Book Reading #29 - Opening Skinner's Box (Mar 1)

Chapter 8: Lost in the Mall

Summary:

In this chapter, the author talks about Elizabeth Loftus's research about human memory. Loftus says that there exists a very thin curtain between memory and imagination. And often times, we tend to confuse things between memory and imagination. She says that long term memory is very fragile and can be easily tampered and manipulated to some extent. Loftus believed that in many of the cases involving child abuse, people were wrongly convicted based on the memories of the children who grew up and claimed that they had memories of their parents abusing them when they were young. Loftus claims that such deviations are possible and the people convicted were not necessarily guilty. To prove this, she had to prove that it's not only possible to distort memories, but it's totally possible create fake memories. "lost in the mall" experiment told participants about their true childhood stories and then added a fake one about them being lost in a mall when they were young. Their parents cooperated in the experiment. The participants were given an option to deny remembering this event if they really couldn't recollect the memories. However, surprisingly large number of participants actually believed that they were lost in the mall and came up with stories of how they were lost. When they were told about the experiment, they were shocked and surprised.

Loftus claims that we hate white empty spaces in our memories. If we can remember something, we tend to make something up to fill in the memory gap and this may or may not be true, something deviating entirely from the truth. When someone trustworthy tells us something about our past, something that really did not happen, we tend to believe it and start believing it firmly as if the event indeed did occur. However, some psychologists argue that traumatic memories are very different than regular memories and that they are stored differently. Traumatic memories can never be forgotten or tampered with.

Discussion:

This was a very interesting chapter that made me doubt my memory ten times while I was reading different incidents mentioned in the chapter. I started doubting if my memories are genuine or is most of it my imagination. Most importantly, I think Loftus is talking about so much more than memory. She's talking about authenticity and whether we, as human beings, have it. If we can successfully fool our memories, then we probably don't have it.

Book Reading #28 - Coming of Age in Samoa (Mar 1)

Chapter 9: The Attitude of the Personality

Summary:

In this chapter, Mead talks about general attitude and personality traits of people in Samoa. "Musu" is the type of attitude that expresses unwillingness and intractability. The appearance of musu attitude is treated with almost superstitious respect. People seldom question this attitude. If someone is being stubborn and unwilling, people just accept it and move on. Mead found that Samoans avoid answering personal questions and questions that involve private matters of someone else. Samoan language lacks comparatives and so attitudes are described simply as good or bad, positive or negative. Relative goodness, relative beauty, relative wisdom are unfamiliar formalizations to the Samoans. Ugliness and viciousness were more vivid and unusual attributes of personality while beauty, wisdom and kindness were taken for granted. Judgments were made in terms of age groups, from standpoints of the group of the speaker and the age of the person judged.

Discussion:

It was interesting to know about the attitudes and personality traits of people living in Samoa. However, I was amazed to read that if someone is obdurate and unwilling, no one tries to force him/her in to speaking what he/she is holding back. Instead, people just let go. This was a little surprising and I think this can actually worsen some conflicts, because talking things out usually helps in resolving problems. Anyway, overall, it was an interesting piece of observations and findings about the general attitudes of the indigenous people of Samoa.

Book Reading #27 - Emotional Design (Mar 1)

Chapter 2: The Multiple Faces of Emotion and Design

Summary:

In this chapter, the author Donald Norman talks about three levels of emotional design:

• Visceral Level: This level deals with the attractiveness of the design, its appearance, look, touch and feel. Positive impact at this level triggers user creativity and curiosity, which is why attractive things are more effective.
• Behavioral Level: This level describes the functionality of the product. This is about the user experience with the product.
• Reflective Level:This is where memories, consciousness and highest levels of feelings reside. This level deals with the overall experience of using the product.

To explain these three levels, he does provide some examples like a video game than can be designed to look stylish and rugged for the young adult male games, should be available in feminine colors like pink in delicate looking packaging for girls, stylist and and decent looking for the kitchens as a cooking aid tool and rugged for the garage as training tool.

Discussion:

I think Norman's arguments and assertions were extremely convincing. The examples he provides make his claims even more convincing and interesting. I think it is very important for any designer to design a product taking into consideration all these three levels. Th product should be attractive looking, perform an important function and should create memories.

Paper Reading #13: Gestalt: Integrated Support for Implementation and Analysis in Machine Learning

Reference Information:

Title: Gestalt: Integrated Support for Implementation and Analysis in Machine Learning
Authors: Kayur Patel, Naomi Bancroft, Steven M. Drucker, James Fogarty, Andrew J. Ko, James A. Landay
Conference: UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Summary:

This paper talks about Gestalt, a development environment designed to support the process of applying machine learning. While traditional programming environments focus on source code, Gestalt explicitly supports both code and data. Gestalt allows developers to implement a classification pipeline, analyze data as it moves through that pipeline, and easily transition between implementation and analysis. An experiment showed that this significantly improved the ability of developers to find and fix bugs in machine learning systems. Gestalt provides new insight into general-purpose support for the machine learning process. Gestalt allows the developers to graphically implement a classification pipeline and analyze the data. The developer can graphically switch back and forth between two operations. The way this was implemented was using add-on widgets to existing IDEs like Eclipse and MS Visual Studio. They added widgets to perform tasks like parse data, train and test models.

Discussion:

I can understand how helpful this software will be in developing machine learning algorithms. It's extremely difficult to visualize the working from the lines of code that you've written and finding bugs is even harder. This IDE plugin will immensely help developers like you and me to visualize the data, spot the discrepancies and fix the bugs. Similar tools will save a lot of time spent in the debugging process and increase efficiency.

Ethnography Results, Week 4

Goal:

Until now I have been discovering new places on Second Life and getting familiar with how different features work. Having acquired that preliminary knowledge, my aim this week was to actually interact with people, rather than simply observing their behavior. This week, I wanted to make friends on Second Life.

Methods of Study:

• Teleport to already visited or some new locations.
• Observe the general behavior of the people.
• Start conversations with different people and get an idea of their general attitude towards newbies.
• Try to make new friends on Second Life.

Locations:

I have set Texas A&M University campus as my default location, so I always start my Second Life session with the Texas A&M Campus. However, so far I have always found the Texas A&M campus empty. Next I teleported to the Standford Campus, then to the IEEE society but all these places were empty.

It was my observation that people mostly sign up for second life for relaxation and to make friends rather than going to universities and libraries, which is why I found all the libraries and college campuses I have visited so far to be empty. People tend to be at places like clubs and beaches where they could hang out with their friends.

So finally, I teleported to one of the places I had visited before and knew that I would find lot of people there. The place was - The Help Island. I have talked about this place in my week 2 results.

Screenshot: The Help Island

Like I had expected, I did find a lot of people here. I did start talking to some people and told them that I was a noob. I asked them about what they usually do on second life, what interests them about second life, what are the places that are worth visiting and questions like these. Following are some of the conversations I recored:

Conversation with AF: (I won't be disclosing names to maintain player's privacy).

Jaideep Balekar: Hi, could you tell me about some interesting places I could visit on SL?

AF: there u go hun thats a load of places u can go

JaideepBalekar: thanks so much!

AF: do u need places to get cloths as well? and that is a place to get free stuff

JaideepBalekar: sure, i am a noob and my clothes are pretty dorky :)

JaideepBalekar: i love free stuff..!

AF: lol well that is a folder of a whole bunch of free stuff

JaideepBalekar: thanks !

JaideepBalekar: btw where are you from?

JaideepBalekar: are there any do and donts I should know about SL?

AF: not really just have fun

JaideepBalekar: alright, thanks a lot AF!

AF: yw

My short conversation with Arc:

JaideepBalekar: hey wats up arc?

Arc: fine how about u ?

Arc: ur quiet new to SL

JaideepBalekar: yes, very new :) what about you?

Arc: i am five months old

JaideepBalekar: so, what made you sign up ?

Arc: brb RL call

Arc: ok jai i was surfing net around august of last year then i saw this website and i like it better than other chatting webs

JaideepBalekar: hmmm, i got here because of a class project and i'm actually liking it here

Arc: but dont become addict to this game ok:)

JaideepBalekar: well, i'll try not to :)

JaideepBalekar: actually, i have to run to my next class. It was nice talking to you. Can I add you as a friend?

Arc: yeah of course

Arc: but i usually come once a month or twice

Friendship offer accepted.

JaideepBalekar: alright bud, ttyl. hope to c u online sometime

Arc: ok bye take care

Finally, I had another conversion with yet another player on Second Life. I'll abbreviate her name as GM. She is from Australia. The conversation was very long and verbose, so I'll summarize it instead. This person told me about some nice places on SL where I can find nice people to hang out with. We asked each other about our interests and got introduced. During the conversation, she told be that she is disabled in real life and that made it very challenging for her to engage in any kind of work in real life. Instead, she run a furniture and resale business on SL and earns real money through this business. I thought this was a really interesting notion. She spends 6 hours a day on second life selling her stuff, so it's pretty much like a job for her.

During night though, she works at a night club as a dancer. It was interesting to know that a person who is disabled in real life can cross the limits and discover new horizons in second life. She also left me a piece of advice - she told me that some people on SL aren't nice and that they can actually trick you into getting your money (linden dollars, which can be converted into USD). Then she invited me to her place in Australia and introduced me to her husband. She had her shop at her place and a rest area for visitors. She told me about how people buy land, houses and other stuff on SL and pay USD for it. People have their businesses and do jobs on second life. Then, I had to end my conversation because I was getting late for the class. However, it was wonderful to talk to these people and get better insight into Second Life.

Screenshot: GM's house and guest area

Overall Experience:

I enjoyed the overall experience this week since I got to talk to people and make friends. During the first two weeks, I was wondering what people really do on second life. Second life can get pretty boring if there is no human interaction. Making new friends and hangings out with them takes the notion of pen friends to a new level. The general attitude of the three persons I talked to was very amiable. They were very helpful and also provided me with some useful advice.

Paper Reading #12: Pen + Touch = New Tools

Reference Information

Title: Pen + Touch = New Tools

Names of authors: Ken Hinckley, Koji Yatani, Michel Pahud, Nicole Coddington, Jenny Rodenhouse, Andy Wilson, Hrvoje Benko, and Bill Buxton

Conference: UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Summary:

Prior to this research, we had multi-touch interfaces (usually using a capacitive touch screen) and pen-touch interface (usually using a resistive touch screen). However, with the age of tablet computers, it was required to have an interface that allows users to touch and perform gestures with fingers and in addition to that, use pen for inking and note-taking. This paper presents a research that makes this possible. They used a Microsoft Surface and a LED pen for this experiment. In this paper, the authors describe techniques for direct pen+touch input. The motivation came from observing people’s manual behaviors with physical paper and notebooks. These serve as the foundation for a prototype Microsoft Surface application, centered on note-taking and scrapbooking of materials. Based on the observations and explorations, the authors advocate a division of labor between pen and touch: the pen writes, touch manipulates, and the combination of pen + touch yields new tools. This articulates how the system interprets unimodal pen, unimodal touch, and multimodal pen+touch inputs, respectively. For example, the user can hold a photo and drag off with the pen to create and place a copy; hold a photo and cross it in a freeform path with the pen to slice it in two; or hold selected photos and tap one with the pen to staple them all together. Touch thus unifies object selection with mode switching of the pen, while the muscular tension of holding touch serves as the glue that phrases together all the inputs into a unitary multimodal gesture. This helps the UI designer to avoid encumbrances such as physical buttons, persistent modes, or widgets that detract from the user’s focus on the workspace.

Discussion:

Today, we are getting rid of the physical hardware buttons from our electronics and substituting them with touch screen. People are rapidly switching to tablets, touch based ebook readers, touch based navigations systems etc. I think this research is revolutionary and provides a major breakthrough in the area of HCI. Some tablets like the iPad do not support pen interaction, while a keyboard is displayed on the screen and the respective keys can be touched to enter the information. However, many people aren't comfortable with this input method. Therefore, some newer tablets like the HP slate and Asus eee slate support multi touch and pen interface making the device ideal for browsing information and for inking / note-taking.

Application:

Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch

Book Reading #26 - Opening Skinner's Box

Chapter 7: Rat Park

Summary:

This chapter is about a psychologist named Bruce Alexander and his research about addiction. He challenged the established theories supporting addiction to narcotic substances. Addiction psychologists like Dr. Herbert Kleber believe that the ease of access to narcotics significantly increase the risk of addiction. However, Alexander firmly believed that there is nothing inherently addictive about any drugs and repeated exposure to even the most enticing drugs do not usually lead to problems. He claims that prior to the temperance movement when opium was legal, the levels of addiction remained at a steady one percent of the population.

In some of the experiments, it was proved that rodents were so addicted to narcotics that they were willing to torture themselves and suffer pain to suck their drug through the straw, which most psychologists believed to be a compelling evidence of addiction. Alexander believed that the rodents became addicts because they were kept in worst conditions, crammed in tiny cages. He felt that if they were kept in a comfortable environment, they would probably not choose the drugs. He proved to be correct. In his experiment called the "Rat Park", he designed a park for lab rats which sufficient space and clean water. The rats that were kept in crammed environment kept striving for drugs while the lab rats in the rat park refrained from any drugs that the experimenters tried to administer. Some of the already addicted rats that were forced to ingest drugs preferred not to take drugs while they were in the happy surroundings.

Thus, Alexander's point was that we are prone to drug addiction if we are surrounded by sad environment, dejection and misery i.e. difficult circumstances lead to addiction. If we are happy in our lives and have almost everything that we desire, we would never get addicted to narcotics.

Discussion:

Alexander indeed had a valid point, however, I think that the mood of the surrounding environment and availability both play a role in addiction. I do agree that if we have nothing to whine for, if there's nothing or very little in our lives to complain about, then we won't be at a risk of a drug addiction. However, most of our lives aren't perfect. We have to often face failures. If drugs were freely available, we would probably use them in a state of mental imbalance like many people drink alcohol when they are upset. The fact that they are illegal and not easily available keeps its usage to low levels.

Book Reading #25 - Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 8: The Role of the Dance

Summary

Dancing is the only activity in which people from all age groups and both the sexes participate. There are many small informal dance sessions and there are formal dances at ceremonies like weddings. It at these informal dances that the children learn to dance. The dancing is usually started by the small children, young people and adults join later. Few young men sitting in the center provide the music. The dancers are the final arbiters of the excellence of the music and are allowed to stop and demand for better music as a price of continuing. The role of the audience is to provide encouragement to the performers. When the child starts performing, every little improvement is rewarded with applause. When the chief or the guests are present, the dancers dress in the best costumes and rub coconut oil on their bodies.

The taupo's dance is grave, aloof and beautiful. She is required to preserve a set, dreamy, nonchalant expression of infinite hauteur and detachment. The boy's dance is much jollier than girls'. Sometimes, the manaia or the jester is also a part of the dance and mimics the main performers. Sometimes, the manaia is so proficient that he becomes the center of attraction and entertainment. Some people imitate the dance of others. There is no stigma on such imitation. The author doesn't resent it and the crowd does not upbraid it. Dance serves as an important factor in the education and socialization of a Samoan child.

Discussion

After reading eight chapters of this book, it occurs to me that the people living in the villages of Samoa, in a primitive civilization enjoy the same things that we enjoy in the developed civilization. We also dancing, playing, teasing and light heartedly bantering each other. I believe these things are intrinsic characteristics of human nature and do not depend on civilization. Overall, it was interesting to know about the dance forms in Samoan villages and their significance in the socialization and education of the Samoan child.

Book Reading #24 - Emotional Design

Chapter 1: Attractive Things Work Better

Summary

This is yet another book from Donald Norman. In the first chapter the author explains why are attractive things and things with aesthetic beauty more efficient. He explains that looking at attractive things causes change in emotions and emotions lead us to take decisions. The author states that looking at beautiful things causes happiness and happiness leads to creative things and helps us to look at the bigger picture. On the other hand, fear and anxiety curb creativity, however, we tend to pay attention to minute details rather than the big picture when we are anxious and nervous. Thus, when the details are important, it's important to generate anxiety in people, and that is what alarms and sirens do.

The author also talks about three levels of processing - visceral layer, behavioral and reflective level. The visceral layer is preprogrammed into us. It's the automatic layer that deals with reflex actions. Behavioral layer dictates everyday behavior and the reflective level is the contemplative layer. This involves some thought process. Our actions are a result of interaction between these three layers.

Discussion

This book has a very different tone from the earlier two Don Norman books that I read - The design of Everyday Things and The Design of Future Things. It was interesting to read how he emphasizes on the emotional aspect in this book rather than the design aspect, constraints and mappings.

Ethnography Results, Week 3

Goal:

This week we decided to visit more communities, and tried to interact with people. we wanted to find communities that had large gatherings, but as we will explain later on, we believe finding these large communities depends highly on the time of day you play second life.

Methods of Study:

• Teleport to different locations - college campuses, libraries, coffee shops, clubs, beaches etc.
• Observe people and their actions.
• Try to initiate conversation with people and judge their tone.
• Notice what music and visuals are playing at different places and what relation it has with the environment of that particular place.

Locations and Communities:

Since Dr. Hammond had asked us if there were any classes held on the Texas A&M second life campus, we decided to go back to Texas A&M and tried to see if any classes were held. We went at night, so there were not any classes, however we were able to take screen-shots of announcement boards.

Screenshot-Texas A&M bulletin board:

As can be seen by the boards, not a lot seems to be happening on the second life campus. We were able to go to the classes, but did not see any meeting times scheduled. From there, we decided to go to Tom Bukowski's house (A.K.A. Tom Boellstorff). Mr. Boellstorff has done some research on second life, and I was curious to know if he was at the home he set up on purpose to conduct interviews, and studies. The name of the location where he "lives" is called Ethnographia.

Screenshot - Ethnographia



Since we did not find anyone at home, we decided to fly around the house to look at the scenery. Lo and behold, we discovered the FCA(first church of atheism) building. Having heard a bit about this community from the CHI classmate doing research on the reddit community, we decided to check it out. As soon as you land near the building, you get greeted with a card that was interesting to read. We plan to bring bring the things we read to class. No one was there though, but we wonder if, and when they actually meet.

Screenshot - FCA(first church of atheism)

Afterward, I thought I'd try coffee shops like Starbucks and Starstruck but did not find people. I did notice how one Starbucks coffee shop was very different from another. The music also would be different.
I then went to a place where new second life users go. There I met a new user who I interacted with. She was new to second life, and told me she had joined because of her friend. An interesting thing I noticed, is that when both of us would start typing to each other, the other would stop typing. The same thing happens in the real world when someone tries to talk at the same time as someone else, but then you stop to let the other person talk first.

Screenshot - Starbucks and Starstruck

A bit of my conversation with the new second life user can be found below. I changed his/her name for privacy.

Kat : Hi. I am new too..
me: that's cool:) I'm really overwhelmed by all there is to learn about
Kat: very overwhelming.. haven't seen anyone.. you're the first i've seen here.
Kat:I need to read on more about it.. don't know what to do
me:I have another friend who recently joined also so I may ask him to give me crash course... so anyways is there a reason for joining second life?
Kat: friend told me about it. he suggested I would li9ke it.. here i am .. clueless :)
me: I actually joined SL as part of a class project- I basically have a few weeks to write a report on my findings about SL
Kat: That's cool. I hope to get better with the game. It's after 12 now, hope to see you again. It was nice talking to you.
me: Cool - nice talking to you- If you want feel free to add me as a friend- I'll try to go to more places in the coming weeks.
Kat:Ok, Thanks a lot.. Tell me how it goes.
me: CIAO!
Kat: C-ya!

Experience:

The overall experience was good, but we wish we had met more people. The chief reason for that is that we were playing second life at night and most users were offline. For next week, we plan to also log onto second life during the day.

Book Reading #23 - Opening Skinner's Box

Chapter 6: Monkey Love

Summary

This chapter talks about Harry Halow's experiments with primates to find what's love. Harry Harlow himself experienced bouts of depression throughout his life and in school, he did not fit in. When Harlow moved to Madison, he began testing monkey intelligence, sort of simian IQ profile. Harlow separated the new born monkeys from their mothers. He observed that they became extremely attached to the terry cloth towels. He came up with the theory, that the sense of "touch" is the basis of forming love. The terry cloth towel was soft and that's what the monkeys used to touch and they became extremely attached to those towels. Harlow then made surrogate mothers, one made out of wire and sharp nails but this one had milk. Other surrogate mother was made out of terry cloth towels but it was dry. The monkeys were still attached to the terry cloth surrogate mother, even though they went to the other one only when they were hungry. Thus, Harlow concluded that "touch" and not "taste" was the basis of forming love.

To examine the power of touch, he put some new born monkeys with Iron Maidens, who pumped freezing water over their children, punched and stabbed the children. No matter what the torture, the babies came back to her. This showed that love is very strong and that we are creatures of faith. Since only touch was important, this notion changed the idea of neonatal care.

However, later he observed that cloth-mothered monkeys were violent and anti-social. So, there was something more than just touch that was important for their development. If the monkeys weren't allowed to socialize and play with other monkeys while they were growing up, they would turn hostile towards them later on. Len Rosenblum, one of the Harlow's students proved that it was "touch","motion" and "play" that lead to the development of a normal monkey.

Discussion

I think it was very cruel to separate new born monkeys from their mothers and then torturing them with different types of experimentation. However, the experiment did teach us something of tremendous value. Now we know what's needed for a proper development of a child. The contributions of Harlow and his students to the field of psychology is tremendous, however, the cruelty against those poor animals can definitely not be forgotten.

Book Reading #22 - Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 7: Formal Sex Relations

Summary

The first attitude of girls towards boys is of avoidance. This continues up to the age of thirteen or fourteen. Children at this age meet at informal parties and at community reef fishings. However, this exposure is not sufficient nor long enough to teach girls co-operation or real appreciation of personality in members of opposite sex. Some sexual relations like love life of a older man and a young girl do take place but they are outside of the recognized forms into which sex relations fall. An affair between a boy and the girl, nearly of the same age is acceptable by the society and often leads to marriage.

The chapter also talks about the boys confidant or the soa. A boy needs to be wise while choosing a soa, since he/she needs to be loyal. Most common choices are usually a brother or another girl. It's the task of the soa to sing his friend's praise, counteract the girl's fears and appoint a rendezvous. Some times the boy stealthily crawls into the girls house during night and this sex activity is called meototolo. If caught, no girl will ever pay any attention to him again. Finally, marriages are much more formal. There is an exchange of property and the girl's and boy's parents must be willing. Concept of celibacy is absolutely meaningless to them but virginity definitely adds to a girl's attractiveness. However, virginity is a legal requirement for a taupo which is why she is always carefully guarded.

Discussion

It was interesting to know that the behavior of adolescents in samoa is actually quite similar to adolescents in any developed civilization. This makes me believe that the clandestine meetings, sneaking out of the houses during night etc. had nothing to do with the cultural impact, rather it's sheer human nature. The Samoans did the exact same things that an American teenager would try to do even though the Somoans do not have exposure to the internet, television, radio, or the newspapers.

Book Reading #21 - Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 7: User-Centered Design

Summary:

Author Donald Norman talks about characteristics of a good design. He also talks about simplifying difficult tasks like making use of natural mappings, giving proper feedback, simplifying the structure of the tasks, exploiting the power of constraints and when everything else fails, making use of standardization. Three aspects of mental models are - design model, user's model and system image. Manuals tend to be less helpful than they should be. They are often written hastily after the product is designed, under severe time pressures. Complex tasks can be restructured and simplified. Ideally, the user should have an option to choose automation or full control. With some sort of simplification, there's sometimes a trade off. For example, digital watches make it easy to read time but it's hard to estimate how much time has past since an earlier reading.

With automation, human becomes the servant of the system and is in no control left with the user. The author says that standardization is the solution of last resort. If no design can be creative and self-intuitive enough, then there a need to adopt a commonly accepted solution. This is standardization. For example, the order of the clutch, brake and the accelerator in the car.

Discussion:

This chapter was like a summary of the book. The author has mentioned automation, simplification of tasks and natural mappings before and so this chapter was a little repetitive. However, it was a great summary that briefly went over all the important aspects of a good design.

Paper Reading# 11: Hands-on math: a page-based multi-touch and pen desktop for technical work and problem solving

Reference Information

Title: Hands-On Math: A page-based multi-touch and pen desktop for technical work and problem solving

Names of authors: Robert Zeleznik, Andrew Bragdon, Ferdi Adeputra, Hsu-Sheng Ko

Presentation venue: UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Summary:

Students, professionals and engineers have to choose between flexible, free-form input of pencil and paper and the computational power of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS). There is no method of interaction or technology that incorporates the two into something that's one easy-to-use, yet powerful, thus reducing the barriers in accessing computational algebra systems while solving math problem. Hands-On Math is a multi-touch and pen-based system which attempts to unify these approaches by providing virtual paper that is enhanced to recognize mathematical notations as a means of providing in situ access to the CAS functionality. It uses Microsoft Surface that runs on a tabletop screen and StarPad SDK to convert handwritten mathematical equations to digital format. Pages can be created and organized on a large pannable desktop and mathematical expressions can be computed, graphed and manipulated using a set of uni and bi-manual interactions which facilitate rapid exploration by eliminating tedious and error prone transcription tasks. Analysis of a qualitative pilot evaluation indicated the potential of the approach and highlighted the issues with the novel techniques used.

Discussion:

The idea of incorporating hand gestures and solving of math equations is brilliant. I have myself been in such situations before, and have been lazy to plug in the equations into CAS. Writing the equations on smart whiteboards and using gesture recognition to recognize the equations and converting them to digital format will make the task very easy and save a lot of time.

Paper Reading #10: PhoneTouch: a technique for direct phone interaction on surfaces

Reference Information:

Title: PhoneTouch: a technique for direct phone interaction on surfaces

Authors: Dominik Schmidt, Fadi Chehimi, Enrico Rukzio, Hans Gellersen

Conference: User Interface Software and Technology 2010

Summary:

This paper talks about PhoneTouch - a novel technique for integration of mobile

phones and interactive surfaces. The technique enables use

of phones to select targets on the surface by direct touch, facilitating

for instance pick&drop-style transfer of objects between

phone and surface. The technique is based on separate

detection of phone touch events by the surface, which determines

location of the touch, and by the phone, which contributes

device identity. The device-level observations are

merged based on correlation in time. In the paper, the authors describe a proof of-

concept implementation of the technique, using vision for

touch detection on the surface including discrimination of

finger versus phone touch and acceleration features for detection

by the phone.

(Fig. PhoneTouch enables direct phone interaction on surfaces alongside conventional multi-touch.)

Discussion:

I think the idea of using a collaborative touch surface with phones is really interesting. It can be used in home as well as in office. In office, documents can be drag-n-dropped on the surface to share them with everyone, at home pictures and movies can be shared by dragging them from the phone onto the the collaborative surface. I believe this technology has already been put to use in developing certain multimedia application, iphone apps etc.

Book Reading #20 - Opening Skinner's Box

Author: Lauren Slator

Chapter 5: Quieting the Mind

Summary:

In this chapter, author Lauren Slater talks about Leon Festinger's theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Cognitive Dissonance can be defined as the phenomenon in which people alter their thoughts and actions to match their surroundings and circumstances. The author mentions some of the Festinger's experiments in which people believed that a massive flood would come on December 21, 1954. In another experiment, he had people lie for $1 and for $20.

Major part of this chapter talks about a woman named Linda Santo who claims that her daughter is a saint. She claimed that her daughter was a victim soul and was born to take the pains for others' sins. Interviews with Linda Santo give more information and raise some questions about cognitive dissonance.

Discussion:

I thought that some of questions raised and facts stated in this chapter were unclear and ambiguous as compared to the other chapters. However, the topic of cognitive dissonance presented by the author was extremely fascinating. I believe that the area has not received much attention and more experiments need to be conducted to better understand the concept of Cognitive Dissonance.

Book Reading #19 - Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 6: The Girl in Her Community

Summary

In this chapter, the author talks about the role of the girl in the community. She goes on to different between two groups - Aumaga and Aualuma. Aumuga is a group of men who do the heavy work of the village and perform an important function of forming relations between two villages while Aualuma is a group of young girls, wives of untitled men and widows. They are village hostesses and provide help at certain meetings for the wives of matais.

The author goes on to explain certain taboos. She discusses the two types of woman's fonos - the ones that follow and other ones who precede the communal work and the ceremonial fonos.

Discussion

It's interesting to know about the woman's potion in the Samoan community. It seems like women don't enjoy the freedom that they do in the developed cultures. There are certain taboos and customs that restrict their behavior. It would be interesting to know if the position of the woman in Somoan society has changed today.

Book Reading #18 - Design of Everyday Things

Author: Donald Norman
Chapter 6: The Design Challenge

Summary:

In this chapter, the author talks about challenges that a designer faces while designing a new product. Author talks about a method which he calls 'hill climbing' which is an iterative process of improving the design of the product. The author talks about why designers sometimes fail in coming up with an effective and efficient design. He says that the designers give priority to aesthetics and they themselves are not typical users.

Norman claims that every customer is unique and has unique expectations. This adds to the complexity of designing a product. Two mistakes that the designers make is to add too many features in to a single product and the other is to make the product too complex to understand.

Discussion:

Towards the end of the chapter Norman talks about design of computers and I think that was pretty interesting. It was fascinating to read that his ideas and claims 20 years ago are now a reality and companies are following his advice. Also the part where he mentions typewriters and faucets was very convincing.

Paper Reading #9: Imaginary interfaces: spatial interaction with empty hands and without visual feedback

Reference Information

Title: Imaginary Interfaces: Spatial Interaction with Empty Hands and without Visual Feedback

Names of authors: Sean Gustafson, Daniel Bierwirth, Patrick Baudisch

Presentation venue: UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Summary:

Current screen-less devices only support buttons and gestures. Screen-less wearable devices allow for the smallest form factor and thus the maximum mobility. Pointing is not supported because users have nothing to point at. However, the designers challenge the notion that spatial interaction requires a screen and propose a method for bringing spatial interaction to screen-less devices.

In this paper, the authors present Imaginary Interfaces, screen-less devices that allow users to perform spatial interaction with empty hands and without visual feedback. Unlike projection-based solutions, such as Sixth Sense, all of the spatial information is contained in the user's mind and all interaction is done relative to the user's frame of reference. Users define the origin of an imaginary space by forming an L-shaped coordinate cross with their non-dominant hand. Users then point and draw with their dominant hand in the resulting space.

With three user studies the authors investigated the question: To what extent can users interact spatially with a user interface that exists only in their imagination? Participants created simple drawings, annotated existing drawings, and pointed at locations described in imaginary space. Their findings suggested that users’ visual short-term memory can, in part, replace the feedback conventionally displayed on a screen. The authors propose a design for such a device, which works by illuminating the user's hands with infrared light, applying a luminance threshold, and discerning the structures that comprise the imaginary interface

Discussion:

The idea and the concept is very interesting. Such methods of interactions are gaining increasing importance, we have already seen the famous research - Sixth Sense done at MIT. However, the users will have to remember hundreds of gestures for performing various tasks, which can be annoying. Also, the gesture recognition has to be really accurate, since there is a good chance that two gestures might look similar and the algorithm may confuse one for another, thus annoying the user. Lastly, consider this situation ten years down the road, everyone having a wearable computer and performing gestures in air, that would be a little weird, I think....everyone waving hand and circling their hands. However, if it brings convenience, other things don't really matter.

Book Reading #17 - HCI Remixed

Chapter 6: A Creative Programming Environment

Summary

In this chapter, the author Henry Leiberman addresses the paper - “Pygmalion: A Creative Programming Environment”. He talks about the creator of the icon based user interface. This person worked at the Xerox corporation. He set the trends for our interaction with computers using icons and drag-n-drop.. Icons are the way we interact with computers today. The idea was later incorporated in Macintosh.

Discussion

The author appreciates Smith's work. No one thought back then that it would be a big thing. I personally think that the idea of using icons was brilliant and it deserves much more credit than Smith received for his revolutionary work.

Chapter 7: Fundamentals in HCI: Learning the Value of Consistency and User Models

Summary:

In this chapter, Sara Bly talks about the Red Book used by the Xerox Corporation. The Red Book instructed the design process and set the design standards at Xerox. It was primarily divided into two parts - document creation and document management. The author mentions that the Red Book is important because it focussed on the interface design. The Red book laid importance on consistency of design. Lastly, she mentions that the Red Book offered a conceptual model.

Discussion:

I thought this chapter was very interesting. I look at the Red Book as the book to success that Xerox Corporation used wisely. It had the secret ingredients to the right design. This was probably why Xerox was a big thing back then and everybody in the field of computing wanted to work for Xerox research.

Chapter 9: The Disappearing Computer

Summary:

In this chapter, Streitz talks about "disappearing of the computer" by which he implies incorporation of technology in our everyday lives to such an extent that we stop realizing that we are using technology anymore. Technology will become so commonplace that there will be nothing special about it.

Discussion:

I think Streitz indeed saw the future. Today, we use technology for everything we do. Everyone carries a cellphone that is as powerful as a decade old computer. Laptops and tablets have become commonplace. Cars, kitchens and garages have computers. Thus, we can see that his metaphor has turned out to be true.

Chapter 10: It Really Is All About Location!

Summary:

The author of the essay Anind Dey talks about a paper titled "The Active Badge Location System". This paper talked about a system in which people could wear badges that helped other people in locating them and which later was used to increase work efficiency. Today, location based services, maps and other software based on GPS have a big market. The paper talks about the importance of such services.

Discussion:

The motive of describing the Active Badge Location System was to describe the origins of location based services. Today, location based services are indeed a huge business. People use Google maps for getting directions instead of traditional maps. GPS technology is used for tracking pets and every car has a built in navigation system.

Chapter 46: The Essential Role of Mental Models in HCI: Card, Moran, and Newell

Summary:

In this essay, the author Kate Ehrlich talks about the book - The psychology of Human-Computer interaction and the influence it had on her. The book describes how people form mental models about computers. She goes on to explain how these mental models helped the developers to develop and design new systems.

Discussion:

I think it was interesting to read about the difference in the thought process of common users, psychologists and computer programmers. Somethings that the programmers find obvious might not be very self intuitive for the end user. It's important to keep this notion is in mind while developing software systems and other technology related products.

Chapter 47: A Most Fitting Law

Summary:

In this essay, Olson mentions mathematical formula that can be used in the field if Human Computer Interaction, especially in designing user interfaces. In general, the area has no mathematical rules. It is driven by aesthetics, user reactions and to some extent human psychology. The mathematical law he mentions is the Fitt's law MT=a+b lg(2A/W) where MT=movement time, and b are constants, A is the distance of the movement and W is the width of the target.

Discussion:

I thought that the mathematical formula did make sense. However, any interface designer would consider the inconvenience the user might have if two buttons having similar functions or some connection (undo and redo, back and forward) are placed very far from each other, say on the opposite sides of the screen. Fitt proved this point mathematically.