Stephen E. Levy

The 1984 Olympic Message System: a test of behavioral principles of system design

There was more than athletic talent being pressed to peak performance at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Behind the scenes, a multilingual Olympic Message System ran round-the-clock keeping more than 10,000 athletes and officials in contact with families and friends, both far and near.

Leveraging digital backchannels to enhance user experience in electronically mediated communication

Rendezvous is a conference call solution that leverages Voice over IP, enterprise calendaring, instant messaging, and rich client functionality to enhance the user experience and effectiveness of distributed meetings. We describe the service, and two of its user experience innovations -- the conference call proxy and iHelp -- which function as digital backchannels. We present results from a preliminary user evaluation, and discuss our notion of digital backchannels with respect to the social translucence framework.

Improving understanding of website privacy policies with fine-grained policy anchors

Website privacy policies state the ways that a site will use personal identifiable information (PII) that is collected from fields and forms in web-based transactions. Since these policies can be complex, machine-readable versions have been developed that allow automatic comparison of a sites privacy policy with a users privacy preferences. However, it is still difficult for users to determine the cause and origin of conformance conflicts, because current standards operate at the page level - they can only say that there is a conflict on the page, not where the conflict occurs or what causes it. In this paper we describe fine-grained policy anchors, an extension to the way a website implements the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), that solves this problem. Fine grained policy anchors enable field-level comparisons of policy and preference, field-specific conformance displays, and faster access to additional conformance information. We built a prototype user agent based on these extensions and tested it with representative users. We found that fine-grained anchors do help users understand how privacy policy relates to their privacy preferences, and where and why conformance conflicts occur.

An empirical study of the use of visually enhanced voip audio conferencing: the case of IEAC

IBM Enhanced Audio Conferencing (IEAC) is a VoIP-based audio conferencing system that, like several other systems, provides a visualization showing who is present and their states (e.g., speaking, muted). This paper presents the first study of the use of such a system. Drawing on log files collected over six weeks of use by over 1300 corporate employees, and interviews with 10 of them, we look at how and why various features of the system are used and what sorts of practices are supported. Our findings shed light on the factors that drive the use of visual enhancements to audio conferencing, and suggest further research topics.

Too Much Information

As mobile computing devices and a variety of sensors become ubiquitous, new resources for applications and services - often collectively referred to under the rubric of context-aware computing - are becoming available to designers and developers. In this article, we consider the potential benefits and issues that arise from leveraging context awareness in new communication services that include the convergence of VoIP (voice over IP) and traditional information technology.

MoCoMapps: mobile collaborative map-based applications

This video demonstrates an experiment in crowdsourcing both map-based data and also the applications that provide the maps, and also presents scenarios of use.

Issues and concerns in Internet based financial applications: an example from an auto finance system

The Internet is an important resource for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer commerce. Its advantages over private networks are often overshadowed by concerns about using public networks for commercial transactions. We present a case study that describes adoption of an Internet-based auto finance system by a financial institution and multiple auto dealerships. We discuss four issues that we needed to solve in order for the system to be accepted. These are: the implications of the open nature of the Internet on existing business-to-consumer relationships; security of enterprise data and systems; ensuring connectivity across enterprises; and the management of information assets generated by large volumes of electronic transactions.

Crafting an environment for collaborative reasoning

We motivate the need for new environments for collaborative reasoning and describe the foundations of our approach, namely collaboration, semantics, and adaptability. We describe the CRAFT collaborative reasoning interface and infrastructure that we are developing to explore this approach.