In my CHI07 Doggie Bag

My unstructured take-aways from this year’s ACM/SIGCHI Conference.

Doctoral Consortium
Last weekend, I participated to the CHI 2007 Doctoral Consortium in San Jose. My presentation summarized the current state of my PhD thesis (problem statement, research questions, research strategy/approach, early observatory work) and layed-out the future steps (ongoing case study and future case and field studies, analysis methods). The slides and notes are available here.

The purpose of the doctoral consortium was to received feedback from five senior faculty members: Deborah Tatar (Virginia Tech), Tom Rodden (University of Nottingham), Wendy Mackay (INRIA), Gary Olson (University of Michigan), Batya Friedman (University of Washington). Beyond the suggestion to improve the students’ research work, they pointed out and helped identifying gaps and holes in our research. For example, they asked us to clearly present our contributions (e.g. How will your work be cited?).

My presentation received rather positive feedback. It was perceived as one of these rare piece of work that investigates the human and social use of technologies, with a deep understanding of the software engineering techniques. However, the faculty advised me to soon make a clear choice on the outcome of my work and the roads to take (“none can be wrong!”). For example, I was suggested to integrate into the middle-ware of a location-aware system, the evidences my case studies could reveal. It is actually a path I discussed a while ago with Paul Verschure. I could have a look the way autonomous systems take spatial uncertainty into consideration (like I did by discussing with Alex). Selecting the road might also come from defining the community I want to talk to: designers, ethnographers, ubicomp/technologists, … I partially answered to that when I was asked on the motivation of my work. I mentioned that I wanted to contribute to a human-centered approach to the design of ubicomp technologies (like I suggested previously). Finally, among other things (discussion on the benefits of uncertainty and on the study of location disclosure), the faculty encouraged me in performing my ethnographic study of taxi drivers (e.g. inspired by Andy Crabtree’s work for example). Nevertheless, I express my concerned about performing several unrelated studies. The approach seemed rather good, if the analysis methods are comparable.

The process of obtaining a PhD in HCI was also a major topic of discussion. I captured a few valuable advices:

• In the introduction of a dissertation, think about the different types of approaches in the audience and then elect one. However, even if you select an audience, make sure to be stay aware of the others.
• For example to feel the entire space of the research, select 5 different approaches to the questions I care about. Think of where do I get for each problem.
• At first, you can start with big claims, but as the research process goes on you must finish with precise claims.
• When defining a contribution rely on what to find out (how can we cite your work?), where does your heart lies, what do you care about.
• Eventually, the goal is to nail down some things and find a credibility
• There is danger i building a system assuming that people will use it. You do not want a thesis to rely on such a system.
• Get specific data first and then generalize
• Find people that you have good access to. For example consider approaching with your data different people with different approaches. Try to get perspective from the data. Do not only show the results, show the data.
• A thesis is very personal and is a narrative bringing discussion and reflexion, argumenting the claims
• Data are measure not observations. It describes the way to go about resolving the problem (which is already an achievement)
• Framework can be an empty work. Make sure to specify a framework for …. to …

Finally, it was a real pleasure to share time with cool cats Leah Findlater, David Holman, Christopher Frauenberger, David Akers, and others.

Relevant talks attended
Why We Tag: Motivations for Annotation in Mobile and Online Media (Morgan G. Ames)
Ethnographic study revealing a taxonomy of motivations for tagging photographs

Social Practices in Location-Based Collecting (Kenton O’Hara)
Focus on location information consumption (in sitiu vs. collecting).

Capturing, sharing, and using local place information (Pamela J. Ludford)
Spatial annotation system that triggers location-based reminders. Interestingly this work did not cover the problem of decay of location information (its timeliness).

Mapmover: a case study of design-oriented research into collective expression and constructed publics (Carl DiSalvo)
Might not agree on the analysis, but at least a research reporting on a failed project! The problem of such outcome is of course to be able to scientifically prove why things did not work.

Show me the way to Monte Carlo: density-based trajectory navigation (Steven Strachan)
Use of GPS and Monte Carlo sampling to build an eyes-free pedestrian navigation system. Talks about the issues on dealing with uncertainty in the GPS data.

Comparing physical, automatic and manual map rotation for pedestrian navigation, (Will Seager)
Field experiment to study the usability of 3 types of map alignment on a mobile device. The study provides strong evidence that physical rotation is the most effective with applications that present the user with a wider map. Most interesting to me, is the way the field experiment was conducted.

I already reported on the workshops Imaging the City and Mobile Spatial Interaction

Missed opportunities
Unfortunately, the day after, I could not attend the The Design of Spatial Applications workshop. Hopefully, I’ll be able to meet up with the instructor Matthew Hockenberry in a couple of weeks at the MIT. I also found out too late that Antti Oulasvirta and Matt Jones were around.