Program

Date: September 13th, 2014 (Saturday)

We plan to organize the workshop program along the following schedule. The timings may change slightly.

 Keynote Talk Details

Keynote I: John C. Thomas (!Problem Solving International)
A Perfect Storm: Computation, Ubiquity, and Social Computing
In this talk, I will present a framework that can be used to generate and extend useful applications in mobile computing. We will also look at the safeguards necessary to help ensure that such applications are humane as well as profitable. In particular, a consideration of users in terms of their characteristics, scales, roles, goals, special needs and values can be used in combination with a look at times and places at various scales, as well as objects, actors and situations. Doing so illustrates that there are many potential applications still to be designed, developed and deployed.

John Thomas received a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Michigan and managed a research project at Harvard Med School on the Psychology of Aging. He joined IBM Research where he worked in Human Computer Interaction for a dozen years including a stint at IBM CHQ where he spearheaded efforts to improve IBM’s user experience. He left IBM to start the Artificial Intelligence Lab at NYNEX where he served as Executive Director for 12 years. In 1998, he rejoined IBM Research to work in knowledge management and human computer interaction. For several years, he managed a group on the business uses of stories and storytelling. He was involved in developing IBM’s strategies for “IT for the next Billions” and “Smarter Planet.” He has over 250 invited presentations and publications in the fields of AI, HCI, and psychology. Recent publications and conference presentation topics include fashion in IT, accessibility and mobile computing and mobile web access for non-literate populations. John currently works as a consultant in strategic innovation and customer experience, broadly conceived.

Keynote II: Mary Czerwinski (Microsoft Research)
Emotional Sentience
In this talk I will describe novel systems and applications we are designing that perform mood detection and interventions in real time using mobile technology. We are exploring “sticky” user interface ideas to help users reflect on and manage their affective experiences. Many questions remain from current affective computing research in terms of how useful technology like this is over the long term and how valuable a mobile tracking system might be in real time (especially given the likelihood of misclassifications).  In addition, we also are interested in intervention styles that can be used when negative or disruptive emotions are detected, whether in a car, at the desktop, or otherwise.  Finally, we feel there is a huge opportunity in the remote familial space, or in a close social network, where knowing about the emotional health of separated loved ones or close friends comes in to play.  These new research areas are tightly coupled to privacy issues.  A few examples of applications from our research will be presented.

Mary Czerwinski is currently a Research Manager and a Principle Researcher in Microsoft Research. Mary’s research focuses primarily on emotion tracking, information worker task management, multitasking, and awareness systems for individuals and groups. Her background is in emotion tracking and awareness, visual attention and multitasking. She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Indiana University in Bloomington. Mary was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award, was inducted into the CHI Academy, and became an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2010. She received the Distinguished Alumni award from Indiana University’s Brain and Psychological Sciences department.

Keynote III: Archan Misra (Singapore Management University)
Lessons Learnt@LiveLabs: Opportunities and Challenges in Practical Socio-Physical Sensing
Since its operational launch in September 2013, LiveLabs has steadily grown in size, and now captures the longitudinal mobile sensor and usage data of several hundreds of participants on the SMU campus. I’ll first briefly describe the vision and the current operational capabilities of LiveLabs. I’ll then describe several examples of in-situ, context-aware behavioral experimentation that LiveLabs can enable, and also discuss practical challenges to executing such experimentation at the fidelity required for “scientific generalization”. Subsequently, I’ll provide several examples of socio-physical analytics, where we’ve used a combination of available demographic, location and behavioral data to make interesting inferences about individual and collective interactions in the physical world.

Archan Misra is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at Singapore Management University (SMU), as well as a Director of the LiveLabs research center at SMU, which is building a large-scale testbed for context sensing and context-based experimentation in urban public venues. Over the past 14 years (including extended stints at IBM Research and Telcordia Technologies), he has worked extensively in the areas of mobile systems, wireless networking and pervasive computing. He is presently an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and the Elsevier Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing and chaired the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) from 2005-2007. Archan holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park.