Reviews of my Pervasive 2007 DC Paper

The written feedback I received for my accepted paper for the Pervasive 2007 Doctoral Colloquium are rather encouraging and reveal similar suggestions and advices given at CHI. My research focus and strategy is well grounded and accepted. One reviewer noticed that my work clearly starts where others (e.g. Benford, Chalmers) have stopped. However, now has come the time to be more specific on the methods to collect and analyze the data. Moreover, I still need to argument the ways I plan to evaluate the design strategies I will propose. I split the feedback as follow:

Scope
First my dissertation research is perceived has well grounded, well situated, and well motivated. My contribution would improve the state of the art. Yet, my early work is perceived as rather preliminary (very simple and obvious). Certaintly because a lot comes from the litterature that concures with what could be observed in CatchBob! Yet, I feel that I contributed into unifying the state of different domains such as context-aware computing, human-computer interaction, CSCW, urban computing, (humanistic) geography, geospatial visualization, transportation research to converge on the specific issue of spatial uncertainty. To my knowledge, the literature in location-aware computing and location-awareness has never profited from the ensemble of these different perspectives. My current contribution maybe lays more in that area, with my first field study acting as revelation and consolidator.

Research strategy
The approach of analyzing the current use of location information and then building and evaluating a location-aware system form an acceptable strategy. In addition, using location-based games has proved to be a feasible avenue of investigation. This strategy is a result of my overall motivation in this research. I believe it is important to study the pieces of the ubicomp of the present in their context and current us to understand how they can gradually be integrated at a larger scale. As a result, practically speaking, knowing how good in good enough in terms of location-awareness, can prevent the counterproductive aim for technological perfection.

Methods and data analysis
Now, how exactly will I tackle my research questions in a way that is not too expensive for a PhD. One reviewer mentions that two of the sub-questions might suffice for a good thesis. However, all this depends on the methods of investigation and support with the data analysis. For example, I might also pursue a collaboration within a larger project (this is my current intention).

Mixing field and case study seems fine, but I must be able to describe in greater details these two different approaches and the methods they imply. For instance, there is not clear definition of both approaches. My perception of a case study is that it is not controlled and very observational both from quantitative and qualitative data. On the other hand, a field study is more directed by the capture of the data from the variables to analyze. That implies a quasy-controlled environment propitious to targetted data collection and focused ethnography. A case study is a good way to explore behaviors and a field study allows to evaluate or demonstrate. Mention field experiment instead of field study for example. At this point I need much more thinking about collecting data and analizing it. Finally, while hard to accomplish and time/resource consuming triangulation of methods (mixed research) is always advisable. Therefore, I should find out which of the analysis methods suit best for my research question, resources (help from co-investigators? collaborate with social scientists) and abilities (improvement with supervision and training, reading about it is not enough).

I still lack of a clear strategy on how to exploit the results of my studies and how to transfer the experience into appropriate solutions/strategies for developing location-aware applications. How will I evaluate the new proposed strategies. I’ll get back to John Creswell’s Research Design over the weekend to help me iterate one more time over my intentions and how to answer the questions of each of my proposed study. Then I’ll need to articulate them as a whole.

Contribution
My preliminary work (while basic and somehow obvious) show that I can meet the research goals. However, I will need to be careful to the extend the results I claim can be generalized across domains (but I guess this is every PhD student’s problem in the field of HCI).

Related avenues to consider
The reviewers suggest avenues that I actually considered in the past, but did not mention in the paper for the sack of … They mention that I should have a look at the positive aspect of uncertainty. For example: How do people exploit uncertainty (keep privacy, location disclosure) and as a way to appropriate ambiguit for one’s one purposes (e.g. Bill Gaver’s Ambiguity as Resource for Design). I should look at how people experience space (or place). There is a good litterature on that in the domaine of “humanistic geography” (so far, I inspired more from the works of Rapper and Mountain… Time geography). So instead of going too much in geography (geometric measurement of space) I should be more aware of the experience and meaningfulness of space.

I could address the privacy issues in addition, with the demand of spatial uncertainty (privacy policites to cloaking). Not to deliver information about the intentional spatial uncertainty. I read a rather technical article (based on a middleware approach) on that recently: Efficiently managing location information with privacy requirements in Wi-Fi networks: a middleware approach. The ideal would be to impact the design and logic of the middleware from a human-centered perspective as Tom Rodden suggested me 2 weekends ago.

Next step: Provide an answer to these feedback in my DC presentation on Sunday. Try to explain more clearly the questions/methodology/data analysis for each study. Then define the outcome of each study to articulate a coherent whole. Iterate, and iterate more…