Wednesday 24 September 2008
Ubicomp 2008 is over
Ubicomp 2008 in Seoul is over now, and it was quite an interesting experience. Not only because of the papers, many of which were very inspiring, but also because of the setting: Seoul is quite metropolitan, but as a Westerner, you can neither understand anything nor read any sign, and there is this interesting 'abstraction' of other cultures - we had lunch in a Bräuhhaus, which was serving sushi and pizza. Add to that a good helping of jet-lag, and suddenly lost in translation seems to resonate very strongly with one's experience.
Anyway, what still lingers in my mind is the closing panel, which discussed (to some degree) what Ubicomp is/should be and where the conference is going as a whole. Gregory Abowd made a similar point he made last year about the need to look into problems that really matter to real people, which I strongly agree with. In a way, this could be one defining factor of what Ubicomp is about: bringing together results from various disciplines and integrating them in a thoughtful way to make a real difference in people's life. I think this year the number of papers that followed this general idea has increased compared to last year.
Another clear trend is definitely energy efficiency - I very much enjoyed the talk about 'the potential for location-aware power management' by R.K Harle and A. Hopper. Combining this trend with the above, might lead to a generic approach to Ubicomp, where the underlying question is 'what can improve a particular situation for the people in it, and how can we realise that with the minimal amount of resources (technology-wise and energy-wise)?'
The other issue discussed at the panel was the future of the conference. I guess everyone agreed that it would be good to have more industry-involvement and to have a stronger exhibition/demo section. I'm not sure whether I agree with the idea of merging all ubicomp related conferences into one big event. Comparing the CHI experience to mobile HCI and Ubicomp, I think I prefer the smaller, single-track event. And for Ubicomp in particular, becoming too big might be quite counterproductive in terms of mixing up researchers from different disciplines (which in my opinion is one of the key strengths of Ubicomp).
Sunday 7 September 2008
Mobile HCI 2008 in Amsterdam
I've just returned from mobile HCI 2008 in Amsterdam - overall, a very enjoyable experience. As always, a broad range of topics were covered, both from an academic and from an industrial/commercial perspective. There were a couple of papers that stood out for me:
While the second keynote was slightly underwhelming, the first one by BJ Fogg was very inspiring. He talked about persuasion and his belief that persuasive systems (e.g. in health applications, social networking tools and environmental education) will take off on mobile devices in the near future.
- Usage of Spatial Information for Selection of Collocated Devices (Roswitha Gostner, Enrico Rukzio, Hans Gellersen), which reported on a user study investigating the use of spatial cues to interact with the environment (relates to the RELATE project).
- T-Bars: Towards Tactile User Interfaces for Mobile Touchscreens (Malcolm Hall, Eve Hoggan, Stephen Brewster), which looked into using tactile feedback to overcome some of the limitations of finger-based touchscreen interaction.
- Multimodal Interfaces for Camera Phones (Stephen Brewster, Jody Johnston), which described a very subtle modification to existing non-visual cues on digital cameras to convey information that is usually encoded as (uncomprehensible) icons on the viewfinder display.
While the second keynote was slightly underwhelming, the first one by BJ Fogg was very inspiring. He talked about persuasion and his belief that persuasive systems (e.g. in health applications, social networking tools and environmental education) will take off on mobile devices in the near future.
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