Living With Complexity

Reference Information: 
Title: Living With Complexity
Author: Donald A. Norman
Editors: The MIT Press (2010)

Chapter 1:
Summary: In the opening chapter of Norman's latest novel, his explains what exactly complexity is, and how it affects our everyday lives. He explains how poor design often leads to complexity, and provides several examples of complex designs. He ends the chapter discussing means of measuring complexity, such as how long it takes someone to master a task.

Discussion: Norman does a very good job of introducing complexity in his first chapter. The examples he used were thought out, and to the point.

Chapter 2:
Summary: In the second chapter of Living With Complexity, Norman discusses conceptual models, and how a good conceptual model can aid in making things easier to understand. He warns against featuritis, and talks about how simple looking products can often be highly complex.

Discussion: Norman's discussion of featuritis was incredibly insightful. We're having to deal with feature creep in our final project, so it's nice to see him discussing the matter.


Chapter 3:
Summary: In the third chapter of Living with Complexity, Norman discusses how with increased numbers, there is increased complexity. When trying to remember several different things, such as computer passwords, the complexity involves greatly each time you add a new item. Norman elaborates, discussing scaling problems, and how complexity increases exponentially, not linearly.

Discussion: This chapter remained interesting, although a lot of what was discussed seemed pretty straight forward or obvious. Overall however, it was still entertaining to read, and highly enlightening.

Chapter 4:
Summary: In his fourth chapter, Norman discusses social signals, and the inherent environmental cues that people pick up on. He discusses perceived affordances as well, and discusses several instances where cultural values actually end up complicating things further.

Discussion: As someone who has to drive from College Station to Washington DC every summer, I really appreciated his discussion on traffic. Some of his observations were incredibly insightful.

Book Reading #52: Living With Complexity

Reference Information: 
Title: Living With Complexity
Author: Donald A. Norman
Editors: The MIT Press (2010)

Chapter 3:
Summary: In the third chapter of Living with Complexity, Norman discusses how with increased numbers, there is increased complexity. When trying to remember several different things, such as computer passwords, the complexity involves greatly each time you add a new item. Norman elaborates, discussing scaling problems, and how complexity increases exponentially, not linearly.


Discussion: This chapter remained interesting, although a lot of what was discussed seemed pretty straight forward or obvious. Overall however, it was still entertaining to read, and highly enlightening.


Chapter 4:
Summary: In his fourth chapter, Norman discusses social signals, and the inherent environmental cues that people pick up on. He discusses perceived affordances as well, and discusses several instances where cultural values actually end up complicating things further.


Discussion: As someone who has to drive from College Station to Washington DC every summer, I really appreciated his discussion on traffic. Some of his observations were incredibly insightful.

Book Reading #51: Living With Complexity

Reference Information: 
Title: Living With Complexity
Author: Donald A. Norman
Editors: The MIT Press (2010)

Chapter 1:
Summary: In the opening chapter of Norman's latest novel, his explains what exactly complexity is, and how it affects our everyday lives. He explains how poor design often leads to complexity, and provides several examples of complex designs. He ends the chapter discussing means of measuring complexity, such as how long it takes someone to master a task.

Discussion: Norman does a very good job of introducing complexity in his first chapter. The examples he used were thought out, and to the point.

Chapter 2:
Summary: In the second chapter of Living With Complexity, Normand discusses conceptual models, and how a good conceptual model can aid in making things easier to understand. He warns against featuritis, and talks about how simple looking products can often be highly complex.

Discussion: Norman's discussion of featuritis was incredibly insightful. We're having to deal with feature creep in our final project, so it's nice to see him discussing the matter.

Book Reading #51: Living With Complexity

Reference Information: 
Title: Living With Complexity
Author: Donald A. Norman
Editors: The MIT Press (2010)

Chapter 1:
Summary: In the opening chapter of Norman's latest novel, his explains what exactly complexity is, and how it affects our everyday lives. He explains how poor design often leads to complexity, and provides several examples of complex designs. He ends the chapter discussing means of measuring complexity, such as how long it takes someone to master a task.

Discussion: Norman does a very good job of introducing complexity in his first chapter. The examples he used were thought out, and to the point.

Chapter 2:
Summary: In the second chapter of Living With Complexity, Normand discusses conceptual models, and how a good conceptual model can aid in making things easier to understand. He warns against featuritis, and talks about how simple looking products can often be highly complex.

Discussion: Norman's discussion of featuritis was incredibly insightful. We're having to deal with feature creep in our final project, so it's nice to see him discussing the matter.

Paper Reading #25: Agent-Assisted Task Management that Reduces Email Overload

Comments: Jacob Lillard, Derek Landini.
Reference Information:
Title: Agent-Assisted Task Management that Reduces Email Overload
Authors: Andrew Faulring, Brad Myers, Ken Mohnkern, Bradley Schmerl, Aaron Steinfeld, John Zimmerman, Asim Smailagic, Jeffery Hansen, and Daniel Siewiore.
Venue: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary: The authors of this paper have designed and developed a system known as RADAR, or  Reflective Agents with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning. RADAR is a email management system that uses a task-based metaphore to attempt to organize a user's inbox. Using machine learning, the system analyzes incoming email to detect if the email is talking about a particular task. Once it has detected a task, it groups all future emails together with the initial email, allowing users to gather emails in a much more logical fashion.

The researchers ran several tests cases with users, and found that the test users on the RADAR system had an easier time finding emails. The researchers were pleasantly surprised at how few false-positives there were with the system.

Discussion: This research was incredibly interesting. It reminded me of Gmail's tagging feature, but not reliant on users to create tags. The overall contents of the article seemed incredibly technical. Overall, it was a good paper none the less.

Why We Make Mistakes

Reference Information: 
Title: Why We Make Mistakes
Author: Joseph T. Hallinan
Editors: Broadway Books (2009)

Summary: In Hallinan's novel Why We Make Mistakes, he discusses the various reasons why, as the title suggests, people make mistakes. He discusses various topics, such as people's lack of observation skills, and how we only notice, "what we want to see." This is further explained when Hallinan mentions the decision making progress, and how people will often latched onto mostly insignificant facts.

Continuing on into the novel, Hallinan discusses the formation and recall of memories. His primary example is the "Rose Colored Glasses", or in other words, our tendency to view out past self better than we actually are. Finally, Hallinan brings up examples from topics such as multitasking, framing, our belief that we perform average.

Hallinan's novel focused greatly on the use of examples. In each section of the book, he told a clear, concise narrative, connecting the ideas with examples. In the conclusion of the novel, he gave the user several different ways that they can fully integrate the lessons from his book into the reader's everyday life.


Discussion: I greatly enjoyed Hallinan's novel. His book echoed some of the lessons that Normand had attempted to teach in his book. However, unlike Normand, Hallinan's book sounds less like a rant, and it knows when to stop using an example, and move onto something new. In total, the book was a very enjoyable read, and I would definitely be open to reading more of Hallinan's work in the future.

Paper Reading #24: Personalized Reading Support for Second-Language Web Documents by Collective Intelligence

Comments: Derek Landini, Aaron Kirkes.
Reference Information:
Title: Personalized Reading Support for Second-Language Web Documents by Collective Intelligence
Authors: Yo Ehara, Nobuyuki Shimizu, Takashi Ninomiya, Hiroshi Nakagawa
Venue: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary: The authors of this paper are working on a system which can analyzes and translate certain phrases in real time. Rather than a traditional translation system, which converts entire pages over to a user's native language, their system analyzes a page to determine what the primary language on the page is, and then it converts any word it cannot detect are written in that language.

The system uses logistic regression to predict which words are written in a second language. The overall results of the system were highly promising. The user feedback they recovered from their test subjects showed that they enjoyed using the system, and that it was overall highly effective.

Dissuasion: This pair's research was incredibly interesting. It seems like this would be a great browser plugin, or perhaps an extension of Google Translate. I hope that this sort of research continues and improves over time.

Paper Reading #23: Aspect-level News Browsing: Understanding News Events from Multiple Viewpoints

Comments: Ryan Kerbow, Patrick Frith.
Reference Information:
Title: Aspect-level News Browsing: Understanding News Events
from Multiple Viewpoints
Authors: Souneil Park, SangJeong Lee, Junehwa Song.
Venue: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary: The authors of this paper attempted to design a computer system of analyzing news feeds in order to determine their bias. Over time, the software can chart out a new source's bias, and report these findings to the user.

In addition to this, the software can find various news articles around a single event which contain a different biases, and present them to the user. This way, they can make sure that they more easily can be informed on all the differing viewpoints surrounding a controversial issue.

The results of the software are extremely optimistic. Users found that the news sources were more informative, and that they were able to more easily get an understanding of complex political issues.

Discussion: I found this research fairly interesting. In my own life however, I've noticed that people are generally set in their ways for a reason, and don't like reading other viewpoints. This is probably not a good thing in and of itself, but it would probably hinder the adoption of this system.

Book Reading #50: Why We Make Mistakes

Reference Information:

Title: Why We Make Mistakes

Author: Joseph T. Hallinan

Editors: Broadway Books (2009)

Chapter 12:

Summary: Hallinan brings up constraints and affordances in his twelfth chapter, discussing how they aid us in our everyday lives. He discusses how affordances can give people insight into how something can be used, as long as the person knows where to look.

Discussion: This chapter echoed of Norman's novels, but with it's own unique twist on it. His examples put Norman's discussions in a new light however, allowing further insight.

Chapter 13:

Summary: Hallinan discusses people's thought processes behind important life decisions, and how they tend to focus on minor factors while doing so. He continues this theme of misdirection throughout the chapter. 

Discussion: I've heard the "clinging to minor facts during decision making" logic before, but it was nice to see Hallinan's take on it. I find it interesting that even after you know these sorts of fallacies, we tend to continue making them anyways.

Conclusion:

Summary: Hallinan concludes his book very well, giving the reader a list of advice that they can use in their life in order to take the book to heart. Like most advice lists, it includes some obvious things such as getting plenty of sleep, but it also suggest things such as keeping a written record in order to not fall victim to the rose colored glasses.

Discussion: I enjoyed Hallinan's conclusion. It wrapped everything up nicely, while giving the reader a large amount of useful advice. It was really good to see him recognize that while he had presented a large amount of useful information to us in his novel, that we might need a bit more direct direction in order to apply the information to our lives.

Full Blog: Media Equation

Reference Information: Part 1
Title: Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers
Authors: Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon
Presentation Venue: Journal of Social Issues; Volume 56, Issue 1, Spring 2000, pp. 81-103.

Summary: The authors of this paper discuss how people apply social rules to computers, and the interesting aspects of technology that have cropped up since it's introduction. For example, people seem to be overly-polite when working with computers. The researchers go in depth to discuss how people have come to anthropomorphize computers, and treat them essentially as humans.

Discussion: I found this article incredibly interesting. I've always enjoyed seeing how people anthropomorphize technology, so it was a fun read. The section of male vs. female voices was interesting as well. Everyone in my family has their own preference for what type of voice they like our GPS unit to speak in, so I've seen this first hand.

Reference Information: Part 2
Title: Computers are social actors
Authors: Clifford Nass, Jonathan Steuer, Ellen R. Tauber
Presentation Venue: CHI ’95: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: celebrating interdependence; April 24, 1995; Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Summary: Part Two continues the aspects introduced in the first paper. In particular, the researchers discuss five experiments in which they tested how people distinguish between their 'self' and 'other' while working with computers. The researchers concluded their paper discussion how they view computer-human relationships as a social experience.

Discussion: This article was slightly less interesting, but still a good read none the less. I'm not sure how much I agree with their social-experience conclusions, but they did have valid points.

Reference Information: Part 3
Title: Can computer personalities be human personalities?
Authors: Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon, B. J. Fogg, Byron Reeves, Chris Dryer
Presentation Venue: CHI ’95: Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems; 1995; Denver, Colorado, USA.

Summary: The final paper describes research into creating a personality for a computer. They attempt to find the right blend of personality traits so that a user will react well to it and have a pleasurable experience. The majority of the computer's personality traits were expressed through it's communication.

Discussion: I found it very interesting people do not universally favor a dominant or submissive system. Instead, they generally like the system that matches themselves. This somewhat makes sense, since people often view computers as extensions of themselves.

Book Reading #48: Media Equation

Reference Information: Part 1
Title: Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers
Authors: Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon
Presentation Venue: Journal of Social Issues; Volume 56, Issue 1, Spring 2000, pp. 81-103.

Summary: The authors of this paper discuss how people apply social rules to computers, and the interesting aspects of technology that have cropped up since it's introduction. For example, people seem to be overly-polite when working with computers. The researchers go in depth to discuss how people have come to anthropomorphize computers, and treat them essentially as humans.

Discussion: I found this article incredibly interesting. I've always enjoyed seeing how people anthropomorphize technology, so it was a fun read. The section of male vs. female voices was interesting as well. Everyone in my family has their own preference for what type of voice they like our GPS unit to speak in, so I've seen this first hand.

Reference Information: Part 2
Title: Computers are social actors
Authors: Clifford Nass, Jonathan Steuer, Ellen R. Tauber
Presentation Venue: CHI ’95: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: celebrating interdependence; April 24, 1995; Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Summary: Part Two continues the aspects introduced in the first paper. In particular, the researchers discuss five experiments in which they tested how people distinguish between their 'self' and 'other' while working with computers. The researchers concluded their paper discussion how they view computer-human relationships as a social experience.

Discussion: This article was slightly less interesting, but still a good read none the less. I'm not sure how much I agree with their social-experience conclusions, but they did have valid points.

Reference Information: Part 3
Title: Can computer personalities be human personalities?
Authors: Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon, B. J. Fogg, Byron Reeves, Chris Dryer
Presentation Venue: CHI ’95: Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems; 1995; Denver, Colorado, USA.

Summary: The final paper describes research into creating a personality for a computer. They attempt to find the right blend of personality traits so that a user will react well to it and have a pleasurable experience. The majority of the computer's personality traits were expressed through it's communication.

Discussion: I found it very interesting people do not universally favor a dominant or submissive system. Instead, they generally like the system that matches themselves. This somewhat makes sense, since people often view computers as extensions of themselves.

Paper Reading #19: Personalized News Recommendation Based on Click Behavior

Comments: Chris Kam, Derek Landini.
Reference Information:
Title: Personalized News Recommendation Based on Click Behavior
Authors: Jiahui Liu, Peter Dolan, Elin Rønby Pedersen.
Venue: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary: In their research paper, the designers lament the current state of online news. Their aim is to develop a system in which a website can predict what type of news stories a user might want to read, without having to rely on the user to proactively provide their preference of what type of news they like to read.

Their system tracks a person around a news site, tracking their clicks and examining how long they spend on each page. It's designed to be mindful of user's changing tastes, and so it changes over time as the users give the system more information. In order to make sure that the results from the system are accurate, it had a polling mechanism in place to see if a user's interest in the customized article selection improves from the previously shown selection of stories.

After designing the system to take advantage of the Google News website, the researchers presented the software to a group of test users, and compared their results against a control group. After careful testing and measuring, they found that the system they had created consistently more relevant news to the user.

Discussion: This sounds like a great system, and I'm sure I'd love it if it was implemented on a news website I visited. However, the idea of a site so closely monitoring my behavior always rubs me the wrong way. It seems like there should be better ways of gathering information than watching a user's every move.

Make-Up Blogs: #18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26

Book Reading #18: The Design of Everyday Things
Reference Information:
Title: Design of Everyday Things
Author: Donald Norman
Publisher: Basic Books (2002)

Summary: In chapter six of The Design of Everyday Things, Normand discusses the various factors working against a designer. These examples include the deadlines that designers have to work against, as well as their tendency to put the aesthetic qualities before functional qualities. He also spends a good portion of the chapter warning against feature creep.

Discussion: In my own personal projects, I've experienced feature creep through my own desire to make my project as useful as possible, so I can definitely understand a manager or project leader pushing more and more features onto designers. In recent years, I've tried to make sure that the number of features I include matches the GUI I present to the user, but it is still difficult to maintain a good balance.

Book Reading #19: Coming Of Age In Samoa
Reference Information:
Title: Coming of Age in Samoa
Author: Margaret Mead
Editors: Williams Morrow and Company (1928)

Summary: In chapter six of Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead discusses the two groups of young people in Samoan society. The young men are known as the Aumaga, while the women are known as the Aualuma. The Aualamua play the role of hostess in Samoan society, and generally do less work than the majority of other groups of women.

Discussion: The differentiation between ranks of Samoan society are very interesting to me. Modern western society has similar definite lines between childhood, teenage years, and adulthood, so it's interesting that Samoans also have similar differentiations.

Book Reading #20: Opening Skinner's Box
Reference Information:
Title: Opening Skinner's Box
Author: Lauren Slater
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company (2008)

Summary: In chapter five of Opening Skinner's Box, Slater discusses the principle of cognitive dissonance. She describes various experiments which show that the more people observing an incident, the fewer people who react to it. The experiments range in severity, from the amount of money a person receives for participating in an experiment, to someone being attacked.

Book Reading #24: Emotional Design
Reference Information:
Title: Emotional Design
Author: Donald Norman
Publisher: Basic Books (2005)

Summary: In the opening chapter of Norman's novel Emotional Design, he discusses why attractive things generally work better. People are happier when using a device they find attractive, so they can often overlook minor design flaws in functionality. He illustrates this idea using his classic teapot example.

Discussion: Norman's books continue to be interesting. His opening chapter easily catches the user's attention, and provides several good examples.

Book Reading #25: Coming of Age in Samoa
Reference Information:
Title: Coming of Age in Samoa
Author: Margaret Mead
Editors: Williams Morrow and Company (1928)

Summary: Mead discusses the role that dance plays in Samoan culture. Unlike most activities in Samoan culture, people of all age groups can participate in the group dances. She discusses the three main styles: Taupo, the dance of boys, and the dance of jesters.

Discussion: I found the level of importance that dancing plays in Samoan culture very interesting. There are several areas that I've observed American and Samoan culture overlapping, but this particular area does not seem to be the case.

Book Reading #26: Opening Skinner's Box
Reference Information:
Title: Opening Skinner's Box
Author: Lauren Slater
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company (2008)

Summary: In the seventh chapter of Opening Skinner's Box, Slater discusses drug addiction. The experiment centers around curing a rat of a morphine addiction by putting it in a "perfect" environment, where all of it's needs and desires are taken care of. Once the rat's need for anything were removed, it no longer felt a need to take morphine.

Discussion: I'm skeptical of how transferable the results are to humans. Our hierarchy of needs is much more complex than a rat's, and it would be hard to create a "perfect" environment in which humans feel their self-actualization needs and desires were being taken care of.

Book Reading #47: Why We Make Mistakes

Reference Information:

Title: Why We Make Mistakes

Author: Joseph T. Hallinan

Editors: Broadway Books (2009)

Chapter 8:
Summary: Chapter 8 of Why We Make Mistakes focuses on memory. In particular, Hallinan discusses how people attempt to keep their memories organize in their head. Hallinan also touches on the differences on how people store their memories, based on their personality traits and memory forming habits.

Chapter 9:
Summary: In Chapter 9, Hallinan discusses the functional differences between men and women. The examples included in the chapter are how men show more confidence in many areas, and how young boys often tinker and explore more than their female counterparts.

Discussion: I found this pair of chapters highly entertaining. I've always been fascinated by the developmental differences between kids growing up, and so chapter 9 one was of particular interest to me.

Book Reading #49: Why We Make Mistakes

Reference Information:

Title: Why We Make Mistakes

Author: Joseph T. Hallinan

Editors: Broadway Books (2009)

Chapter 10:
Summary: Hallinan discusses our natural tendencies to believe that we tend to perform above average. He discusses how people have a natural overconfidence, and that counterintuitively, our confidence goes up as the difficulty of a task increases. He gives the reader several examples, including one focused on golf.

Chapter 11:
Summary: Hallinan spends this chapter discussing experts vs. novices. He discussed how becoming an expert in something usually takes years of practice, along with an interesting study on how novices usually perform a task as they learned it, even if there exists a better method out there.

Discussion: Once again, Hallinan's book remains a delight to read. I enjoy his examples, and the information he provided is not only interesting, but useful.

Paper Reading #21: Addressing the Problems of Data-Centric Physiology-Affect Relations Modeling

Comments: Patrick Frith, Vince Kocks.
Reference Information:
Title: Addressing the Problems of Data-Centric Physiology-Affect Relations Modeling
Authors: Roberto Legaspi, Ken-ichi Fukui, Koichi Moriyama, Satoshi Kurihara, Masayuki Numao, Merlin Suarez.
Venue: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary: Using a data-centric approach, the researchers of this paper attempted to come up with a way to use machine learning in order to define so called "affective states". Using an EEG helmet, the researchers attempted to classify, and define the different emotions that the wearer was experiencing.

One of the main problems that they ran into was the size of the data set. Existing emotion sensing algorithms are general of O(n^2) or O(n^3) complexity, and so using a large data set slows the process down. This is a problem when attempting to sense something as fluid and changing as emotion, which can move on to something new before your previous analysis is completed.

Throughout the paper, they suggest several different changes to the algorithms used, and change in data set size, which may help improve the capabilities of the machine.

Discussion: This was the hardest paper I've read in the class. It was not designed for someone with an inexperience in the subject, and I could hardly understand what they were talking about. I'm sure their research is interesting, but I'm not sure if anyone is going ever know what they actually did, judging from this paper.

Book Reading #46: Why We Make Mistakes

Reference Information:

Title: Why We Make Mistakes

Author: Joseph T. Hallinan

Editors: Broadway Books (2009)

Chapter 6:
Summary: Hallinan's sixth chapter discusses the effects a person's frame of mind can have on a situation. His examples mostly revolve around the time it takes for a person to make a consumer purchasing decision, and whether or not they make an immediate decision or a future one.


Chapter 7:
Summary: Hallinan's seventh chapter discusses skimming. Skimming is when you glance over information, kind of like how you're just glancing at this blog entry to make sure it has the barest required information before giving it credit. When we skim, we loose the ability to detect small details, to the point where a novice approaching materials for the first time can notice errors that an expert won't.

Discussion: With so much reading to do for this course, the skimming portion particularly hit home for me. I like Hallinan's writing style a bit more than Normand. He uses his examples to build up to an overall key concept, rather than just reiterating the same point over and over.

Things That Make Us Smart

Reference Information:

Title: Things That Make Us Smart

Author: Donald A. Norman

Editors: Broadway Books (1993)

Summary: In Normand's third book, he reiterates most of the points in his earlier novels, while expanding on a few new ones. The central theme of the novel is how technology needs to be more human-centric. Technology should conform to the person using it, not the other way around.


He expands into discussion on specific example, like externalized artifacts and the various forms of cognition, and different types of learning. He provided several examples of each topic, and explained it clearly in an easy to understand way.

Discussion: Normand's third book does tread new ground, but he still has his habit of over-reiterating certain topics. Still, the examples shown in this book were much clearer then some of his other books, and I felt I learned more from this particular book than I did the other two.

Book Reading #45 - Things That Make Us Smart

Reference Information:

Title: Things That Make Us Smart

Author: Donald A. Norman

Editors: Broadway Books (1993)

Chapter 3:

Summary: In Chapter 3 of Things That Make Us Smart, Normand discusses external visual cues used to impart information upon the user. These external cues let the user not keep track of complex events, so that they do not have to internalize them and remember them.

Chapter 4:

Summary: In Chapter 4, Normand continues to discuss artifacts, particularly surface artifacts and internal artifacts. Surface artifacts, naturally, are artifacts which we can see an interact with on the surface of an object. Internal artifacts are artifacts which are introspective, and represented internally.

Discussion: Once again, Normand seems to be repeating himself. Chapter 3 seemed like a rehash of his earlier works, but Chapter 4 was highly insightful, and presented some interesting information.

Paper Reading #20: Automatically Identifying Targets Users Interact with During Real World Tasks

Comments: Cindy Skatch, Patrick Frith.
Reference Information:
Title: Automatically Identifying Targets Users Interact with During Real World Tasks
Authors:Amy Hurst, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff.
Venue: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary: In their paper, the researchers attempted to improve computer accessibility APIs. The existing Microsoft Active Accessibility API have roughly a 75% success rate, but are rather rigid and lack flexibility. They also examined previous attempts at accessibility, which do a purely visual analysis of a GUI.

Their approach is mixture of the two. Using existing MSAA APIs, they created a system of analyzing various other visual cues in order to build a system which is more robust than either one alone. Their system particularly took advantage of mouse over visual effects to detect click-able buttons. The researchers found that their system was 89% accurate.

Discussion: Buzzwords! Jargon! Buzzword buzzword! I read the first page of this article and honestly had no idea what they were talking about. They kept saying real-world in the introduction, so I was visualizing some sort of smart phone based object detection system. If it weren't for the screenshots they included, I would probably still be lost.

Book Reading #43: Things That Make Us Smart

Reference Information:

Title: Things That Make Us Smart

Author: Donald A. Norman

Editors: Broadway Books (1993)

Summary: In Normand's next novel, he beings explaining the importance of designing things for human beings. He elaborates on the differences between hard and soft sciences, along with the differences in experimental and reflective cognition. In the second chapter, he elaborates on experimental and reflective cognition, using the example of ineffective museums.

Discussion: Normand's third novel follows the pattern of his early two novels. The second chapter in particularly is highly reflective of his earlier works. Overall, his books remain highly insightful.

Paper Reading #19: A POMDP Approach to P300-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces

Comments: Joe Cabrera, Patrick Firth.
Reference Information:
Title: A POMDP Approach to P300-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces
Authors: Jaeyoung Park,  Kee-Eung Kim, Sungho Jo.
Venue: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary: This paper discusses mind reading using non-invasive EEG devices. In particular, it explores the area of text input. In traditional EEG mind reading text input, a grid of random characters is displayed. One by one, a character is flashed at random. If the user of the system were looking at the character as it was flashed, the EEG would pick it up, and the system would know which character they were thinking about.

The problem with this solution is that the algorithm is completely random. If you're trying to spell out the word "house", the flashing doesn't factor this in at all. It's just as likely to flash the letter J, Q, or Z at you, even though there's a good likelihood that you'd be attempting to input an S after the U.

The algorithm that the researchers have designed takes these sorts of things into account, as well as other particularities of the system, such as "Repetition Blindness". Repetition Blindness is a particularity of the system which takes place when the same letter is flashed immediately after or within close succession of itself. When this occurs, the system cannot differentiate between the letters nearby, and it must continue to flash randomly to find out which letter the user meant to input. The algorithm also takes this into account, and doesn't flash the same letter near itself.

Discussion: This article was incredibly interesting... but so technical. This isn't technically brain surgery, but it might as well be close. The overall gist of the article was interesting, but it's a little over the head of the average CHI journal reader. Overall though, it's fairly interesting to see someone implement cell phone style predictive text on EEG machines like this.

Coming of Age In Samoa

Reference Information:

Title: Coming of Age in Samoa

Author: Margaret Mead

Editors: Williams Morrow and Company (1928)

 

Summary: Coming of Age in Samoa is Margaret Mead's ethnography about the women in Samoan culture, with an emphasis on the younger women and girls. Throughout her novel, Mead discusses the various trials and tribulations a Samoan woman must go through, while linking her findings back to Western Culture.

One of the areas Mead emphasizes the contrast between Samoan and Western culture the most is their treatment of young children and their exposure to various types of information, such as birth and death. Unlike Western cultures, no attempt is made to hide Samoan children from these cycles of life. Samoan women are also given responsibilities and taught how to do household chores as early as the age of five. Mead points out that, unlike children in Western cultures, the Samoan children can see a direct connection between what they are learning, and how it can help them in their everyday life, so they are much more motivated then the children in our Western society.

After a lengthy discussion on relationships and domestic life, Mead spends a portion of her ethnography describing Samoans who fit outside of the social norms, such as delinquent and the musu. Musu is Samoan for "Unwilling, or Abstaining", and describes a person who refuses to perform a specific task. Unlike Western culture, where this could be seen as a negative, the Samoans deeply respect the musu. Finally, Mead closes her novel with several appenxies, which attempt to give some quantitative information the qualatiative information found in the main portion of the book.

Discussion: Mead's ethnography was highly enlightening. The differences between American children and Samoan children always struck me at how dissimilar they were. I still have a hard time believing that the children were intrusted with the care taking of others at such a young age. It was nice getting to read the "definitive" ethnography, but it's a shame that we didn't have an opportunity to read a computer or design related ethnography.