Social Computing

myUnity

Awareness system that allows participants to gage whether their colleagues might be available for communication by seeing their presence and busyness. Provided a feeling for the overall flow in the company.

Technical challenges. Reimplemented the Android app because the first version had poor reliability and battery usage. Determined how periodic location information can be gathered with minimal battery impact by controlling GPS usage and the wake state of the phone.

Technologies. Java, Android, GPS.

J. Wiese, J. T. Biehl, T. Turner, B. van Melle, A. Girgensohn. Beyond 'Yesterday's Tomorrow': Towards the Design of Awareness Technologies for the Contemporary Worker. MobileHCI, 455-464 doi:10.1145/2037373.2037441, 2011.
J. T. Biehl, T. Turner, B. van Melle, A. Girgensohn. myUnity: A New Platform to Support Communication in the Modern Workplace. ACM Multimedia Industrial Exhibits, 801-802, doi:10.1145/2072298.2072465, 2011.

Plasma Poster and CHIplace

The Plasma Poster merged the digital and physical worlds by presenting a large interactive display with rotating multimedia content added via a web-based UI by the community. That was combined with CHIplace, a year-long social network leading up to the CHI 2002 conference. At the conference, the Plasma Poster provided access to CHIplace content.

Technical challenges. With one collaborator, created from scratch a social network with several thousand regular users. Created engaging photo galleries of people and provided a UI that group people by similarity. Linked the social network to the Plasma Poster installed during the conference and created a view that made that information accessible from a distance.

Technologies. Java, Java Server Pages, Java applet, JavaScript, MySQL.

E. Churchill, A. Girgensohn, L. Nelson, A. Lee. Blending Digital and Physical Spaces for Ubiquitous Community Participation. Communications of the ACM, 47(2), 38-44, doi:10.1145/966389.966413, 2004.
E. Churchill, L. Nelson, L. Denoue, A. Girgensohn. The Plasma Poster Network: Posting Multimedia Content in Public Places. Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT, 599-606, 2003.
E. Churchill, A. Girgensohn, L. Nelson, A. Lee. Weaving Between Online and Offline Community Participation. Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT, 729-732, 2003.
A. Girgensohn, A. Lee. Making Web Sites Be Places for Social Interaction. ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, doi:10.1145/587078.587098, 2002.

Portholes

Inspired by an earlier system called Portholes developed at Xerox PARC and EuroPARC, devised a new awareness system that delivered content over the World Wide Web, still in its infancy at that time. Used video cameras at people’s desks to snap a still image every five minutes of all participants. Provided various privacy and activity settings.

Technical challenges. Used video phones with analog connections to a central switch to capture video of some participants. Used early versions of digital webcams to capture images of others. Created web pages with settings that let users select their community and their privacy preferences. Applied bluring and other filters to images to apply privacy settings. Created a redesign implemented as a Java applet that used a stage metaphor to place people of interest closer to the front in a perspective view.

Technologies. WWW, CGI, Perl, C++, JPEG, GIF, image library, Java.

A. Lee, A. Girgensohn. Design, Experiences, and User Preferences for a Web-Based Awareness Tool. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 56(1), 75-107, doi:10.1006/ijhc.2001.0516, 2002.
A. Girgensohn, A. Lee, T. Turner. Being in Public and Reciprocity: Design for Portholes and User Preference. Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT, 458-465, 1999.
A. Lee, A. Girgensohn, K. Schlueter. NYNEX Portholes: Initial User Reactions and Redesign Implications. International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP), 385-394, doi:10.1145/266838.267359, 1997.
A. Lee, K. Schlueter, A. Girgensohn. Sensing Activity in Video Images. CHI Extended Abstracts, 319-320, doi:10.1145/1120212.1120413, 1997.