David W. McDonald

Activity sensing in the wild: a field trial of ubifit garden

Recent advances in small inexpensive sensors, low-power processing, and activity modeling have enabled applications that use on-body sensing and machine learning to infer peoples activities throughout everyday life. To address the growing rate of sedentary lifestyles, we have developed a system, UbiFit Garden, which uses these technologies and a personal, mobile display to encourage physical activity. We conducted a 3-week field trial in which 12 participants used the system and report findings focusing on their experiences with the sensing and activity inference. We discuss key implications for systems that use on-body sensing and activity inference to encourage physical activity.

PHOAKS: a system for sharing recommendations

The feasibility of automatic recognition of recommendations is supported by empirical results. First, Usenet messages are a significant source of recommendations of Web resources: 23% of Usenet messages mention Web resources, and ?>0% of these mentions are recommendations. Second, recommendation instances can be machine-recognized with nearly 90% accuracy. Third, some resources are recommended by more than one person. These multiconfirmed recommendations appear to be significant resources for the relevant community. Finally, the number of distinct recommenders of a resource is a tallying, and redistributing recom-

Expertise recommender: a flexible recommendation system and architecture

Locating the expertise necessary to solve difficult problems is a nuanced social and collaborative problem. In organizations, some people assist others in locating expertise by making referrals. People who make referrals fill key organizational roles that have been identified by CSCW and affiliated research. Expertise locating systems are not designed to replace people who fill these key organizational roles. Instead, expertise locating systems attempt to decrease workload and support people who have no other options. Recommendation systems are collaborative software that can be applied to expertise locating. This work describes a general recommendation architecture that is grounded in a field study of expertise locating. Our expertise recommendation system details the work necessary to fit expertise recommendation to a work setting. The architecture and implementation begin to tease apart the technical aspects of providing good recommendations from social and collaborative concerns.

Theory-driven design strategies for technologies that support behavior change in everyday life

In this paper, we propose design strategies for persuasive technologies that help people who want to change their everyday behaviors. Our strategies use theory and prior work to substantially extend a set of existing design goals. Our extensions specifically account for social characteristics and other tactics that should be supported by persuasive technologies that target long-term discretionary use throughout everyday life. We used these strategies to design and build a system that encourages people to lead a physically active lifestyle. Results from two field studies of the system - a three-week trial and a three-month experiment - have shown that the system was successful at helping people maintain a more physically active lifestyle and validate the usefulness of the strategies.

Flowers or a robot army?: encouraging awareness & activity with personal, mobile displays

Personal, mobile displays, such as those on mobile phones, are ubiquitous, yet for the most part, underutilized. We present results from a field experiment that investigated the effectiveness of these displays as a means for improving awareness of daily life (in our case, self-monitoring of physical activity). Twenty-eight participants in three experimental conditions used our UbiFit system for a period of three months in their day-to-day lives over the winter holiday season. Our results show, for example, that participants who had an awareness display were able to maintain their physical activity level (even during the holidays), while the level of physical activity for participants who did not have an awareness display dropped significantly. We discuss our results and their general implications for the use of everyday mobile devices as awareness displays.

Answer Garden 2: merging organizational memory with collaborative help

This research examines a collaborative solution to a common problem, that of providing help to distributed users. The Answer Garden 2 system provides a secondgeneration architecture for organizational and community memory applications. After describing the need for Answer Garden 2’s functionality, we describe the architecture of the system and two underlying systems, the Cafe ConstructionKit and Collaborative Refinery. We also present detailed descriptions of the collaborative help and collaborative refining facilities in the Answer Garden 2 system.

Just talk to me: a field study of expertise location

Everyday, people in organizations must solve their problems to get their work accomplished. To do so, they often must find others with knowledge and information. Systems that assist users with finding such expertise are increasingly interesting to organizations and scientific communities. But, as we begin to design and construct such systems, it is important to determine what we are attempting to augment. Accordingly, we conducted a five-month field study of a medium-sized software firm. We found the participants use complex, iterative behaviors to minimize the number of possible expertise sources, while at the same time, provide a high possibility of garnering the necessary expertise. We briefly consider the design implications of the identification, selection, and escalation behaviors found during our field study.

Social matching: A framework and research agenda

Social matching systems bring people together in both physical and online spaces. They have the potential to increase social interaction and foster collaboration. However, social matching systems lack a clear intellectual foundation: the nature of the design space, the key research challenges, and the roster of appropriate methods are all ill-defined. This article begins to remedy the situation. It clarifies the scope of social matching systems by distinguishing them from other recommender systems and related systems and techniques. It identifies a set of issues that characterize the design space of social matching systems and shows how existing systems explore different points within the design space. It also reviews selected social science results that can provide input into system design. Most important, the article presents a research agenda organized around a set of claims. The claims embody our understanding of what issues are most important to investigate, our beliefs about what is most likely to be true, and our suggestions of specific research directions to pursue.

Incorporating ideas from computer-supported cooperative work

Many information systems have failed when deployed into complex health-care settings. We believe that one cause of these failures is the difficulty in systematically accounting for the collaborative and exception-filled nature of medical work. In this methodological review paper, we highlight research from the field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) that could help biomedical informaticists recognize and design around the kinds of challenges that lead to unanticipated breakdowns and eventual abandonment of their systems. The field of CSCW studies how people collaborate with each other and the role that technology plays in this collaboration for a wide variety of organizational settings. Thus, biomedical informaticists could benefit from the lessons learned by CSCW researchers. In this paper, we provide a focused review of CSCW methods and ideas-we review aspects of the field that could be applied to improve the design and deployment of medical information systems. To make our discussion concrete, we use electronic medical record systems as an example medical information system, and present three specific principles from CSCW: accounting for incentive structures, understanding workflow, and incorporating awareness.

Articulations of wikiwork: uncovering valued work in wikipedia through barnstars

Successful online communities have complex cooperative arrangements, articulations of work, and integration practices. They require technical infrastructure to support a broad division of labor. Yet the research literature lacks empirical studies that detail which types of work are valued by participants in an online community. A content analysis of Wikipedia barnstars -- personalized tokens of appreciation given to participants -- reveals a wide range of valued work extending far beyond simple editing to include social support, administrative actions, and types of articulation work. Our analysis develops a theoretical lens for understanding how wiki software supports the creation of articulations of work. We give implications of our results for communities engaged in large-scale collaborations.