Paper Reading # 13

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Mouse 2.0: Multi-touch Meets the Mouse
Nicolas Villar, Shahram Izadi, Dan Rosenfeld, Hrvoje Benko, John Helmes, Jonathan Westhues, Steve Hodges, Eyal Ofek, Alex Butler, Xiang Cao, Billy Chen
UIST 09 October 4-7, 2009 Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Summary
This paper talks about innovative input devices that have computer mice capabilities combined with multi-touch capabilities. Even though multi-touch has been incorporated to mobile phones and tablets, desktops have yet to incorporate multi-touch input devices. The authors describe five different MT mice along with their benefits and limitations. The five prototypes are the FTIR, Orb Mouse, Cap Mouse, Side Mouse, and the Arty Mouse. The frustrated total internal inflection (FTIR) mouse is composed of an acrylic sheet, IR-Leds, optical sensors, and a camera.  When fingers are pressed on the acrylic sheet an IR light is detected by the camera. The acrylic sheet is molded as a smooth arc. The optical sensor is used to located input displacement across the acrylic sheet. The Orb Mouse is composed of an IR-sensitive camera and an internal source of IR illumination. Illumination radiates away from the center of the device and is reflected back by objects. The main problem here is that the objects could be a user's hand, or a keyboard that is close by which is hard for the device to differentiate. Cap Mouse uses capacitive touch sensing similar to how keyboards work. When a user presses the mouse a change in capacitance in a specific area is determined. The benefit of this system is that it is not affected by illumination. Side Mouse detects movement in the surface in front of it instead of actual movement in the mouse. Finger movement is reflected as IR light back to the camera. The main benefit of this mouse is that the input area is not limited by the surface of the device. Arty Mouse is composed of a base where the palm of the hand rests, and two arms extend from it where the thumb and index fingers are placed.

Discussion
It seems incredible to me that even though we know that multi-touch has become the new norm of input, we have not yet implemented multi-touch mice. I do not know if we are waiting for the next generation of desktops to incorporate multi-touch mice, but we are definitely lacking on that part. Out of the five designs described in this paper I think I would like the FTIR mouse the best.

Paper Reading # 25

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A code Reuse Interface for Non-Programmer Middle School Students
Paul A. Gross, Micah S. Herstand, Jordana W. Hodges, Caitlin L. Kelleher
IUI'10, February 7-10, 2010, Hong Kong, China


Summary
This paper talks about a programming tool for middle school students with no programming experience to reuse code functionality. The authors believe that middle school is a very important learning stage where students usually determine if they will pursue math and science related careers in the future. It is extremely rare that schools offer courses in Computer Science in this stage of education. In order to try to awake more interest in Computer Science, they developed a programming tool that is integrated with a program called Looking Glass. The process of this tool is the following: users will find the code that corresponds to the desired functionality, users will then extract this code which will be called Actionscript, and finally users will integrate this code into a new program. The main goal is to allow middle school students to reuse snippets of code without them fully understanding how all of the code works. In order to facilitate this process, the code navigation is based on an observable output display. Look Glass is based on story telling and is designed to create animation stories.  An experiment was conducted on an Exxon Mobil Summer Science Camp. At the end of the session, the students participated in a quiz where they were asked to identify the best description of code snippets. According to their results, about 98% of the participants were able to capture and reuse Actionscripts.

Discussion
How awesome would it have been if I had been exposed to something similar to this? My first experience with computer programming was in my second semester in college. I truly believe that programs like this could really attract more people to Computer Engineering/Science. It is a very interesting approach and there should be more of these programs trying to teach middle school students about future opportunities. Even though this experiment was triggering students to become more familiar with Computer Science, it could work with any other subjects as well.

Paper Reading # 24

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Outline Wizard: Presentation Composition and Search
Lawrence Bergman, Jie Lu, Ravi Konuru, Julie MacNaught, Danny Yeh
IUI'10, February 7-10, 2010, Hong Kong, China


Summary
This paper talks about creating presentations from existing presentations from common program such as Microsoft PowerPoint. There are no searching tools that can return single slides displaying the content a user is searching for. The authors propose a system called Outline Wizard which is an outline-based composition and search program. The main goal of Outline Wizard is to search from hierarchical structures to facilitate creating presentations and adding slides from existing presentation. Another important aspect of their system to achieve search that can find results that are relevant to a specific topic of information. Currently when you search for a specific keyword the user will find a single slide but other slides with relevant information on that keyword will not be retrieved in the search. Trying to find relevant information can be tedious and time consuming, so Outline Wizard stressed the importance of adding the capability of constructing presentation with a hierarchical structure.

Discussion
This paper introduces a very cool idea, I consider this paper one of those that can actually beneficial to users. I am not too familiar with PowerPoint's searching capabilities but I would think that idea would have been introduced earlier. Another thing that I noticed is that in the screen shots, they seem to have an older version of PowerPoint which would probably explain these proposed search capabilities were not present in PowerPoint yet.

Paper Reading # 23

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Facilitating Exploratory Search by Model-Based Navigational Cues
Wai-Tat Fu, Thomas G. Kannampallil, and Ruogu Kang
IUI'10, February 7-10, 2010, Hong Kong, China


Summary
This paper talks about social tagging and exploratory search. The simplest way to describe social tagging is associating labels or shortcuts to pieces of information to facilitate a search. Exploratory search is explained thoroughly in the paper and it is best described as ongoing search. Social tagging and exploratory search can generate navigational cues that facilitate knowledge exchange. The author's thesis states that different interaction methods will significantly impact the structuring, shaping, and behavior of human-computational systems. They claim that navigational cues create more intelligent interfaces. Social tags provide cues that facilitate information exploration as they help users predict content. These cues can help discover information in relevant topics. These methods focus in exploratory search and not in simple fact-retrieval searching. The main issue with navigational cues or creating tags for pieces of information is the vocabulary problem. This problem happens when different words are used to describe similar content, and as the number of tags increase they are incorrectly used to describe information. Even though this is an existing problem, authors have shown with their research that tags seem to converge over time and there is stability in tagging information. This could be explained by the fact that users seem to imitate how other users have created tags to keep the community consisted I would think.

Discussion
After reading multiple papers regarding research on navigational cues, I am starting to read very similar content. I have to say that I found this paper boring to some extent. The statistics in this paper completely lost me. One thing I read in a previous paper that could be very helpful to these researchers is the ability to create search communities which are created based on similar topic searching.

Full Blog - Media Equation

Summary
All three of these papers discuss the concept of social cues leading humans to apply social responses to computers. The authors study how humans can stereotype computers by ethnicity and gender. There are social cues that can give a computer a dominant or a submissive personality. The experiment shows that humans tend to prefer interaction with a computer with a similar "personality" as their own. Another experiment shows that humans apply social rules to computers. An example of this is politeness. The researchers try to answer some questions:
Do humans apply politeness to computers?
Do humans apply stereotypes to computers?
Do humans interact socially because they feel they interact with the computer or with an external agent?
Students volunteer for a three session experiment to determine the answers to the questions above. The other paper talks about determining the minimum set of cues to create a computer-based personality. There are two personality dimensions: dominance and the affiliation dimensions. The authors claim the a person with a dominant personality will perceive a computer as dominant,  and a person with a submissive personality as submissive.

Discussion
I think that reading all three papers is a must because they are so tightly related. I read them in a different order from what is shown in the course website, and I felt I was able to understand the social interaction study better. I like these readings because they are easy to read. Another interesting thing is that most of the content can be considered common sense yet it is information you don't think about everyday and therefore I find it extremely useful to think about it.

Book Reading # 48

Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers
Summary
This paper talks about how humans apply social rules to computers even though we know they are just computers. In their studies they discuss how people categorize computers by gender (perhaps pink computers for females), how people engage in polite behavior towards the computer, and humans interacting with dominant and submissive computers.
Discussion
It is impressive how we as humans unconsciously assign social traits to computer. How can a computer be dominant or submissive? I was surprised by the results the paper gives. The personality test and personality matching is also described in on of the other papers.

Computers are Social Actors
Summary
This paper talks about a study that involved 180 college computer literate students. The main goal of this study was to answer if people interact with computers applying social rules. There were five answers the authors wanted to answer from the results of the study.  Study volunteers would go through  a tutoring, testing, and evaluation session. After the three sessions, volunteers would answer a questionnaire about their experience.
Discussion
It is nice to read this paper at last, and it was actually by accident. This paper shows actual results about the five questions the authors wanted to answer.

Can Computer Personalities be Human Personalities?
Summary
This paper talks about determining the minimum set of cues to create a computer-based personality. There are two personality dimensions: dominance and the affiliation dimensions. The authors claim the a person with a dominant personality will perceive a computer as dominant,  and a person with a submissive personality as submissive. According to psychologists people tend to prefer to interact with other people of their same personality.
Discussion
The interesting thing about this paper is how they create a personality test and randomly match you with a computer with a certain personality. The results show that their initial hypothesis were all true. Individuals who were randomly placed with a matching personality computer found the experiment to be more satisfying.

Paper Reading # 22

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DocuBrowse: Faceted Searching, Browsing, and Recommendations in an Enterprise Context
Andreas Girgensohn, Frank Shipman, Francine Chen, Lynn Wilcox
IUI'10, February 7-10, 2010, Hong Kong, China

Summary
This paper talks about browsing and searching for documents in enterprise document repositories and the system the author propose called DocuBrowse. Their main focus is searching for information in a unstructured corporate document repository. The weaknesses of current enterprise document repositories are that the employees usually know where the document they are searching for is located. In a corporate document structure, information is created in such a way that documents are stored in files corresponding to projects or a certain department within the corporation. Finding this documents is easy when the user expects the document to be there. The authors propose a system where document searching resembles more of a web search engine where you can search for documents that you are unfamiliar with, there does not need to be a repository structure and most importantly a user does not need to expect a specific result.  Browsing in DocuBrowse is similar to the famous directory trees. In order to propose an innovative interface design, the authors use a data-oriented document analysis similar to the search engines (Google). DocuBrowse supports faceted searching and also adds the capability of recommendations. This way users will be allowed to determine if their search was successful or if some properties of the document can lead them to the correct information.

Discussion
While working on my internship I became really frustrated sometimes when I was trying to search for information that I did not know where to search for it. The system we were using suffered from the same weaknesses this paper points out and I truly believe DocuBrowse could have been really helpful. It is no lie that current web search engines are extremely powerful and it is an interesting idea to add those capabilities to enterprise document repositories.