Over a billion people use social networking sites like Facebook to maintain awareness of their friends. Facebook's News Feed is the primary mechanism by which people are shown updates about their friends' daily activities on the site in the form of an algorithmically curated list of stories. This paper examines how people browse the News Feed, their perceptions and satisfaction while using it, and the interactions they make with their personal social network. We conducted a qualitative study involving think-aloud semi-structured interviews as the participants casually browsed their own feeds. We observed a wide variation in the use of the News Feed ranging from careful consideration of social conventions, judgment of people, and annoyance and frustration towards certain friends. Our findings suggest that people do not deliberately curate their own News Feed either due to lack of awareness or perceived social repercussions.

In this paper we present a novel mixed reality tracking system for collaborative tabletop applications that uses decorative markers and embedded application markers to create a continuous and seamless tracking space for mobile devices. Users can view and interact with mixed reality datasets on their mobile device, such as a tablet or smartphone, from distances both far and very near to the tabletop. We implement the tracking system in the context of a collaborative reservoir engineering tool that brings together many experts who need a private workspace to interact with unique datasets, which is supported by our system.

Computation is increasingly prevalent in the home: it serves as a way to control the home itself, or it is part of the many digital appliances within it. The question is: how can home inhabitants effectively understand and control the digital home? Our solution lets a person examine and control their home surroundings through a mobile display that serves as a 'magic lens', where the detail shown varies with proximity. In particular, HomeWindow is an augmented reality system that superimposes an interactive graphical interface atop of physical but digital artifacts in the home. One can get an overview of a room's computational state by looking through the display: the basic state of all digital hot spots are shown atop their physical counterparts. As one approaches a particular digital spot, more detailed information as well as a control interface is shown using a semantic zoom. Our current implementation works with two home devices. First, people can examine and remotely control the status of mobile domestic robots. Second, people can discover the power consumption of household appliances, where appliances are surrounded by a colorful aura that reflects its current and historical energy use.

We describe a new method for controlling a group of robots in three-dimensional (3D) space using a tangible user interface called the 3D Tractus. Our interface maps the task space into an interactive 3D space, allowing a single user to intuitively monitor and control a group of robots. We present the use of the interface in controlling a group of virtual software bots and a physical Sony AIBO robot dog in an urban search and rescue environment involving a bomb hidden inside of a building. We also describe a comparative user study we performed where participants were asked to use both the 3D physical interface and a traditional 2D graphical user interface in order to try and demonstrate the benefits and drawbacks of each approach for HRI tasks.