What happened on UIST Day 2, and what’s up next!
by the UIST Publicity team, especially our stellar SVs, Haemin Ryu, April Wang, and Josh Urban Davis
Tomorrow is the last day of #uist2020, and you know what that means: the final paper talk sessions and our much anticipated Closing Plenary Keynote by Sasha Costanza-Chock on Design Justice and User Interface Design.
But first, let’s take a look at what happened today!
Papers on Adaptive Input
Have you ever been bothered by a bailed click? When you are about to click something, an ad flashes on your screen and you click on it unexpectedly? In the session Adaptive Input: State Changes and Correction, Philippe Schmid from Inria reported their recent study on interaction inferences from a perspective of neuroscience + HCI. They found the minimal time interval that the participants could not refrain from completing their action after an unexpected change before clicking.
In the same session, researchers from Microsoft Research presented a new interaction for digital drawing boards — tilt-responsive techniques. They demonstrated a variety of usage scenarios using tilt-responsive as transitions between reading vs. writing (annotation), public vs. personal, shared person-space vs. task-space, and so on. We can’t wait to see how this new interaction technique can be applied to digital drawing boards and other tablets devices! Check out their cool demo video.
Live Programming
Next, let’s take a look at novel programming paradigms on UIST this year. Live programming allows users to view runtime values continually as they program. Sorin Lerner from UCSD presented the loop-datavoid problem that in a live programming environment, the value of loop might be incorrect when the loop body is incomplete. He proposed the paradigm named focused live programming with loop seeds to solve this issue. Kasra Ferdowsifard, also from UCSD, aligned live programming with programming by example — a programming synthesis technique that can generate the code by given input/output examples. Their team proposed Small-Step Live Programming by Example. In such a programming environment, users can change the runtime values in live programming displays to other input/output examples, and the tool can generate candidate code that achieves users’ goals.
With this smooth transition from the topic of live programming to programming synthesis, Tianyi Zhang from Harvard University presented interactive programming synthesis to help programmers better think of the input/output examples and collaborate with the programming synthesis tools. They explored semantic augmentation that allows users to annotate different aspects of an example, and data augmentation that generates additional examples to help users understand and validate synthesized programs.
Fabrication, Textiles, and Animation
The Designing and Fabricating Electronics on Surfaces Session asked us to reconsider what and where a circuit could be. Presentations in this exciting session included BodyPrinter, which used a small robotic plotter to print circuitry directly onto skin, akin to tattooing. Similarly, the Sensing and Actuation on Textiles session saw many fascinating innovations in the realm of interactive fabrics and e-textiles. From embroidery speakers to object-recognizing fabrics, this session was bursting with new and exciting ideas. A fascination with the body also occurred during the Authoring Animation Session, where we saw an interesting machine learning approach to facial expression synthesis, as well as a similar machine learning technique for animation interpolation using pose estimation. A highlight of this session, for us, was Autocomplete Animated Sculpting, which imbued static sculptures with pose-able animatics. Similarly, during the Fabrication of Reconfigurables, HERMITS presented a 3D printable robotics approach for reusable kinematic animation of 3D fabricated objects. Other projects in this session included Romeo, an approach to reconfigurable robotic functionalities, as well as Poimo, which interpolated a user’s posture into a bespoke inflatable motorcycle or wheelchair. These works toed a fascinating line between whimsy and practicality that was both invigorating and uncanny.
UIST Vision Plenary and Lasting Impact Award Announcement
Today’s plenary session started off with the UIST Lasting Impact Award announcement. This year, the award was given to Bernstein et. al’s 2010 paper “Soylent: A Word Processor with a Crowd Inside” due to its pioneering exploration of crowdsourcing. This important work laid the foundation for crowdsourcing as a useful tool and domain of research within HCI. Michael Bernstein shared some insightful reflections on the work, and discussed how crowdwork and research has evolved and will continue to evolve as we head into the next decade.
We then heard two thought-provoking UIST Vision talks from David Smith (Croquet Co.) and Steve Hodges (Microsoft Research). In The Augmented Conversation and the Amplified World, David Smith discussed how much of the technology we use today enables consumption rather than creation. He took us on a walk through history, comparing Alan Kay’s visionary Dynabook to the modern smartphone and noting how today’s portable devices encourage passive consumption more than creation or collaboration. Smith then laid out a future where Augmented Reality is the new ubiquitous technology that defines our everyday lives, and discussed how with the right design and implementation, this new AR world can enable us to work together and create in new and exciting ways.
Finally, Steve Hodges presented Democratizing the Production of Interactive Hardware, where he asked us to reconsider the afterlife of research prototypes, and how innovation used in these prototypes could potentially be applied to ensuring their manufacturing. He centered this exploration around a recent trip he made to Shenzhen, and lessons learned while touring many of the electronic manufacturing warehouses there. Hodges encouraged designers and researchers to consider how their prototypes would be manufactured, in order to better facilitate the translation of research prototype to product, and improve the experiences of the many people who often hand-manufacture common electronic components.
Interactive Demos and Posters
Our first ever virtual demo and poster session took place today on Discord, where attendees wandered from “room” to “room”, meeting with presenters in small video channels. From live interactive demos to posters to doctoral symposium participants, there was no lack of content to see! If you missed a demo or poster you wanted to see, be sure to check out the second interactive session at the start of tomorrow’s program, which will also include the highly anticipated Student Innovation Contest entries!
What’s on Day 3?
Don’t miss the last day of UIST to check out awesome demos, posters, talks, and grab a virtual coffee ☕️ with other UIST attendees! Tomorrow we have authoring environments, fabrications, voice interactions, visualizations, VR, brains, and more. We also have the plenary sessions for the UIST closing keynote and closing remarks. Party starts @7:30am CDT sharp!
Closing Keynote: Design Justice and User Interface Design
In this keynote talk, Dr. Costanza-Chock will explore the theory and practice of design justice, discuss how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people — specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism) — and invite us to consider how user interface design can contribute to building “a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.”
Bio
Sasha Costanza-Chock (they/them or she/her) is a researcher and designer who works to support community-led processes that build shared power, move towards collective liberation, and advance ecological survival. They are known for their work on networked social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha is currently a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Senior Research Fellow at the Algorithmic Justice League (ajlunited.org), and a Faculty Affiliate with the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. They are the author of two books and numerous journal articles, book chapters, and other research publications. Their new book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, was published by the MIT Press in 2020. Sasha is a board member of Allied Media Projects (alliedmedia.org) and a member of the Steering Committee of the Design Justice Network (designjustice.org).
