Elizabeth Bales

CitiSense: improving geospatial environmental assessment of air quality using a wireless personal exposure monitoring system

Environmental exposures are a critical component in the development of chronic conditions such as asthma and cancer. Yet, medical and public health practitioners typically must depend on sparse regional measurements of the environment that provide macro-scale summaries. Recent projects have begun to measure an individuals exposure to these factors, often utilizing body-worn sensors and mobile phones to visualize the data. Such data, collected from many individuals and analyzed across an entire geographic region, holds the potential to revolutionize the practice of public health. We present CitiSense, a participatory air quality sensing system that bridges the gap between personal sensing and regional measurement to provide micro-level detail at a regional scale. In a user study of 16 commuters using CitiSense, measurements were found to vary significantly from those provided by official regional pollution monitoring stations. Moreover, applying geostatistical kriging techniques to our data allows CitiSense to infer a regional map that contains considerably greater detail than official regional summaries. These results suggest that the cumulative impact of many individuals using personal sensing devices may have an important role to play in the future of environmental measurement for public health.

CoupleVIBE: mobile implicit communication to improve awareness for (long-distance) couples

Long-distance couples face considerable communication challenges in their relationships. Unlike collocated couples, long-distance couples lack awareness cues associated with physical proximity and must use technologies such as SMS or telephony to stay in sync. We posit that long-distance couples have needs that are not met by prevailing communication technologies, which require explicit action from the sender as well as the receiver. We built CoupleVIBE to explore the properties of an implicit messaging channel and observe how couples would use such a technology. CoupleVIBE is a mobile application that automatically pushes a users location-information to her partners mobile phone via vibrotactile cues. We present qualitative results of a four-week user study, studying how seven couples used CoupleVIBE. A key result is that CoupleVIBEs implicit communication modality operated as a foundation that helps keep couples in sync, with other modalities being brought into play when further interaction was needed.

Planning, apps, and the high-end smartphone: exploring the landscape of modern cross-device reaccess

The rapid growth of mobile devices has made it challenging for users to maintain a consistent digital history among all their personal devices. Even with a variety of cloud computing solutions, users continue to redo web searches and reaccess web content that they already interacted with on another device. This paper presents insights into the cross-device reaccess habits of 15 smart-phone users. We studied how they reaccessed content between their computer and smartphone through a combination of data logging, a screenshot-based diary study, and user interviews. From 1276 cross-device reaccess events we found that users reaccess content between their phone and computer with comparable frequency, and that users rarely planned ahead for their reaccess needs. Based on our findings, we present opportunities for building future mobile systems to support the unplanned activities and content reaccess needs of mobile users.

Citisense: mobile air quality sensing for individuals and communities

Individual and community health can be greatly impacted by poor air quality. Unfortunately air quality metrics are hard for individuals to obtain and are often not precise enough for people to make the inferences they need to construct positive personal health choices. Through the Citisense mobile air quality system we enable users to track their personal air quality exposure for discovery, self-reflection, and sharing within their local communities and online social networks.

Supporting a sense of connectedness: meaningful things in the lives of new university students

We report findings from interviews with new undergraduate students, in which they identified particular items as supporting a sense of connectedness with home. We characterize ways in which artifacts underpinned a sense of connection, including by conveying the character of the parental home, supporting a sense of continuity with it, and enabling a physical presence to be maintained there. We then consider how simple affordances offered by these artifacts, such as being able to move, position and sort them, enabled participants to reinforce the meanings that were associated with them. Such actions are normally taken for granted, but we describe how they are compromised for social media especially, due to functional limitations and questions of ownership. We highlight design opportunities for making the transition from home more gradual, and supporting the archiving and display of social media.

Exploring the diversity of families: designing technologies for the contemporary family life

In recent years, the HCI community has expanded its interest to include exploring the role of technology within the domestic domain; particularly in the context of families and technology. Numerous studies have fo-cused on mapping the challenges and opportunities faced in designing technologies that are appropriated to the needs of contemporary families. However, few re-search lines have focused on supporting families with diverse structures and situations (i.e. divorced, same-sex, dealing with death, work-related periodic separation and reunion). This workshop aims to bring together researchers, practitioners and designers who are interested in exploring the research space of family design and furthering our understanding of what it means to design technologies for diverse family structures. During the workshop we will readdress the meaning of a diverse family, the methods used to conduct family research as well as discuss design and evaluation techniques with a focus on user experience.

Best of Both Worlds: Opportunities for Technology in Cross-Cultural Parenting

Families are becoming more culturally heterogeneous due to a rise in intermarriage, geographic mobility, and access to a greater diversity of cultural perspectives online. Investigating the challenges of cross-cultural parenting can help us support this growing demographic, as well as better understand how families integrate and negotiate advice from diverse online and offline sources in making parenting decisions. We interviewed parents from 18 families to understand the practices they adopt to meet the challenges of cross-cultural parenting. We investigated how these families respond to conflicts while integrating diverse cultural views, as well as how they utilize the wealth of parenting resources available online in navigating these tasks. We identify five themes focused on how these families find and evaluate advice, connect with social support, resolve intra-family tensions, incorporate multicultural practices, and seek out diverse views. Based on our findings, we contribute three implications for design and translations of these implications to concrete technology ideas that aim to help families better integrate multiple cultures into everyday life.

Case study: faculty professional development workshops for innovation diffusion

Part of computer science education research focuses on the design of new technologies and techniques for improving educational experiences. However, for these systems and techniques to be truly impactful, their use must be disseminated to the larger instructor population. Single-instance workshops, where instructors are brought together to learn about a new technique or system so that they can possibly adopt it, are a common dissemination method. Unfortunately, rarely do we see reports regarding their effectiveness. In this case study, we report on two NSF-funded single-instance workshops designed to support adoption of the Ubiquitous Presenter (UP) active learning classroom presentation system. Though only 44% of workshop attendees used the system in their classrooms, 65% of those used the system repeatedly. Overall this impacted 1570 students. Additionally, 60% of our attendees used the active learning features of UP - a much higher usage rate than in the general UP user population. We reflect on the aspects of the workshops which seemed to promote, and hinder, instructor adoption and, finally, suggest some metrics for evaluating innovation dissemination workshops in general.

Supporting unplanned activities through cross-device interaction

People interact with numerous personal devices on a daily basis. Sharing content among these devices is often done depending on the device capabilities and context of use; following turn-by-turn directions is more appropriate when mobile. Although several solutions exist to share content among ones devices, these solutions rely on the user planning ahead for the data he may need on another device. In this paper, we describe a system that addresses the unplanned activities, by automatically extracting addresses and points of interest that users view in their web browser and making those readily available through an in-car interface.