Projects
The Problem
The future of the research university will revolve around learning and applying methods of inquiry. Today, the classroom lecture and the course textbook are dominant features of the environment. However, these tools suggest to students that you learn best by listening to inaccessible experts, and that the world's problems can be solved by looking up the answer.
In today's world, with global warming, energy shortages, and the threat of global pandemics, we cannot afford this naive view. We need to teach the next generation of leaders the methods for how to solve the unsolved problems, where no expert has the answer, and there is no textbook. These are the methods of inquiry, or more formally, research.
Activities
In the Campus of the Future project we are exploring technologies, applications, and social structures that make it easier to employ methods of inquiry in the university environment.
This project acknowledges that most students do not know what research is, nor that the dominant activity of research universities is research -- much of it relevant to the most pressing problems in our world today. Thus, the first step in this project is to explore applications and social structures that make students aware of what is going on around them.
Secondarily, this project acknowledges that conducting research within 10 or 15 week terms, mixed in with other classes, is difficult. To this end we are developing technologies to enable computer science students and other tech-savvy students to more quickly investigate research questions.
In particular, we are doing the following:
- Offering both quarter-long and year-long inquiry-oriented capstone design courses in ubiquitous computing for the campus of the future.
- In research and the above courses, exploring the promise of smartphone, web, and networked public display technologies for supporting a university community.
- Developing enabling infrastructure for the rapid development of the above applications.
- Putting on exhibits and shows that will show the community what is possible and urge them to get involved.
Mobile phones are the most widely deployed and used portable devices in the world today, and they are playing an increasingly prominent role in our lives. We no longer use phones just to make calls, but also to send SMS and email messages, to take pictures, to listen to music, and to access the Internet. We keep our phones with us and switched on at all times, providing both a constant connection with the world and also a source of distraction.
At the same time the ideas of "Web 2.0" are transforming Internet publishing. The Web 2.0 vision is a shift away from centrally provided content to user-contributed and user-driven content. The proliferation of mobile phones combined with the ideas of Web 2.0 offers the potential for many new applications that support inquiry, debate, and activism.
Finally, public displays, through their scale and the fact that they are a shared resource, offer a highly public and social way to employ computers for methods of inquiry.
Campus of the Future Projects
ENG 100L TIES "Campus of the Future"
CSE 118 Ubiquitous Computing
PeopleTones
Partners and Funding Agencies
Microsoft Research ER&P
UC MICRO Program
Hewlett Packard
Today online social communities are playing an increasingly significant role
in people's lives. These communities involve everything from sharing content
and interests to dating and making of friends. So far there has been a
distinct border between online communities and the real world. You either
access the communities on the computer or you meet people in the real world
- you rarely do both at the same time.
"TIES" ENG 100 is an outgrowth of Purdue's EPICS program, rooted in the concept of the service learning capstone experience. ENG 100L "Campus of the Future" is studying social life on the campus and exploring large public display technologies for supporting learning communities.
Their website can be found here.
Understanding what mobile users do and how they address their information needs can help inform design in building mobile applications. Although mobile users face many challenges such as slow network connections, clumsy input methods, and small disk space these barriers may get better. The fundamental problem mobile users face is they are often multitasking, which means limited attention span. We are exploring the current problems mobile users face, and have begun to prototype new applications to address their needs.
Personnel
- Tim Sohn, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, U.C. San Diego
- William G. Griswold, Ph.D., Department of Computer Science and Engineering, U.C. San Diego
People often need common local knowledge to decide when and where to
attempt their location-dependent tasks, such as shopping. Digital
aids would be more usable if they could access and apply that common
knowledge. For example, a location-based reminder system could be
set to issue a reminder at any place where postage stamps are sold,
without the user supplying the list of locations. The set of place
capabilities for everyday tasks comprises a vast number of
individually uninteresting facts, so it is not surprising that it is
poorly supported by manually constructed web pages.
This project investigates the building of a model of typical common
local knowledge by applying machine learning to data sources such as
locations of deletions from to-do lists, and general knowledge about
related clusters of capabilities.
Personnel
- Patricia Shanahan, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, U.C. San Diego
- William G. Griswold, Ph.D., Department of Computer Science and Engineering, U.C. San Diego
Keeping in touch has become a challenge for busy, nomadic people. Many people spend a significant part of the day outside the home, where they lack the rich affordances available at home for maintaining connections with friends and family. Mobile phones can enable novel forms of affective communication, the communication of a sense of closeness or shared experience, for people on the go. Sharing digital photos has been shown to increase affective awareness, yet existing approaches to photo sharing are too demanding and distracting for the mobile domain.
We claim that mobile image sharing can keep people connected without distracting them if we reduce the burdens on users and follow an ambient interaction model. To research the validity of this claim, we have created Emotipix, an application for channel-based photo publishing on camera phones. Emotipix reduces the act of publication to the act of image capture, and turns the phone into a peripheral display device. Emotipix is ambient or calm, in the sense that users have the option to explicitly interact with the application, but are not be required to do so at any time.
Emotipix works as follows. Each user captures photos on his/her phone and these photos are automatically published to an outgoing channel. Published images are displayed to a channel’s subscribers as an ambient slideshow, appearing as the wallpaper on each subscriber’s phone. A 1-click feedback mechanism completes the communication loop between publisher and subscriber. Images are automatically selected for display based on a probabilistic selection function weighted by image age and subscriber feedback.
Personnel
- Lisa Cowan, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, U.C. San Diego
- William G. Griswold, Ph.D., Department of Computer Science and Engineering, U.C. San Diego
Mobile phones have the potential to be useful agents for their owners by detecting and reporting situations that are of interest. Several challenges emerge in the case of detecting and reporting “nice to know” situations, such as the proximity of a friend. For detection, the precision of sensing must be high enough to minimize annoying false notifications, despite the constraints imposed by the inaccuracy of commodity sensors and the limited battery power available on mobile phones. For reporting, the notifications cannot be too obtrusive to the user or those in the vicinity. Peripheral cues are appropriate for conveying information like proximity, but have been studied primarily in settings like offices where sensors and cueing mechanisms can be controlled.
We explore these issues through the design of PeopleTones, a buddy proximity application for mobile phones. We contribute (1) an algorithm for detecting proximity, (2) techniques for reducing sensor noise and power consumption, and (3) a method for generating peripheral cues. Empirical measurements demonstrate the precision and recall characteristics of our proximity algorithm. A two-week study of three groups of friends using PeopleTones shows that our techniques were effective, enabling the study of how people respond to peripheral cues in the wild. Our qualitative findings underscore the importance of cue selection and personal control for peripheral cues.
Funded by Motorola Research and Microsoft Research ER&P
Personnel
- Kevin Li, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, U.C. San Diego
- Timothy Sohn, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, U.C. San Diego
- William G. Griswold, Ph.D., Department of Computer Science and Engineering, U.C. San Diego
Project summary
We are studying the everyday use of multi-functional mobile phones amongst working adults. Our pilot study results suggest phone function use is tied more closely to individual lifestyle and economic considerations than to interface design or phone instrument functionality. We are now conducting an expanded, self-funded study to try to confirm these findings.
Personnel
- Louise Barkhuus, Ph.D. [lead], Department of Computer Science, U.C. San Diego
- Valerie Polichar, Ph.D., Department of Cognitive Science, U.C. San Diego
