INDEX

Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability

Professor Preece researches and teaches human-computer interaction and online communities. Current projects include characterizing lurking behavior, supporting online moderators, identifying models of online community for patient support. Jenny Preece is Chair of Information Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has also worked in distance education at the UK Open University. Jenny Preece is author or co-author of several HCI books including a new book with Yvonne Rogers and Helen Sharp entitled Interaction Design: Beyond human-computer interaction published by John Wiley & Sons that will be available in summer 2001.
Like twentieth-century architects and town planners, online community developers shape digital landscapes, but successful communities must have a clear purpose, people and social policies. Millions of people meet online to debate baseball scores, compare parenting experiences, get stock information, and check consumer advice. They create communities by their presence or absence, their behavior and personalities. Developers can't control what people do but they can influence them by defining purposes, policies and creating safe, enticing places for people to meet. Knowing how to support social interaction (i.e., sociability) and human-computer interaction (i.e., usability) produces thriving online communities instead of electronic ghost towns. In this keynote I will discuss how developers can create sociability and usability for different kinds of online communities. Compelling examples from research on empathy, hostility and lurking illustrate key points. I also suggest how online communities can influence social capital for better or worse.
URL: http://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/

Affective and Wearable Interfaces: Sensing and Responding to Human Emotion

The unique needs of an affective computing system present challenges to designers of hardware as well as software. We expect to build systems that maintain not only constant sensing contact with the user, but also contact via more traditional user interface paradigms. One problem with many technologies is their tendency to irritate, frustrate, or annoy. Our designs aim to sense aspects of the user's affective response, e.g., whether the user is pleased or displeased, calm or stressed, during an interaction. The idea is to give the system the ability to modify its behavior and response in a way that is more respectful. (Some examples are online at http://www.media.mit.edu/affect.)

Rosalind W. Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory. In 1984, she earned a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology and was named a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. She worked as a Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1984-1987, designing VLSI chips for digital signal processing and developing new methods of image compression and analysis. Picard earned the Masters and Doctorate, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from MIT in 1986 and 1991, respectively. In 1991 she joined the MIT Media Laboratory as an Assistant Professor, and in 1992 was appointed to the NEC Development Chair in Computers and Communications. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1995, and awarded tenure at MIT in 1998. Her award-winning book, Affective Computing, (MIT Press, 1997) lays groundwork for giving machines skills of emotional intelligence.
URL: http://vismod.www.media.mit.edu/people/picard/

Augmented Interaction

Today's computers serve mainly as tools for manipulating digital information, but are not designed for making our physical world more comfortable. I am interested in designing a new human computer interaction style based on highly personalized portable computers and environmentally embedded computers. These computers will be aware of our physical situations and thus will be more real-world oriented rather than computationally oriented. Under such an environment, we will be able to concentrate on real world tasks that are constantly augmented by the computer's information. I expect that such environments will be as commonplace as today's everyday things such as eyeglasses or wristwatches, and will be seamlessly integrated into our daily lives. This talk will introduce our recent efforts to realize computer augmented physical environments, ranging from sensor architecture to interaction design.
Jun Rekimoto,
Director of Interaction Laboratory in Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.
URL: http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto.html