Drones are increasingly used to support humanitarian crises and events that involve dangerous or costly tasks. While drones have great potential for remote collaborative work and aerial telepresence, existing drone technology is limited in its support for synchronous collaboration among multiple remote users. Through three design iterations and evaluations, we prototyped Squadrone, a novel aerial telepresence platform that supports synchronous mid-air collaboration among multiple remote users. We present our design and report results from evaluating our iterations with 13 participants in 3 different collaboration configurations. Our first design iteration validates the basic functionality of the platform. Then, we establish the effectiveness of collaboration using a 360-degree shared aerial display. Finally, we simulate a type of search task in an open environment to see if collaborative telepresence impacts members’ participation. The results validate some initial goals for Squadrone and are used to reflect back on a recent telepresence design framework.

Despite recent popularity of mindfulness smartphone applications and an interest in incorporating mindfulness into new technologies, existing applications tend to focus mainly on its meditation dimension. In this paper, we review existing literature on digital and traditional mindfulness to map its design space and synthesize the findings with our prior research on designing for aesthetic needs. We identify "recollection" and "evaluation" as two important dimensions of mindfulness that have not yet been incorporated into popular digital tools. Through a two-phase design activity over 16 months, we developed ColorAway, an innovative tool that promotes mindfulness through interaction with modified travel photos. Recruited participants evaluated ColorAway and offered unique insights into how mindfulness can be better designed. We also discuss how the process of designing for mindfulness can possibly inform the design of personal technology. This research is part of a larger study that builds on scholarly research and theories with the goal of designing interactive technologies for solo travelers.

This paper describes the design and development of a preliminary qualitative coding tool as well as a method to improve the process of achieving inter-coder reliability (ICR) in small teams. Software applications that support qualitative coding do not sufficiently assist collaboration among coders and overlook some fundamental issues related to ICR. We propose a new dimension of collaborative coding called 'coders' certainty" and demonstrate its ability to illustrate valuable code disagreements that are missing from existing approaches. Through a case study, we describe the utility of our tool, Code Wizard, and how it helped a group of researchers effectively collaborate to code naturalistic observation data. We report the valuable lessons we learned from the development of our tool and method: (1) identifying coders' certainty constitutes an important part of determining the quality of data analysis and facilitates identifying overlapping and ambiguous codes, (2) making the details of coding process visible helps streamline the coding process and leads to a sense of ownership of the research results, and (3) there is valuable information hidden in coding disagreements that can be leveraged for improving the process of data analysis.

During crises, the ability to access relevant information is extremely important for those affected. Previous research shows that social media have become popular for rapid information exchange between members of the online community after crisis events. This study focuses on the effects of proximity to a crisis on information sharing behaviors. Using constructivist grounded theory to guide our inquiry, we conducted interviews with eleven people who used social media in the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings. Salient themes emerging from this study suggest that both physical and emotional proximity to a crisis influence online information seeking and sharing behaviors. Additionally, speed of information sharing and information access renders social media especially useful during crisis and particularly susceptible to the spread of misinformation. We view the latter as a consequence of the inevitable sensemaking process that occurs as individuals attempt to make sense of incomplete information.

This study offers an in-depth analysis of four rumors that spread through Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings. Through qualitative and visual analysis, we describe each rumor's origins, changes over time, and relationships between different types of rumoring behavior. We identify several quantitative measures-including temporal progression, domain diversity, lexical diversity and geolocation features-that constitute a multi-dimensional signature for each rumor, and provide evidence supporting the existence of different rumor types. Ultimately these signatures enhance our understanding of how different kinds of rumors propagate online during crisis events. In constructing these signatures, this research demonstrates and documents an emerging method for deeply and recursively integrating qualitative and quantitative methods for analysis of social media trace data.