The HCIL Goes to Glasgow

With another strong showing at the CHI 2019 conference, the HCIL is heading to the Scottish lowlands in early May.

Lighthouse and cliffs at Stirling in Scotland, 25 miles northeast of Glasgow. (Photo by Miro Alt from Pexels.)

During May 4–8 this year, the 2019 edition of the premier academic conference on human-computer interaction — ACM CHI (pronounced “kai”)— will take place in Glasgow, Scotland. It is the first time the conference has come to the UK, let alone Scotland, and the conference has grown larger than ever with almost 3,000 (2,958 to be precise) submissions and approximately 700 papers accepted to the full paper track. As always, CHI is one of the top venues for researchers in the HCIL , and we have a total of 14 papers accepted at the conference this year. Based on the statistics (which are not entirely correct due to duplicated names), that puts us tied for the #9 spot based on total number of papers accepted, which is no small feat!

Of course, CHI is not only about papers. During the five days of the conference, there are multiple concurrent events, including panels, workshops, courses, posters, and keynotes. Many of our members also participate and even organize these events.

In this post we give a quick overview of all of the contributions that HCIL members will be presenting during the conference. In fact, three of the papers (so far) have in-depth blog posts describing them in more detail:

• Automatically Arranging Charts with Vistribute (Tom Horak)
• Something is Rank in the State of Data (Niklas Elmqvist)
• Co-Designing Food Trackers with Dietitians (Yuhan Luo)
• Exploring Digital Privacy and Security in Elementary Schools (Priya Kumar)

Papers

Vistribute: People are increasingly using multiple devices — such as combinations of laptops, tablets, smartphones, and large displays — when analyzing data, but arranging data charts across all these screens can be tedious and time-consuming. In our Vistribute framework, we propose several rules of thumb between how different visualizations relate to each other and how they should be arranged on a specific display setup. For example, two bar charts showing sales data for different years are typically used for comparison, and should thus be placed side by side. In our study, participants manually built layouts based on the same principles as our automated prototype. While manual ones were slightly higher rated than automatic ones, the almost instant layout provided by our prototype is much better suited for flexible and effortless multi-display environments of the future.

• Tom Horak, Andreas Mathisen, Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose, Raimund Dachselt, Niklas Elmqvist. 2019. Vistribute: Distributing Interactive Visualizations in Dynamic Multi-Device Setups. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
• Sparks of Innovation post: Automatically Arranging Charts with Vistribute

Digital Privacy and Elementary Schools: Digital technologies, from netbooks to messaging apps, permeate K-12 classrooms, but it’s unclear how privacy and security factor into decisions to use these technologies. Through focus groups with educators, we found that privacy and security in the classroom meant responsibly handling student data (e.g. login credentials) and minimizing students’ inappropriate use of technology. The educators we spoke to rarely gave lessons about privacy or security to their students; some felt such lessons were unnecessary for elementary school students while others said they lacked the time to do so. We see an opportunity for designers to integrate “teachable moments” into educational technologies as a way to spark conversations between students, teachers, and parents about digital privacy and security. More broadly, the HCI and other communities must grapple with tensions about the datafication of education and its concomitant privacy and security concerns.

• Priya C. Kumar, Marshini Chetty, Tamara L. Clegg, and Jessica Vitak. 2019. Privacy and Security Considerations For Digital Technology Use in Elementary Schools. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
• Blog post: Exploring Digital Privacy and Security in Elementary Schools (Priya Kumar)

Ranked-List Visualization: What’s the best way to show a list of sorted values? Classic bar charts, invented by William Playfair in 1786, are accurate, but require a lot of scrolling for long lists. Researchers have suggested several new ways to visualize ranked lists. In this paper, we ran a head-to-head comparison between six both classic and novel such ways. We found that bar charts are the most accurate representation. However, treemaps — where the area of tightly packed boxes are used to convey values — performed surprisingly well, confirming their recent use in practice. Finally, wrapped bars, where the width of the chart is split into columns so that scrolling can be avoided, had the all-round best performance in both accuracy and speed.

• Pranathi Mylavarapu, Adil Yalcin, Xan Gregg, Niklas Elmqvist. 2019. Ranked-List Visualization: A Graphical Perception Study. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
• Sparks of Innovation post: Something is Rank in the State of Data

Verification and Credibility on Twitter: Many popular social networking and microblogging sites support verified accounts — user accounts that are deemed to be of public interest and whose owners have been authenticated by the site. For example, Twitter uses a blue checkmark badge to indicate verification. Importantly, the content of messages contributed by verified account owners is not verified: messages from a verified account may or may not be factually correct. In two online studies with more than 2,700 participants, we investigated whether users can distinguish verification of a user from verification of that user’s content or claims: are people more likely to believe content from verified accounts? Somewhat surprisingly, we found that in fact users can effectively make this important distinction.

• Tavish Vaidya, Daniel Votipka, Michelle L. Mazurek, and Micah Sherr. 2019. Does Being Verified Make You More Credible? Account Verification’s Effect on Tweet Credibility. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
• Video Preview

Design and Menopause: Though menopause is often seen as a personal women’s health issue and examined through the lens of clinical research, there are many opportunities for human-computer interaction research to contribute to this area. In a set of papers, we first empirically examined the lived experience of menopause through an analysis of a Subreddit forum. We found that the experience of menopause is social: bodily changes are experienced in the social context and gendered marginalization plays a significant role. We then iteratively generated new design frames to take on the topic of menopause in HCI, including smart spaces and networked interactive “menobuddies.”

• Amanda Lazar, Norman Makoto Su, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell. 2019. Parting the Red Sea: Sociotechnical Systems and Lived Experiences of Menopause. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
• Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Amanda Lazar, Norman Makoto Su. 2019. (Re-)Framing Menopause Experiences for HCI and Design. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Co-Designing Food Trackers with Dietitians: Dietitians typically see patients who have various dietary problems, thus having different information needs. However, existing food trackers such as paper-based diaries and mobile apps are rarely customizable, making it difficult to capture necessary data for both patients and dietitians. We report co-design workshops with registered dietitians conducted to identify opportunities for designing customizable food trackers. We found a wide range of potential tracking items such as food, reflection, symptom, activity, and physical state. Depending on patients’ dietary problems and dietitians’ practice, the necessity and importance of these tracking items vary. We identify opportunities for patients and healthcare providers to collaborate around data tracking and sharing through customization. We also discuss how to structure co-design workshops to solicit the design considerations of self-tracking tools for patients with specific health problems.

• Yuhan Luo, Peiyi Liu, and Eun Kyoung Choe. 2019. Co-Designing Food Trackers with Dietitians: Identifying Design Opportunities for Food Tracker Customization. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
• Sparks of Innovation post: Co-Designing Food Trackers with Dietitians

Understanding Personal Productivity: What does personal productivity mean for knowledge workers? In this work, we investigate how knowledge workers conceptualize personal productivity and delimit productive tasks in both work and non-work contexts. We report on a 2-week diary study followed by a semi-structured interview with 24 knowledge workers. Participants reported a wide range of productive activities beyond typical desk-bound work — ranging from having a personal conversation with dad to getting a haircut. We found six themes that characterize the productivity assessment — work product, time management, worker’s state, attitude toward work, impact & benefit, and compound task — and identified how participants interleaved multiple facets when assessing their productivity. We discuss how these findings could inform the design of a comprehensive productivity tracking system that covers a wide range of productive activities.

• Young-Ho Kim, Eun Kyoung Choe, Bongshin Lee, and Jinwook Seo. 2019. Understanding Personal Productivity: How Knowledge Workers Define, Evaluate, and Reflect on Their Productivity. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Hand-detection in Object Recognition for the Blind: How can we enable blind users train their mobile phone to recognize objects of interest when camera manipulation can be challenging? In this paper we examine hands as a natural interface for including and indicating the object of interest in the camera frame. Leveraging prior evidence on the ability of blind people to coordinate hand movements using proprioception, we propose a deep learning system that estimates the center of the object based on its proximity to the segmented user’s hand. We found that this can help with the recognition accuracy especially when photos are taken in cluttered backgrounds. We made our dataset publicly available: TEgO.

• Kyungjun Lee and Hernisa Kacorri. 2019. Hands Holding Clues for Object Recognition in Teachable Machines. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

#HandsOffMyADA: Twitter is increasingly used as a medium for advocacy, activism, and social change, but its efficacy is questionable. In this paper we explore how well are online platforms enabling people with disabilities to engage politically and participate in conversations affecting their rights. In the context of the Twitter response to the ADA Education and Reform Act, we show how disability campaigns in Twitter receive little attention by media outlets compared to previous disability rights efforts. While multimedia can boost retweetability, a striking small percentage of the multimedia was accessible for this campaign, even though it involves a community that cares about disability rights. Surprisingly, many users reveal information about their disability and health either in their bios, tweets, or comments, raising privacy concerns.

• Brooke E. Auxier, Cody L. Buntain, Paul Jaeger, Jennifer Golbeck, Hernisa Kacorri. 2019. #HandsOfMyADA: A Twitter Response to the ADA Education and Reform Act. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Workshops

Hacking Blind Navigation: One of the major challenges for blind people is to be able to navigate unfamiliar and complex environments independently. This workshop intends to bring researchers from accessibility, cognitive science, computer vision, and ubiquitous computing together to increase awareness on recent advances in blind navigation assistive technologies, benefit from diverse perspectives and expertise, discuss open research challenges, and explore avenues for multi-disciplinary collaborations. Interactions are fostered through a panel on open challenges and avenues for interdisciplinary collaboration, minute-madness presentations, and a hands-on session where workshop participants can hack (design or prototype) new solutions to tackle open research challenges.

• João Guerreiro, Hernisa Kacorri, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Edward Cutrell, Daisuke Sato, Dragan Ahmetovic, Chieko Asakawa. 2019. Hacking Blind Navigation. Workshop at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Late Breaking Work

Non-expert Perception of Machine Teaching: In the machine teaching paradigm, non-expert end-users are called to personalize machine learning applications by explicitly providing a few training examples. While facilitating user control, lack of machine learning expertise or common misconceptions can hinder the effectiveness of this approach. Through a mobile teachable testbed in Amazon Mechanical Turk, we explore how non-experts (N=100) conceptualize, experience, and reflect on their engagement with machine teaching in the context of object recognition. Our preliminary results show that more than half of the participants understood the importance of variation in training examples for robustness. However, this was often limited to variation in object size and viewpoint and less in image background and illumination. Moreover, participant strategies for variation were inconsistent across object classes.

• Jonggi Hong, Kyungjun Lee, June Xu, Hernisa Kacorri. 2019. Exploring Machine Teaching for Object Recognition with the Crowd. Late Breaking Work of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Panels

Careers in HCI and UX: The Digital Transformation from Craft to Strategy: At this Thursday 11.00–12.20 panel in room Argyll 1 CROWN, our very own Ben Shneiderman will join four other panelists from both industry and academia to discuss how human-computer interaction (HCI) and user experience (UX) can have an increased presence and role in future organizations. The panel will explore how to position HCI and UX to become a driver for both business and social transformation.

• Charles B. Kreitzberg (Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA)
• Elizabeth Rosenzweig (Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA)
• Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD, USA)
• Elizabeth F. Churchill (Google Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA)
• Elizabeth Gerber (Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA)

Other Contributions

Courses: Jonathan Lazar is leading a team of four instructors (Casey Fiesler, Anthony Giannoumis, Raja Kushalnagar), to teach a new course at CHI: “Introduction to Legal Issues in Human-Computer Interaction.” The course will provide a basic understanding of legal issues in five different areas of HCI: accessibility, privacy, intellectual property, telecommunications, and requirements in using human participants in research. This course is in addition to the “Introduction to HCI” course, which Jonathan Lazar has been co-teaching with Simone Barbosa (PUC-Rio, Brazil) at CHI since 2014.

Student Research Competition Extended Abstract: This paper describes a Ph.D. research project involving people with dementia and practitioners who work primarily with people with dementia to support engagement in meaningful activities and activities of everyday living. The aim of this work is to develop a technology which adapts to changing cognitive demands of people with dementia in order to facilitate continuous engagement in meaningful activities. In depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with practitioners to understand their methods for personalization of activities and the implications for design of future adaptive technologies. Preliminary results from interviews with Occupational Therapists are presented.

• Emma Dixon. 2019. Understanding the Occupational Therapists Method to Inform the Design of Technologies for People with Dementia. In Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Book launch events: On Monday evening, Ben Shneiderman’s new book Encounters with HCI Pioneers: A Personal History and Photo Journal, published by Morgan & Claypool, will be released. On Wednesday evening, Jenny Preece (with Yvonne Rogers and Helen Sharp) will be releasing the 5th edition of their Interaction Design book (Wiley).

If you’re in Glasgow for CHI, be sure to look for HCIL members. In fact, on Tuesday, we’ll be easy to spot: that day is the HCIL Green Day, which means that all HCIL members should be wearing their green t-shirt or hockey jerseys!

Hope you see you there!