Lab member Taylor Jackson Scott gave a well received presentation at the ACM Special Interest Group on Design of Communication conference in Seattle on a paper entitled “Adapting Grounded Theory to Construct a Taxonomy of Affect in Collaborative Online Chat.” The work detailed a flexible and extensible means for constructing a taxonomy of affect in text-based online communication. Katie Kuksenok, Michael Brooks, Daniel Perry, Ona Anicello, and Cecilia Aragon were co-authors for the paper.
News
Professor and SCCL director Cecilia Aragon and her colleagues received the best paper award at the IEEE/IAPR International Conference on Biometrics in India this weekend, for their paper, “Biometric Authentication via Oculomotor Plant Characteristics.”
Michael Brooks, a member of SCCL, along with collaborators Jevin West, Carl Bergstrom, and Cecilia Aragon, submitted their “hoptree” navigation system to the University of Washington Center for Commercialization. The hoptree assists users with browsing large hierarchical data sets (including file systems, web sites, or other trees) by displaying a branching navigation history over the hierarchy.
SCCL members will be presenting work at the upcoming HCDE Corporate Affiliates Day Research Poster Showcase on Wednesday, February 29th, from 12:30pm – 1:30pm. Presentations will be made in the Walker Ames Room of Kane Hall.
Works to be presented include:
ARGHHH!! Understanding Frustration with Biometric Authentication
Authors: Michael Brooks, Michael Toomim, & Cecilia Aragon
If You’re Happy and You Show It :) … Detecting Emotion in Text-Based Collaboration
Authors: Taylor Scott, Ona Anicello, Michael Brooks, Daniel Perry, & Cecilia Aragon
Measuring Distributed Affect to Engage Students in Bioinformatics Education
Authors: Daniel Perry, Cecilia Aragon, Jeanne Chowning, Brian Glanz, & Mette Peters
February 16th
Several members of the SCCL lab, including lab director Cecilia Aragon, students Michael Brooks, Katie Kuksenok, Taylor Scott, and Daniel Perry, attended the Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference in Seattle this past week. Daniel Perry presented a poster (co-authored with Cecilia Aragon) titled “Measuring Distributed Affect in Collaborative Games” that proposed a system for responding to text-based emotional cues within the framework of a multi-player game.
November 3, 2011
Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) Professor Cecilia Aragon began research earlier this month for a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant through the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI), which coordinates and supports the acquisition, development and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools and services essential to the conduct of 21st century science and engineering research and education. Her project, Collaborative Games for Bioinformatics Education, aims to create a novel educational game that incorporates bioinformatics and cyberinfrastructure (CI) concepts aimed at early high school students.
Many educational games have been developed in recent years with a social networking component that have reached audiences of varying sizes. However, few of these have been designed specifically to teach CI concepts. Aragon’s research approach is novel not only because it will teach bioinformatics and CI, but because the research team will focus on eliciting emotions in a multi-player environment. Emotional responses within the game will be utilized to enhance peer-to-peer learning, and analyze the outcomes of the player experience.
The long-term benefits of this research to society include the uptake of concepts of cyber problem solving specifically among young underrepresented minorities and women, and the production of conceptual models that will help us to better understand the larger relationships between people, educational games, and infrastructural computational technologies more generally.
Dr. Cecilia Aragon and SCCL researcher, Daniel Perry, attended the Serious Play conference held at the DigiPen Institute in Redmond, Washington August 23rd – 25th. The conference attracted leaders within the fields of game design, education and learning. “It was incredible to see people from computer science, game designers, learning scientists, k -12 educators, and corporate professionals all come together to discuss the future of gaming and education,” said Perry.
http://www.seriousplayconference.com/
Collaborative Creativity: A Complex Systems Model with Distributed Affect
Cecilia R. Aragon and Alison Williams
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2011
Abstract:
The study of creativity has received significant attention over the past century, with a recent increase in interest in collaborative, distributed creativity. We posit that creativity in distributed groups is fostered by software interfaces that specifically enable socio-emotional or affective communication. However, previous work on creativity and affect has primarily focused on the individual, while group creativity research has concentrated more on cognition rather than affect. In this paper we propose a new model for creativity in distributed groups, based on the theory of groups as complex systems, that includes affect as well as cognition and that explicitly calls out the interface between individuals as a key parameter of the model. We describe the model, the four stages of collaborative creativity and the causal dynamics in each stage, and demonstrate how affect and interface can facilitate the generation, selection, and amplification of ideas in the various stages of collaborative creativity. We then validate our model with data from three field sites. The data was collected from longitudinal studies of two distributed groups involved in producing creative products—astrophysicists studying supernovae and the expansion rate of the universe and children creating multimedia programming projects online—and interviews with staff in a multinational engineering company.
Making Energy Savings Easier: Usability Metrics for Thermostats
Daniel Perry, Cecilia Aragon, Alan Meier, Therese Peffer, and Marco Pritoni
Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 6, Issue 4, August 2011, pp. 226 – 244
Abstract
U.S. residential thermostats control approximately 9% of the nation’s energy use. Many building codes now require programmable thermostats (PTs) because of their assumed energy savings. However, several recent field studies have shown no significant savings or even higher energy use in households using PTs compared to those using non-PTs. These studies point to usability problems that lead to incorrect use and wasted energy. However, the lack of clear, consistent metrics has hampered the acceptance of usability concerns by thermostat manufacturers. Thus there is a need for metrics specific to PTs that manufacturers can use to evaluate their products.
In this paper, we report on the results of a usability study conducted on five commercially available PTs and the development of four new metrics suitable for use in evaluating thermostat usability. Our study confirmed usability deficits in the current generation of PTs and showed the metrics are correlated with each other as well as agreeing with the qualitative results of the study.
