HIIT - UIx news

UIx Research featured in Technology Review and Engadget!

hoggan — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 18:07:48 +0000

Eve Hoggan, Craig Stewart, Laura Haverinen and Giulio Jacucci (alongside Vuokko Lantz from Nokia Research Center) have published their work on the augmentation of traditional phone calls with haptic interaction in UIST 2012. ForcePhone is a mobile synchronous haptic communication system. During phone calls, users can squeeze the side of the device and the pressure level is mapped to vibrations on the recipient’s device. The pressure/vibrotactile messages supported by ForcePhone are called pressages. The results showed that an additional haptic channel of communication can be integrated into mobile phone calls using a pressure to vibrotactile mapping with local and remote feedback. The longitudinal study showed that such a system has value as a communication channel in real-world settings with users expressing greetings, presence and emotions through pressages.

Engadget article

Technology Review

The paper can be downloaded here

UIx news:

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Study: Music Choices Change When They are Published

lampinen — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 21:02:48 +0000

Giving out information on your music consumption publicly can change it.

A study finds that people are willing to put a lot of effort into maintaining a desirable public image of their music consumption. When information about music listening is published automatically, youth and young adults retain a notion of truth in presenting themselves: they rather change the music they listen to than "cheat" digitally.

Suvi Silfverberg, Lassi A. Liikkanen and Airi Lampinen from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT studied the experience of maintaining a profile in the online music service Last.fm. Twelve Finnish youth and young adults where interviewed on their use of this music-focused social network service and its extension, called "the scrobbler", that publishes information of music listened to by service users.

The researchers found that people make active efforts to control the image their online profile gives of them, especially when their music listening is published automatically. While automated sharing of behavior information provides new opportunities for online music services, it also affects the people listening to music:

"When an online service publishes behavioral information automatically, it is important to give users a chance to express and explain the meanings of their actions. Listening to a song doesn't necessarily mean that one likes it - or wants to be known as the kind of person who does", says Liikkanen.

The study was published in the internationally renowned 2011 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in March in Hangzhou, China. The presented research was conducted as part of the Academy of Finland funded research project Musiquitous (http://musiq.fi). HIIT is a joint institute of Aalto University and University of Helsinki and is located in the capital region of Finland.

The publication is available at http://www.musiq.fi/publications

01.03.2011 Sounds of Helsinki receives funding from Aalto Media Factory

liikkane — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 20:33:10 +0000

01.03.2011 Sounds of Helsinki receives funding from Aalto Media Factory

Aalto Media Factory granted HIIT 20k€ for development work to be done in UIx'
Musiquitous together with Adaptive computing group. The funding makes possible
of further development of Capella, a mobile music player, which logs interaction
and context data. Capella prototype will be used to research some of the
concepts of Sounds of Helsinki, a platform for location-based music services.

Field tests with users will be done in August 2011.

More about Sounds of Helsinki: http://mediafactory.aalto.fi/?p=786
More about Capella (later this spring): http://universe.hiit.fi/capella/

CHI2011 workshop ”Privacy for a Networked World”: Bridging Theory and Design

lampinen — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:14:19 +0000

CHI2011 workshop ”Privacy for a Networked World”: Bridging Theory and Design

UIx will co-organize a workshop at upcoming CHI2011 conference: "Privacy for a Networked World”: Bridging Theory and Design on Saturday, May 7, 2011, in Vancouver, BC, Canada

As our lives are more commonly mediated by information technology, an interactional perspective to how people find and construct privacy in socio-technical interactions has proven effective as a starting point for theoretical and empirical studies of privacy in everyday life in which online interactions have a significant role.

Yet, there remain important open questions regarding how to translate results based on this perspective into design practice. Addressing these questions requires a greater sensitivity to when interactional privacy is applicable, a better understanding of suitable research methods, and more effective means for communicating results to the researcher and practitioner communities. The goal of this workshop is to bring privacy theory and design together.

We seek participants from various domains for a multidisciplinary workshop to share their knowledge and views of both the theory and design of interactional privacy.

We invite 2-4 page submissions in ACM Ext. Abstracts format by January 26, 2011. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

(1) Theoretical and empirical study of interactional privacy.

(2) Ways of designing for interactional privacy.

More information available at http://networkedprivacy.wordpress.com

CHI2011 workshop on Appropriation and Creative Use

asalovaa — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 11:36:36 +0000

UIx will co-organize a workshop at upcoming CHI2011 conference: "Appropriation and Creative Use: Linking User Studies with Design":

Sunday 8 May 2011, Vancouver, Canada

End users of technology have a significant power in determining how technologies are used, adapted and re-purposed. Over the years, two communities – designers and user researchers – have been working on these topics but have had limited interaction with each other. This workshop provides a forum for the two to meet.

We invite 2-4 page submissions in ACM Ext. Abstracts format by 14 January 2011. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* user research methods that are suitable for gaining understanding about
    different forms of appropriation
* theories and conceptualizations of how appropriations take place, how
    different factors play part in them, and how they can be affected by design choices
* design principles that support appropriation
* approaches that link theories and concepts with design
* critical viewpoints on the prevailing appropriation-related design and
    research practice

More information available at www.hiit.fi/u/asalovaa/chi2011-appropriation

03.12.2010 Paper accepted to CSCW’11

liikkane — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 20:42:32 +0000

I’ll press Play, but I won’t listen: Profile Work in a Music-focused Social Network Service, a full paper by Suvi Silfverberg, Lassi A. Liikkanen and Airi Lampinen was accepted to CSCW 2011 conference taking place in March 19–23, 2011, Hangzhou, China.

The paper describes how young users of a social networking service work hard and even change their music listening behavior to appear favorably in social media. The study was carried out as a part of Academy of Finland research project Musiquitous by University of Helsinki graduate student Suvi Silfverberg. Full paper will appear at http://musiq.fi before the conference.

28.9. Study: People hesitate to ask help from their community

oulasvir — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 05:29:42 +0000

People Hesitate to Ask for Help from Their Community, According to New Research

http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/news/20100927onlinecommunityresearch

18.06.2010 UIx paper accepted to DIS'10!

liikkane — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:30:06 +0000

Paper from Liikkanen and Lahdensuo called Observing the Mobile Music Phenomenon: One in Seven Commuters is Wired will be presented at the Designing Information Systems 2010 conference. Paper has been prepared as a part of the Musiquitous project.

25.4.2010 Prof. Brewster to give a talk on mobile multimodal interaction

oulasvir — Mon, 24 May 2010 07:38:22 +0000

25 May 10:00 Stephen Brewster:

Please join us for an exciting session on the future of mobile human-computer interaction!

INVITED SPEAKER
Professor Stephen Brewster, University of Glasgow

TITLE
"Mobile Multimodal Interaction: How can we use human capabilities to improve mobile interfaces"

TIME
Tuesday 25th May (next week!) at 10-11am

PLACE
Auditorium T1, Computer Science Building, Konemiehentie 2

ABSTRACT
Mobile user interfaces are commonly based on techniques developed for desktop computers in the 1970s, often including buttons, sliders, windows and progress bars. These can be hard to use on the move, which then limits the way we use our devices and the applications on them. This talk will look at the possibility of moving away from these kinds of interactions to ones more suited to mobile devices and their dynamic contexts of use where users need to be able to look where they are going, carry shopping bags and hold on to children. Multimodal (gestural, audio and haptic) interactions provide us new ways to use our devices that can be eyes and hands free, and allow users to interact in a 'head up' way. These new interactions will facilitate new services, applications and devices that fit better into our daily lives and allow us to do a whole host of new things.

I will discuss some of the work we are doing on input using gestures done with fingers, wrist and head, along with work on output using non-speech audio, 3D sound and tactile displays in applications such as for mobile devices such as text entry, camera phone user interfaces and navigation. I will also discuss some of the issues of social acceptability of these new interfaces; we have to be careful that the new ways we want people to use devices are socially appropriate and don't make us feel embarrassed or awkward.

BIO
Stephen Brewster has been a professor of human-computer interaction in the department of computing science at the University of Glasgow, UK for since 2001. Brewster's research focuses on multimodal human computer interaction, or using multiple sensory modalities (particularly hearing, touch and smell) to create richer interactions between human and computer. His work has a strong experimental focus, applying perceptual research to practical situations. He has shown that novel use of multimodality can significantly improve usability in a wide range of situations, for mobile users, visually-impaired people, older users and in medical applications.

More information is available at www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~stephen

HOST
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT
Network Society and the HIIT Interactive Computing Seminar

Contact for more information:
Joanna Bergström-Lehtovirta, email: joanna.bergstrom@hiit.fi

12.04.2010 Teknologiateollisuuden 100-vuotissäätiö funding to HIIT project

liikkane — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 09:39:59 +0000

DSc Lassi A Liikkanen from UIx (HIIT) and MSc Matti Hämäläinen at Aalto TKK Engineering Design and Production department received a funding of 300Ke from Teknologiateollisuuden 100-vuotissäätiö.

The project is called Luovat käytännöt tuotesuunnittelussa (Creative practices in product design) and it involves both product and interaction design. The work will be carried out at Design Factory and in HII

http://www.teknologiateollisuus.fi/fi/teknologiateollisuus-ry/rahoitusp-t-kset.html

12.1.2010 HIIT-TAUCHI workshop in Tampere

oulasvir — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:18:52 +0000

Topics: mobile augmented reality, multimodality, affective computing, social media.

Schedule:
- 11-12 Lunch
- 12:00-12:20 TAUCHI Introduction
- 12:20-12:40 HIIT/UIx introduction + presentations
- 12:40-14:00 Demos by UTA
- 14:00-15:00 Discussion

14.1.2010 ContextLogger2 published

oulasvir — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:01:33 +0000

www.contextlogger.org

13.1.2010 Three full papers from HIIT accepted to CHI2010!

oulasvir — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:26:55 +0000

Three full papers accepted to CHI this year

18.12.2009 Esko Kurvinen will join HIIT for a year in 2010

oulasvir — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:42:17 +0000

Dr. Esko Kurvinen received a one year grant from Academy of Finland to work at HIIT, starting in June 2010. Esko is a top expert in ethnomethodologically inspired interaction analysis.

14.12.2009 Academy of Finland grant to Lassi A. Liikkanen

liikkane — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:17:13 +0000

Academy of Finland has granted one year researcher mobility grant to Lassi Liikkanen.

24.11.2009 First HIIT researcher meeting by UIx

liikkane — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:20:00 +0000

Lassi Liikkanen from UIx organized today the first researcher rendezvous attracting together 16 HIIT researchers from all research programs.

Read full report of X-HIIT 2009

24.11.2009 Mark Billinghurst visits UIx

oulasvir — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:23:11 +0000

http://www.hiit.fi/node/1071

18.11.2009 UIx-Mobile Life Centre half-day workshop

oulasvir — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:40:29 +0000

7 researchers from UIx visited Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm (Oskar Juhlin, Kristina Höök, Annika Waern, Lars Erik Holmquist and others from the centre) for a half-day workshop

5.11.2009 Nokia Scholarship granted to Lassi A. Liikkanen

liikkane — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:39:54 +0000

Nokia Foundation makes available grants and awards for "development of information and telecommunications technologies and to promote education of the sector in Finland". This year the foundation has granted a Scholarship for HIIT/UIx post-graduate researcher Lassi A. Liikkanen. The awards were given out on Wednesday evening 4th Nov by Jorma Ollila and Henry Tirri.

3.9.2009 Open positions at UIx (DL 15 Nov, 2009)

oulasvir — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:34:30 +0000

Please see:

http://www.hiit.fi/node/1044