Mobile community-oriented smartphone apps can enhance citizen awareness, enable participation in local politics and decision-making, facilitate the creation and strengthening of social ties, broadly support collaborative activity and co-production, and encourage place-making, reflection, and identity bonds. These are longstanding objectives of community informatics, and mobile technologies provide affordances for addressing them in new scales and scenarios. An emergent and integrating affordance of mobile community information systems is an innovation infrastructure of aggregated data streams from mobile community information services, a smart social grid. Key components of this infrastructure are already in place, and evolving further. Our work focuses on envisioning and deploying new community information services, and new ways to aggregate and leverage feeds produced by these services. In this talk, we discuss examples, possibilities, and issues raised.

We have explored several prototypes that enable rich shared experiences out in the wild. These prototypes go beyond just using the mobile smartphone by leveraging mobile and wearable video to enable people to remotely do things together anywhere. Experiences2Go was a portable proxy that enabled families to share experiences together outside the home. The design was revised into PortaProxy, an appliance that could be used as part of an outsourced task to participate in events. ProxyWear was a wearable prototype that enabled freely moving about while visiting a space together remotely. Beyond the mobile endpoint, we also explored augmenting a living room to create a more immersive experience for connecting with the mobile partner as they roamed about in the wild. We present these prototypes and reflect on what we have learned about rich mobile shared experiences.

The last two decades have seen the emergence of a new family of communication products- telepresence robots that bridges research and development on media spaces, telepresence, teleoperation, and robotics. These products offer remote users mobility as well as embodiment in a local environment and thus promise improvements in communication and collaboration among distributed work teams. While the early prototypes of telepresence robots date back to the late 90s, the recent emergence of commercial applications and increasingly widespread adoption by organizations have spurred an exploration of the rich design space for these products. This talk will outline the history of robotic telepresence, sketch out the design space for its applications, present recent work that explores this space, and discuss open questions surrounding the design and use of robotic communication products.

As public interest and curiosity in mobile, wearable computing is on the rise, technology companies are rushing to develop wearable augmented reality (AR) display systems with embedded lightweight computing capabilities that strive to make mobile living effective, convenient, pleasant and aesthetic. While we are already seeing some successful first-generation, commercially available lightweight wearable AR systems, the full potential of opportunities for mobile users (pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists) and headworn displays has not been fully tapped, nor the visual perceptual challenges widely understood. As we race to field headworn outdoor AR applications for mobile computing, we need to first understand, and then design for, the visuoperceptual issues that have been documented in the traditional AR community. This tutorial presents key visuoperceptual issues inherent in commercial optical see-though headworn displays and applications. Using examples from our experiences researching and evaluating AR interfaces, we illustrate the potential impact on user perception and task performance.

We have entered the age of personal informatics, defined by technology helping people collect and reflect on their personal information. Connected devices and mobile applications are now available in a variety of domains, with people using them to track their health, their finances, the places they go, and the media they consume. The adoption and importance of these systems will continue to grow, as mobile platforms enable ready access and new sensing removes barriers to long-term monitoring. We will discuss the state of personal informatics, organized around research in a variety of personal health informatics domains. Current approaches are not working, as they often provide little value or impose unbearable burdens. Using examples from our research in physical activity, food, and sleep, we will argue that the way forward lies in moving away from 'more is better' to designing for the variety of personal goals people bring to personal informatics.

Smartphone platforms provide an excellent opportunity for projecting existing or new behavior-change methods into everyday life at great economies of scale. In this paper we present an experimental test of a new behavior-change smartphone platform and application called Fittle, which delivers ecological momentary interventions and group support to help people progressively master healthy habits. An 8-week field study involving 19 participants demonstrated the engagement and efficacy of Fittle across three classes of behavior (diet, physical activity, and stress-reduction). Individual adherence to the behavior programs was found to be associated with group membership. Content analysis of intragroup interactions suggests that high performance groups were generally more social, more supporting of each other on program goals, and shared more. Currently we are working with Kaiser Permanente Hawaii's weight loss program is using Fittle to help their Optifast weight loss program patients to form healthy eating habits.

A significant challenge in developing context-aware systems is simulating a realistic range of contextual inputs during development time. One approach to this problem is to employ captured data representing the anticipated contexts of use. Previous work has argued for the value of using captured data during design and development, but little has been said about the process of understanding, selecting, manipulating, and using such data. Our group has been developing tools and techniques for systematically incorporating data capture, analysis, and playback throughout the application design and development process. In this talk, we will present examples of our work and discuss remaining questions, opportunities, and challenges.

Mobile platforms employ permission-granting mechanisms so that users can exert control over how third-party applications access their personal data. Some platforms take a paternalistic approach by relying on a review process before an application can be approved for public consumption. At the opposite end of the spectrum, other platforms aim for transparency by presenting users with a list of requested permissions every time an application is installed. The former approach is opaque and does not allow users to understand how their data will be used, whereas the latter approach results in habituation when users are bombarded with requests they either do not understand or do not find concerning. In this talk, I discuss how balancing transparency with concerns over habituation empowers users to make better decisions about their privacy and security. Specifically, I describe previous and ongoing human subjects research to replace unnecessary user interactions, how to improve necessary ones, as well as how to determine the difference.

Work currently in progress focuses on how to shift complex crew activity planning tasks performed by specialized personnel on the ground to the astronauts themselves, on tablets, in space as they perform their work. Right now, a team of ground controllers works out the impacts of schedule changes looking out up to a year. Will that be possible for crew members using a mobile device? A second important question revolves around the potential collaborative aspects astronaut self-scheduling. Currently, the ground planning teams work on one plan for all the crew members. Will it be possible for multiple crew members to collaboratively generate a common plan or will it be more effective for each crew member to schedule their own time? We will discuss these topics in the context of a series of analog studies that will be conducted this year leading to the deployment of the self-scheduling system on the Space Station in 2015.

Mobile devices allow people to connect with the rest of the world from anywhere. Ironically, however, while they connect users with the greater world, they often disengage them from their immediate environment. Rather than fight the creep of technology into our social spaces, there is an opportunity to build solutions that embrace it. We explore how mobile devices can augment existing face-to-face social interactions. Mobile device use by co-located users is unique in that users share persistent verbal and non-verbal non-mediated communication channels and significant background context. Co-located mobile applications can take advantage of these unique aspects to support social interaction. Using several examples, we show that it is possible for mobile devices to not take their users' attention away from the people they are with, and to augment existing physical and verbal communication.

Imagine a system that helps people communicate over social media, using their ubiquitous voices and cell phones. Also imagine that this system could infer vocal expression, along with words, and visualize both the expressive and semantic elements of the voice. This system could help people find interesting messages and interpret message content, without requiring users to listen first. Imagine having a way to notate vocal expression in voices, along with the words. These useful functions are also important enabling technologies for crowdsensing via voice and mobile devices. We discuss this vision, our progress toward this vision, and a research agenda for exploring our vision.

We announce a new program in design at the University of California, San Diego: Design at UC San Diego ' Think Observe Make. The program starts as a research organization, but with intentions to offer courses and degrees later. The goal is to strengthen and expand the existing areas of design, combining principles from HCI with business, art, theater, and the understanding of people from the social sciences. Our motto is TOM: Think, Observe, Make.

We propose to compare three common crowdsensing techniques--participatory sensing, in situ sensing, and post-hoc sensing in terms of data quality, effectiveness and efficiency of collecting data, and participant's burden and compliance. We aim to identify the pros and cons of each technique and suggest features for future crowdsensing tools.

In this paper we present insight about using a 3D printed tactile picture book as a design probe to improve the technical and human processes required for creating 3D printed tactile pictures for children with visual impairments, and cultivate a community of practice around these processes.

We present the design of Big Black Dog, a smartphone-based system for gathering data about social and sleep behaviors in people with depression. We report on the results of a pilot study to understand the feasibility of gathering and using data from smartphones for inferring the onset of depression.

Disaster events are complex socio-technical environments including diverse stakeholders and limited resources for preparation, response, and recovery. I present here a discussion of software engineering challenges to produce reliable, usable, and socially-aware mobile apps during and for disaster events.

Constructing personal stories can be difficult without special skills. In this paper, we propose scaffolding novice creative work using storytelling patterns extracted from stories created by experts to 1) allow novices to focus on the high-level aspects of a story and 2) provide novices with a guide for what to capture. We anticipate running a controlled study comparing this story construction approach with unguided methods.

Robotic telepresence systems attempt to enhance users' sensation of "being there" in a remote location. Mobility of these systems can increase these feelings of presence, but limitations in camera views often leave remote users disoriented and detract from their effectiveness. We explore how offering additional views of the robot's surroundings affects users' situational awareness and presence in collaborative tasks.

The Personal Taxi Meter is a personal informatics system for tracking the total cost of ownership for driving on a per-trip basis. The motivation is to increase awareness and affect behavior change in transportation choices, and to understand the most effective ways to present this information to the driver.

Significant work is rarely finished in one sitting. More often it's broken up by conversations, meetings, travel, and other projects. Although interruptions can foster collaboration and creativity, they make resuming complex work difficult. This research explores visualizing past computer activity to help people restore context and resume cognitively demanding activities.

My research explores the technical, user interaction and deployment challenges of integrating mobile, camera-based systems into resource-constrained environments, with the goal of aiding data collection and disease diagnosis in remote settings. My findings highlight the feasibility, benefits and challenges of using camera-based systems to aid the delivery of health and information services to underprivileged populations.

This paper discusses two mobile prototypes developed to investigate the problem space of exploring objective user engagement information in meaningful ways. My research uses mobile and wireless Electroencephalographic (EEG) devices and mobile phones/tablets to facilitate collection and review of personal engagement information to help improve cognitive wellness and attention skills.

Cellular phones are a fundamental part of billions of peoples' lives, yet hundreds of millions remain without coverage. Concurrently, the cost of cellular equipment is dropping: for US$10,000, an individual can install an autonomous cellular network. These are defined as community cellular networks; effectively locally operated telecoms. Our research focuses on enabling community cellular through the holistic design of effective socio-technical systems. This includes core network innovations, such as power management,as well as tools and designs supporting network operations. In this work we discuss our existing research results as well as potential future agendas.

The new feature request (NFR) process in free and open source software (FOSS) is an opportunity for users and other FOSS community members to participate in determining user requirements and innovating the software. This dissertation seeks to understand how the socio-technical conditions of FOSS communities influence the NFR process.

Growing popularity of devices like Fitbit and Jawbone highlight the appeal of such devices and their features like visualizing physical activity, goal-setting, encourage social influence, persuasive messages and others. We believe that personalizing these interventions can significantly improve their intended outcomes. In our research, we plan to explore the design space for generating personalized messages based on the context, daily activities and future plans for a user. In this boaster, we present our motivation and some of our preliminary thoughts for the design of a system that generates personalized messages to support users in being more physically active.

Robotic telepresence systems---videoconferencing systems that allow a remote user to drive around in another location---provide a unique way of interacting over distances. This paper summarizes findings from four studies which explore how the key features provided by these systems shape user perceptions, behaviors, and task outcomes.

From the User Interface(UI) point of view, all the navigation systems implemented in mobile devices can be broadly divided into two categories: 1) allocentric approach and 2) egocentric approach. Our focus is to understand how these two different approaches affect the user experience and navigation accuracy in indoor environment.

Our biological processes are structured around 24 hour period. Continued disruption of biological rhythms often has serious consequences for physical and mental well-being. In this work, we are focusing on smartphone and wearable based technology that are aware of variations in our circadian rhythms and help stabilize them.

Federal Agencies which receive over $100 million in annual research funds are under mandate to enable search, archiving, and dissemination of research data. Drexel University and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are collaborating to build an OAIS-compliant scientific data repository. Here we describe the analysis and modeling of the work and data flows at an FAA Lab.

Conventional wisdom suggests interdisciplinary collaboration leads to innovation by combining disparate ideas. Many factors affect how those raw ideas become final results. My goal is to develop a scale that indicates where research results are presented, and how the interdisciplinary group dynamics influences the time to present a project's results.

Patient-provider collaboration is considered crucial to successful patient care. Collaborative care incorporating patient awareness could support patients' health management, empower patients, and improve overall their care experience. I am conducting a qualitative study of patient care process in an emergency department, examining patient awareness, information needs and patient-clinician interaction, particularly in situations of information deprivation.

In this article, we describe the Human-Computer Interac- tion (HCI) research efforts at Yahoo Labs; this program both strives for scientific thought leadership as well as research powering product. In particular, we address the allure of large-data solutions in industry and how HCI research at big and small scales. We aim to apply a core foundation of HCI, as research understanding as well as implementations, to- wards contemporary research efforts in other fields such as multimedia, deep learning, and mobile sensing as well as grow new crowd-work efforts and ethnographic practices.

In this work, we explored the potential use of gas sensors to monitor food during the cooking process and be used in applications to support users while they cook.

Eyes-free access is critical for blind people and sighted people in certain situations. During my dissertation, I have worked on improving eyes-free input on mobile devices, focusing on enabling access for blind people. To improve eyes-free access, I have designed, developed, and evaluated the following eyes-free input methods: (1) Perkinput, a text entry method for touchscreens based on Braille, (2) PassChords, an authentication method for touchscreens, and (3) Respeak, a speech input method with fast speech-based editing. I discuss these projects in this boaster.

Many mobile and ubiquitous computing systems are characterized by two important properties: their output is uncertain'it has an associated accuracy that researchers attempt to optimize'and this uncertainty is user-facing'it directly affects the quality of the user experience. Novel classifiers are typically evaluated using measures like the F1 score'but given an F-score of (e.g.) 0.85, how do we know whether this performance is good enough? Is this level of uncertainty actually tolerable to users for the intended application? We set out to connect two domains'classifier evaluation and technology acceptance models'to develop a survey instrument that can systematically answer such questions. We introduce a new measure, acceptability of accuracy, and show how to predict it based on classifier performance. Connecting these two domains can not only improve classifier evaluation, but can also offer new insights into how a seemingly-low-performing classifier might be combined with appropriate feedback to make a highly usable system. It also reveals potential issues with the ubiquitous F-measure as applied to user-facing systems.