Recent combinations of interactive technology, humans, and water have resulted in “WaterHCI”. WaterHCI design seeks to complement the many benefits of engagement with the aquatic domain, by offering, for example, augmented reality systems for snorkelers, virtual reality in floatation tanks, underwater musical instruments for artists, robotic systems for divers, and wearables for swimmers. We conducted a workshop in which WaterHCI experts articulated the field's grand challenges, aiming to contribute towards a systematic WaterHCI research agenda and ultimately advance the field.

Online crowds, with their large numbers and diversity, show great potential for creativity. Research has explored different ways of augmenting their creative performance, particularly during large-scale brainstorming sessions. Traditionally, this comes in the form of showing ideators some form of inspiration to get them to explore more categories or generate more and better ideas. The mechanisms used to select which inspirations are shown to ideators thus far have not taken into consideration ideators' individualities, which could hinder the effectiveness of support. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate CrowdMuse, a novel adaptive system for supporting large-scale brainstorming. The system models ideators based on their past ideas and adapts the system views and inspiration mechanism accordingly. We evaluate CrowdMuse over two iterative large online studies and discuss the implication of our findings for designing adaptive creativity support systems.

Appreciating the importance of robust understanding of human motion and its emotional intention, this research assesses the relevance of the Laban Effort system in classifying movement quality as it applies to the design of gestural interfaces. Labeling of Laban Efforts and affect in human motion by 14 participants demonstrated that non-expert humans can recognize a subset of the Laban Efforts with a reasonable degree of inter-rater reliability - ICC(2, k)=0.78- and validity-F1-Score=0.76. This study also includes a preliminary exploration of relationships between different emotions and Laban Efforts.

Research has explored different ways of improving crowd ideation, such as presenting examples or employing facilitators. While such support is usually generated through peripheral tasks delegated to crowd workers who are not part of the ideation, it is possible that the ideators themselves could benefit from the extra thought involved in doing them. Therefore, we iterate over an ideation system in which ideators can perform one of three peripheral tasks (rating originality and usefulness, similarity, or idea combination) on demand. In controlled experiments with workers on Mechanical Turk, we compare the effects of these secondary tasks to simple idea exposure or no support at all, examining usage of the inspirations, fluency, breadth, and depth of ideas generated. We find tasks to be as good or better than exposure, although this depends on the period of ideation and the fluency level. We also discuss implications of inspiration size, homogeneity, and frequency.

Desirable outcomes such as health are tightly linked to behaviors, thus inspiring research on technologies that support people in changing those behaviors. Many behavior-change technologies are designed by HCI experts but this approach can make it difficult to personalize support to each user's unique goals and needs. This paper reports on the iterative design of two complementary support strategies for helping users create their own personalized behavior-change plans via self-experimentation: One emphasized the use of interactive instructional materials, and the other additionally introduced context-aware computing to enable user creation of "just in time" home-based interventions. In a formative trial with 27 users, we compared these two approaches to an unstructured sleep education control. Results suggest great promise in both strategies and provide insights on how to develop personalized behavior-change technologies.

Facial expressions transmit a variety of social, grammatical, and affective signals. For technology to leverage this rich source of communication, tools that better model the breadth of information they convey are required. MiFace is a novel framework for creating expression lexicons that map signal values to parameterized facial muscle movements. In traditional mapping paradigms using posed photographs, naïve judges select from predetermined label sets and movements are inferred by trained experts. The set of generally accepted expressions established in this way is limited to six basic displays of affect. In contrast, our approach generatively simulates muscle movements on a 3D avatar. By applying natural language processing techniques to crowdsourced free-response labels for the resulting images, we efficiently converge on an expression's value across signal categories. Two studies returned 218 discriminable facial expressions with 51 unique labels. The six basic emotions are included, but we additionally define such nuanced expressions as embarrassed, curious, and hopeful.

As technology is increasingly integrated into the classroom, understanding the facilitators and barriers for deployment becomes an important part of the process. While systems that employ traditional WIMP-based interfaces have a well-established body of work describing their integration into classroom environments, more novel technologies generally lack such a foundation to guide their advancement. In this paper we present Robo-Tangible Activities for Geometry (rTAG), a tangible learning environment that utilizes a teachable agent framing, together with a physical robotic agent. We describe its deployment in a school environment, qualitatively analyzing how teachers chose to orchestrate its use, the value they saw in it, and the barriers they faced while organizing the sessions with their students. Based on this analysis, we extract four recommendations that aid in designing and deploying systems that make use of affordances that are similar to those of the rTAG system.

Students self-reported not only their emotional state, but also the causal attributions of their emotions. After coding emotions with internal references to self, and external references to the environment or domain, we examined how sub-groups of students based on internal/external attributions and above or below median performance differ in terms of their emotional state, perceptions of item difficulty, and gender.

This paper presents the constructive design research (CDR) of smart domestic environments comprised of smart home infrastructure, smart domestic artifacts and digital services. CDR is an approach that focuses on imagining futures and learning through the making and testing of prototypes to construct new knowledge about how people engage with the world. While the body of research on smart domestic environments includes a wealth of human-centered research, the use of CDR is marginal. Our work demonstrates how such a process engages residents in activities to imagine why people might value smart domestic environments and how they might want to interact with them. Through goal setting activities, paper prototyping, and field-testing of resident designed technology probes, we present use cases, design principles and experiential insights. After sharing these findings, we introduce the emergence of smart domestic environments as possessing persuasive, personified and artful qualities.

End-user programming tools, if properly designed, have the potential to empower end-users to create context-aware applications tailored to their own needs and lives, in order to help them break bad habits and change their behaviors. In this work, we present GALLAG Strip, an easy to use mobile and tangible tool that allows users to create context-aware applications without the need of programming experience. It enables programming by physical demonstration of envisioned interactions with the same sensors and objects that users will later encounter in their finished application. After an initial pilot to verify the usability of GALLAG Strip, we conducted a user study to evaluate the effects of tangible programming in terms of ease of use, engagement, and facilitation of the ideation process. We found that tangibility has both benefits and drawbacks, and suggest a mixed tangible and non-tangible approach for better user experience.

The ability of a learning system to infer a student's affects has become highly relevant to be able to adjust its pedagogical strategies. Several methods have been used to infer affects. One of the most recognized for its reliability is face-based affect recognition. Another emerging one involves the use of brain-computer interfaces. In this paper we compare those strategies and explore if, to a great extent, it is possible to infer the values of one source from the other source.

Early literacy is a leading indicator of academic success. Recent findings describe the important role that embodied cognition can play in the promotion of early literacy. Libraries---children's libraries in particular---stand to benefit greatly from emerging forms of tangible and embodied interactive technology that can leverage these findings. As informal community-based learning institutions with a mandate to provide user-centered, personalized reading and learning experiences, children's libraries are uniquely positioned to empower young learners through the development of reading skills. Within these institutions, reading skills---particularly those representing embodied cognition---are supported by social interaction with peers, caregivers, and librarians. Through embodied cognition, children develop critical early literacy skills by linking concepts with corresponding physical actions, to establish the foundation of reading comprehension. When such activities are playful, fun, and interactive, learning to read becomes intrinsically motivating. While embodied technology is particularly conducive to creating such novel interactions, few libraries have adopted technology that deliberately channels these phenomena towards literacy development. Through qualitative ethnographic methods this investigation presents opportunities for embodied cognition and tangible embedded interactive play and learning systems within children's libraries.

Relationships between creativity in teamwork, and team members' movement and face-to-face interaction strength were investigated "in the wild" using sociometric badges (wearable sensors), electronic Experience Sampling Methods (ESM), the KEYS team creativity assessment instrument, and qualitative methods, in academic and industry settings. Activities (movement and face-to-face interaction) and creativity of one five-member and two seven-member teams were tracked for twenty-five days, eleven days, and fifteen days respectively. Paired-sample t-test confirmed average daily movement energy during creative days was significantly greater than on non-creative days and that face-to-face interaction tie strength of team members during creative days was significantly greater than for non-creative days. The combined approach of principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) conducted on movement and face-to-face interaction data yielded a model that predicted creativity with 87.5% and 91% accuracy, respectively. Computational models that predict team creativity hold particular promise to enhance Creativity Support Tools.

Flexible displays potentially allow for interaction styles that resemble those used in paper documents. Bending the display, e.g., to page forward, shows particular promise as an interaction technique. In this paper, we present an evaluation of the effectiveness of various bend gestures in executing a set of tasks with a flexible display. We discuss a study in which users designed bend gestures for common computing actions deployed on a smartphone-inspired flexible E Ink prototype called PaperPhone. We collected a total of 87 bend gesture pairs from ten participants and their appropriateness over twenty actions in five applications. We identified six most frequently used bend gesture pairs out of 24 unique pairs. Results show users preferred bend gestures and bend gesture pairs that were conceptually simpler, e.g., along one axis, and less physically demanding. There was a strong agreement among participants to use the same three pairs in applications: (1) side of display, up/down (2) top corner, up/down (3) bottom corner, up/down. For actions with a strong directional cue, we found strong consensus on the polarity of the bend gestures (e.g., navigating left is performed with an upwards bend gesture, navigating right, downwards). This implies that bend gestures that take directional cues into account are likely more natural to users.

We report on the reactions of males and female students to the presence of animated pedagogical agents that provided emotional and motivational support. One hundred high school students used agents embedded in an Intelligent Tutoring System for Mathematics and randomized controlled evaluations compared students with and without learning companions. The results indicate that affective pedagogical agents improve affective outcomes of students in general and particularly so for female students, who reported being more frustrated and less confident while solving math problems prior to using the tutoring system. We discuss issues of incorporating gender into user models and of generating responses tailored to gender.

The human-element is crucial for designing and implementing interactive intelligent systems, and therefore on instructional design. This tutorial provides a description and hands-on demonstration for detection of affective states and a description of devices, methodologies and tools necessary for automatic detection of affective states. Automatic detection of affective states requires that the computer sense information that is complex and diverse, it can range from brain-waves signals, and biofeedback readings to face-based and gesture emotion recognition to posture and pressure sensing. Obtaining, processing and understanding that information, to create systems that improve learning, requires the use of several sensing devices (and their perceiving algorithms) and the application of software tools.

Meta-tutoring applies the basic policies of interactive tutoring to get students to adopt effective meta-cognitive strategies. Unfortunately, when the meta-tutor is removed, students often revert to using ineffective strategies. This paper is an early report on the progress of the Affective Meta-Tutoring (AMT) project, which will use an affective learning companion to motivate students to more permanently adopt effective meta-cognitive strategies.

The level up procedure is a method for evaluating the learning gains of educational software, and tutoring systems in particular, that includes some form of embedded assessment. The instruction is arranged in levels that take only a few minutes to master, and students level up when the software indicates they have achieved mastery. This paper reports some methodological lessons learned from applying this procedure in studies of a tutoring system that taught high school students how to model dynamic systems.

Socially Relevant Simulation Games (SRSG), a new medium for social interaction, based on real-world skills and skill development, creates a single gaming framework that connects both serious and casual players. Through a detailed case study this paper presents a design process and framework for SRSG, in the context of mixed-reality golf swing simulations. The SRSG, entitled "World of Golf", utilizes a real-time expert system to capture, analyze, and evaluate golf swing metrics. The game combines swing data with players' backgrounds, e.g., handicaps, to form individual profiles. These profiles are then used to implement a golf simulation game using artificially controlled agents who inherit the skill levels of their corresponding human users. The simulation and assessment modules provide the serious player with tools to build golf skills while allowing casual players to engage within a simulated social world. A framework that incorporates simulated golf competitions among these social agents is presented and validated by comparing the usage statistics of 10 PGA Golf Management (PGM) students with 10 non-professional students.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems are software applications capable of complementing and enhancing the learning process by providing direct customized instruction and feedback to students in various disciplines. Although Intelligent Tutoring Systems could differ widely in their attached knowledge bases and user interfaces (including interaction mechanisms), their behaviors are quite similar. Therefore, it must be possible to establish a common software model for them. A common software model is a step forward to move these systems from proof-of-concepts and academic research tools to widely available tools in schools and homes. The work reported here addresses: (1) the use of Design Patterns to create an object-oriented software model for Intelligent Tutoring Systems; (2) our experience using this model in a three-year development project and its impact on facets such as creating a common language among stakeholders, supporting an incremental development, and adjustment to a highly shifting development team; and (3) the qualities achieved and trade-offs made.

The computer's ability to recognize human emotional states given physiological signals is gaining in popularity to create empathetic systems such as learning environments, health care systems and videogames. Despite that, there are few frameworks, libraries, architectures, or software tools, which allow systems developers to easily integrate emotion recognition into their software projects. The work reported here offers a first step to fill this gap in the lack of frameworks and models, addressing: (a) the modeling of an agent-driven component-based architecture for multimodal emotion recognition, called ABE, and (b) the use of ABE to implement a multimodal emotion recognition framework to support third-party systems becoming empathetic systems.

What if children's make-believe characters could keep in touch when the children were apart? We propose a novel concept for children's use of technology through imagination play: user interfaces designed to be used by children's character toys rather than directly by the children ("doll-computer interfaces"). We apply this model to the challenge of remote communication for children with an enhanced dollhouse containing small-scale interfaces for the dolls with a variety of fully functional multimodal communication functions. Using this interface as a technology probe, we explore a variety of design decisions with remote pairs of children. Our preliminary results suggest that toy-perspective and manipulable toy elements are particularly helpful in supporting play and successful use of communication technologies, while the "true-to-life" toy aspects are sensitive to individual frames of reference and more flexible interfaces that still fit within the toy context lead to creative communication strategies. We found that different communication channels offered interesting tradeoffs between uninterrupted play and rich verbal description. We also learned that the concept appeals to a wide age range but that the youngest children may need additional scaffolding for successful remote play.

Slow Computing: is a transdisciplinary paradigm that celebrates the rich history and evolution of HCI and computational thinking experiences with diverse forms of interactive computing to foster democratic innovation. It appreciates Stonehenge and pyramids' tangible and embodied interactions as culturally integrated, social, communal, sustainable ubiquitous computing. Advancing Froebel's and Resnick's gifts for intrinsically motivated constructionist learning, slow computing gifts: Sundials; Towers of Hanoi puzzles; marble rollercoasters; water-play and Rube-Goldberg machines, enable simple and transparent DIY experiences that foster computational thinking (recursion, sequencing, parallel processing, modularity, timing, abstraction, systems thinking, sustainable computing, natural computing, etc.), discovery, exploration, and creativity. Requiring only existing local materials (water, sticks, balls, pebbles, etc.), these slow computing gifts provides powerful computational experiences that are globally accessible at "zero" cost. The studio will engage participants' transdisciplinary expertise to invent, create, deploy, and advance slow computing and slow computing gifts.

In Game As Life --- Life As Game (GALLAG), ubiquitous computing and personally-tailored game scenarios integrate activities across the virtual and physical domains to further extend emerging avant-garde "real-life games" that are coordinated by digital means to blur digital-physical-social barriers. Influences and activities in GALLAG game scenarios affect real life and vice versa. To realize this, we are using several methods of experience and behavioral assessment, as well as environmental, contextual and physiological sensors, in conjunction with participatory design approaches that include end-user-programming. This agenda empowers users to create their own synergies between their on-line activities to help them achieve their personal realworld aspirations. Ultimately GALLAG is leading to "Life Long Games" that provide persistent, supportive, and actualizing experiences.

Pendaphonics is a tangible physical-digital-sonic environment and interactive system that motivates children and adults to be physically active and explorative. The development of this system presents a strategy for the design and evaluation of a low-cost, flexible, large scale tangible system that is engaging for children and adults alike. Pendaphonics has been installed in a public new media arts space, where over 200 people have interacted with it. Here, we describe Pendaphonics tangible interaction scenarios, including the broad potential of this system as a compositional and choreographic tool, an educational exhibit, and as an interface that facilitates playful interaction, exploration, discovery and creativity.

Research shows that children construct much of their knowledge through active manipulation of the environment, which allows them to connect abstract concepts to observable outcomes. Despite these findings, although the integration of novel pedagogical technologies into classroom settings has begun, the technologies predominantly have focused on instruction in virtual contexts. To date, however, little is known about novel technologies that step outside of the virtual realm into the physical classroom, thereby leveraging findings on embodied mathematical cognition to influence educational practices. As a first step in filling this gap, we present the Active Learning Environment with Robotics Tangibles (ALERT) framework. Our system relies on human-robot interaction and tangible instruction to motivate and trigger learning in students through a variety of activities that integrate play and instruction in mixed reality environments. Here we describe some of the activities supported by ALERT, and discuss plans for evaluating the pedagogical utility of the system.

This paper describes the use of sensors in intelligent tutors to detect students' affective states and to embed emotional support. Using four sensors in two classroom experiments the tutor dynamically collected data streams of physiological activity and students' self-reports of emotions. Evidence indicates that state-based fluctuating student emotions are related to larger, longer-term affective variables such as self-concept in mathematics. Students produced self-reports of emotions and models were created to automatically infer these emotions from physiological data from the sensors. Summaries of student physiological activity, in particular data streams from facial detection software, helped to predict more than 60% of the variance of students emotional states, which is much better than predicting emotions from other contextual variables from the tutor, when these sensors are absent. This research also provides evidence that by modifying the “context” of the tutoring system we may well be able to optimize students' emotion reports and in turn improve math attitudes.

The relationship between affect and creativity represents an intriguing opportunity for creativity support tools. A fine grain model that links affect with creativity can lead to development of feedback environments that maximize a user's effectiveness and creative output. In this paper, we present an empirical study that will lead us to formulation of such environments for affective support of the user. Five members in a research group reported their daily affect and creativity using an online social science survey. In addition, they used a PDA liken social sensing device called socioscopes that captured their affective and social behavior patterns. The results show that creativity is positively correlated with positive affect. Furthermore, person's speech and movement profiles are also significantly correlated with creativity. More studies are planned for future that will refine these results. Based on these empirical investigations, we propose that creativity support tools will benefit by actively considering the impact of affect on the creative process. Physiological and behavioral sensors can serve an important role in providing this measurement. The proposed research lays the foundation for future work in development of such affect driven real time measurement and modulation systems for creativity support.

Pendaphonics is a tangible physical-digital-sonic environment and interactive system that engages users in individual, collaborative, group, and distributed interactive experiences. The development of this system, as an element of urban revitalization and as a transdisciplinary research endeavor, presents strategies for the design and evaluation of low-cost, flexible, and distributed tangible interaction architectures for public engagement, expression, and performance. Pendaphonics is installed in a public media arts space, where over 200 people experienced it during the environment's opening event. Internationally, interaction laboratories at five research universities are advancing explorations of Pendaphonics. This paper presents the development process and findings from observation and evaluation of people using Pendaphonics; diverse social interaction patterns among performers and the general public are discussed. In particular, we identify the repeated and sustained invitation to interact -- created by the cyclic motion of a pendulum's simple harmonic oscillation -- as a new tangible interaction modality for human computer interaction, in 3D physical-digital-sonic environments. An investigation of this and related elements of Pendaphonics' large-scale tangible interaction scenarios are articulated, along with descriptions of the system's broad potential as a compositional and choreographic tool; an educational exhibit and classroom manipulative; and as an interface that facilitates playful interaction, exploration, discovery and creativity.

"Sprock-it" is a hand-sized robotic character that encourages full-body interaction and engaging mental play. Through social and physical interactions with the system and with each other, children influence the character's mobile and responsive autonomous driving behavior. Enabling constructionist activities and participatory adaptive design the system employs RFID tags and readers, wireless Bluetooth modules, Atmega microprocessors within Arduino's development environment, along with a wearable interface and a variety of physiological/activity sensors. Sprock-it has been developed in collaboration with LEGO and the MIT Media Lab as a concept that represents a new strategy for LEGO by updating the original LEGO mantra of "the little constructor" to "the little interactor". This paper presents the system development of Sprock-it.

Anger detection is a topic that is gaining more and more attention with voice portal carriers, as it can be useful for quality measurement and emotion-aware dialog strategies. In the context of a prototype voice portal we describe methods to search for training data, report on the performance of the prosodic classifier under real world conditions and explore the use of dialog information for anger prediction. The results show that, although significantly worse than under laboratory conditions, anger detection still works well above chance level and can be used to enhance real world voice-portal usability. Index Terms: Emotion Recognition, Voice Portal, Speech Classification, Dialogue System.

Hydrogen Wishes, presented at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, explores the themes of wishes and peace. It dramatizes the intimacy and power of transforming one's breath and vocalized wishes into a floating sphere, a bubble charged with hydrogen. The floating bubble represents transitory anticipation as a wish is sent on its trajectory toward fulfillment. Light, heat sensors, microphones, projected imagery, hydrogen and ordinary soap bubbles come together in this exploration of human aspiration. As in our lives, many wishes escape, but many others are catalyzed by the heat of the candle and become ethereal. The fulfilled wishes then become living artifacts within projected photographs of Earth cities as seen from outer space.

No abstract available.