Jeffrey Nichols

Who Will Retweet This? Detecting Strangers from Twitter to Retweet Information

There has been much effort on studying how social media sites, such as Twitter, help propagate information in different situations, including spreading alerts and SOS messages in an emergency. However, existing work has not addressed how to actively identify and engage the right strangers at the right time on social media to help effectively propagate intended information within a desired time frame. To address this problem, we have developed three models: (1) a feature-based model that leverages peoples exhibited social behavior, including the content of their tweets and social interactions, to characterize their willingness and readiness to propagate information on Twitter via the act of retweeting; (2) a wait-time model based on a users previous retweeting wait times to predict his or her next retweeting time when asked; and (3) a subset selection model that automatically selects a subset of people from a set of available people using probabilities predicted by the feature-based model and maximizes retweeting rate. Based on these three models, we build a recommender system that predicts the likelihood of a stranger to retweet information when asked, within a specific time window, and recommends the top-N qualified strangers to engage with. Our experiments, including live studies in the real world, demonstrate the effectiveness of our work.

Understanding the Challenges of Designing and Developing Multi-Device Experiences

As the number of computing devices available to users continues to grow, personal computing increasingly involves using multiple devices together. However, support for multi-device interactions has fallen behind users desire to leverage the diverse capabilities of the devices that surround them. In this paper, we report on an interview study of 29 designers and developers in which we investigate the barriers to creating useful, usable, and delightful multi-device experiences. We uncovered three key challenges: 1) the difficulty in designing the interactions between devices, 2) the complexity of adapting interfaces to different platform UI standards, and 3) the lack of tools and methods for testing multi-device user experiences. We discuss the technological and business factors behind these challenges and potential ways to lower the barriers they impose.

Rico: A Mobile App Dataset for Building Data-Driven Design Applications

Data-driven models help mobile app designers understand best practices and trends, and can be used to make predictions about design performance and support the creation of adaptive UIs. This paper presents Rico, the largest repository of mobile app designs to date, created to support five classes of data-driven applications: design search, UI layout generation, UI code generation, user interaction modeling, and user perception prediction. To create Rico, we built a system that combines crowdsourcing and automation to scalably mine design and interaction data from Android apps at runtime. The Rico dataset contains design data from more than 9.7k Android apps spanning 27 categories. It exposes visual, textual, structural, and interactive design properties of more than 72k unique UI screens. To demonstrate the kinds of applications that Rico enables, we present results from training an autoencoder for UI layout similarity, which supports query- by-example search over UIs.

GOAALLL!: Using sentiment in the world cup to explore theories of emotion ☆

Abstract Sporting events evoke strong emotions among fans and thus act as natural laboratories to explore emotions and how they unfold in the wild. Computational tools, such as sentiment analysis, provide new ways to examine such dynamic emotional processes. In this article we use sentiment analysis to examine tweets posted during 2014 World Cup. Such analysis gives insight into how people respond to highly emotional events, and how these emotions are shaped by contextual factors, such as prior expectations, and how these emotions change as events unfold over time. Here we report on some preliminary analysis of a World Cup twitter corpus using sentiment analysis techniques. After performing initial tests of validation for sentiment analysis on data in this corpus, we show these tools can give new insights into existing theories of what makes a sporting match exciting. This analysis seems to suggest that, contrary to assumptions in sports economics, excitement relates to expressions of negative emotion. The results are discussed in terms of innovations in methodology and understanding the role of emotion for “tuning in” to real world events. We also discuss some challenges that such data present for existing sentiment analysis techniques and discuss future analysis.

ZIPT: Zero-Integration Performance Testing of Mobile App Designs

To evaluate the performance of mobile app designs, designers and researchers employ techniques such as A/B, usability, and analytics-driven testing. While these are all useful strategies for evaluating known designs, comparing many divergent solutions to identify the most performant remains a costly and difficult problem. This paper introduces a design performance testing approach that leverages existing app implementations and crowd workers to enable comparative testing at scale. This approach is manifest in ZIPT, a zero-integration performance testing platform that allows designers to collect detailed design and interaction data over any Android app -- including apps they do not own and did not build. Designers can deploy scripted tests via ZIPT to collect aggregate user performance metrics (e.g., completion rate, time on task) and qualitative feedback over third-party apps. Through case studies, we demonstrate that designers can use ZIPTs aggregate data and visualizations to understand the relative performance of interaction patterns found in the wild, and identify usability issues in existing Android apps.

The Moving Context Kit: Designing for Context Shifts in Multi-Device Experiences

Multi-device product designers need tools to better address ecologically valid constraints in naturalistic settings early in their design process. To address this need, we created a reusable design kit of scenarios, hint cards, and a framework that codifies insights from prior work and our own field study. We named the kit the Moving Context Kit, or McKit for short, because it helps designers focus on context shifts that we found to be highly influential in everyday multi-device use. Specifically, we distilled the following findings from our field study in the McKit: (1) devices are typically specialized into one of six roles during parallel use notifier, broadcaster, collector, gamer, remote, and hub, and (2) device roles are influenced by context shifts between private and shared situations. Through a workshop, we validated that the McKit enables designers to engage with complex user needs, situations, and relationships when incorporating novel multi-device techniques into the products they envision.

Systems and tools for cross-device user interfaces

The goal of the XDUI 2015 workshop is to bring together leading and upcoming systems researchers in the area of cross-device interfaces and define a research agenda together. The workshop aims to be useful, not only for the EICS research community, but for the wider HCI community, where many recent cross-device systems and tools have been developed and investigated almost in parallel without learning from and building on each other. It targets both new and established researchers in the area---new researchers will quickly get an overview of the state of the art, while established researchers can draw more detailed comparisons between their solutions and discuss benefits and limitations. This workshop at EICS provides a unique opportunity to sketch the design space of possible cross-device user interfaces and discuss technical concerns of existing solutions as well as open issues and future research directions.

InkWell: A Creative Writer's Creative Assistant

InkWell is a writers assistant---a natural language revision program designed to assist creative writers by producing stylistic variations on texts based on craft-based facets of creative writing and by mimicking aspects of specified writers and their personality traits. It is built on top of an optimization process that produces variations on a supplied text, evaluates those variations quantitatively, and selects variations that best satisfy the goals of writing craft and writer mimicry. We describe the design and capabilities of InkWell, and present an early evaluation of its effectiveness and uses with two established literary writers along with an experiment using InkWell to write haiku on its own.

Welcome Letter

Welcome to this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, which will focus on contributions from the research community Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS). This diverse research community explores the methods, processes, techniques and tools that support specifying, designing, developing, deploying and verifying interactive systems. Building interactive systems is a multifaceted and challenging activity, involving a plethora of different actors and roles. This is particularly true in the domain of HCI, where we continuously push the edge of what is possible, where there is a crucial need for adequate processes, tools and methods to build reliable, useful and usable systems that help people cope with the ever-increasing complexity of work and life. The contents of this issue on EICS is the sum of four separate rounds of submissions, evenly spaced from July 2017 through May 2018. In total, the rounds attracted a total of 81 submissions from Asia, Canada, Australia, Europe, Africa, and the United States. Promising submissions in a round that were not accepted were invited to resubmit to a subsequent round, and 6 of the papers appearing in this issue were accepted after at least one round of resubmission. In each round, papers were subject to a rigorous reviewing process where they were reviewed by two EICS senior editors, as well as external reviewers. At the conclusion of each round, a Virtual Committee meeting was held to discuss all of the papers and arrive at final decisions. Ultimately, 14 papers were accepted over all rounds. This issue exists because of the dedicated volunteer effort of 20 senior editors who handled two to four papers each round, and 115 expert reviewers to ensure high quality and insightful reviews for all papers in all rounds. Reviewers and committee members were kept constant as much as possible for papers that were submitted to multiple rounds. Senior members of the editorial group also helped shepherd some papers, reflecting the deep commitment of this research community. We are excited by the detailed and insightful work that resulted in this PACMHCI EICS issue and look forward to equally high quality submissions in subsequent submission cycles over the coming year. For those interested in this area, this group holds their next annual conference June 19-22, 2018 in Paris, France. That conference will provide many opportunities to share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world.

Welcome to the First Issue of PACMHCI EICS

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the first issue of PACMHCI EICS, which features full papers appearing at the 9th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Systems (EICS17). The conference takes place in Lisbon, Portugal on 26-29 June, 2017.n EICS gathers researchers that aim to improve the ways we build interactive systems. Building interactive systems is a multi-faceted and challenging activity, involving a plethora of different actors and roles. This is particularly true in the domain of HCI, where we continuously push the edge of what is possible, where there is a crucial need for adequate processes, tools and methods to build reliable, useful and usable systems that help people cope with the ever-increasing complexity of work and life. The primary goal of the EICS conference series is to provide a venue for novel and high quality contributions in this direction.n EICS is probably the longest running HCI conference in the field. Its starting point in history goes back as far as 1974 to an IFIP Conference on Command Languages held in Lund, Sweden, from July 29 to August 2. Although it only has been an ACM SIGCHI sponsored conference since 2009, EICS is a continuation and merge of a set of series of conferences, symposiums and workshops - most notably the IFIP WG 2.7/13.4 conference on Engineering HCI (EHCI) - that shared a common interest: the engineering aspects of HCI. The figure below shows a timeline of the conference and its parent conferences.n This issue represents a transition for the EICS publication model, where full papers have traditionally been submitted and reviewed once per year and appeared in conference proceedings. Going forward, and in accordance with the PACMHCI vision, there will now be multiple paper deadlines spaced throughout the year, and papers will be reviewed and decisions made within approximately two months. Accepted papers will appear in an issue of the PACMHCI EICS journal shortly after acceptance, and authors will be invited to give a talk on their work at the next EICS conference.n A benefit of this process is that authors may take advantage of the iterative reviewing model of a journal and the continuity that it provides. Authors of papers that are not accepted at one deadline but show promise will be encouraged to submit a revised version of their manuscript at a subsequent deadline, and the committee members and reviewers assigned to a paper will remain as constant as possible across revisions.n This issue contains papers accepted over two iterations of this new review process. The first round of reviewing received 40 submissions, of which 11 were accepted in that round (27.5% acceptance rate). Authors of papers that were not accepted were encouraged to submit a revised version to a second round deadline, to which 10 papers were submitted and 3 were accepted (30% acceptance rate). For many of those papers, authors received shepherding and guidance by a senior PC member. This shows the commitment of the EICS community to not only ensure high quality contributions at the conference, but also to educate and enable authors to write down and present their best work for this conference.n 15 senior PC members selected reviewers from a set of expert program committee members to ensure high quality and insightful reviews for all papers in both rounds, and reviewers and committee members were kept as constant as possible for papers that submitted to both rounds. A physical program committee meeting with the senior PC members and paper chairs to discuss the full paper submissions in person was organized on March 17 in Paris.