Diane J. Schiano

Why we blog

Bloggers are driven to document their lives, provide commentary and opinions, express deeply felt emotions, articulate ideas through writing, and form and maintain community forums.

Activity-based serendipitous recommendations with the Magitti mobile leisure guide

This paper presents a context-aware mobile recommender system, codenamed Magitti. Magitti is unique in that it infers user activity from context and patterns of user behavior and, without its user having to issue a query, automatically generates recommendations for content matching. Extensive field studies of leisure time practices in an urban setting (Tokyo) motivated the idea, shaped the details of its design and provided data describing typical behavior patterns. The paper describes the fieldwork, user interface, system components and functionality, and an evaluation of the Magitti prototype.

Perceptual and Conceptual Factors in Distortions in Memory for Graphs and Maps

We propose that representations of visual stimuli are a consequence of both perceptual and conceptual factors that may be revealed in systematic errors in memory. Three experiments demonstrated increased (horizontal or vertical) symmetry in perception and memory of nearly symmetric curves in graphs and rivers in maps. Next, a conceptual factor, an accompanying description biasing toward symmetry or asymmetry, also distorted memory in the expected direction for the symmetric descriptions. In the two final experiments, we investigated conceptual factors in selection of a frame of reference. Subjects remembered lines in graphs, but not in maps, as closer to the imaginary 45 degrees line. Combined with earlier research, this suggests that the reference frame for map lines is the canonical axes and for graph lines, the imaginary 45 degrees line.

The first noble truth of CyberSpace: people are people (even when they MOO)

This paper presents major findings Corn a large research project designed to carefully characterize what “life in LambdaMOO” (a classic social MUD) is lie for many of its members. A “convergent methodologies” approach embracing qualitative and quantitative, subjective and objective procedures was used. A rich, extensive database was produced, Corn which robust patterns could emerge, be considered in context and assessed with some confidence. Results are discussed in terms of four broad categories of interest: 1) users and use, 2) identity 3) sociality and 4) spatiality. These data should help inform the discourse on, and design of, online communities in the future.

With a little help from my friends: examining the impact of social annotations in sensemaking tasks

In prior work we reported on the design of a social annotation system, SparTag.us, for use in sensemaking activities such as work-group reading and report writing. Previous studies of note-taking systems have demonstrated behavioral differences in social annotation practices, but are not clear in the actual performance gains provided by social features. This paper presents a laboratory study aimed at evaluating the learning effect of social features in SparTag.us. We found significant learning gains, and consider implications for design and for understanding the underlying mechanisms in play when people use social annotation systems.

Face to interface: facial affect in (hu)man and machine

Facial expression of emotion (or “facial affect”) is rapidly becoming an area of intense interest in the computer science and interaction design communities. Ironically, this interest comes at a time when the classic findings on perception of human facial affect are being challenged in the psychological research literature, largely on methodological grounds. This paper presents two studies on perception of facial affect. Experiment 1 provides new data on the recognition of human facial expressions, using experimental methods and analyses designed to systematically address the criticisms and help resolve this controversy. Experiment 2 is a user study on affect in a prototype robot face; the results are compared to the human data of Experiment 1. Together they provide a demonstration of how basic and more applied research can mutually contribute to this rapidly developing field.

Lessons from LambdaMOO: A Social, Text-Based Virtual Environment

The growing use of the Internet to provide a sense of personal connection and community is converging with the development of shared virtual spaces. In particular, the strong popularity of Multi-User Domains (MUDs), text-based networked virtual worlds, suggests the high premium many people place on social interactivity in their virtual environments. The project described in this paper was designed to broadly characterize what life in LambdaMOOa classic, social, text-based MUDis like for many of its members. A comprehensive, data-driven approach was used to explore topics including user and use characteristics, identity and gender role-play, sociality, and spatiality. A rich database of results was gathered. The findings demonstrate a striking and increasingly strong focus on social interaction, even at the expense of spatial navigation. Moreover, contrary to expectations, small, private, even exclusive social interactions were the rule, not the exception. In addition, provocative claims regarding the prevalence of identity and gender role-play were shown not to hold, at least for most people, in this classic social MUD. Finally, some intriguing results regarding the sense of place and space in a purely text-based virtual environment are presented. Taken together, these data shed light on robust psychological and social patterns observed in a large-scale, social virtual world. In doing so, they can help inform the discourse on, and design of, related systems in the future.

Structure and strategy in encoding simplified graphs

Tversky and Schiano (1989) found a systematic bias toward the 45° line in memory for the slopes of identical lines when embedded in graphs, but not in maps, suggesting the use of a cognitive reference frame specifically for encoding meaningful graphs. The present experiments explore this issue further using the linear configurations alone as stimuli. Experimental and 2 demonstrate that perception and immediate memory for the slope of a test line within orthogonal “axes” are predictable from purely structural considerations. In Experiments 3 and 4, subjects were instructed to use a diagonal-reference strategy in viewing the stimuli, which were described as “graphs” only in Experiment 3. Results for both studies showed the diagonal bias previously found only for graphs. This pattern provides converging evidence for the diagonal as a cognitive reference frame in encoding linear graphs, and demonstrates that even in highly simplified displays, strategic factors can produce encoding biases not predictable solely from stimulus structure alone.

If you build it they might stay: retention mechanisms in World of Warcraft

We analyze mechanisms of player retention and commitment in massively multiplayer online games. Our ground assumptions on player retention are based on a marketing model of customer retention and commitment. To measure the influence of gameplay, in-game sociality, and real-life status on player commitment, we use the following metrics: weekly play time, stop rate and number of years respondents have been playing the game. The cross-cultural sample is composed of 2865 World of Warcraft players from North-America, Europe, Taiwan, and Hong-Kong who completed an online questionnaire. We differentiate players in terms of demographic categories including age, region, gender and marital status.

Three-Dimensional Bilateral Symmetry Bias in Judgments of Figural Identity and Orientation

The two experiments reported explored a bias toward symmetry in judging identity and orientation of indeterminate two-dimensional shapes Subjects viewed symmetric and asymmetric filled, random polygons and described “what each figure looks like” and its orientation Viewers almost universally interpreted the shapes as silhouettes of bilaterally symmetric three-dimensional (3-D) objects This assumption of 3-D symmetry tended to constrain perceived vantage of the identified objects such that symmetric shapes were interpreted as straight-on views, and asymmetric shapes as profile or oblique views Because most salient objects in the world are bilaterally symmetric, these findings are consistent with the view that assuming 3-D symmetry can be a robust heuristic for constraining orientation when identifying objects from indeterminate patterns