Benjamin R. Cowan

Take it personally: personal accountability and energy consumption in domestic households

We explore the overlooked area of personal energy consumption in the context of a shared domestic household. We discuss the potential benefits of such an approach. We report the results of a lab study and field trial with four households using a personal energy monitoring system. We describe the results of the studies and discuss how such previously hidden information might raise awareness of individual energy consumption and the benefits and problems this entails.

Interaction science SIG: overcoming challenges

Over the past 30 years science has played a key role in shaping and advancing research in Human-Computer Interaction. Informed in part by methods, theories and findings from the behavioral sciences and from computer science, scientific contributions to HCI have provided explanations of how and why people interact through and with technology. We argue that the contribution of science to HCI could be enhanced if key challenges are met. During a SIG meeting we will discuss the challenges and potential responses and set an agenda for the coming years.

What can i help you with?: infrequent users' experiences of intelligent personal assistants

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are widely available on devices such as smartphones. However, most people do not use them regularly. Previous research has studied the experiences of frequent IPA users. Using qualitative methods we explore the experience of infrequent users: people who have tried IPAs, but choose not to use them regularly. Unsurprisingly infrequent users share some of the experiences of frequent users, e.g. frustration at limitations on fully hands-free interaction. Significant points of contrast and previously unidentified concerns also emerge. Cultural norms and social embarrassment take on added significance for infrequent users. Humanness of IPAs sparked comparisons with human assistants, juxtaposing their limitations. Most importantly, significant concerns emerged around privacy, monetization, data permanency and transparency. Drawing on these findings we discuss key challenges, including: designing for interruptability; reconsideration of the human metaphor; issues of trust and data ownership. Addressing these challenges may lead to more widespread IPA use.

The impact of an embodied agent's emotional expressions over multiple interactions

The impact of simulated embodied agent emotion has been explored in short-term studies, but no work to date has examined its impact in longer interactions that involve multiple interactions with agents. We present an embodied agent (Rachael) that simulates a health professional and attempts to help people improve their fruit and vegetable consumption. Emotional and unemotional versions of the agent were developed to examine how user perceptions of the agent changed over an intervention period of 49 days and in turn how this influenced fruit and vegetable consumption. Results found that whilst participants consumed more daily portions of fruit and vegetables over the intervention period and reduced their consumption gains post-intervention, there was no significant difference in consumption gains over time between those who interacted with the emotional or unemotional agents. Qualitative feedback, however, highlighted a strong preference for the emotional agent. A novelty effect was also observed where the agents were perceived more positively initially and less so over time.

Designing Speech, Acoustic and Multimodal Interactions

Traditional interfaces are continuously being replaced by mobile, wearable, or pervasive interfaces. Yet when it comes to the input and output modalities enabling our interactions, we have yet to fully embrace some of the most natural forms of communication and information processing that humans possess: speech, language, gestures, thoughts. Very little HCI attention has been dedicated to designing and developing spoken language, acoustic-based, or multimodal interaction techniques, especially for mobile and wearable devices. In addition to the enormous, recent engineering progress in processing such modalities, there is now sufficient evidence that many real-life applications do not require 100% accuracy of processing multimodal input to be useful, particularly if such modalities complement each other. This multidisciplinary, one-day workshop will bring together interaction designers, usability researchers, and general HCI practitioners to analyze the opportunities and directions to take in designing more natural interactions especially with mobile and wearable devices, and to look at how we can leverage recent advances in speech, acoustic, and multimodal processing.

Exploring the feasibility of subliminal priming on smartphones

Subliminal priming has the potential to influence peoples attitudes and behaviour, making them prefer certain choices over others. Yet little research has explored its feasibility on smartphones, even though the global popularity and increasing use of smartphones has spurred interest in mobile behaviour change interventions. This paper addresses technical, ethical and design issues in delivering mobile subliminal priming. We present three explorations of the technique: a technical feasibility study, and two participant studies. A pilot study (n=34) explored subliminal goal priming in-the-wild over 1 week, while a semi-controlled study (n=101) explored the immediate effect of subliminal priming on 3 different types of stimuli. We found that although subliminal priming is technically possible on smartphones, there is limited evidence of impact on changes in how much stimuli are preferred by users, with inconsistent effects across stimuli types. We discuss the implications of our results and directions for future research.

Measuring Anxiety Towards Wiki Editing: Investigating the Dimensionality of the Wiki Anxiety Inventory-Editing

General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Although wikis are common in both the workplace and in Higher Education, little research has studied the wiki user experience. Recent literature highlights that users may be anxious about editing wiki content; yet in most of this research this anxiety has not been measured quantitatively. Although computer anxiety metrics exist to measure anxiety towards technology, they lack specificity and relevance to the wiki editing context. This paper reports two studies used to research the validity and reliability of the wiki anxiety inventory-editing (WAI-E), an inventory developed and used to measure anxiety in wiki editing (Study 1) and to explore the factor structure of the WAI-E and the validity and reliability of the resulting subscales (Study 2). Study 1 shows that the WAI-E, when used as a uni-dimensional structure, shows high reliability and validity. The principal component analysis conducted in Study 2 showed that the measure converged on a three-factor solution with factors measuring positive affect, editability anxiety and contribution judgement anxiety. The subscales showed high reliability and validity. It therefore seems that although the validity and reliability of using the WAI-E as a uni-dimensional construct are high, the use of the metric as such hides the true structure and nuances of the concept of wiki anxiety. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS • The paper presents a self-report inventory (wiki anxiety inventory-editing, WAI-E) to measure anxiety in wiki editing. • The uni-dimensional WAI-E has good reliability and validity. • Principal component analysis (PCA) highlights three factors: positive affect, editability anxiety and contribution judgement anxiety. • These factors also show high reliability and validity. • PCA shows that use of uni-dimensional WAI-E masks strong factor structure of WAI-E. The benefits of using wikis as collaborative tools for knowledge sharing and co-creation such as their facilitation of democratic knowledge construction (Glaser, 2004), their dynamic nature leading to …

Touching annotations: A visual metaphor for navigation of annotation in digital documents

Direct touch manipulation interactions with technology are now commonplace and significant interest is building around their use in the culture and heritage domain. Such interactions can give people the opportunity to explore materials and artefacts in ways that would otherwise be unavailable. These are often heavily annotated and can be linked to a large array of related digital content, thus enriching the experience for the user. Research has addressed issues of how to present digital documents and their related annotations but at present it is unclear what the optimal interaction approach to navigating these annotations in a touch display context might be. In this paper we investigate the role of two alternative approaches to support the navigation of annotations in digitised documents in the context of a touch interface. Through a control study we demonstrate that, whilst the navigation paradigm displays a significant interaction with the type of annotations task performed, there is no discernible advantage of using a natural visual metaphor for annotation in this context. This suggests that design of digital document annotation navigation tools should account for the context and navigation tasks being considered.

Choosing your moment: interruptions in multimedia annotation

In a cooperative mixed-initiative system, timely and effective dialogue between the system and user is important to ensure that both sides work towards producing the most effective results, and this is affected by how disruptive any interruptions are as the user completes their primary task. A disruptive interaction means the user may become irritated with the system, or might take longer to deal with the interruption and provide information that the system needs to continue. Disruption is influenced both by the nature of the interaction and when it takes place in the context of the users progress through their main task. We describe an experiment based on a prototype cooperative video annotation system designed to explore the impact of interruptions, in the form of questions posed by the system that the user must address. Our findings demonstrate a preference towards questions presented in context with the content of the video, rather than at the natural opportunities presented by transitions in the video. This differs from previous research which concentrates on interruptions in the form of notifications.

Chunks in Multiparty Conversation—Building Blocks for Extended Social Talk

Building applications which can form a longer term social bond with a user or engage with a group of users calls for knowledge of how longer conversations work. This paper describes preliminary explorations of the structure of long (c. one hour) multiparty casual conversations, focusing on a binary distinction between two types of interaction phases—chat and chunk. A collection of long form conversations which provide the data for our explorations is described. The main result is that chat and chunk segments show differences in the distribution of their duration.