HCI Remixed Chapters 1, 4, 5

Chapter 1: My Vision Isn't My Vision: Making a Career Out of Getting Back to Where I Started

Author: William Buxton

Chapter 4: Drawing on SketchPad: Reflections on Computer Science and HCI

Author: Joseph A. Konstan

Chapter 5: The Mouse, the Demo, and the Big Idea

Author: Wedny Ju

Comment: Zach

Summary:

HCI Remixed is a book compiled of multiple authors who have written about their CHI backgrounds. Chapter 1 talks about Buxton's initial skepticism of why he would need to use a computer and goes into to his love for computers in order to help him create his music. He went from a normal student to a master of a computer machine that allowed him to create music with it. There is a chord keyboard that he uses in order to make different cords on the computer. Each finger had a different kind of chord that could be created. There was also a "mouse" that was basically a block of wood with some wires attached to it.

The next chapter talked about a SketchPad system that used a light pen for the display. It also anticipated object-oriented programming before object-oriented programming took off in the computer science world. Sketchpad influenced other programs that we use today such as AutoCad.

The last chapter that we read dealt with the mouse that Englbert and English created. Everyone seemed to focus on the fact that it was a mouse that they could do things with, when creators had bigger ideas that they wanted to share. They wanted to show what was actually possible and how this device could help create bigger and better things for people to actually interact with their computers. Unfortunately their demo wasn't taken in this way and really only focused on the fact that it was a mouse.

Discussion:

I think these were some of the more interesting things we've read in this class. I would have liked to actually have read the entire book but just reading these was better than nothing. It's really cool to see where computing all began.

Obedience to Authority

Author: Stanley Milgram

Comments: Zach

Summary:

Milgram's book focused on his controversial experiment and the obedience of the human subjects that were a part of the experiment. The experiment consisted of a subject that would shock another subject, or victim, if they answered a question incorrectly. There were different scenarios of this experiment in order to see how obedient a person would be to authority. Most people will follow the experimenter in a situation whenever they believe that the experimenter has authority. Even if the person in the experiment feels that they are doing something morally wrong they will continue to go on with experiment instead of disobey the perceived authority of the experimenter. When a subject was in close proximity of the person in which they were shocking they still followed the orders of the experimenter because they claimed that they had lowered the status of the victim in their mind. If the scenario changed to where a "normal person" would be giving the orders and the experimenter turned into the victim the subject would still listen to the experimenter and stop shocking them. This shows that the authority of the experimented has some sort of credibility. If the scenario changed to where the experimenter was not in the room the subject didn't feel it necessary to shock at high levels. They also didn't feel responsible for their actions whenever the experimenter was there because they were only following orders and therefore the experimenter is the one who had all the responsibility. It's interesting to see how people change their mind about something whenever they "get caught". The last observation made in the experiments was when the the subject was given a choice in order to shock they continued to shock at the lower levels. This was interpreted to the subject not taking out their aggression with high levels but instead just following the authority they believed the experimenter had.

Discussion:

I think this book was an interesting read and we got a more in depth view than we did when we read the one chapter in Opening Skinner's Box. It's interesting to think that people will listen to someone they believe to have authority even if they don't and how hard it is to break that perceived authority so that they can "be free". It's also a very scary thing to think about because there could be some people who are intimidating enough to feel like they have authority, yet really be someone who's intentions are illegal.

Re-Placing Faith

Paper: Re-Placing Faith: Reconsidering the Secular-Religious Use Divide in the United States and Kenya

Authors: Susan P. Wyche, Paul M Aoki, and Rebecca E. Grinter

Comments: Patrick

Summary:
This study talked about a six month design project that examined the use of technology for different religious purposes. They focused on understanding the U.S. "megachurches" and got a sense for how parishioners were using technology. Then they did some fieldwork in Nairobi, Kenya. Below are the lists of percentages of religions based on if they lived in the U.S. or Kenya.

Interviews of the participants were conducted in middle and upper-middle class homes. The interviews lasted for about one to one-and-a-half hours and there was a tour of each home or office. Some technology that was used by the participants included SMS text messages for daily bible versus as well as calendar software in order to plan their days around different religious activities. Note-taking was also prominent amongst the different religions. There were still differences amongst the U.S. and Kenya participants in how they took notes as well. The U.S. used the internet in order to supplement their note-taking activities and their churches also had websites with outlines of the sermons. America seemed to be more technology oriented than Kenya was.

Discussion:
I thought that this paper was rather interesting even though I personally don't see the need for technology for my own religious beliefs. Emails and websites seem to be very popular with the church scene now so I understand people wanting to be able to see what is going on in their church without having to drive up there. It will also help people plan ahead when thinking about going to a certain church function.

Intelligent User Assistance...

Paper: Intelligent User Assistance for Cost Effective Usage of Mobile Phone

Authors: Deepak P, Anuradha Bhamidipaty, Swati Chall

Comments: Aaron

Summary:

This paper deals with an enhancement for mobile phone design to be more cost-conscious for users. Lower income areas like India and China have found it difficult to purchase mobile phones because of how expensive they can be. Those who do own mobile phones sparsely use them so that they can manage the cost and achieve "cheap-usage". This paper focuses on different techniques that will make the phone assist the user to be cost-conscious so that they can stay within their budget. Usage history logs are a sequence of entries ordered in time that have type, duration, time of activity, and category of recipient. In order to find patterns they used an algorithm described below.

They also made a suggestion generator that would let the user know that they were making over the recommended number of calls in order to stay within their budget. In order to test out both generators they took logs from four people from the lower-income group and some logs from the high-income groups. There were strong call patterns for those in lower-income groups because they are trying to save money.

Discussion:

This paper was interesting because it was exploring a topic that hasn't really been looked into before. In order to make a persons cell phone bill within their budget it is usually up to them to keep track of how many minutes they have used and how much everything they do on their phone costs. Many phone companies have websites that tell you all of this information, but no one has really thought about making your phone help you stay within your budget. I think this kind of application would be useful for people who can't really afford cell phones but really need one to help keep in contact with people. This may also help younger adults learn how to budget their money and still have a cell phone to call their friends with.

Intelligent Email

Paper Title - Intelligent Email: Reply and Attachment Prediction

Authors: Mark Dredze, Tova Brooks, Josh Carroll, Joshua Magarick, John Blitzer, Fernando Pereira

Comment: Jill

Summary:

This article deals with different types of email predictions. There are reply predictions, attachment predictions, and other tasks that can be treated as binary classification problems. Each email was represented by a sparse vector and in order for learning to occur they used a logistic regression classifier. In order to evaluate the system they used F-measure.

Reply prediction

This helps decide which emails need a user to respond to and allows the user to mark their messages as "replied" and "needs reply".

Each user needs to have a profile that is created from their past email responses and their contact list. If a user is CC'd in an email they are more than likely not required to respond. If the email was directly sent to someone regardless of people being CC'd it is more than likely required of them to respond. Using TF-IDF scoring on the words of an email it can determine the terms frequencies in order to figure out which emails have questions in them. Tests were done on four different participants and their emails.

Since the precision is higher than the recall it is indicating that there were many messages that were difficult to determine if they needed a reply or not.

Attachment Prediction

Not having a document attached to an email that requires the attachment to also be sent can cause chaos amongst the business workplace. When production depends on a document being edited in order to continue and someone forgets to attach it this could cause problems. Some suggestions for this would be to have the email client suggest possible things to attach from previous messages received by the same person.

Each prediction system could be useful for a work setting, but future works will be done on more complex user models in order to solve the problems better.

Discussion:

I thought this article was interesting because sometimes emails can get overwhelming. I know that I've waited for days for a professor or TA to email me back answers to a few questions I had for them and sometimes I wasn't able to continue work on an assignment until they responded. I think something like this, after being developed better, could possibly benefit the users of a specific email client. It may get people to respond quicker or remember to send the appropriate attachment when emailing someone. I know I've forgotten to attach something that was the initial point of sending the email in the first place.

Opening Skinner's Box

Book: Opening Skinner's Box

Author: Lauren Slater

Comments: Jill

Summary:

This book discussed the top psychological experiments that have shaped the way we view things today. Each chapter discussed a new experiment.

• B. F. Skinner: Skinner's experiment dealt with rats who were conditioned to do things for rewards. He found that the mind does well when given rewards, and punishments only hinder the conditioning. Maybe this could be linked to the way children learn from their parents?
• Stanley Milgram: Milgram designed an experiment where a "teacher" was told to shock the other person answering questions if they got a question wrong. The volts went from a small shock up until the point where the shock was lethal. There were 65% of participants who used the shock level up to the lethal voltage during the experiment. This experiment showed that people are obedient to authority and to just what extent some people could be obedient.
• David Rosenhan: Rosenhan along with a few friends got themselves admitted into mental hospitals by telling them that they were hearing a voice that said "thud". Even though each participant was actually sane they were admitted anyway and psychologists really thought that they were insane. This experiment caused a lack of trust in psychology and today there it is more difficult to get admitted to a mental hospital but just as easy to get prescribed drugs.
• John Darley and Bibb Latane: Participants were in rooms of different amounts of people and were shown recordings of someone having a seizure. To them it was an actual person having a seizure and not a recording but since no one else in the room was reacting most of the people who saw the recording also didn't react. This experiment showed that if no one else in a group reacted to the person having a seizure it would take someone much longer to react than it would if they thought they were alone and the only person to possibly help the person having a seizure.
• Leon Festinger: This chapter dealt with cognitive dissonance. These studies found that people will change their beliefs in order to not sound crazy.
• Harry Harlow: Harlow did a study on infant monkeys and how they could become attached to a fake "mother" that was soft, versus a "mother" that was hard but gave them food. The babies preferred the soft "mother" but of course when they needed to eat they would go to the metal one. In the end he concluded that touch was important to a babies development.
• Bruce Alexander with Robert Coambs and Patricia Hadaway: This experiment dealt with addiction and the test subjects were rats. Alexander placed some rats in a nice, clean environment, and then palced other in a solitary, confined environment. The rats were then give clean water and water laced with morphine in both environments. They found that the rats in the confined conditions drank the water with the morphine, while the rats with the nice environment drank the regular water. This experiment suggest that drug addiction isn't a "natural affinity" to drugs but possibly a situational based addiction.
• Elizabeth Loftus: This experiment dealt with false memories. The participants started to remember things that never really happened to them. They were reciting false memories such as being lost in the mall when they were a kid and each participant was certain that these memories actually happened. Loftus used her findings to keep people from being wrongly convicted of sexual abuse crimes that weren't brought up until years later of the supposed crimes being committed.
• Eric Kandel: Kandel did experiments on sea slugs in order to show that memory is strengthened by increasing the strength of connections between neurons. By using the neurons from a sea slugs head in order to see process of memory creation. This helped him create memory-enhancing drugs later on.
• Antonio Moniz: Moniz was the first person to perform a lobotomy on patients who were depressed or had other mental disorders in order to cure them of the disorder. Now we have medicine that does this, but because of his experiments we were able to understand what parts of the brain the drugs should focus on.

Discussion:.

I thought all of these experiments were interesting and it was kind of neat to see where we get our current thinking about certain things from. Some of these experiments seem to be ignored though when people are learning about certain disorders, and it is odd to think that people aren't looking into some of these experiments more to find more humane ways to prove the results. Slater herself is rather interesting and it wouldn't surprise me if there was actually something wrong with her....she at least wrote a good book?

Automatically Detetcing Pointing Performance

Authors: Amy Hurst, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff, and Shari Trewin

Comments: Aaron

Summary:

There are people in the world that would love to use computers but are physically unable to do the tasks necessary to run something on a computer. This article deals with "pointing" on a computer which basically consists of clicking an item, dragging it and dropping it somewhere, and just moving the mouse to a target that they want to click. In order to adapt to a user with different disabilities it is necessary to create software that will assess the user and automatically change to make it easier for each individual to use a computer. Statistical models were constructed during tests on participants. Each model found correlations between the "occurrence of certain features and and the occurrence of the property it tries to predict. Once a model is created it can figure out if the user will benefit from an adaptation to the software to fit their needs. In order to begin they took a group of people to test the differences in missed clicks, movement speed, and other data that would help design adaptable software. There was a group of people who had no disabilities, and a group that did and the data sets were compared.

They also compared data between young adults, adults, older adults, and individuals with Parkinson's disease. They found that older adults took much longer to reach peak velocity than it did the young adults and "adults". Individuals with Parkinson's had the slowest peak velocity and they also seemed to pause near the end of their movements. Based off this data they created a model to distinguish the differences between each group. The accuracy results are shown below.

Now that they had a good model for detecting what group a person falls into, they wanted to develop a system to predict if a user would benefit from an adaptation of the software they are using. This statistical model had 94.4% accuracy. With such high accuracies on each test they have done they are going to in the future actually try to build software that can automatically asses a user's performance and adapt to their needs.

Discussion:

I think adaptable software for people with certain disabilities that are keeping them from enjoying computer use would be something very useful. Everyone should be able to enjoy computers that wish to and if there is a possibility that we could make this possible then why not do it. I think this software has really good potential for users with disabilities when dealing with every day computing, but also may help people in the gaming world as well. It should be interesting to see what happens if this software is actually developed.