Yevgeniy Medynskiy

Culturally embedded computing

In culturally embedded computing, we begin by examining how the technology is emblematic of its cultural context. Culturally embedded computing explicitly situates embedded computing in society, individual experience, culture, and history. Based on this new emphasis, five projects explore alternatives to traditional human-computer interaction design. Designing and building these new technologies requires more than simply building and understanding hardware and software. It also requires analyzing and incorporating the stories, meanings, and social networks that these devices engage.

Personal informatics in practice: improving quality of life through data

Personal informatics refers to a class of software and hardware systems that help individuals collect personal information to improve self-understanding. Improving self-understanding can foster self-insight and promote positive behaviors: healthy living, energy conservation, etc. The development of personal informatics applications poses new challenges for human-computer interaction and creates opportunities for applications in various domains related to quality of life, such as fitness, nutrition, wellness, mental health, and sustainability. This workshop will continue the conversations from the CHI 2010 and CHI 2011 workshops on personal informatics [6][7]. The focal themes for this workshop are: (1) practical lessons from previous research and development experiences that can guide interface design for systems that allow users to collect and reflect on personal data; (2) requirements for building robust personal informatics applications; and (3) design and development of infrastructures that make personal informatics applications easier to create and evaluate.

Personal informatics and HCI: design, theory, and social implications

Personal informatics is a class of systems that help people collect personal information to improve self-knowledge. The development of personal informatics applications poses new challenges in human-computer interaction and creates opportunities for collaboration between diverse disciplines, including design, ubiquitous computing, persuasive technology and information visualization. This workshop will continue the conversation from the CHI 2010 workshop and extend the discussion of personal informatics to include behavioral theories that can guide the development of such systems, as well as the social implications of self-tracking.

Salud!: An open infrastructure for developing and deploying health self-management applications

Health self-management strategies have been shown to improve health outcomes and decrease the cost of healthcare for individuals living with chronic illness. Personal health informatics applications, which allow individuals to track and review personal health-related information have, in turn, been shown to improve health self-management outcomes by supporting learning and reflection. We identify the need for a software infrastructure that facilitates the creation and deployment of such applications and describe our progress in developing and making available such an infrastructure, which we call Salud! We discuss how the design of Salud! follows from key strategies and results in the health self-management literature, and how its application programming interface (API) and related services can be leveraged by other researchers wishing to build a personal health informatics applications. Finally, we describe our own health self-management application that we are building using Salud!

Using hybrid networks for the analysis of online software development communities

Social network-based systems usually suffer from two major limitations: they tend to rely on a single data source (e.g. email traffic), and the form of network patterns is often privileged over their content. To go beyond these limitations we describe a system we developed to visualize and navigate hybrid networks constructed from multiple data sources - with a direct link between formal representations and the raw content. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by analyzing patterns of collaboration in a large Open Source project, using hybrid networks to uncover important roles that would otherwise have been missed.

Exploring the use of large displays in american megachurches

Within the HCI community, there is a growing interest in how technology is used and appropriated outside the workplace. In this paper, we present preliminary findings of how large displays, projection systems, and presentation software are used in American megachurches to support religious practice. These findings are based on ten visits to church services by the study.s authors. We describe how large display technology augments and replaces certain church traditions, and finish by discussing issues related to the design for church environments that are highlighted by this use of technology.

Five strategies for supporting healthy behavior change

There is an ongoing search for theoretical foundations and design principles for interactive systems that support healthy behavior change. In this work-in-progress, we present several behavior change strategies that are currently used in effective health self-management interventions. We then discuss how these strategies can be used in applications that support behavior change in the healthwellness domain.