Jason Wiese

I'm the mayor of my house: examining why people use foursquare - a social-driven location sharing application

There have been many location sharing systems developed over the past two decades, and only recently have they started to be adopted by consumers. In this paper, we present the results of three studies focusing on the foursquare check-in system. We conducted interviews and two surveys to understand, both qualitatively and quantitatively, how and why people use location sharing applications, as well as how they manage their privacy. We also document surprising uses of foursquare, and discuss implications for design of mobile social services.

Are you close with me? are you nearby?: investigating social groups, closeness, and willingness to share

As ubiquitous computing becomes increasingly mobile and social, personal information sharing will likely increase in frequency, the variety of friends to share with, and range of information that can be shared. Past work has identified that whom you share with is important for choosing whether or not to share, but little work has explored which features of interpersonal relationships influence sharing. We present the results of a study of 42 participants, who self-report aspects of their relationships with 70 of their friends, including frequency of collocation and communication, closeness, and social group. Participants rated their willingness to share in 21 different scenarios based on information a UbiComp system could provide. Our findings show that (a) self-reported closeness is the strongest indicator of willingness to share, (b) individuals are more likely to share in scenarios with common information (e.g. we are within one mile of each other) than other kinds of scenarios (e.g. my location wherever I am), and (c) frequency of communication predicts both closeness and willingness to share better than frequency of collocation.

ZoomBoard: a diminutive qwerty soft keyboard using iterative zooming for ultra-small devices

The proliferation of touchscreen devices has made soft keyboards a routine part of life. However, ultra-small computing platforms like the Sony SmartWatch and Apple iPod Nano lack a means of text entry. This limits their potential, despite the fact they are quite capable computers. In this work, we present a soft keyboard interaction technique called ZoomBoard that enables text entry on ultra-small devices. Our approach uses iterative zooming to enlarge otherwise impossibly tiny keys to comfortable size. We based our design on a QWERTY layout, so that it is immediately familiar to users and leverages existing skill. As the ultimate test, we ran a text entry experiment on a keyboard measuring just 16 x 6mm - smaller than a US penny. After eight practice trials, users achieved an average of 9.3 words per minute, with accuracy comparable to a full-sized physical keyboard. This compares favorably to existing mobile text input methods.

The post that wasn't: exploring self-censorship on facebook

Social networking site users must decide what content to share and with whom. Many social networks, including Facebook, provide tools that allow users to selectively share content or block people from viewing content. However, sometimes instead of targeting a particular audience, users will self-censor, or choose not to share. We report the results from an 18-participant user study designed to explore self-censorship behavior as well as the subset of unshared content participants would have potentially shared if they could have specifically targeted desired audiences. We asked participants to report all content they thought about sharing but decided not to share on Facebook and interviewed participants about why they made sharing decisions and with whom they would have liked to have shared or not shared. Participants reported that they would have shared approximately half the unshared content if they had been able to exactly target their desired audiences.

Toss 'n' turn: smartphone as sleep and sleep quality detector

The rapid adoption of smartphones along with a growing habit for using these devices as alarm clocks presents an opportunity to use this device as a sleep detector. This adds value to UbiComp and personal informatics in terms of user context and new performance data to collect and visualize, and it benefits healthcare as sleep is correlated with many health issues. To assess this opportunity, we collected one month of phone sensor and sleep diary entries from 27 people who have a variety of sleep contexts. We used this data to construct models that detect sleep and wake states, daily sleep quality, and global sleep quality. Our system classifies sleep state with 93.06% accuracy, daily sleep quality with 83.97% accuracy, and overall sleep quality with 81.48% accuracy. Individual models performed better than generally trained models, where the individual models require 3 days of ground truth data and 3 weeks of ground truth data to perform well on detecting sleep and sleep quality, respectively. Finally, the features of noise and movement were useful to infer sleep quality.

You Never Call, You Never Write: Call and SMS Logs Do Not Always Indicate Tie Strength

How effective are call and SMS logs in modeling tie strength? Frequency and duration of communication has long been cited as a major aspect of tie strength. Intuitively, this makes sense: people communicate with those that they feel close to. Highly cited research papers have pushed this idea further, using communication as a direct proxy for tie strength. However, this operationalization has not been validated. Our work evaluates this assumption. We collected call and SMS logs and ground truth relationship data from 36 participants. Consistent with theory, we found that frequent or long-duration communication likely indicates a strong tie. However, the use of call and SMS logs produced many errors in separating strong and weak ties, suggesting this approach is incomplete. Follow-up interviews indicate fundamental challenges for inferring tie strength from communication logs.

Beyond 'yesterday's tomorrow': towards the design of awareness technologies for the contemporary worker

Modern office work practices increasingly breach traditional boundaries of time and place, increasing breakdowns workers encounter when coordinating interactions with colleagues. We conducted interviews with 12 workers and identified key problems introduced by these practices. To address these problems we developed myUnity, a fully functional platform enabling rich workplace awareness and coordination. myUnity is one of the first integrated platforms to span mobile and desktop environments, both in terms of access and sensing. It uses multiple sources to report user location, availability, tasks, and communication channels. A pilot field study of myUnity demonstrated the significant value of pervasive access to workplace awareness and communication facilities, as well as positive behavioral change in day-to-day communication practices for most users. We present resulting insights about the utility of awareness technology in flexible work environments.

Achieving Ubiquity: The New Third Wave

In this article, Chris Harrison, Jason Wiese, and Anind K. Dey discuss the predictions of Mark Weiser, the father of ubiquitous computing, who envisioned that we would have smart personal environments, with numerous computational devices embedded within each environment. The authors point out that, rather than this happening, what we have currently are personalized computational devices, for example, smart phones, tied to users rather than embedded in the environment. The interesting development of this observation is the crux of their article. Even though multimedia, per se, is not specifically addressed in the article, what the authors have to say is certainly relevant to our community, as smart computational devices and sensors of various sorts are certainly siblings under the skin.-William I. Grosky

Mailing Archived Emails as Postcards: Probing the Value of Virtual Collections

People accumulate huge assortments of virtual possessions, but it is not yet clear how systems and system designers can help people make meaning from these large archives. Early research in HCI has suggested that people generally appear to value their virtual things less than their material things, but theory on material possessions does not entirely explain this difference. To investigate if changes to the form and behavior of virtual things may surface valued elements of a virtual archive, we designed a technology probe that selected snippets from old emails and mailed them as physical postcards to participating households. The probe uncovered features of emails that trigger meaningful reflection, and how contextual information can help people engage in reminiscence. Our study revealed insights about how materializing virtual possessions influences factors shaping how people draw on, understand, and value those possessions. We conclude with implication and strategies for aimed at supporting people in having more meaningful interactions and experiences with their virtual possessions.

Evolving the Ecosystem of Personal Behavioral Data

Everyday, people generate lots of personal data. Driven by the increasing use of online services and widespread adoption of smartphones (owned by 68% of U.S. residents; Anderson, 2015), personal data take many forms, including communications (e.g., e-mail, SMS, Facebook), plans and coordination (e.g., calendars, TripIt, to-do lists), entertainment consumption (e.g., YouTube, Spotify, Netflix), finances (e.g., banking, Amazon, eBay), activities (e.g., steps, runs, check-ins), and even health care (e.g., doctor visits, medications, heart rate). Collectively, these data provide a highly detailed description of an individual. Personal data afford the opportunity for many new kinds of applications that might improve people’s lives through deep personalization, tools to manage personal well-being, and services that support identity construction. However, developers currently encounter challenges working with personal data due to its fragmentation across services. This article evaluates the landscape of personal data, including the systemic forces that created current fragmented collections of data and the process required for integrating data from across services into an application. It details challenges the fragmented ecosystem imposes. Finally, it contributes Phenom, an experimental system that addresses these challenges, making it easier to develop applications that access personal data and providing users with greater control over how their data are used.