“Computational Agroecology” published in alt.chi A team of people that I’m working with, led by Barath Raghavan, just had a paper accepted to alt.chi 2016! This is a portion of the CHI conference that is devoted to “controversial, risk-taking, and boundary pushing presentations at CHI”. The focus of the paper is to argue for the increased…
I’m very excited to announce that my colleagues and I had a paper accepted to ACM DEV 2015, “a premier venue to present original and innovative work on the applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computing in developing regions.” We used the paper to put forward a vision of resilient local infrastructures that are coordinated via software…
Research is often inspired by visions of the future. These visions can take on various narrative forms, and can fall anywhere along the spectrum from utopian to dystopian. Even though we recognize the importance of such visions to help us shape research questions and inspire rich design spaces to be explored, the opportunity to…
This paper presents a curated collection of fictional abstracts for papers that could appear in the proceedings of the 2039 CHI Conference. It provides an opportunity to consider the various visions guiding work in HCI, the futures toward which we (believe we) are working, and how research in the field might relate with broader social,…
Gas sensors have the potential to assist cooking by providing feedback on the cooking process and by further automating cooking. In this work, we explored the potential use of gas sensors to monitor food during the cooking process. Focusing on dry cooking, we collected gas emissions using 13 sensors during trials in which food was…
In urban environments great effort is directed toward alleviating traffic including the design and implementation of complex software and hardware infrastructure. We introduce the idea of an auction-based mechanism for resolving vehicle intersections using a multi-way group auction mechanism. We propose a supporting infrastructure that has promise for increasing performance and responsiveness to dynamic traffic…
In this paper we demonstrate a Markov model based technique for recognizing gestures from accelerometers that explicitly represents duration. We do this by embedding an Erlang-Cox state transition model, which has been shown to accurately represent the first three moments of a general distribution, within a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN). The transition probabilities in the…
Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent collapse is far from certain, it is prudent…
Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that…
In this paper we describe a system that leverages accelerometers to recognize a particular involuntary gesture in babies that have been born preterm. These gestures, known as cramped-synchronized general movements are highly correlated with a diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy. In order to test our system we recorded data from 10 babies admitted to the newborn…
Accurately annotating entities in video is labor intensive and expensive. As the quantity of online video grows, traditional solutions to this task are unable to scale to meet the needs of researchers with limited budgets. Current practice provides a temporary solution by paying dedicated workers to label a fraction of the total frames and otherwise…
In this paper, we present the results of a two-month field study of fifteen people using a software tool designed to model changes in a user’s availability. The software uses status update messages, as well as sensors, to detect changes in context. When changes are identified using the Kullback-Leibler Divergence metric, users are prompted to…
In this paper we describe the use of collaborative filtering to make predictions about place using data from custom instant messaging status. Previous research has shown accurate predictions can be made from an individual’s personal data. The work in this paper demonstrates that community data can be used to make predictions in locations that are…
To better coordinate information displays with moving people and the environment, software must know the locations and three dimensional alignments of the display hardware. In this paper we describe a technique for creating such an enhanced topological map of networked public displays using a mobile phone. The result supports a richer user experience, without the…
The use of personal status messages is becoming a part of popular culture through wide-spread instant messaging (IM) adoption, the growth of social networking websites and the increased connectivity provided by mobile phones. However, the implications of status broadcasting and people’s behavior in the milieu of social life is still poorly understood. In this paper,…
This paper describes an approach for creating detailed full coverage labelings of human activity. Our goal is to create global maps of physical positions labelled with a distribution over the most likely place name and most likely activity. We ground our ontology of labels as: the term that a person would want to display to…
< In this paper we report on the results of a large scale user survey investigating the status setting and interruption management behavior of mobile instant messaging (IM) users with existing systems. The motivation for this study was to inform the design of interface tools that support users by setting contextually appropriate awareness messages. Our…
Interventions to support children with cognitive and social developmental disabilities often include visual elements. Use of visual artifacts has been shown to increase the communication and understanding levels of children with disabilities. We describe a research agenda for expanding these capabilities using interactive, collaborative and intelligent systems. ( permanent, local copy ) Published in Interactive Design for…
Intelligent assistants that support human communication need to respect the difficulty of understanding the context surrounding the interchange. Rather than attempting to directly communicate for a user, intelligent assistants should support decision making on the part of the involved parties so that complex social negotiations are preserved. We describe an intelligent assistant that does this…
In this paper we present a social and technical architecture which will enable the study of localization from the perspective of crowds. Our research agenda is to leverage new computing opportunities that arise when many people are simultaneously localizing themselves. By aggregating this and other types of context information we intend to develop a statistically…
In this paper we present results related to achieving fine grained activity recognition for context-aware computing applications. We examine the advantages and challenges of reasoning with globally unique object instances detected by an RFID glove. We present a sequence of increasingly powerful probabilistic graphical models for activity recognition. We show the advantages of adding additional…
We present an automated transportation routing system, called “Opportunity Knocks,” whose goal is to improve the efficiency, safety and independence of individuals with mild cognitive disabilities. Our system is implemented on a combination of a Bluetooth sensor beacon that broadcasts GPS data, a GPRS-enabled cell-phone, and remote activity inference software. The system uses a novel…
The ability to determine what day-to-day activity (such as cooking pasta, taking a pill, or watching a video) a person is performing is of interest in many application domains. A system that can do this requires models of the activities of interest, but model construction does not scale well: humans must specify low-level details, such…
The modern knowledge worker has become very adept at working with desktop computers through familiar user interface devices such as keyboards, mice and screens. This interaction has relied on human adaptation for people to enter into the digital world by learning to type, double-click, etc. This paradigm has been sufficient to assist people in an…
We present a method of learning a Bayesian model of a traveler moving through an urban environment. This technique is novel in that it simultaneously learns a unified model of the traveler’s current mode of transportation as well as his most likely route, in an unsupervised manner. The model is implemented using particle filters and…
Accurate splice site prediction is a critical component of any computational approach to gene prediction in higher organisms. Existing approaches generally use sequence-based models that capture local dependencies among nucleotides in a small window around the splice site. We present evidence that computationally predicted secondary structure of moderate length pre-mRNA subsequences contains information that can…