This paper describes design principles for and the implementation of Gavagai Explorer---a new application which builds on interactive text clustering to extract themes from topically coherent text sets such as open text answers to surveys or questionnaires. An automated system is quick, consistent, and has full coverage over the study material. A system allows an analyst to analyze more answers in a given time period; provides the same initial results regardless of who does the analysis, reducing the risks of inter-rater discrepancy; and does not risk miss responses due to fatige or boredom. These factors reduce the cost and increase the reliability of the service. The most important feature, however, is relieving the human analyst from the frustrating aspects of the coding task, freeing the effort to the central challenge of understanding themes. Gavagai Explorer is available on-line.

In spring of 2003, a mobile field trial of a concept prototype application titled Scent was conducted in a corporate environment, attracting more than 500 voluntary users. Scent was a social proximity application enabling scanning of one's immediate environment for other Scent users and initiating social exchanges with them. The design of Scent prototype application aimed at incorporating various facets of face-to-face social interaction. This gave trial users multiple options of using the application in any given social context during the unguided trial period. Both qualitative and quantitative data was collected and analyzed, which helped shaping up the foundation to further the research in understanding mediated social proximity interaction. The study revealed not only motivations of use, but also barriers of adoptions, which in turn had implications on evolutionary steps of the development and on the prospect of market entry. Identity expression was seen as the most rudimentary motivation in mediated social proximity interaction. The final section of the paper discusses how the research team utilized the field trial in the spearhead research project in an emerging arena of social interaction.

This paper presents the design, implementation and validation of an enhanced mobile phone messaging system (DeDe), allowing the sender to define the context in which the message will be delivered to the recipient. A field trial among a socially tight group of teenagers showed that the DeDe feature was incorporated as part of the participants' existing messaging culture. 11,4% of their total messaging output made use of the DeDe feature. The most frequently used context parameters were location (based on network cell-ID) and time. Novel message practices emerged, as compared to 'normal' messaging, both in terms of timing of message sending, as well as creating content that specifically exploited the DeDe feature. Some use barriers were recognized, the most important being the sender's uncertainty of delivery success. Implications for design are discussed.

While many synchronous computer-mediated communication systems have failed to encourage users to make use of the expressive capabilities of their avatars, asynchronous systems may hold better chance. This paper reports on the design and user study of a message system that allows users to concatenate and annotate avatar animations and send them to peers. During three weeks, a group of 11 17-year-olds exchanged 222 animated messages in their everyday life environment. The interplay between text and animation allowed users to create significantly expressive messages. Many messages told micro-stories about fictitious and real events. Users identified with their avatars and were proud of their embodied representation. The content of messages deepened during the course of the study.

The multimode mean field annealing (MM-MFA) approach is introduced as an efficient tool to design digital filters with discrete coefficients, each implemented as a sum of signed power-of-two terms and additional general hardware constraints. As an application example demonstrating the potential of the new method, we consider the design of a linear phase nonrecursive finite impulse response (FIR) filter with a least squares criterion and minimum number of power-of-two terms.

The ultimate purpose with socially intelligent agent (SIA) technology is not to simulate social intelligence per se, but to let an agent give an impression of social intelligence. Such user-centred SIA technology, must consider the everyday knowledge and expectations by which users make sense of real, fictive, or artificial social beings. This folk-theoretical understanding of other social beings involves several, rather independent levels such as expectations on behavior, expectations on primitive psychology, models of folk-psychology, understanding of traits, social roles, and empathy. The framework presented here allows one to analyze and reconstruct users' understanding of existing and future SIAs, as well as specifying the levels SIA technology models in order to achieve an impression of social intelligence.