We demonstrate Water Advisor, a multi-modal assistant to help non-experts make sense of complex water quality data and apply it to their specific needs. A user can chat with the tool about water quality and activities of interest, and the system tries to advise using available water data for a location, applicable water regulations and relevant parameters using AI methods.

We demonstrate an embodied cognitive agent that helps scientists visualize and analyze exo-planets and their host stars. The prototype is situated in a room equipped with a large display, microphones, cameras, speakers, and pointing devices. Users communicate with the agent via speech, gestures, and combinations thereof, and it responds by displaying content and generating synthesized speech. Extensive use of context facilitates natural interaction with the agent.

Gaze is a powerful form of social feedback, providing cues about attention and interest, and boredom and distraction. We designed a working prototype that enabled remote participants in a collocated meeting to look around the local meeting space, and that showed local participants where the remote participants' "simulated gazes" (that is, their virtual cameras) were directed. Of course, pointing a camera is not the same as gazing, and so we conducted a study to understand how simulated gazes might be used, and to what extent they would be experienced as social cues. Findings range from the use of simulated gaze to signal attention, to ways in which local and remote participants experienced these simulated gazes. These findings illustrate the value of indirection and abstraction in presenting social cues; raise issues of privacy, visibility, and participation asymmetry; and suggest implications for design and further research.

Today, commodity technologies like mobile phones - once symbols of status and wealth - have become deeply woven into social and economic participation in Western society. Despite the pervasiveness of these technologies, there remain groups who may not have extensive access to them but who are nonetheless deeply affected by their presence in everyday life. In light of this, we designed, built, and deployed a ubiquitous computing system for one such overlooked group: the staff and residents at a shelter for homeless mothers. Our system connects mobile phones, a shared display, and a Web application to help staff and residents stay connected. We report on the adoption and use of this system over the course of a 30 week deployment, discussing the substantial impact our system had on shelter life and the broader implications for such socio-technical systems that sit at the juncture of social action and organizational coordination.

The design and use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has now evolved beyond its workplace origins to the wider public, expanding to people who live at the margins of contemporary society. Through field work and participatory co-design with homeless shelter residents and care providers we have explored design at the common boundary of these two "publics." We describe the design of the Community Resource Messenger (CRM), an ICT that supports both those in need and those attempting to provide care in a challenging environment. The CRM consists of three components: 1) a message center that pools messages to and from mobile users into a shared, persistent forum; 2) a text and voice messaging gateway linking the mobile phones of the homeless with the web-enabled computer facilities of the care providers; 3) a shared message display accessible from mobile texting, voice, e-mail, and the web, helping the two groups communicate and coordinate for mutual good. By democratizing design and use of technology at the margins of society, we aim to engage an entire "urban network," enabling shared awareness and collective action in each public.

Distributed teams are increasingly common in today's workplace. For these teams, face-to-face meetings where members can most easily build trust are rare and often costprohibitive. 3D virtual worlds and games may provide an alternate means for encouraging team development due to their affordances for facile communication, emotional engagement, and social interaction among participants. Using principles derived from social psychological theory, we have designed and built a collection of team-building games within the popular virtual world Second Life. We detail here the design decisions made in the creation of these games and discuss how they evolved based on early participant observations.

As open source development has evolved, differentiation of roles and increased sophistication of collaborative processes has occurred. Recently, we described coordination issues in software development and an interactive visualization tool called the Social Health Overview (SHO) developed to address them [12]. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of SHO intended to identify its strengths and weaknesses. Eleven informants in various open source roles were interviewed about their work practices. Eight of these participated in an evaluation comparing three change management tasks in SHO and Bugzilla. Results are discussed with respect to task strategy with each tool and participants' roles.

Software development tools primarily focus on supporting the technical work. Yet no matter the tools employed, the process followed, or the size of the team, important aspects of development are non-technical, and largely unsupported. For example, increasing distribution of development teams highlights the issues of coordination and cooperation. This paper focuses on one area: managing change requests. Interviews with industry and open-source programmers were used to create designs for the visual inspection of change requests. This paper presents fieldwork findings and two designs. We conclude by reflecting on the issues that task visualizations that support social inferences address in software development.

As a more diverse population of users moves online, understanding how to help those groups work together and leverage their diverse skills poses a significant challenge for human-computer interaction. This paper presents a case study of the design of an online community that supports kids interviewing elders to build up a shared database of oral history. Two pilot studies with existing technology are presented, and a software design based on those studies is described, along with future work. This work shows the value of prototyping with existing technology in order to uncover user needs in an onine environment.

In this paper, we describe the process behind the design of Audio Aura. The goal of Audio Aura is to provide serendipitous information, via background auditory cues, that is tied to people's physical actions in the workplace. We used scenarios to explore issues in serendipitous information such as privacy and work practice. Our sound design was guided by a number of strategies for creating peripheral sounds grouped in cohesive ecologies. Faced with an physical and software infrastructure under development in a laboratory distant from our sound studio, we prototyped different sonic landscapes in VRML worlds. In our infrastructure design, we made a number of trade-offs in our use of legacy systems and our client-server design. Keywords: Audio, Augmented Reality, Auditory Icons, Active Badge, VRML. Earcons, Awareness, Periphery INTRODUCTION In this work we explore using audio to connect a person's activities in the physical world with information culled from the virtual ...

Article Putting visualization to work: ProgramFinder for youth placement Share on Authors: Jason B. Ellis GVU Center at Georgia Tech. and Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, University of Maryland, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, College Park, MD GVU Center at Georgia Tech. and Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, University of Maryland, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, College Park, MDView Profile , Anne Rose Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, University of Maryland, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, College Park, MD Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, University of Maryland, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, College Park, MDView Profile , Catherine Plaisant Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, University of Maryland, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, College Park, MD Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, University of Maryland, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, College Park, MDView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '97: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systemsMarch 1997 Pages 502–509https://doi.org/10.1145/258549.259003Online:27 March 1997Publication History 2citation207DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations2Total Downloads207Last 12 Months3Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access