The Challenges User-Aware Platform Technologies

In his keynote at the Fall 2005 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Justin Rattner, Intel senior fellow and director of the Corporate Technology Group, outlined long-term research to make “user-aware” platform technologies that could be used to build systems that intuitively respond to people and their ever-changing needs.

Rattner mentioned that:

the current problem is that electronic products have almost no way of knowing how they are being used, who is using them, or what the user wants to accomplish without that person directing their every move. This leads to frustration because of what people have to do just to use and manage their technology.

This kind of statements are of course sweat music to my hears and perfectly match my interests in the management of uncertainty in pervasive environment. It is an incredible challenge to envision electronic products to be capable of adapting to the way people around the world use them. “Out of clutter find simplicity” as Einstein would say.

In his Ethical Guidelines for Ubicomp Adam Greenfield mentions the same challenges but in more user-centered terms:

If ubicomp applications are rushed to market and allowed to appear as have so many technological artifacts in the last thirty years – i.e. without compassionate attention to the needs and abilities of all sorts of human users, without many painstaking rounds of iterative testing and improvement in realistic settings – then they will present those users with a truly unprecedented level of badness.

Global Pet Finder

Via MobHappy. GlobalPetFinder is a GPS collar that enables you to track your missing dog via cell phone, PDA or computer. The moment Fido trots across the invisible line, a text message pops up on your cell phone.

Varied method of tagging and tracking animals have been used over the years in the while and in farms, like Micro-GPS to track pigeons and study their navigation or GPS Tracking of Cattle on Pasture. It is interesting to notice the slow intrusion of technology into pets’ daily life. We are now used to tag them with micro-ships and track them. There is now the technological potential to transform pets into blogjects and make them belong to the Internet of Things. Your pet would have the ability to talk about its day when you return home.

I couldn’t help posting it also on the new Petistic, a collective blog about user-centered pet gear.

Location is Not Enough

Nicolas went to the Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education Conference 2005 in Tokushima, Japan to present our full paper for the IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education :

Nova, N., Girardin, F. & Dillenbourg, P.: ‘Location is not enough!’: an Empirical Study of Location-Awareness in Mobile Collaboration (pdf). Full paper for IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education, Tokushima, Japan.

Abstract:

There is an ever growing number of mobile learning applications based on location-awareness, However, there is still a lack of information concerning how it might impact socio-cognitive processes involved in collaboration. This is what the following empirical study aimed to address. We used a mobile and collaborative game, running on Tablet PCs, to test two conditions. In one experimental condition, groups could see the positions of each member; while in the other location-awareness was not provided. All users could use the Tablet PC to communicate through annotations. We found no differences between the two conditions with regard to the task performance. Neither were there any differences in terms of cognitive workload. However, players without the location-awareness indications had a better representation of their partners’ paths. They wrote more messages and better explicated their strategies. The paper concludes with remarks about how this can be taken into account by mobile learning practitioners.

The slides of his presentation are here (pdf)