Jaime Montemayor

Designing StoryRooms: interactive storytelling spaces for children

Costly props, complicated authoring technologies, and limited access to space are among the many reasons why children can rarely enjoy the experience of authoring room-sized interactive stories. Typically in these kinds of environments, children are restricted to being story participants, rather than story authors. Therefore, we have begun the development of StoryRooms, room-sized immersive storytelling urrent technology implementation and example StoryRooms.

Designing PETS: a personal electronic teller of stories

We have begun the development of a new robotic pet that cansupport children in the storytelling process. Children can buildtheir own pet by snapping together the modular animal parts of thePETS robot. After their pet is built, children can tellstories using the My Pets software. These stories canthen be acted out by their robotic pet. This video paper describesthe motivation for this research and the design process of ourintergenerational design team in building the first PETSprototypes. We will discuss our progress to date and our focus forthe future.

Tools for children to create physical interactive storyrooms

Over the past few years, researchers have been exploringpossibilities for ways in which embedded technologies can enrichchildrens storytelling experiences. In this article we present ourresearch on physical interactive storytelling environments from achilds perspective. We present the system architecture as well as aformative study of the technologys use with 18 children, ages 5-6.We discuss the challenges and opportunities for kindergartenchildren to become creators of their own physical storytellinginteractions.

Supporting insight-based information exploration in intelligence analysis

Capturing the exploratory search process can help represent analytical insight.

Therapeutic play with a storytelling robot

We are developing a prototype storytelling robot for use with children in rehabilitation. Children can remotely control a furry robot by using a variety of body sensors adapted to their disability or rehabilitation goal. We believe this robot can motivate children and help them reach their therapy goals through therapeutic play, either by exercising muscles or joints (e.g. for physically challenged children) or by reflecting on the stories (e.g. for children with developmental disabilities). To develop this technology we use an innovative design methodology involving children as design partners.

Physical programming: software you can touch

Tangible computer-human interfaces is an important and active research area. But, few people are working on ways to easily program these systems. My work addresses this need by developing a physical programming language. This research comes out of our work in developing tools for children to build room-sized storytelling environments. In this extended abstract, I will describe the motivation for my research, my proposed work and design methods.

Interactive poster - SocialRank: An ego- and time-centric workflow for relationship identification

From instant messaging and email to wikis and blogs, millions of individuals are generating content that reflects their relationships with others in the world, both online and offline. Since communication artifacts are recordings of life events, we can gain insights into the social attributes and structures of the people within this communication history. In this paper, we describe SocialRank, an ego- and time-centric workflow for identifying social relationships in an email corpus. This workflow includes four high-level tasks: discovery, validation, annotation and dissemination. SocialRank combines relationship ranking algorithms with timeline, social network diagram, and multidimensional scaling visualization techniques to support these tasks.

Social Relationship Identification: An Example of Social Query

Every moment, millions of people worldwide are communicating and sharing content online. We express ourselves online to enrich existing relationships and establish new relationships that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to develop offline. Such actions are reflected in a corresponding set of digital social artifacts, such as blog posts, emails and status updates. We are accustomed to thinking of collections of digital artifacts online as repositories of information. What if we are now searching collections of digital social artifacts that reflect peoples online relationships with one another and aspects of their lives? Are standard search methods sufficient? How do we want to query such data? We contend that general queries may have both informational and social components to them. We define social queries as queries about social attributes and behaviors that identify individuals, relationships or groups exhibiting such characteristics. To develop a deeper understanding of social query, we focus on the specific task of social relationship identification. In the context of two scenarios, we examine the challenges posed by the task, review an initial realization of social relationship identification and present a way forward to address the general task.

From Pets to Storyrooms

Working with children as our design partners, our intergenerational design team at the University of Maryland has been developing both new design methodologies and new storytelling technology for children. In this chapter, we focus on two results of our efforts: PETS, a robotic storyteller, and Storykit, a construction kit of low-tech and high-tech components for children to build physical interactive storytelling environments.