Gail is back!

A familiar face returns: Gail Johnsson Tabtim will be interning with us again, this time within the 'Drawing the City' project. 


Gail will be helping us out on our Motorola Mobility - Mobile Life study on people's perceptions of their cities. Gail will be following up on our study in Chicago, and will be collecting hand-drawn maps from Stockholmers. 

Mobile2.0 at SIGGRAPH Asia 2011

If you happen to be around Hong Kong in time for the SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 conference, come by and join us in an exciting panel about the past, current and future visions of research within the Mobile2.0 project! The panel, entitled Mobile2.0 - The Future of Apps: Mashing It Up and Getting It Out There, will bring up some of the key research areas that have been covered within the time span of the Mobile2.0 project. The panel will touch upon the design and distribution of mobile services and applications within the past, current and future mobile market. We will discuss the delights of having worked with novel mobile service concepts in an era before the mobile app markets and how the current mobile markets change the way research is done today. The possibilities we find with changes to the mobile ecosystem over the past 5-10 years and the challenges this brings for a new era of services and service values to come in the future. Both from the perspective of the actors within the mobile ecosystem, but also from the perspective of the consumers in use of these services.

Hope to see you there!

Date of panel: December 14th, 4.15-6pm local HK time

Participants in panel: Lars-Erik Holmquist, Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost & Zeynep Ahmet

New visiting researcher: Matthias Korn

Matthias Korn, a PhD-student of Aarhus University's Computer Mediated Activity Group in Denmark is our new visitor. Matthias is working with us within Mobile 2.0's location-based services theme.

Matthias' work focuses on the cross roads of citizen participation and mobile ubiquitous technology, and studies how location and 'being there' may support citizens in deliberation activities such as participatory planning. His research explores how mobile location-based services interweave physical and digital spaces and, specifically, how people make and experience the link between the two. Matthias' research ties into our work on location-sharing quite nicely, and it's great having him around.

Migrating robots at ACE'11

One of the human-robot interaction concepts explored within the LIREC project is the concept of migrating agents; agents that move from embodiment to embodiment, allowing to pick whichever physical form fits the robot's task and user's context best. If the migrating agent needs to be perceived as one single character, balancing consistency of its behavior with the advantages of switching embodiments is crucial.

In collaboration with INESC-ID in Portugal, Elena Márquez Segura explored user reactions to migration, focusing on this balance. Elena spent about three weeks in Portugal, and together with INESC-ID's Paulo Gomes, studied children's reactions to the robot dinosaur Pleo, moving from its regular physical form, to a virtual character in a mobile app, and vice versa. Implementation and perceptions of the 'migration moment' itself play a large role in how children experience the move, and their interaction with the agent.

First publication, presented by Elena at ACE'11:
Paulo F. Gomes, Elena Márquez Segura, Henriette Cramer, Tiago Paiva, Ana Paiva, Lars Erik Holmquist (2011) ViPleo and PhyPleo: Artificial pet with two embodiments, Proc. ACE’11, Lisbon, Portugal. pdf

Lars Erik to Yahoo! Labs

Finally a public note on some very big news! From January 1, Lars Erik Holmquist is moving to sunny California to set up a group at Yahoo! Labs in Santa Clara. Lots of luck - we're expecting lots of surfin' and sunscreen in your future!
 
In the mean time, Henriette Cramer has taken over as project leader for both Future App Labs projects, Lirec and Mobile 2.0, so direct any questions about the project and collaborations her way.

New master student: Miguel!

He's been here for a while now, so it's time for an announcement: Miguel Pais is our new master student!

Miguel (on the left, hidden behind his laptop) is working with Nao, the robot, within the Lirec project. Together with our project partners at INESD-ID in Portugal Miguel will be exploring how robots' social cues can mediate people's interactions with each other.

Columbus in Personal Ubiquitous Computing

A paper entitled Mobile exploration of geotagged photographs, authored by Mattias Rost, Henriette Cramer, and Lars Erik Holmquist, published in Personal Ubiquitous Computing is now available online through the following SpringerLink.

Abstract:

Columbus is a mobile application that lets users explore their surroundings through geotagged photographs, presented to them at the location they were taken. By moving around the physical world, the user unlocks photographs and gets to see and experience them in unison with their location. During two consecutive field trials, we investigated how the application was used and experienced and how photographs and locations are explored together. We found that previous experience with the surroundings people was exploring affected how they experienced the localized content. We report on the system’s design and implementation, the trials as well as resulting insights that can be used by other developers of locative media applications.

We'll be at MobileHCI 2011 in Stockholm

We will naturally be at MobileHCI 2011 starting in two weeks from now. MobileHCI will be held i Stockholm, Sweden, and is organized by Mobile Life Centre - the very same centre where we are based! We are all thus very involved in the organization, and will personally make sure it will be an outstanding conference for all.

Besides taking part in the organization, we will also be presenting. On wednesday during the first paper session in Riddarsalen, Henriette Cramer will present the paper 'Performing a Check-in: Emerging Practices, Norms and ‘Conflicts’ in Location-sharing Using Foursquare' , by herself, Mattias Rost, and Lars Erik Holmquist.

Another, more unconventional presentation takes place after the conference dinner at Munchenbryggeriet, where Lars Erik will be DJ:ing under his alias Got To Have Pop.

You will also see us throughout the conference during various other things, but do not hesitate say hi!

2nd workshop on Research in the Large at UbiComp'11

We're organizing a 2nd edition of our 'Research in the Large' workshop at UbiComp 2011 on September 18th in Beijing. The workshops will deal with the shared challenges and practical strategies to deal with the challenges inherent to wide deployment and dealing with large-scale data sets. More information at the workshop page.

Organizers: Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost (Mobile Life/SICS), Frank Bentley (Motorola Research) and David Ayman Shamma (Yahoo!).

SICS Open House

FAL is participating in the SICS open house in Kista. We are showing many demonstrations including Pic-In, SubwayArt, Mobile Mash-ups and the Flower Wall (above). Henriette Cramer talks about studies of emergent location-sharing practices and location mash-ups.

We are in the semi-final of the Ericsson Application Awards

Two applications, developed by Mobile 2.0, were selected for the semi-final of the Ericsson Application Awards (EAA). Both of our submissions are based on recent work on mobile image recognition.

In the EAA student category we entered our application "MobileArt" in the competition. With MobileArt users can receive information about art pieces in the Stockholm subway by just potining the mobile phone camera at them.

The application "Pic-In" entered in the EAA company competition is a tool for users of location-sharing service foursquare. The application can recognize places based on photos. Users can now share a location by - you guessed it - taking a photo of it.

The winners of the semi-final will be announced at May 28th, so stay tuned for further announcements.

If you want to see, how our applications work, just have a look at the videos below.

New people at FAL

We have been joined by two new people who will work in the LIREC project: Anders Green and Elena Márquez Segura. Here is how they introduce themselves!

Anders: My research is focused on Human-Robot Interaction with semi-autonoumus service robots. I have a background in computational linguistics and a special interest in communicative quality in relation to interaction with embodied devices. Topics of interest include user-centred interaction design and evaluation for advanced human-robot interaction and challenges related to increasing usability in multimodal dialogue systems for human-robot communication. My thesis is entitled Designing and Evaluating Human-Robot Communication: Informing Design through Analysis of User Interaction.

Elena: I did my bachelor and master in Telecommunication Engineering, Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros, Sevilla, Spain. I am currently studying a second master in Interactive Systems Engineering at KTH, with expected graduation in June.I am really interested in tangling up technology and design, in balanced bottom-up/ top-down design processes, aiming creative, fun, and engaging experiences. I am particularly interested in full body, gesture-based interactions to create embodied and aesthetic experiences.

Back from South By South West!

A group from FAL went to the South By South West Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, to talk to start-ups and hear about the latest in mobile and location-based services. Among the companies we interviewed were Bump, TangoTab, MapDing, Yobongo, View.io, HeyTell, Locaii, Ditto and Skylines. And some of us also made a splash at the SXSW fashion scene!

Open post-doc position, 1yr, available now!

The Future Applications Lab is looking for a new post-doc! We are looking for recent Ph.D. graduates from all over the world with a strong interest in robotic artefacts and interaction design.

You'd be working with us in creating practical guidelines that can be used in the design and evaluation of long-term robot ’companions’. You can contribute in many different ways: creating novel concepts for robotic interactions; by investigating the ethical and sociological ramifications of robots and robotic artefacts in everyday life; by performing user tests and ethnographic studies; and much more. The post is for one year. More info in this pdf.

New Master Thesis Student

We welcome Javier Jiméndes that will write his master thesis in the LIREC project, during the Spring 2011. Javier has a background in interaction design, and will conduct an experience centred study on a robotic eating aid.

'Ethics, logs & videotape'. Large-scale ethics workshop at CHI2011

App stores have made distribution of research apps to thousands of users incredibly easy. There is more user-generated content around than we can manage to analyze; Millions of tweets, public status updates and shared locations are waiting for us. These are huge opportunities, but researchers now also run into some interesting ethical questions.

Procedures, regulations and ethics - especially in an international and intercultural setting - are unclear and the notion of informed consent is changing. Can we just use all data that is out there? Is someone's tweet intended to be quoted in a research paper? How do we deal with permissions if we use data from users of freely available applications? Do we need to tell people about all our research plans? Is anyone downloading our app a participant?

Asking a million users for a signed consent form is not a feasible option. Notices and messages in apps telling people about our research plans will probably be skipped. If they are read, there is no guarantee they are actually understood. Sometimes researchers cannot even know who the people providing content for their studies are.

Not studies would be missing a huge opportunity, but a discussion is in order. Do we have added responsibilities if we log people’s actions? Can we always be sure there will be no adverse effects for our unwitting ‘participants’?

Join us for a discussion at the CHI2011 workshop we're co-organizing in Vancouver, Saturday May 7th: ETHICS, LOGS, and VIDEOTAPE: Ethics in Large Scale User Trials and User Generated Content.

Position papers due January 14, 2011.
Co-organised by Donald McMillan, Alistair Morrison, Matthew Chalmers (Univ. Glasgow), Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost (Mobile Life), Wendy Mackay (Univ. Paris Sud) and Adam Greenfield.

Meet us at NordiCHI'10!

Alex Taylor (Microsoft Research), Mattias Jacobsson, Ylva Fernaeus and Sara Ljungblad are organizing the:
2nd International DESIGNING ROBOTIC ARTEFACTS WITH USER- AND EXPERIENCE-CENTRED PERSPECTIVES We look forward to have lively discussions about existing myths in robotic designs, and what we as researchers and designers consider to be down-to earth research in the field! The Workshop is held on Oct 16, Sunday, at Reykjavik University.

SHORT PAPER presented on Tuesday Oct 19 at 15:00 in room H:
Blue-Sky and Down-to-Earth: How Analogous Practices can Support the User-centred Design Process, (Sara Ljungblad and Clint Heyer, ABB)
See you at NordiCHI'10!

Robots as our future companions?

32 robot researchers met up at Mobile Life Centre and SICS to discuss their current research on how people can live with robots and interactive agents in the future. The meeting is held within the EU project LIREC (Living with Robots and Interactive Companions), a collaboration between six universities, two research institutes and two companies spread across 7 European countries. The project also includes experts in etology, studying peoples relations to dogs and how this knowledge can be transferred into robot design.

Mattias Jacobsson, Ylva Fernaeus, Henriette Cramer, Lars Erik Holmquist and Sara Ljungblad (WP10 leader) from Mobile Life are contributing to the project. We are conducting studies of robots in naturalistic environments, collaborating with swedish startup robot companies, and are exploring user-centred robotic design. Read more about  LIREC activites at SICS.

UbiComp 2010

The whole Future Applications Lab will attend UbiComp 2010 in Copenhagen, Denmark on September 26-29! We will present two posters, GeoLocation in the Mobile Web Browser and φ²: Exploring physical Check-Ins for Location-Based Services and organize the workshop Research in the large. We hope to see you there!

Mobile Mash-ups and a tribute to Marc Weiser at APPNATION

APPNATION is a new conference and exposition focusing on the burgeoning consumer applications economy. It will focus on social and mobile apps across all devices and platforms and the editorial focus will be on the business conversation including monetization, new media business models, advertising and marketing best practices, and consumer insights and analytics. APPNATION will take place September 13-14 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California.

Of particular interest is the closing keynote event:

A Tribute to Mark Weiser, the Father of Ubiquitous Computing, and the Rise of the Mobile Mash-Up

Panelists:

• Lars Erik Holmquist, Mobile Life Centre, Swedish Institute of Computer Science
• Mike Kuniavsky, Orange Cone, author of Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design
• Bo Begole, Principal Scientist and Manager of the Ubiquitous Computing Area, Palo Alto Research Center
• Mattias Rost, Mobile Life Centre, Swedish Institute of Computer Science

The panel will look back at the dawn of ubiquitous computing at PARC, and ahead with the rise of mobile apps and beyond.

The conference can offer a discounted academic rate with 50% off the regular fee for full conference passes ($397 net cost). Simply go to online registration at www.appnationconference.com and use the code: DIFC50