Asta Roseway

Geographic location tags on digital images

We describe an end-to-end system that capitalizes on geographic location tags for digital photographs. The World Wide Media eXchange (WWMX) database indexes large collections of image media by several pieces of metadata including timestamp, owner, and critically, location stamp. The location where a photo was shot is important because it says much about its semantic content, while being relatively easy to acquire, index, and search.The process of building, browsing, and writing applications for such a database raises issues that have heretofore been un- addressed in either the multimedia or the GIS community. This paper brings all of these issues together, explores different options, and offers novel solutions where necessary. Topics include acquisition of location tags for image media, data structures for location tags on photos, database optimization for location-tagged image media, and an intuitive UI for browsing a massive location-tagged image database. We end by describing an application built on top of the WWMX, a lightweight travelogue-authoring tool that automatically creates appropriate context maps for a slideshow of location-tagged photographs.

AffectAura: an intelligent system for emotional memory

We present AffectAura, an emotional prosthetic that allows users to reflect on their emotional states over long periods of time. We designed a multimodal sensor set-up for continuous logging of audio, visual, physiological and contextual data, a classification scheme for predicting user affective state and an interface for user reflection. The system continuously predicts a users valence, arousal and engage-ment, and correlates this with information on events, communications and data interactions. We evaluate the interface through a user study consisting of six users and over 240 hours of data, and demonstrate the utility of such a reflection tool. We show that users could reason forward and backward in time about their emotional experiences using the interface, and found this useful.

Under pressure: sensing stress of computer users

Recognizing when computer users are stressed can help reduce their frustration and prevent a large variety of negative health conditions associated with chronic stress. However, measuring stress non-invasively and continuously at work remains an open challenge. This work explores the possibility of using a pressure-sensitive keyboard and a capacitive mouse to discriminate between stressful and relaxed conditions in a laboratory study. During a 30 minute session, 24 participants performed several computerized tasks consisting of expressive writing, text transcription, and mouse clicking. During the stressful conditions, the large majority of the participants showed significantly increased typing pressure (>79% of the participants) and more contact with the surface of the mouse (75% of the participants). We discuss the potential implications of this work and provide recommendations for future work.

DuoSkin: rapidly prototyping on-skin user interfaces using skin-friendly materials

Miniature devices have become wearable beyond the form factor of watches or rings---functional devices can now directly affix to the users skin, unlocking a much wider canvas for electronics. However, building such small and skin-friendly devices currently requires expensive materials and equipment that is mostly found in the medical domain. We present DuoSkin, a fabrication process that affords rapidly prototyping functional devices directly on the users skin using gold leaf as the key material, a commodity material that is skin-friendly, robust for everyday wear, and user-friendly in fabrication. We demonstrate how gold leaf enables three types of interaction modalities on DuoSkin devices: sensing touch input, displaying output, and communicating wirelessly with other devices. Importantly, DuoSkin incorporates aesthetic customizations found on body decoration, giving form to exposed interfaces that so far have mostly been concealed by covers. Our technical evaluation confirmed that gold leaf was more durable and preferable when affixed to skin than current commodity materials during everyday wear. This makes gold leaf a viable material for users to build functional and compelling on-skin devices. In our workshop evaluation, participants were able to customize their own on-skin music controllers that reflected personal aesthetics.

MoodWings: a wearable biofeedback device for real-time stress intervention

Stress has a wide range of negative impacts on people, ranging from declines in real-time task performance to development of chronic health conditions. Despite the increasing availability of sensors and methods for detecting stress, little work has focused on automated stress interventions and their effect. We present MoodWings: a wearable butterfly that mirrors a users real-time stress state through actuated wing motion. We designed MoodWings to function both as an early-stress-warning system as well as a physical interface through which users could manipulate their affective state. Accordingly, we hypothesized that MoodWings would help users both calm down and perform better during stressful tasks. We tested our hypotheses on a common stressful task: driving. While users drove significantly more safely with MoodWings, they experienced higher stress levels (physiologically and self-perceived). Despite this, users were enthusiastic about MoodWings, expressing several alternative contexts in which they would find it useful. We discuss these results and future design implications for building externalized manifestations of real-time affective state.

MediaBrowser: reclaiming the shoebox

Applying personal keywords to images and video clips makes it possible to organize and retrieve them, as well as automatically create thematically related slideshows. MediaBrowser is a system designed to help users create annotations by uniting a careful choice of interface elements, an elegant and pleasing design, smooth motion and animation, and a few simple tools that are predictable and consistent. The result is a friendly, useable tool for turning shoeboxes of old photos into labeled collections that can be easily browsed, shared, and enjoyed.

Food and Mood: Just-in-Time Support for Emotional Eating

Behavior modification in health is difficult, as habitual behaviors are extremely well-learned, by definition. This research is focused on building a persuasive system for behavior modification around emotional eating. In this paper, we make strides towards building a just-in-time support system for emotional eating in three user studies. The first two studies involved participants using a custom mobile phone application for tracking emotions, food, and receiving interventions. We found lots of individual differences in emotional eating behaviors and that most participants wanted personalized interventions, rather than a pre-determined intervention. Finally, we also designed a novel, wearable sensor system for detecting emotions using a machine learning approach. This system consisted of physiological sensors which were placed into womens brassieres. We tested the sensing system and found positive results for emotion detection in this mobile, wearable system.

Time travel proxy: using lightweight video recordings to create asynchronous, interactive meetings

Time Travel Proxy (TTP) enables participating in meetings that you cannot attend in real time, either because of time conflicts or global time zone differences. TTP uses lightweight video recordings to pre-record your contributions to a meeting, which are played on a tablet that serves as a proxy for you during the meeting. Reactions and responses in the meeting are also captured in video to give you feedback of what happened at the meeting. A working prototype of TTP was deployed and studied within four developer teams in their daily stand-up meetings. The study found that the affordances of video helped integrate the time traveler into the social context of the meeting, although the current prototype was better at enabling the time traveler to contribute to the meeting than it was in conveying the meeting experience back to the time traveler.

Video threads: asynchronous video sharing for temporally distributed teams

Work teams are often geographically distributed, and in some cases, experience large time-zone differences with no overlap in working hours. We explored the use of asynchronous video in temporally distributed teams. We developed VideoThreads, which provides a novel thread-based visualization of video messages. Based on a deployment to four teams, we offer design recommendations and insights about the benefits of asynchronous video sharing.

VideoPal: Exploring Asynchronous Video-Messaging to Enable Cross-Cultural Friendships

Pen pal programs for connecting students from around the world through letter writing have been popular for generations. However, traditional technologies have several limitations in supporting pen pal activities. In this study, we explored the potential of video-based asynchronous messaging in supporting the development of children’s cross-cultural friendships. This paper presents the results of a 2-month study of 30 children from the USA and Greece, exploring their uses of, and experiences with, email and an asynchronous video-based messaging tool we developed called VideoPal. The results from this work highlight the important benefits video provides compared to its text counterpart - email. We conclude with a discussion of the key factors that video enables to benefit the development of children’s long-distance friendships.