Tadashi Okoshi

FOCUS: a usable & effective approach to OLED display power management

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Focus, a system for effectively and efficiently reducing power consumption of OLED displays on smartphones. These displays, while becoming exceedingly common still consume significant power. The key idea of Focus is that we use the notion of saliency to save display power by dimming portions of the applications that are less important to the user. We envision Focus being especially useful during low battery situations when usability is less important than power savings. We tested Focus using 15 applications running on a Samsung Galaxy S III and show that it saves, on average, between 23 to 34% of the OLED display power with little impact on task completion times. Finally, we present the results of a user study, involving 30 participants that shows that Focus, even with its dimming behaviour, is still quite usable.

Attelia: Reducing user's cognitive load due to interruptive notifications on smart phones

In todays ubiquitous computing environment where the number of devices, applications and web services are ever increasing, human attention is the new bottleneck in computing. To minimize user cognitive load, we propose Attelia, a novel middleware that identifies breakpoints in user interaction and delivers notifications at these moments. Attelia works in realtime and uses only the mobile devices that users naturally use and wear, without any modifications to applications, and without any dedicated psycho-physiological sensors. Our evaluation proved the effectiveness of Attelia. A controlled user study showed that notifications at detected breakpoint timing resulted in 46% lower cognitive load compared to randomly-timed notifications. Furthermore, our “in-the-wild” user study with 30 participants for 16 days further validated Attelias value, with a 33% decrease in cognitive load compared to randomly-timed notifications.

Attention and engagement-awareness in the wild: A large-scale study with adaptive notifications

In todays advancing ubiquitous computing age, with its ever-increasing amount of information from various applications and services available for consumption, the management of peoples attention has become very important. In particular, the high volume of notifications on mobile devices has become a major cause of interruption of users. There has been much research aimed at detecting the opportune moment to present such information to users with in a way that lowers the cognitive load or frustration. However, evaluation of such systems in the real-world production environment with real users and notifications, and evaluation on users engagement to the presented notification beyond simple responsiveness have not been adequately studied. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate user interruptibility and engagement using a real-world large-scale mobile application and real-world notifications consisting of actual news content. We equipped the Yahoo! JAPAN Android app, one of the most popular applications on the national market, with our mobile-sensing and machine-learning-based interruptibility estimation logic. We conducted a large-scale in-the-wild user study with more than 680,000 users for three weeks. The results show that in most cases delaying the notification delivery until an interruptible moment is detected is beneficial to users and results in significant reduction of user response time (49.7%) compared to delivering the notifications immediately. We also observed a higher number of notifications opened in our system as well as constant improvement in user engagement levels throughout the entire study period.

VNA: an object model for virtual network appliances

This paper presents a new architecture for integrating networked appliances, called virtual network appliance (VNA). Instead of merely connecting appliances seen in existing approaches, the VNA architecture enables users to create a networked appliance by assembling functional components of existing appliances. Users can achieve dynamic adaptation and personal customization, exploiting VNA.

Smarttention, please!: 2nd workshop on intelligent attention management on mobile devices

Today, many users of mobile devices are continuously confronted with a huge variety of information: notifications from Facebook, new application updates, won badges, or reminders. This leads to an information overload, which makes it hard to stay focused. This workshop will investigate approaches towards smart attention management systems. We will discuss the fundamental challenges of smart notifications and the design of proactive notification mechanisms. We invite submissions that focus on the understanding of users and their current, mobile information handling. We further appreciate contributions that propose design concepts for the interaction with smart attention management systems. The expected workshop outcome is a summary of emerging challenges in the design and development of smart attention management systems as well as approaches to address them.

UbiTtention: smart & ambient notification and attention management

Users of digital devices are increasingly confronted with a tremendous amount of notifications that appear on multiple devices and screens in their environment. Today many users own different ubiquitous devices such as a smart-phone, a tablet, a notebook and a smartwatch. If an email client is installed on every device an incoming email produces up to four notifications -- one on each device. In the future, we will receive notifications from an increasing number of ubiquitous devices. Therefore, we need smart attention management for incoming notifications as well as novel ways to present and interact with notifications. One way for a less interrupting attention management could be the use of ambient representations of incoming notifications. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to explore how the flood of notifications on different computing devices and in smart environments can be managed, to avoid information overload.

Towards health exercise behavior change for teams using life-logging

Recent technological trends on mobile/wearable devices and sensors have been enabling increasing number of people to collect and store their “life-logs” easily in their daily lives. Beyond exercise behavior change of individual user, our research focus is on the behavior change of teams, based on life-logging technologies and information sharing. In this paper, we propose and evaluate six different types of information sharing model among team members for their exercise promotion, leveraging concepts of “competition” and “collaboration”. According to our experimental mobile web application for exercise promotion and extensive user study among 64 total users for three weeks, the model with “external competition” technique resulted the most effective performance for competitive teams such as sport teams.

Mobile platform and application research at SMU LiveLabs

LiveLabs is an urban scale research testbed in Singapore. It is currently in the process of design, implementation and deployment at real-life urban spaces like a sprawling university campus, a shopping mall, an airport and an amusement park; where real smartphone users are being incentivized to participate in large scale consumer behavioral trials and experiments. The scale of the testbed needs careful research on multiple aspects of mobile computing - including smart application and UI design, smartphone power management, handling user privacy and so on. In this demonstration paper, we outline some important aspects of ongoing research, for handling some key technical challenges of a real city-scale smartphone testbed.

AMRB: toward location and migration transparency of services

In this paper, we present a new mobility-support model for applications, Application Module Request Broker (AMRB). We focus on two types of mobility: host mobility and application code mobility. These two types of mobility dynamically change the binding between applications name and location in the network. AMRB conceals these changes of banding to reduce a complexity in development of applications. In AMRB, we deal with mobile application codes that communicate with each other as Application Modules (AMs). AMRB provides AMs service transparent communication for applications by using a specifier which does not need to include any network location information. Furthermore, applications can use AMs service transparently of migration by exploiting location management mechanism. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of AMRB and some evaluations. Also, we demonstrate a sample application that AMRB is effective for developing mobile sensor type applications.

Intelligent notification and attention management on mobile devices

Today, many users of mobile devices are continuously confronted with a huge variety of information: notifications from Facebook, new application updates, won badges, or reminders. This leads to an information overload, which makes it hard to stay focused. This workshop will investigate approaches towards smart attention management systems. We will discuss the fundamental challenges of smart notifications and the design of proactive notification mechanisms. We invite submissions that focus on the understanding of users and their current, mobile information handling. We further appreciate contributions that propose design concepts for the interaction with smart attention management systems. The expected workshop outcome is a summary of emerging challenges in the design and development of smart attention management systems as well as approaches to address them.