Khai N. Truong

Who, What, When, Where, How: Design Issues of Capture & Access Applications

One of the general themes in ubiquitous computing is the construction of devices and applications to support the automated capture of live experiences and the future access of those records. Over the past five years, our research group has developed many different capture and access applications. In this paper, we present an overview of six of these applications. We discuss the different design issues encountered while creating each of these applications and share our approaches to solving these issues (in comparison and in contrast with other work found in the literature). From these issues we define the large design space for automated capture and access. This design space may then serve as a point of reference for designers to extract the requirements for systems to be developed in the future.

Designing Capture Applications to Support the Education of Children with Autism

We explore the social and technical design issues involved in tracking the effectiveness of educational and therapeutic interventions for children with autism (CWA). Automated capture can be applied in a variety of settings to provide a means of keeping valuable records of interventions. We present the findings from qualitative studies and the designs of capture prototypes. These experiences lead to conclusions about specific considerations for building technologies to assist in the treatment of CWA, as well as other fragile demographics. Our work also reflects back on the automated capture problem itself, informing us as computer scientists how that class of applications must be reconsidered when the analysis of data in the access phase continually influences the capture needs and when social and practical constraints conflict with data collection needs.

Personalizing the capture of public experiences

In this paper, we describe our work on developing a system to support the personalization of a captured public experience. Specifically, we are interested in providing students with the ability to personalize the capture of the lecture experiences as part of the Classroom 2000 project. We discuss the issues and challenges involved in designing a system that performs live integration of personal streams of information with multiple other streams of information made available to it through an environment designed to capture public information.

Automatically sharing web experiences through a hyperdocument recommender system

As an approach that applies not only to support user navigation on the Web, recommender systems have been built to assist and augment the natural social process of asking for recommendations from other people. In a typical recommender system, people provide suggestions as inputs, which the system aggregates and directs to appropriate recipients. In some cases, the primary computation is in the aggregation; in others, the value of the system lies in its ability to make good matches between the recommenders and those seeking recommendations.In this paper, we discuss the architectural and design features of WebMemex, a system that (a) provides recommended information based on the captured history of navigation from a list of people well-known to the users --- including the users themselves, (b) allows users to have access from any networked machine, (c) demands user authentication to access the repository of recommendations and (d) allows users to specify when the capture of their history should be performed.

StuPad: integrating student notes with class lectures

A classroom environment contains both private (student-generated) and public (teacher-generated) streams of information. This paper discusses a system, StuPad, that integrates publicly available streams of information, such as a lecture presented by an instructor, with notes captured by individual students. We discuss the motivation for StuPad within the Classroom 2000 project and present a prototype to support capture and access/review activities.

INCA: A Software Infrastructure to Facilitate the Construction and Evolution of Ubiquitous Capture & Access Applications

People’s daily lives provide them with memories and records that they often want to review later. They must expend time and effort to record these experiences manually for future retrieval. To address this issue, applications that automatically capture details of a live experience and provide future access to that experience have become an increasingly common theme of research in ubiquitous computing. In this paper, we present our experience building a number of capture and access applications, sharing insights on the successes and difficulties we encountered. These lessons inform the design of the INCA toolkit (Infrastructure for Capture and Access), which supports the construction of applications in this class. We will demonstrate how INCA facilitates the rapid prototyping and simplified evolution of increasingly complex capture and access applications.

Preventing camera recording by designing a capture-resistant environment

With the ubiquity of camera phones, it is now possible to capture digital still and moving images anywhere, raising a legitimate concern for many organizations and individuals. Although legal and social boundaries can curb the capture of sensitive information, it sometimes is neither practical nor desirable to follow the option of confiscating the capture device from an individual. We present the design and proof of concept implementation of a capture-resistant environment that prevents the recording of still and moving images without requiring any cooperation on the part of the capturing device or its operator. Our solution involves a tracking system that uses computer vision for locating any number of retro-reflective CCD or CMOS camera sensors in a protected area. A pulsing light is then directed at the lens, distorting any imagery the camera records. Although the directed light interferes with the cameras operation, it can be designed to minimally impact the sight of other humans in the environment.

Experience buffers: a socially appropriate, selective archiving tool for evidence-based care

Diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of interventions for children with autism can profit most when caregivers have substantial amounts of data they can easily record and review as evidence of specific observed behaviors over time. Through our work with one prototype system and interviews with caregivers, we have recognized the importance of socially appropriate ways to add rich data to the information recorded by caregivers. Analysts must be able to view incidents as they occurred without unnecessarily burdening caregivers and other children with always-on recording of data about them. In this paper, we introduce experience buffers, a collection of capture services embedded in an environment that, though always on and available, require explicit user action to store an experience.. This creates a way to balance the social, technical, and practical concerns of capture applications.

An open linking service supporting the authoring of web documents

Both content driven web authors and application designers may have their attention deviated from their main task when they have to be concerned with the generation of elaborated linking structures. This work aims to demonstrate how a metadata-enhanced web-based open linking service can be exploited towards supporting content driven authors in their tasks. The following results are presented in this paper: (a) the Web Linking Service (WLS), a novel open hypermedia system that stores and exchanges metadata in RDF standard syntax for hypertext structures across the wire and (b) two case studies in which applications offer to their users the ability to create linking structures upon existing contents by making use the WLS service.

Devices for sharing thoughts and affection at a distance

Interpersonal communication involves more than just words. Many forms of communication involve physical acts showing warm thoughts and affection, such as giving flowers or displaying photos. Yet these forms of personal communication are difficult at a distance. In this paper, we describe the concept of devices for communicating affection and thoughts from a distance. We detail two devices that we are exploring to support many of these physical interpersonal interactions-an augmented candy dispenser and a digital picture frame-and discuss design issues we have encountered as we investigate this interesting application space.