Sally A. Applin

Pervasive Computing in Time and Space: The Culture and Context of 'Place' Integration

We consider some possible broad changes that may impact society as a whole as a result of widespread integration of full-spectrum deployed pervasive computing technologies. Our approach considers design challenges for successfully developing and integrating pervasive technologies into culture and society. This is particularly challenging, since pervasive technologies as services are most successful when transparent, invisible, overlooked, unacknowledged and seemingly forgotten by the very groups that embrace their usage and development. We suggest a heuristic for understanding pervasive technology from an anthropological/social perspective, along with a reminder that humans create, shape and use the technologies that affect them. In particular, we look at the impact on social relations in a poly-social world where people must develop means to blend their own realities with those of of others. In conclusion, we remind those developing these technologies, that although we will eventually become wedded and intertwined as cyborgs within this new environment, it may have a positive outcome, creating new social group models for human interaction.

Watching Me, Watching You. (Process surveillance and agency in the workplace)

The notion that computers are somehow separate from our lives is misleading and ignores the level of integration that has emerged. Most of the processes that dispense, load, and deliver the supplies that sustain cosmopolitan life are impacted by some form of computer in one way or another. The systems created when networks of computers intersect with networks of people are shaping our current cultural environment and the way that we exist in the world. This phenomena has created multiple types of interactions that are hybrids between humans and machines and at present, the balance of human behavior towards other humans is impacted by processes in business and elsewhere that have an over arching governance based on machines. This limits human agency and impacts understanding, service and privacy rights for humans. Further, these processes increasingly depend on greater and greater quantities of what had previously been considered personal information, often scraped from online processes people do not anticipate, yielding an often revealing portrait of themselves. Also, a poorly configured paradigm has created a culture where, when systems are required for big business, people more often alter their behavior to suit machines and work with them, rather than the other way around, and that this has eroded conceptions of agency. We explore the use of Thing-theory to implement a partial means of implementing mutual surveillance between management and workers to increase human agency while developing more adaptive and efficient business processes.

Amazon?s Echo Look: Harnessing the Power of Machine Learning or Subtle Exploitation of Human Vulnerability?

Here we are in 2017, but, at times, it feels as though we are back in the 1950s. Apparently, how women look and present themselves to the world is so crucial that they must sacrifice their privacy, security, and trust to Amazons algorithms, just to gain societal acceptance for their fashion choices. Or at least, this is how it appears in the Amazon Echo Look video.

Ham Stakes: Repurposing consumer electronics for amateur radio.

For anyone who likes electronics, ham radio offers plenty of different avenues to explore and experiment with the radio spectrum in new ways, both on Earth and in space. For more than 100 years, radio amateurs (hams) have been adapting, making, hacking, modifying, and repairing radio- and nonradio-related items to use while engaged in their wireless communication hobby [1]. Hams have a long reputation of helping and teaching each other to understand and use radio technology, and this practice continues today. There are more than 700,000 licensed hams in the United States and about three million worldwide [2]. Hams experiment, modify, and adapt many forms of consumer, military, broadcast, and other electronics products, such as computer network routers (wired and wireless), military radar system components, and long-distance telecommunications equipment, to innovate how they communicate with each other.

Exploring Cooperation with Social Machines

As humans become more and more immersed in a networked world of connected and mobile devices, cooperation and sociability to achieve valued outcomes within geographic locales appears to be waning in favour of extended personal networks and interaction using semi-automated agents to support communications, transportation and other services. From a messaging structure that is complex, multiplexed and much of the time asynchronous, conditions emerge that disrupt symmetry of information exchange. People thus encounter circumstances that seem unpredictable given the information available to them, resulting in limited or failed cooperation and consequent quality of outcomes. We explore the role of Social Machines to support, change, and enhance human cooperation within a blended reality context.

Deliveries by Drone: Obstacles and Sociability

The current desire of retailers and vendors to have goods delivered via drones to individuals within an urban environment is in its early stages. Providing near ubiquitous delivery services to customers is an outcome of a desire for delivery optimization and customer satisfaction that may be anything but optimizing or satisfying. Those subjected to the fleet of drones coming to their neighborhoods will need to yield within urban public spaces to enable this type of disruption innovation to take hold. People may have to change the way that they “look out” as they walk within cities, looking not just “both ways” before crossing a street, but upwards as well. Noise may cause stress to an already stressed environment, and wildlife, particularly birds, will have to change their instinctive habits in order to accommodate the retailers’ goals of faster and faster delivery times. Part of the fabric of a community are the social relations that are maintained in a steady, regular way by the delivery couriers and carriers who build relationships with members of a community as a by-product of the nature of being in a job that requires them to spend time in a neighborhood on a daily basis, interacting with its inhabitants. Drone delivery could remove this type of community knowledge—this silent glue of communities—and change the way knowledge is created in our local urban environments. Sociability is crucial when automating a social system and drones are no exception. Drones will need to be social with people and with each other in order to negotiate and navigate crowded airspace. However, the knowledge they collect will be content without context, interaction, or sociability. This chapter examines the factors of what is required for delivery drones to become a viable presence in public space and to successfully integrate with people, wildlife, transportation, and social systems.

Toward a Multiuser Social Augmented Reality Experience: Shared pathway experiences via multichannel applications.

In social media environments, users engage in multiple relationships and networks, but may not always do so with the same people at the same times. If they share too few channels of information relevant to a common goal, there may be too little mutual information about a transaction to interact and communicate well collaboratively. Future interaction design development for the user experience (UE) of augmented reality (AR) must be aimed toward people where they operate? in social, physical, and network spaces. A conceptual understanding of the global interaction context within which people experience the social mobile Web is needed, one that emerges from the aggregate of multiplexed asynchronous or synchronous data pathways of interacting individuals. Stories are a means to relate multiple individuals? pathway experiences in a collective form. At the moment, AR is based on fixed navigational pathways and single narratives without regard for broader context or history. We encourage UE development for AR to provide environments for sociability, shared stories, and shared experiences.

Extending Driver-Vehicle Interface Research Into the Mobile Device Commons : Transitioning to (nondriving) passengers and their vehicles.

For more than a century, driver-vehicle interaction research has been mainly focused on interfaces that assist drivers as they interact with their vehicles with very limited attention paid to interacting with people and their agents moving within the surrounding commons. With the emergence of semiautomated and self-driving vehicles in combination with mobile phones, internal vehicular interfaces will gradually transition to (nondriving) passengers and their vehicles. These newly transitioning interfaces share (or will require) similar specifications to the ones currently used to control many consumer electronics. As mobile devices continue to grow in usage, people are creating secondary interface experiences that are related to but may not be attached to vehicles. It is suggested that future automotive IT infrastructure and interaction specifications should follow from general human-computer interaction guidelines, with the understanding that there will be a high heterogeneity to manage in these contexts. A critical point of vehicle interface is between self-driving cars, manually steered vehicles, and other, so-called vulnerable road users (VRUs), whose attention may also be divided between the road and their mobile phones. When humans, as passengers in semiautomated or automated vehicles, are no longer directly responsible for human-human/interpersonal communication and negotiation, new interactive paradigms must be considered and designed to protect people in manually controlled cars and VRUs within shared road space. Thus, automotive user interface research must also formally extend outward to include intervehicular interaction rather than being limited to the mainly intravehicular environment, as is the present case. In this article, we will examine broader issues of user interface (UI) consistency in vehicular contexts and present recommendations for future automotive UI research.

IUI 2013 3rd workshop on location awareness for mixed and dual reality: (LAMDa'13)

This workshop explores the interactions between location awareness and Dual/Mixed/PolySocial Reality in smart (instrumented) environments and their impact on culture and society. The main scope of this workshop is to explore how a Dual/Mixed/PolySocial Reality paradigm can be used to improve applications in smart environments and, by extension, which new possibilities can be opened up by these paradigms. These may include positioning methods and location-based services using the DR paradigm, such as navigation services and group interaction services (location-based social signal processing) as well as agent based intermediaries to offset errant voluminous multiplexed communication messaging. The workshop is also open to discuss sensor and actuator technologies that are being developed to foster the growth of interaction possibilities in smart environments.

2nd workshop on location awareness for mixed and dual reality (LAMDa'12)

The workshop explores the interactions between location awareness and Dual/Mixed Reality in smart environments and the impact on culture and society. The main scope of this workshop is: How can the Dual Reality paradigm be used to improve applications in smart environments and which new possibilities are opened up by these paradigms? This includes positioning methods and location-based services using the DR paradigm, such as navigation services and group interaction services (location-based social signal processing). The workshop is also open to discuss sensor and actuator technologies that may help to realize the synchronization of the virtual and real world. The main scope of this workshop is: How can the Dual Reality paradigm be used to improve location-based and socially-aware services and other applications in smart environments?