James E. Young, Gregor McEwan, Saul Greenberg, Ehud Sharlin
New generation media spaces let group members see each other and share information, but are often static and separated from the physical world. To solve this problem, we propose the AIBO Surrogate—a robotic interface for a media space group, allowing members to extend their group interactions into the physical, real world. Distributed group members see a first-person view of what the robot sees and can control its walking direction, gaze and actions. For members physically collocated with the robot the AIBO Surrogate provides physical presence and awareness: a tele-embodiment of the distributed group.
For more information
May 31st, 2007
Cockburn, A., Gutwin, C. and Greenberg, S. (2007)
Menus are a primary control in current interfaces, but there has been relatively little theoretical work to model their performance. We propose a model of menu performance that goes beyond previous work by incorporating components for Fitts’ Law pointing time, visual search time when novice, Hick-Hyman Law decision time when expert, and for the transition from novice to expert behaviour. The model is able to predict performance for many different menu designs, including adaptive split menus, items with different frequencies and sizes, and multi-level menus. We tested the model by comparing predictions for four menu designs (traditional menus, recency and frequency based split menus, and an adaptive ‘morphing’ design) with empirical measures. The empirical data matched the predictions extremely well, suggesting that the model can be used to explore a wide range of menu possibilities before implementation.
For more information
- A Predictive Model of Menu Performance, Proc ACM CHI’07 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (Apr 28-May 3, San Jose, CA, USA). 10 pages
- Andy Cockburn andy@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
May 31st, 2007
NECTAR recently welcomed a new chair to the Board of Directors. By unanimous vote, Doug Hull, President of Connectivity Partners International Inc. (CPI) in Ottawa, has assumed the role effective May 9, 2007.
As President of CPI, Doug plays a leading role in its work of assisting governments in the development and implementation of their ICT and connectivity strategies. Examples of this include supporting the Government of Jordan with the creation of its Connecting Jordanians Program and the design of the Jordan Broadband Learning Network. Other projects include Chile, Lebanon and Kuwait.
Doug holds a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Western Ontario. He also received an Honourary Doctor of Science from Ryerson Polytechnic University in 1996 and an Honourary Doctor of Law from Open University in 2000.
He is the recipient of Five Government of Canada Merit Awards the 1994 Federal Government Technology Leadership Gold Medal and the 1995 CATA Award of Distinction for Public Sector Leadership in Advanced Technology, the 1998 CANARIE Information Highway Award for Technology Applications, the 1999 Collegium of Work and Learning Tribute for Distinguished Service to Public Education in Canada, the 2000 Treasury Board Award of Excellence, the 2001 Canadian Library Association William C. Watkinson Award for Outstanding Service to Public Libraries, the 2001 IT Hero Award from the Information Technology Association of Canada and the 2001 Smart Community Leardership Award from the Smart Winnipeg Association.
In addition to his role with CPI, Doug has been a member of several advisory bodies surrounding the Information Highway, including the Government of Canada’s Health Information Highway Advisory Board, and the Advisory Board on On-line Learning and the Broad Task Force. He continues a similar role today as a Director on various boards.
May 9th, 2007
NECTAR would like to extend a sincere thanks to the outgoing Chair of the NECTAR Board of Directors, Ian Kyer, senior partner of Fasken Martineau, who provided the Board leadership through a busy and demanding third year.
Starting in IT Law in 1982, Ian was a pioneer in the field. He has numerous accolades for his work including being listed in Best of the Best, outlining the top 25 IT lawyers in the World, as well as in the Top 500 Lawyers in Canada. He is also founder of the International Federation of Computer Law Associations in Amsterdam in 1988, and founder and first President of the Canadian IT Law Association in 1997.
His interests also include reading and writing history, and he is currently working on a history of his law firm, Fasken Martineau.
As Board Chair he presided over the November 8th, 2006, Meeting of the Board held in conjunction with the NECTAR Annual General Meeting in Banff, Calgary. His advice and direction at that time and throughout this past year have proven invaluable and we are fortunate to have had him as Board Chair. Ian will continue as a NECTAR Board member through 2008.
The NECTAR Board responsibility covers the management, direction and financial accountability of the network. For the past year those activities included:
- a comprehensive review and complete approval of the quality NECTAR research to date,
- a thorough assessment of the NECTAR finances and full approval of 2007 funding,
- recommendations for future spending; and,
- advice on how to keep the momentum of NECTAR going.
May 9th, 2007
The CHCCS Awards Committee is pleased to announce that there will be three awards presented at GI 2007 this year from the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society. …The final award for this year is an achievement award to Saul Greenberg, one of the world’s leaders in human-computer interaction and computer-supported collaborative work. Full details are available here .
March 22nd, 2007
Tovi Grossman, a student of Ravin Balakrishnan, has received this competitive 2007 Microsoft Fellowship award. The Microsoft Research Redmond lab recognizes the following fellows, who represent the best and the brightest from North America.
See http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/jobs/fellowships/fellows_us.aspx
March 9th, 2007
This may be a CHI Record! Ravin Balakrishnan and people he has worked with have 10 full papers appearing in CHI 2007. Usually, people are incredibly pleased to have a single paper at this conference, so this is a remarkable accomplishment.
Rather than provide all the abstracts, here are a list of the papers. You can find preprints of them as papers: #64-73 www.dgp.toronto.edu/~ravin. All papers below will appear as (in press - 2007) in Proceedings of CHI 2007 – the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Shengdong Zhao, Pierre Dragicevic, Mark Chignell, Ravin Balakrishnan, Patrick Baudisch.
earPod: Eyes-free menu selection using touch input and reactive audio feedback.
Clifton Forlines, Chia Shen, Daniel Wigdor, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Direct-touch vs. mouse input for tabletop displays.
Gonzalo Ramos, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Pressure marks.
Gonzalo Ramos, Andy Cockburn, Ravin Balakrishnan, Michel Beaudoiun-Lafon.
Pointing lenses.
Abhishek Ranjan, Jeremy Birnholtz, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Dynamic shared visual spaces: Experimenting with automatic camera control in a remote repair task.
Daniel Wigdor, Chia Shen, Clifton Forlines, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Perception of elementary graphical elements in tabletop and multi-surface environments.
Jeremy Birnholtz, Tovi Grossman, Clarissa Mak, Ravin Balakrishnan.
An exploratory study of input configuration and group process in a negotiation task using a large display.
Tovi Grossman, Nicholas Kong, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Modeling pointing at targets of arbitrary shapes.
Tovi Grossman, Daniel Wigdor, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Exploring and reducing the effects of orientation on text readability in volumetric displays.
Tovi Grossman, Pierre Dragicevic, Ravin Balakrishnan.
Strategies for accelerating on-line learning of hotkeys.
March 9th, 2007
I am very pleased to announce that Ravin Balakrishnan has been awarded a 2007 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. These awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. This year 118 fellowships were awarded in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. Ravin is one of 16 computer science recipients across North America, and one of only two University of Toronto recipients (in all disciplines).
March 9th, 2007
Carman Neustaedter (U Calgary), A.J. Brush (Microsoft Research) and Saul Greenberg (U Calgary)
Digital family calendars have the potential to help families coordinate, yet they must be designed to easily fit within existing routines or they will simply not be used. To understand the critical factors affecting digital family calendar design, we extended LINC, an inkable family calendar to include ubiquitous access, and then conducted a month-long field study with four families. Adoption and use of LINC during the study demonstrated that LINC successfully supported the families’ existing calendaring routines without disrupting existing successful social practices. Families also valued the additional features enabled by LINC. For example, several primary schedulers felt that ubiquitous access positively increased involvement by additional family members in the calendaring routine. The field trials also revealed some unexpected findings, including the importance of mobility—both within and outside the home—for the Tablet PC running LINC.
The figure illustrates the LINC family calendar as located in one household (in the kitchen)
For more information
March 1st, 2007
Kathryn Elliot, Mark Watson, Carman Neustaedter and Saul Greenberg
Ethnographic studies of the home revealed the fundamental roles that physical locations and context play in how household members understand and manage conventional information. Yet we also know that digital information is becoming increasingly important to households. The problem is that this digital information is almost always tied to traditional computer displays, which inhibits its incorporation into household routines. Our solution, location-dependent information appliances, exploit both home location and context (as articulated in ethnographic studies) to enhance the role of ambient displays in the home setting; these displays provide home occupants with both background awareness of an information source and foreground methods to gain further details if desired. The novel aspect is that home occupants assign particular information to locations within a home in a way that makes sense to them. As a device is moved to a particular home location, information is automatically mapped to that device along with hints on how it should be displayed.
The figure illustrates an appliance, an identifying data stream tag, and the base that defines how the appliance will operate at a particular location.
For more information
March 1st, 2007
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