A dozen faculty, students, and scholars from the School of Information are preparing to present their research at this year's CHI conference May 7–12 in Vancouver, BC.
The I School contingent will be joining more than 2,500 other conference attendees from 40 countries to focus on the design, user experience, and engineering of all types of computer-based systems. The CHI 2011 conference, entitled "Connecting," particularly features works on child-computer interaction, entertainment, health, and sustainability.
I School faculty, students, lecturers, and visiting scholars will be delivering papers, presenting "works in progress" posters, and participating in workshops, and two I School contribution have already received honorable mentions in the conference Best Paper competition. In addition, the opening keynote speaker will be Howard Rheingold, who has taught several courses at the School of Information on virtual communities and social media.
Papers & Notes
- “Designing Mobile Interfaces for Novice and Low-Literacy Users” by lecturer and visiting senior researcher Kentaro Toyama et al.
“While mobile phones have found broad application in bringing health, financial, and other services to the developing world, usability remains a major hurdle for novice and low-literacy populations. In this paper, we offer an ethnographic study of the usability barriers facing 90 low-literacy subjects in India, Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa.”
- “Folk Music Goes Digital in India” by doctoral student Neha Kumar, assistant professor Tapan Parikh, et al.
“Describes the motivations underlying folk music practices, the adoption of new media technologies for folk music production and dissemination, and the resultant widespread nature of piracy across four field sites in rural India.”
- “Designing for Emerging Rural Users: Experiences from China” by doctoral student Elisa Oreglia et al.
“Describes information-sharing practices and ICT use in rural Northern China. Can help understanding emerging users in a region that faces different challenges than more studied areas in Africa and India.”
- “We're in It Together: Interpersonal Management of Disclosure in Social Network Services” by visiting student researcher Airi Lampinen et al.
“Presents a framework of strategies for managing disclosure in social network services. Informs both theoretical work and design practice that concerns the challenges related to privacy and publicness.”
- “Understanding Interaction Design Practices” by doctoral student Elizabeth Goodman et al.
“Research aimed at influencing interaction design must begin by studying current design practice. This paper describes methodological and theoretical changes to better integrate HCI research with interaction design practices.”
- “StoryFaces: Children Exploring Emotional Expressions in Storytelling with Video” by assistant professor Kimiko Ryokai, visiting student researcher Robert Kowalski, et al.
“StoryFaces is a new composition and storytelling tool for children to record and embed emotional video expressions in stories. Digital tools leverage pretend-play to empower children in a narrative process.”
- “GreenHat: Exploring the Natural Environment Through Experts’ Perspectives” by assistant professor Kimiko Ryokai, alumnus Michael Manoochehri (MIMS '10), et al.
“We present the design of mobile learning experience that takes advantage of access to multiple experts and context-sensitive information in the learner’s immediate physical environment.”
This paper has been awarded an honorable mention in the Best Paper competition.
- “Antiquarian Answers: Book Restoration as a Resource for Design” by doctoral student Daniela Rosner et al.
“As technologies age, they experience wear, sometimes resulting in loss of functionality. The aim of this paper is to enrich HCI design practices by considering the material qualities of book restoration.”
This paper has been awarded an honorable mention in the Best Paper competition.
- “From Garments to Gardens: Negotiating Material Relationships Online and ‘By Hand’” by doctoral students Elizabeth Goodman & Daniela Rosner
“Leisure activities performed “by hand” increasingly involve digital tools. We use data from an observational field study of knitting and gardening to examine relationships to information technology around handwork.”
Work in Progress
- “Crowdsourcing Suggestions to Programming Problems for Dynamic Web Development Languages” by master's student Dhawal Mujumdar et al.
“Developers increasingly consult online examples and message boards to find solutions to common programming tasks. On the web, finding solutions to debugging problems is harder than searching for working code. Prior research introduced a social recommender system, HelpMeOut, that crowdsources debugging suggestions by presenting fixes to errors that peers have applied in the past. However, HelpMeOut only worked for statically typed, compiled programming languages like Java. We investigate how suggestions can be provided for dynamic, interpreted web development languages. Our primary insight is to instrument test-driven development to collect examples of bug fixes. We present Crowd::Debug, a tool for Ruby programmers that realizes these benefits.”
Workshop
Visiting student researcher Airi Lampinen is one of the organizers of the day-long workshop “Privacy for a Networked World”: Bridging Theory and Design.
In that same workshop, MIMS student Alex Smolen will be presenting his paper “Privacy Design Analysis: A Framework for Identifying and Resolving Privacy Threats”.
