 11 young people to further explore how a context-aware self-management application might be used to support them. We contribute an in-depth understanding of how triggers for self-harm might be identified and subsequently predicted and prevented using mobile-sensing technology.

Beside reminiscing, the increasing cognitive decline in dementia can also be addressed through sensory stimulation allowing the immediate, nonverbal engagement with the world through one's senses. Much HCI work has prioritized cognitive stimulation for reminiscing or personhood often on small screens, while less research has explored sensory stimulation like the one enabled by large displays. We describe a year-long deployment in a residential care home of a wall-sized display, and explored its domestication through 24 contextual interviews. Findings indicate strong engagement and attachment to the display which has inspired four psychosocial interventions using online generic content. We discuss the value of these findings for personhood through residents' exercise of choices, the tension between generic/personal content and its public/private use, the importance of participatory research approach to domestication, and the infrastructure-based prototype, illustrated by the DementiaWall and its generative quality.

Commercialisation of augmented reality (AR) devices has led to their growing application in domestic environments and leisure activities. One such domain is that of television, where AR is one of several technologies driving innovation (c.f. Internet broadcasting, second screen devices). We conduct a systematic literature review to quantify research at the intersection of AR and broadcast television. We identify six common themes and a set of cross-cutting design decisions. We distill this information into a design space incorporating six dimensions: abstraction, interaction, time, display, context and editorial control. We provide methods to operationalise the dimensions to enable research and development of novel concepts, and through this generate six design guidelines to shape future activity at the intersection of AR and television.

Obtaining meaningful user consent is increasingly problematic in a world of numerous, heterogeneous digital services. Current approaches (e.g. agreeing to Terms and Conditions) are rooted in the idea of individual control despite growing evidence that users do not (or cannot) exercise such control in informed ways. We consider an alternative approach whereby users can opt to delegate consent decisions to an ecosystem of third-parties including friends, experts, groups and AI entities. We present the results of a study that used a technology probe at a large festival to explore initial public responses to this reframing -- focusing on when and to whom users would delegate such decisions. The results reveal substantial public interest in delegating consent and identify differing preferences depending on the privacy context, highlighting the need for alternative decision mechanisms beyond the current focus on individual choice.

Reviewing lifelogging data has been proposed as a useful tool to support human memory. However, the sheer volume of data (particularly images) that can be captured by modern lifelogging systems makes the selection and presentation of material for review a challenging task. We present the results of a five-week user study involving 16 participants and over 69,000 images that explores both individual requirements for video summaries and the differences in cognitive load, user experience, memory experience, and recall experience between review using video summarisations and non-summary review techniques. Our results can be used to inform the design of future lifelogging data summarisation systems for memory augmentation.

There is increasing interest in using digital signage to deliver highly personalised content. However, display personalization presents a number of architectural design challenges in particular, how best to provide personalisation without unduly compromising viewers' privacy. While previous research has focused on understanding specific elements of the overall vision, our work presents details of the first significant attempt at a system that integrates future pervasive display networks and mobile devices to support display personalisation. We describe a series of usage models and design goals for display personalisation and then present Tacita, a system that supports these models and goals. Our architecture includes mobile, display and cloud-based elements and provides comprehensive personalisation features while preventing the creation of user profiles within the display infrastructure, thus helping to preserve users' privacy. An initial evaluation of our prototype implementation of the architecture is also included and demonstrates the viability of the Tacita approach.

As the cost of display hardware falls so the number of public display networks being deployed is increasing rapidly. While these networks have traditionally taken the form of digital signage used for advertising and information there is increasing interest in the vision of "open display networks" [8]. A key component of any open display network is an effective channel for disseminating applications created by third-parties and recent research has proposed a display-oriented "application store" as one such channel [5]. In this paper we present a critical analysis of the requirements and design of display application stores -- providing insights designed to help the implementers of future application stores.

The convergence of mobile computing and cloud computing enables new multimedia applications that are both resource-intensive and interaction-intensive. For these applications, end-to-end network bandwidth and latency matter greatly when cloud resources are used to augment the computational power and battery life of a mobile device. We first present quantitative evidence that this crucial design consideration to meet interactive performance criteria limits data center consolidation. We then describe an architectural solution that is a seamless extension of today's cloud computing infrastructure.

No abstract available.

Transient use of displays by mobile users was prophesied two decades ago. Today, convergence of a range of technologies enable the realization of this vision. For researchers in this space, one key question is where to physically locate the application for which the display has been appropriated. The emergence of cloud and cloudlet computing has increased the range of possible locations. In this paper we focus on understanding the extent to which application location impacts user experience when appropriating displays. We describe a usage model in which public displays can be appropriated to support spontaneous use of interactive applications, present an example architecture based on cloudlets, and explore how application location impacts user experience.

In this paper we reflect on our long-term experiences of developing, deploying and supporting an experimental digital signage system. Existing public display systems almost always feature a single point of control that is responsible for scheduling content for presentation on the network and provide sophisticated mechanisms for controlling play-out timing and relative ordering. Our experiences suggest that such complex feature-sets are unnecessary in many cases and may be counter productive in signage systems. We describe an alternative, simpler paradigm for encouraging widespread use of signage systems based on shared 'content channels' between content providers and display owners. Our system has been in continuous use for approximately 3 years. We reflect and draw lessons from how our user community has adopted and used the resulting public display network. We believe that these reflections will be of benefit to future developers of ubiquitous display networks.