Richard Beckwith

Vineyard computing: sensor networks in agricultural production

Using ethnographic research methods, the authors studied the structure of the needs and priorities of people working in a vineyard to gain a better understanding of the potential for sensor networks in agriculture. We discuss an extended study of vineyard workers and their work practices to assess the potential for sensor network systems to aid work in this environment. The major purpose is to find new directions and new topics that pervasive computing and sensor networks might address in designing technologies to support a broader range of users and activities.

Report from the field: results from an agricultural wireless sensor network

This paper reports the results of a 6-month deployment of a 65-node multi-hop network in a vineyard setting. This deployment specifically looked to discover ways in which a farm setting could find a return on investment for deploying such a network. Our ongoing collaborations of over two years ultimately have included everyone from the vineyard owners to the technology developers. We have been able to find several areas where wireless sensor networks deliver valuable information and provide a return on investment.

Exploring Privacy Concerns about Personal Sensing

More and more personal devices such as mobile phones and multimedia players use embedded sensing. This means that people are wearing and carrying devices capable of sensing details about them such as their activity, location, and environment. In this paper, we explore privacy concerns about such personal sensing through interviews with 24 participants who took part in a three month study that used personal sensing to detect their physical activities. Our results show that concerns often depended on what was being recorded, the context in which participants worked and lived and thus would be sensed, and the value they perceived would be provided. We suggest ways in which personal sensing can be made more privacy-sensitive to address these concerns.

Unwired wine: sensor networks in vineyards

This paper describes the design, deployment, and output of a large-scale wireless sensor network in agriculture. We began with ethnographic research to determine needs. This research informed the design of a network that was then deployed in a working vineyard. Finally, the sensor data were analyzed for agricultural significance. Our dense-monitoring of temperature allowed us to track, among other things, not only fruit maturity as it responded to heat accumulation and but also damage from freezing as the plants entered dormancy. This paper shows that dense on-the-ground monitoring can have a substantial impact on agricultural practices, quality, yield, and, most significantly, the value of the crop. More than that, this paper demonstrates how a working deployment that provides return on investment (ROI) for the sensor network owner requires domain knowledge about the phenomena to be monitored.

Making food, producing sustainability

Many contemporary approaches to environmental sustainability focus on the end-consumer. In this panel, we explore lessons from small food producers for future development of HCI as an agency of sustainable ways of being. We argue that attention to the relationship small producers have to the environment and their experiences of interrelations between environmental, economic, and social sustainability suggest new foundational issues for sustainable HCI research.

Privacy: personal information, threats, and technologies

The three primary thrusts of this paper are: first, that people do not think enough about their own privacy, in particular, they may not know enough about their privacy that they can really make informed decisions about sharing information; second, that technologies exist that can mitigate some of the problems associated with information sharing; and third, that services (in addition to to technologies) might be a reasonable way to think about addressing the privacy problem.

Child computer interaction: workshop on UI technologies and educational pedagogy

Given the growth of Child Computer Interaction research, next generation HCI technologies play an important role in the future of education. Educators rely on technology to improve and adapt learning to the pedagogical needs of learners. Hence, this community needs to understand how current technology concepts match with current pedagogical paradigms. The classroom is a high stakes environment for experimentation, thus new interaction techniques need to be validated to prove their pedagogical value in the educational setting. This workshop provides a forum to discuss key HCI issues facing next generation education. With a particular focus on child computer interaction, these issues comprise inter alia the interaction with whole class interactive whiteboards, small group interactive multi-touch tables, and individual personal response systems (e.g. mobile devices) in the classroom.

'This all together, Hon?' Ubicomp in non-office work environments

Ubiquitous computing technologies offer the promise of extending the benefits of computing to workers who do not spend their time at a desktop environment. In this paper, we review the results of an extended study of non-office workers across a variety of work domains, noting some key characteristics of their practices and environments, and examining some challenges to delivering on the ubicomp promise. Our research points to three important challenges that must be addressed, these include: (a) variability across work environments; (b) the need to align disparate, sometimes conflicting interests; and (c) the need to deal with what appear to be informal ways of creating and sharing knowledge. As will be discussed, while daunting, these challenges also point to specific areas of focus that might benefit the design and development of future ubicomp systems.

Extending ubiquitous computing to vineyards

In this paper, we describe how an ethnographic approach led to novel interface and system designs for vineyard management and discuss the lessons learned from it.

Context aware education for agriculture

This paper reports results of an ethnographic study undertaken to support the development of an educational tool for a context-aware computing project. This research looked at how teachers use an agricultural context (i.e., school gardens) to teach and how farmers learn within the context of a farm. The goal of this research was to define a set of needs that we could address in developing an educational application that makes use of a mobile device that includes high-definition video, broadband connectivity, and various on-board sensors. More importantly, this mobile device will, on the basis of these data, generate inferences to be used in computer vision and other applications. Our immediate future work is to explore ways in which devices of this type can influence learning and teaching.