Eamonn O'Neill

Instrumenting the city: developing methods for observing and understanding the digital cityscape

We approach the design of ubiquitous computing systems in the urban environment as integral to urban design. To understand the city as a system encompassing physical and digital forms and their relationships with peoples behaviours, we are developing, applying and refining methods of observing, recording, modelling and analysing the city, physically, digitally and socially. We draw on established methods used in the space syntax approach to urban design. Here we describe how we have combined scanning for discoverable Bluetooth devices with two such methods, gatecounts and static snapshots. We report our experiences in developing, field testing and refining these augmented methods. We present initial findings on the Bluetooth landscape in a city in terms of patterns of Bluetooth presence and Bluetooth naming practices.

Feasibility of structural network clustering for group-based privacy control in social networks

Users of social networking sites often want to manage the sharing of information and content with different groups of people based on their differing relationships. However, grouping contacts places a significant configuration burden on the user. Automated approaches to grouping may have the potential to reduce this burden, however, their use remains largely untested. We investigate peoples rationales when grouping their contacts for the purpose of controlling their privacy, finding six criteria that they commonly considered. We assess an automated approach to grouping, based on a network clustering algorithm, whose performance may be analogous to the humans use of some of these criteria. We find that the similarity between the groups created by people and those created by the algorithm is correlated with the modularity of their network. We also demonstrate that the particular clustering algorithm, SCAN, which detects hubs and outliers within a network can be beneficial for identifying contacts who are hard to group or for whom privacy preferences are inconsistent with the rest of their group.

Special Section on Touching the 3rd Dimension: 3D selection with freehand gesture

The use of 3D computer graphics is important in a very wide range of applications. However, user interaction with 3D applications is still challenging and often does not lend itself to established techniques that have been developed primarily for 2D desktop interaction. Meanwhile, 3D user interfaces that rely on tracking hand-held devices or fiducial markers attached to the user are cumbersome or entirely inappropriate in some situations. These challenges may be addressed by refining and building on the increasing use of freehand gestural input, i.e. without markers or hand-held devices, to extend the fluidity and immediacy of todays 2D touch-based interactions. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of freehand gestural 3D interaction, and report a set of 3 related evaluation studies focused on the fundamental user interface task of object selection. We found that interaction design requiring a high accuracy single action are not appropriate for freehand gestural selection, while separating it into several connected low demand operations could be a potential solution; that our Reach technique is accurate and potentially useful for option selection tasks with freehand gesture; and that strong directional effects influence performance and usability of both 2D and 3D option selection. We propose guidelines for designers of 3D freehand gestural interaction based on our evaluation results.

Brief encounters: Sensing, modeling and visualizing urban mobility and copresence networks

Moving human-computer interaction off the desktop and into our cities requires new approaches to understanding people and technologies in the built environment. We approach the city as a system, with human, physical and digital components and behaviours. In creating effective and usable urban pervasive computing systems, we need to take into account the patterns of movement and encounter amongst people, locations, and mobile and fixed devices in the city. Advances in mobile and wireless communications have enabled us to detect and record the presence and movement of devices through cities. This article makes a number of methodological and empirical contributions. We present a toolkit of algorithms and visualization techniques that we have developed to model and make sense of spatial and temporal patterns of mobility, presence, and encounter. Applying this toolkit, we provide an analysis of urban Bluetooth data based on a longitudinal dataset containing millions of records associated with more than 70000 unique devices in the city of Bath, UK. Through a novel application of established complex network analysis techniques, we demonstrate a significant finding on the relationship between temporal factors and network structure. Finally, we suggest how our understanding and exploitation of these data may begin to inform the design and use of urban pervasive systems.Many complex human and natural phenomena can usefully be represented as networks describing the relationships between individuals 1,2,3,4 . While these relationships are typically intermittent, previous research has used network representations that aggregate the relationships at discrete intervals 5 . However, such an aggregation discards important temporal information, thus inhibiting our understanding of the network’s dynamic behaviour and evolution. We have recorded patterns of human urban encounter using Bluetooth technology (Figure 1) thus retaining the temporal properties of this network. Here we show how this temporal information influences the structural properties of the network. We show that the temporal properties of human urban encounter are scale-free, leading to an overwhelming proportion of brief encounters between individuals. While previous research has shown preferential attachment to result in scale-free connectivity in aggregated network data 11 , we found that scale-free connectivity results from the temporal properties of the network. In addition, we show that brief encounters act as weak social ties 6,7 in the diffusion of non-expiring information, yet persistent encounters provide the means for sustaining timeexpiring information through a network.

Auditory icon and earcon mobile service notifications: intuitiveness, learnability, memorability and preference

With an ever increasing number of mobile services, meaningful audio notifications could effectively inform users of the incoming services while minimising undesired and intrusive interruptions. Therefore, careful design of mobile service notification is needed. In this paper we evaluate two types of audio (auditory icons and earcons) as mobile service notifications, by comparing them on 4 measures: intuitiveness, learnability, memorability and user preference. A 4-stage longitudinal evaluation involving two lab experiments, a field study and a web-based experiment indicated that auditory icons performed significantly better in all measures. Implications for mobile audio notification design are presented.

Designing Urban Pervasive Systems

A conceptual framework describes three aspects of designing and analyzing pervasive systems in an urban environment. A systematic approach to designing the urban environment as an integrated system of architecture and pervasive technologies requires drawing on knowledge, theory, and methods from the disciplines of architecture and computer science. Key to this interdisciplinary integration is the concept of space, by which we mean not only physical location or volume but also the social protocols, conventions, and values attached to a particular space

Modelling context: An Activity Theory Approach

In this paper, we review different context classification systems that have been used to define elements of context. Although existing classification systems cover various types of context, in the development of context aware applications, only a few types of context have been used. In this work, we aim to build a context classification model based on Activity Theory that provides a basis both for dialogue amongst context awareness researchers and for the implementation of a context awareness architecture.

Understanding and measuring the urban pervasive infrastructure

The increasing popularity of mobile computing devices has allowed for new research and application areas. Specifically, urban areas exhibit an elevated concentration of such devices enabling potential ad-hoc co-operation and sharing of resources among citizens. Here, we argue that people, architecture and technology together provide the infrastructure for these applications and an understanding of this infrastructure is important for effective design and development. We focus on describing the metrics for describing this infrastructure and elaborate on a set of observation, analysis and simulation methods for capturing, deriving and utilising those metrics.

Building common ground for face to face interactions by sharing mobile device context

We describe an application used to share context and build common ground between nearby users. Our application runs on mobile devices and allows users securely to exchange the contents of their address books. This exchange reveals only which entries are common to the two users. We explore the use of our application using both Bluetooth and NFC as an underlying technology. Finally, we present the results of a small user study we have conducted.

Easing the wait in the emergency room: building a theory of public information systems

In this paper we discuss a real world problem encountered during recent fieldwork: that of providing information in public settings when the information has both public and private components. We draw on our ethnographic studies in the waiting area of a busy hospital Emergency department. Despite evidence that lack of information can lead to stress, problem behaviours and poor levels of satisfaction with treatment, little information was made available to patients. We review the types of information needed and propose how the theoretical concepts of public, social and private information spheres relate to public spaces such as the Emergency department waiting area. We argue how the further theoretical concept of interaction spaces may be used in conjunction with these information spheres to inform interaction design for public settings.