Laura M. Levy

Health Mashups: Presenting Statistical Patterns between Wellbeing Data and Context in Natural Language to Promote Behavior Change

People now have access to many sources of data about their health and wellbeing. Yet, most people cannot wade through all of this data to answer basic questions about their long-term wellbeing: Do I gain weight when I have busy days? Do I walk more when I work in the city? Do I sleep better on nights after I work out? We built the Health Mashups system to identify connections that are significant over time between weight, sleep, step count, calendar data, location, weather, pain, food intake, and mood. These significant observations are displayed in a mobile application using natural language, for example, “You are happier on days when you sleep more.” We performed a pilot study, made improvements to the system, and then conducted a 90-day trial with 60 diverse participants, learning that interactions between wellbeing and context are highly individual and that our system supported an increased self-understanding that lead to focused behavior changes.

Effects of worker size on the dynamics of fire ant tunnel construction

Social insects work together to complete tasks. However, different individuals within a colony may vary in task proficiency. We investigated if fire ant (Solenopsis invicta) worker body size influenced the ability to construct tunnels—a key component of subterranean nests. We monitored excavation by worker groups in a substrate of small wetted glass particles in quasi-two-dimensional arenas. Morphological and network features of the tunnel system were measured. Total tunnel area did not differ significantly between groups of large and small workers, although the tunnel area of control sized workers was significantly larger than that of large workers. Moreover, large workers created wider but shorter tunnels, with slower growth rate of tunnel number. However, edge–vertex scaling and degree distribution of the tunnel network were similar across all treatments. In all cases, the amount of excavated material was correlated with the number of active workers. Our study reveals that morphological features of excavated tunnels show modest variation when constructed by workers of varying sizes, but topological features associated with the tunnel network are conserved. These results suggest that important behavioural aspects of tunnel construction—and thus nest building—are similar among morphologically distinct members of fire ant societies.

The Evolution of the Argon Web Framework Through Its Use Creating Cultural Heritage and Community–Based Augmented Reality Applications

The Argon project was started to explore the creation of Augmented Reality applications with web technology. We have found this approach to be particularly useful for community-based applications. The Argon web browser has gone through two versions, informed by the work of our students and collaborators on these kinds of applications. In this paper, we highlight a number of the applications we and others have created, what we learned from them, and how our experiences creating these applications informed the design of Argon2 and the requirements for the next version, Argon3.

Midtown Buzz: Bridging the Gap Between Concepts and Impact in a Civic Computing Initiative

Midtown Buzz is a partnership between Georgia Tech and Midtown Alliance (MA), focusing on engaging urban communities through mobile innovation. Since 2013, we have been collaborating with the Midtown Atlanta community with the goal of transforming the area into an innovation district. This approach provided us with an opportunity to utilize Midtown as a living laboratory for civic computing research. During the two years of this project we have engaged in a participatory design process with diverse stakeholders to explore the needs of people in the Midtown area, and develop new technologies and approaches to address the identified needs. In this paper we discuss the lessons learned regarding the challenges of bridging the gap between concepts and deployable systems that can create positive transformation in a community.

Le Monstré: an interactive participatory performance costume

LE MONSTRE is a responsive performance garment, changing the sound and projection of the performance space through audience interaction. As the audience is invited to investigate the garment through touch and pull, capacitive and resistive strain sensors relay the interaction as wifi MIDI signals. The garment was designed as an investigation into the technology and arts collaborative design process.

Fear of failure: gender differences in older adult gamers

In this poster, we examine gender differences in older adults playing an off-the-shelf puzzle game (Boom Blox, EA 2008). Game design research for the elderly is an under-developed area, even though one-fifth of adults over the age of sixty-five reported playing video games and those that do so play more often that their younger counterparts. Gender differences in older adult gamers are even less understood. We use quantitative and qualitative techniques to identify gender differences in older adult game players and we discuss ramifications for cognitive game design.

Method in the madness: the design of games as valid and reliable scientific tools

Video games have great value for collecting rich data that can be used to study fundamental research questions in fields such as psychology and human-computer interaction. There is an increased use of games as scientific tools to assess and train the cognitive, as well as non-cognitive traits and abilities of players. However, games designed as research tools have a unique and challenging set of considerations so that they meet both the requirements of a scientific protocol, while also maintaining an acceptable gaming experience. Additionally, the success of a research game requires extensive planning and co-creation support for trans-disciplinary teams. This paper describes five critical considerations for the design and implementation of custom-built games as scientifically valid and reliable experimental test beds. These findings resulted from several years of work creating game artifacts to study cognitive training and assessment of individual differences. This class of games presents unique design challenges that are often at odds with traditional game design conventions. However, there are many promising applications and use cases for thoughtfully instrumented games that are capable of generating data with comparable accuracy to traditional and previously validated measures.

Designing AR Systems to Explore Point-of-View, Bias, and Trans-cultural Conflict

Over ten years ago, we created a novel dramatic augmented reality (AR) experience exploring bias and point-of-view (PoV) based upon the classic film “Twelve Angry Men,” which allowed a user to experience a dramatic jury room deliberation from the PoV of each of four different characters. Recently, informed by this previous work, we have created a new AR platform for engaging users in different PoVs, exposing forms of biases, and studying cultural conflicts. We are currently using this system for training and assessment in two domains: healthcare and psychological studies of terrorism. In this paper we present the requirements we have identified for this type of user experience, the co-design of both AR environments with domain experts, and the results of an initial user study of technology acceptance that yielded positive feedback from participants.