ISWC 2019 Daily Journal
A day-by-day memoir of the International Symposium for Wearable Computers
Day 1
After finally arriving at Heathrow Airport and snaking my way through the custom’s line and several trains, I finally made it the Queen Elizabeth II Center. The first day of the conference was a dedicated to workshops, a day of informal talks when work could be presented in an area specific setting. I chose the eye-wear computing group. Throughout the day, I learned about eye tracking and facial temperature sensing and how both of those techniques could be utilized to address problems facing society today. And to cap off the day, we broke into small groups to discuss some of our ideal projects in that field. My group, comprised of several PhD students and professors from around the globe, discussed a more psychological side of computing. We asked questions like:
- How does a car passenger being able to see the driver’s dashboard affect the driver’s ability and accuracy?
- How could we leverage eye tracking technology to possibly make movie scenes more adaptive.
To expand on that last question, the idea was to take advantage of the various scene cuts that directors use in movies. Directors already strategically splice together various camera angles and shot lengths to make the viewer see the scene in a certain way (i.e. the Joker as the antagonist in Batman movies). However, we talked about how we could link the eye tracking and the viewer’s perception of characters to better leverage a scenes impact and potentially use machine learning to make the film more adaptive to future audiences.
Day 2
The second day of workshops lived up to the standards of the first. In the morning, I attended the AppLens workshop, a session on mining and learning from smartphone app usage. Here, I was intrigued by a study being done by University of Melbourne HCI Professor, Vassilis Kostakos, in which the he was trying to model how users interact with their phone through the lens of time of day, day of the week, and battery level just to name a few. One part of his study aimed to answer the question:
Do smartphones create habits?
To address this, his team deployed an app that, upon user agreement, monitored their revisitation patterns. After gathering their data and comparing it to an identical study done over a decade ago about computer usage, the group was able to conclude that similar online services offered similar revisitation patterns regardless of whether it took place on a desktop or on mobile. They, hence, were able to conclude that smartphones do not create habits. This study was among the most intriguing things I heard throughout the second day of workshops.
To cap the day off, I, along with several other Georgia Tech students took to the streets of London to not only take in the sites and sounds of the city, but also to practice and prepare for the presentations we would be making in the coming days.
Day 3
The first official day of the conference started off quickly with a keynote talk from Dr. Marta Kwiatkowska of University of Oxford. She spoke about how she is using machine learning models to predict both the safety and reliability of different fields of technology. One place she focused most on was the self-driving car industry. And even though she may have frightened us with a couple news articles about self-driving vehicles underperforming, the assured us that the work she has been doing was on track to make us feel as comfortable as possible with not only that type of cutting edge tech, but many others as well. If you really think about it, new technology means nothing if humans never use and trust it.
From there, we moved into several field specific sessions. Most memorable on the day for me was the session entitled Interaction Paradigms. Here, students presented their work on various specific case like one-handed text entry, tap-to-pair devices, and even detachable smartwatches. It’s always interesting to see new perspectives on the field and these small sessions are a perfect place for that.
Day 4
This second to last day was again packed with talks from morning until night. Even my research project’s talk would be taking place today, but like yesterday, we started off with a morning keynote. This time, Lama Nachman, an Intel Fellow and the Director of Anticipatory Computing Lab, enlightened the crowd with how she brings technology into the real world.
The most memorable portion of her talk was when she spoke of her time working with Dr. Stephen Hawking. She and several other Intel researchers were tasked with creating new, and more usable technology for the famed British professor to make doing everyday tasks easier for him. She hit on the idea that even though the latest and greatest piece of tech might seem like the best path forward, you always have to work with the end-user of the product. She claimed that Professor Hawking had grown so used to interacting with the specifics of his older technology that bringing in a new system would only make things worth, Rather, she noted, you have to consider your user and adjust accordingly and that no two users are the same, especially when dealing with a disease like ALS. She never failed to stress how it important it is to get your work out of the lab and small tests and into the real world to be used with real people.
If you want to learn more about Lama Nachman and Intel’s work with Dr. Hawking, please visit: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/stephen-hawking-intel-helped-give-voice/#gs.2wnqa5.
As the sessions began to get going for the day, I anxiously awaited my talk. The talk was a bit unique in that our research was accepted to ISWC ’19 as a brief and not a full length paper. That being said, I was challenged with presenting in just three minutes as opposed to the normal ten minute. In the talk, I made sure to hit on only the important and overarching points of the project like JacquardToolkit and the Gesture Creation studio. Be sure to watch the video of the talk to hear what I had to say.
Day 5
In the final day of the conference, I attended what I considered to be the most interesting talk of the day. Presented by Snap Inc. researcher, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, the minecraft-esque idea of collaborative augmented reality was discussed. In his talk, he described different scenarios in which the Snapchat feature that they called Blocks was implemented. By manipulating the physical location and level of collaborative-ness of Blocks, Monroy-Hernandez and his team were able to draw certain conclusion about how to best implement collaborative augmentative reality experiences in the real world.
If you want to learn more about Dr. Monroy-Hernandez and his team’s work please visit: https://doi.org/10.1145/3351241.
Recap
As the first time attendee of a computing conference, I can really say that I learned a lot throughout the entire week of events. Not only are conferences like these a place to present your work and publish your findings, but it is also a place to network with likeminded individuals. All in all, the experience was very positive and hopefully we can get more work with the Jacquard published to make a return to the conference next year.
Georgia Tech’s E-Textile Hacking Team is always looking to collaborate with engineers and researchers across industry and academia. If you are enthusiastic about new forms of human computer interactions like this one or interested in our work on the Jacquard E-textile, please reach out!
