Bill Tomlinson

Who are the crowdworkers?: shifting demographics in mechanical turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing system in which tasks are distributed to a population of thousands of anonymous workers for completion. This system is increasingly popular with researchers and developers. Here we extend previous studies of the demographics and usage behaviors of MTurk workers. We describe how the worker population has changed over time, shifting from a primarily moderate-income, U.S.-based workforce towards an increasingly international group with a significant population of young, well-educated Indian workers. This change in population points to how workers may treat Turking as a full-time job, which they rely on to make ends meet.

Expressive autonomous cinematography for interactive virtual environments

We have created an automatic cinematography system for interactive virtual environments. This system controls a virtual camera and fights in a three-dimensional virtual world inhabited by a group of autonomous and user-controlled characters. By dynamically changing the camera and the fights, our system facilitates the interaction of human participants with this world and displays the emotional content of the digital scene. Building on the tradition of cinema, modern video games and autonomous behavior systems, we have constructed this cinematography system with an ethologically-inspired structure of sensors, emotions, motivations, and action-selection mechanisms. Our system breaks shots into elements, such as which actors the camera should focus on or the angle it should use to watch them. Hierarchically arranged cross-exclusion groups mediate between the various options, arriving at the best shot at each moment in time. Our cinematography system uses the same approach that we use for our virtual actors. This eases the crossover of information between them, and ultimately leads to a richer and more unified installation. As digital visualizations grow more complex, cinematography must keep pace with the new breeds of characters and scenarios. A behavior-based autonomous cinematography system is an effective tool in the creation of interesting virtual worlds. Our work takes first steps toward a future of interactive, emotional cinematography.

Exploring the role of the reader in the activity of blogging

Within the last decade, blogs have become an important element of popular culture, mass media, and the daily lives of countless Internet users. Despite the mediums interactive nature, most research on blogs focuses on either the blog itself or the blogger, rarely if at all focusing on the readers impact. In order to gain a better understanding of the social practice of blogging, we must take into account the role, contributions, and significance of the reader. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of blog readers, including common blog reading practices, some of the dimensions along which reading practices vary, relationships between identity presentation and perception, the interpretation of temporality, and the ways in which readers feel that they are a part of the blogs they read. It also describes similarities to, and discrepancies with, previous work, and suggests a number of directions and implications for future work on blogging.

Collapse informatics: augmenting the sustainability & ICT4D discourse in HCI

Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent collapse is far from certain, it is prudent to consider now how to develop sociotechnical systems for use in these scenarios. We introduce the notion of collapse informatics---the study, design, and development of sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity---as a complement to ICT4D and mitigation-oriented sustainable HCI. We draw on a variety of literatures to offer a set of relevant concepts and articulate the relationships among them to orient and evaluate collapse informatics work. Observing that collapse informatics poses a unique class of cross-cultural design problems, we sketch the design space of collapse informatics and provide a variety of example projects. We explore points of connection and distinction between collapse informatics and sustainable HCI, ICT4D, and crisis informatics. Finally, we discuss next steps and comment on the potential value of collapse informatics work even in the event that collapse never occurs.

Green tracker: a tool for estimating the energy consumption of software

The energy consumption of computers has become an important environmental issue. This paper describes the development of Green Tracker, a tool that estimates the energy consumption of software in order to help concerned users make informed decisions about the software they use. We present preliminary results gathered from this systems initial usage. Ultimately the information gathered from this tool will be used to raise awareness and help make the energy consumption of software a more central concern among software developers.

Collapse informatics and practice: Theory, method, and design

What happens if efforts to achieve sustainability fail? Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent collapse is far from certain, it is prudent to consider now how to develop sociotechnical systems for use in these scenarios. We introduce the notion of collapse informatics—the study, design, and development of sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity. We sketch the design space of collapse informatics and a variety of example projects. We ask how notions of practice—theorized as collective activity in the “here and now”—can shift to the future since collapse has yet to occur.

Bloggers and Readers Blogging Together: Collaborative Co-creation of Political Blogs

A significant amount of research has focused on blogs, bloggers, and blogging. However, relatively little work has examined blog readers, their interactions with bloggers, or their impact on blogging. This paper presents a qualitative study focusing specifically on readers of political blogs to develop a better understanding of readers’ interactions with blogs and bloggers. This is the first such study to examine the same blogging activity from both readers’ and bloggers’ perspectives. Readers’ significance and contributions to blogs are examined through a number of themes, including: community membership and participation; the relationship between political ideology, reading habits, and political participation; and differences and similarities between mainstream media (MSM) and blogs. Based on these analyses, this paper argues that blogging is not only a social activity, but is a collaborative process of co-creation in which both bloggers and readers engage. Implications of this finding contribute to the study and understanding of reader participation, to the design of technologies for bloggers and blog readers, and to the development of theoretical understandings of social media.

PersonalSoundtrack: context-aware playlists that adapt to user pace

This paper describes a mobile music player, PersonalSoundtrack, that makes real-time choices of music based on user pace. Standard playlists are non-interactive streams of previously chosen music, insensitive to user context and requiring explicit user input to find suitable songs. The context-aware mobile music player described here works with its owners library to select music in real-time based on a taxonomy of attributes and contextual information derived from an accelerometer connected wirelessly to a laptop carried under the arm. We are in the process of evaluating this prototype with 25 users who will compare the systems context-sensitive playlist to random shuffle. On the basis of user feedback and analysis, a hand-held device will be implemented for testing in less constrained mobile scenarios. PersonalSoundtrack allows users to experience their music with both mind and body, providing a unique embodied experience of their personal music library. In mobile environments where attention is a limited resource, users can spend less time deciding what music to enjoy and more time enjoying it.

AlphaWolf: Social Learning, Emotion and Development in Autonomous Virtual Agents

We present research in synthetic social behavior for interactive virtual characters. We describe a model from the natural world, the gray wolf (Canis lupus), and the social behavior exhibited by packs of wolves, to use as the target for an interactive installation entitled AlphaWolf, which was shown at SIGGRAPH 2001. We offer a computational model that captures a subset of the social behavior of wild wolves, involving models of learning, emotion and development. There is a range of real-world applications of synthetic social behavior, from short-term possibilities such as autonomous characters for computer games, to long-term applications such as computer interfaces that can interact more appropriately with humans by utilizing human social abilities. Our research offers initial steps toward computational systems with social behavior, in hope of making interactions with them more functional and more inherently rewarding.

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.