Technology increasingly allows us to capture and revisit rich digital records of our lives, processes which we call Technology-Mediated Memory (TMM). We explore whether TMM alters unmediated remembering and also whether such changes affect psychological well-being. Human memory biases promote well-being by adaptively editing our memories, making them more positive. In contrast, TMM often provides rich records of what people actually did and felt, which could disrupt adaptive edits. To explore this, we developed a smartphone-based personal TMM application, Echo, that allows participants to record and later reflect on everyday events. In a month-long deployment, 64 users made over 3200 recordings and reflections. We found that although Echo TMM alters how we remember, these changes remain adaptive. Instead of compromising adaptive biases, Echo TMM helps well-being and benefits are sustained long-term. Logfile analysis shows that participants use Echo strategically to prospectively edit by initially reporting events positively to anticipate future viewing. Participants also distance themselves from past negative events by reflecting more positively than at recording. We discuss design and theoretical implications.

Searching a large document collection to learn about a broad subject involves the iterative process of figuring out what to ask, filtering the results, identifying useful documents, and deciding when one has covered enough material to stop searching. We are calling this activity "discoverage," discovery of relevant material and tracking coverage of that material. We built a visual analytic tool called Footprints that uses multiple coordinated visualizations to help users navigate through the discoverage process. To support discovery, Footprints displays topics extracted from documents that provide an overview of the search space and are used to construct searches visuospatially. Footprints allows users to triage their search results by assigning a status to each document (To Read, Read, Useful), and those status markings are shown on interactive histograms depicting the user's coverage through the documents across dates, sources, and topics. Coverage histograms help users notice biases in their search and fill any gaps in their analytic process. To create Footprints, we used a highly iterative, user-centered approach in which we conducted many evaluations during both the design and implementation stages and continually modified the design in response to feedback.

As people document more of their lives online, some recent systems are encouraging people to later revisit those recordings, a practice we're calling technology-mediated reflection (TMR). Since we know that unmediated reflection benefits psychological well-being, we explored whether and how TMR affects well-being. We built Echo, a smartphone application for recording everyday experiences and reflecting on them later. We conducted three system deployments with 44 users who generated over 12,000 recordings and reflections. We found that TMR improves well-being as assessed by four psychological metrics. By analyzing the content of these entries we discovered two mechanisms that explain this improvement. We also report benefits of very long-term TMR.

Recent advances in ubiquitous technology have greatly changed the way people stay connected. We conducted an in-depth video shadowing study to observe how close-knit groups use all the technology at their disposal to stay in touch and share their lives. We observed a pattern of related behaviors that we call channel blending, the integration of interactions and content over multiple channels into one coherent conversation, often including both local and remote participants. Channel blending is the opposite of multitasking in that it involves merging many lines of focus into one, rather than switching attention between them. We discuss ways technology could better support this emerging style of multichannel content-sharing and communication.

This paper presents a context-aware mobile recommender system, codenamed Magitti. Magitti is unique in that it infers user activity from context and patterns of user behavior and, without its user having to issue a query, automatically generates recommendations for content matching. Extensive field studies of leisure time practices in an urban setting (Tokyo) motivated the idea, shaped the details of its design and provided data describing typical behavior patterns. The paper describes the fieldwork, user interface, system components and functionality, and an evaluation of the Magitti prototype.

Modern work is a highly social process, offering many cues for people to organize communication and access information. Shared physical workplaces provide natural support for tasks such as (a) social reminding about communication commitments and keeping track of collaborators and friends, and (b) social data mining of local expertise for advice and information. However, many people now collaborate remotely using tools such as email and voicemail. Our field studies show that these tools do not provide the social cues needed for group work processes. In part, this is because the tools are organized around messages, rather than people. In response to this problem, we created ContactMap, a system that makes people the primary unit of interaction. ContactMap provides a structured social desktop representation of users' important contacts that directly supports social reminding and social data mining. We conducted an empirical evaluation of ContactMap, comparing it with traditional email systems, on tasks suggested by our fieldwork. Users performed better with ContactMap and preferred ContactMap for the majority of these tasks. We discuss future enhancements of our system and the implications of these results for future communication interfaces and for theories of mediated communication.

There have been many attempts to support awareness and lightweight interactions using video and audio, but few have been built on widely available infrastructure. Text-based systems have become more popular, but few support awareness, opportunistic conversations, and mobility, three important elements of distributed collaboration. We built on the popularity of text-based Instant Messengers (IM) by building a mobile IM called Hubbub that tries to provide all three, notably through the use of earcons. In a 5.5-month use study, we found that Hubbub helped people feel connected to colleagues in other locations and supported opportunistic interactions. The sounds provided effective awareness cues, although some found them annoying. It was more important to support graceful transitions between multiple fixed locations than to support wireless access, although both were useful

Current perceptions of Instant Messaging (IM) use are based primarily on self-report studies. We logged thousands of (mostly) workplace IM conversations and evaluated their conversational characteristics and functions. Contrary to prior research, we found that the primary use of workplace IM was for complex work discussions. Only 28% of conversations were simple, single-purpose interactions and only 31% were about scheduling or coordination. Moreover, people rarely switched from IM to another medium when the conversation got complex. We found evidence of two distinct styles of use. Heavy IM users and frequent IM partners mainly used it to work together: to discuss a broad range of topics via many fast-paced interactions per day, each with many short turns and much threading and multitasking. Light users and infrequent pairs mainly used IM to coordinate: for scheduling, via fewer conversations per day that were shorter, slower-paced with less threading and multitasking.

No abstract available.

Much of the support for communication across distributed communities has focused on meetings and intentional contact. However, most interactions within co-located groups occur when people happen to run into each other. Such unintended interactions should also be supported among distributed communities. We conducted a study of the communication patterns of a large, distributed organization and found that people tend to disseminate information using formal techniques, even though people usually receive information informally. We then designed a system called Piazza that is intended to support the range of communication styles evident in large communities, paying particular attention to adchessing the problems revealed in our study. Piazza allows people to be aware of others who are doing similar tasks when they are using their computers, the~by enabling unintended interactions. It also supports intentiomd contacts and planned meetings. We discuss issues for analysis in an upcoming use study.

This 1.5 day workshop will bring together designers and researchers working on on-line communities, to discuss: (a) Existing understanding of real-world cummunities; (b) Experiences with the behaviour, implementation and design of on-line communities; (c) Lessons from traditional CSCW systems. We will develop design goals for such communities and identify oustanding research issues.

As organizations become distributed across multiple sites, they are looking to technology to help support enterprisewide communication and training to distant locations.We developed an application called Forum that broadcasts live video, audio, and slides from a speaker to distributed audiences at their computer desktops.We studied how distributed presentations over Forum differed from talks given in face-to-face settings.We found that Forum attracted larger audiences, but the quality of interaction was perceived to be lower.Forum appeared to provide more flexible and effective use of slides and other visual materials.On the whole, audiences preferred to watch talks over Forum but speakers preferred to give talks in a local setting.The study raises issues about how to design this technology and how to help people discover effective ways of using it.

Computer technology is available to build video-based tools for supporting presentations to distributed audiences, but it is unclear how such an environment affects participants' ability to interact and to learn. We built and tested a tool called Forum that broadcasts live audio, video and slides from a speaker, and enables audiences to interact with the speaker and other audience members in a variety of ways. The challenge was to enable effective interactions while overcoming obstacles introduced by the distributed nature of the environment, the large size of the group, and the asymmetric roles of the participants. Forum was most successful in enabling effective presentations in cases when the topic sparked a great deal of audience participation or when the purpose of the talk was mostly informational and did not require a great deal of interaction. We are exploring ways to enhance Forum to expand the effectiveness of this technology. KEYWORDS: Broadcast video, distrib...

The Montage prototype provides lightweight audio-video glances among distributed collaborators and integrates other applications for coordinating future contact. We studied a distributed group across three conditions: before installing Montage, with Montage, and after removing Montage. We collected quantitative measures of usage as well as video-tape and user perception data. We found that the group used Montage glances for short, lightweight interactions that were like face-to-face conversations in many respects. Yet like the phone, Montage offered convenient access to other people without leaving the office. Most glances revealed that the person was not available, so it was important to integrate other tools for coordinating future interaction. Montage did not appear to displace the use of e-mail, voice-mail, or scheduled meetings.

No abstract available.

As multimedia becomes an integral part of collaborative systems, we must understand how to design such systems to support users' rich set of existing interaction skills, rather than requiring people to adapt to arbitrary constraints of technology-driven designs.To understand how we may make effective use of video in remote collaboration, we compared a small team's interactions through a desktop video conferencing prototype with face-to-face interactions and phone conversations.We found that, compared with audioonly, a video channel adds or improves the ability to show understanding, forecast responses, give non-verbal information, enhance verbal descriptions, manage pauses and express attitudes.These findings suggest that video may be particularly useful for handling conflict and other interaction-intense activities.But the advantages of video depend critically on the nearly-instantaneous transmission of audio, even if it means getting out of sync with the video image.On the other hand, when compared with face-to-face, it can be difficult in video interactions to notice peripheral cues, control the floor, have side conversations, point to things or manipulate real-world objects.To fully enable rich interactions, video should be integrated with other distributed tools that increase the extent and type of shared space in such a way that enables natural collaborative behaviors within those environments.