Discovery, Exploration and Understanding of Urban Social
Context
David McGookin1, Andreas Komninos2 and Vassilis Kostakos3
1
Department of Computer Science, Aalto University Finland
Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Strathclyde University, U.K.
3
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Oulu, Finland
2
[email protected], [email protected],
[email protected]
1
Workshop Description
Geo-tagged user generated content, especially in urban areas, has led to large, somewhat publically available, datasets that tie data such as images, videos, textual data and
user activity to geographical locations. Such “Big Data” presents significant opportunities to understand the Urban Social Context and ambiently communicate information
about a geographical space to a user. In this workshop participants will have the opportunity to work on such a data set provided by the organisers, or their own data, to create
and prototype ideas, novel interaction concepts and how such data might be better used
to connect users to their nearby geographic environment. Our goal is to foster a community of researchers who are interested in this topic area, and bring together the unique
blend of science, engineering and design attendees from AmI to establish a multidisciplinary community to focus on connecting people with the environment through data.
2
Rationale
A key use of smartphones is their ability to inform us about our current environment, in
spatial and temporal terms. Nearby bus stops, landmarks, tourist attractions and restaurants have all emerged as key use cases for mobile interaction. Yet the way we interact
and view this information continues to be visually dominated, and largely limited to lists
or pins in maps, which suppress user exploratory behaviour. For example, in navigation,
the default approach is still to generate `turn by turn' instructions that direct users explicitly to a destination, even though such systems leave users as feeling 'bossed around' [3].
It is only very recently that research has begun to emerge that considers how to encourage users to explore and discover their immediate built environment (e.g. allowing users
to discover a quirky coffee shop rather than being explicitly directed towards it). For
example, Columbus [4], allowed users to discover flickr photographs taken in their immediate environment as they walked through it. McGookin and Brewster [2] presented
spoken twitter messages generated in an urban environment as a user walked through it,
finding how it shaped and altered user understanding of familiar places. Komninos [1]
developed an awareness system that used social media to help identify `hot' areas of a
city, allowing the awareness of its social context. Yet our understanding of how to use
and present this increasing amount of geo-content to support users in-situ is still lacking.
How it can be used to promote and support playful discovery of the environment and
exploration of 'urban context' is not well understood. This timely workshop aims to bring
together researchers working in this nascent area to explore its frontiers, and develop a
research agenda for its future exploration.
3
Workshop Experience
All the organizers have successful experience in hosting national and internationaly
successful workshops: David McGookin, co-founded and chaired the successful Haptic
and Audio Interaction Design Workshop (HAID) in 2006, which has run until 2013. He
has also co-chaired workshops at Pervasive 2010 and NordiCHI 2010, both of which led
to Journal special issues. He is an Associate Chair for ACM CHI 2013-2015 and is Interactivity Chair for the IFIP Interact 2015 conference. Andreas Komninos has acted as a
committee member for several workshops, e.g. Personal Information Management
(2008/9), Pervasive technologies for the Support of Alzheimers’ and related disorders
(2007/8), Designing with Care (2009), Nudge & Influence Through Mobile devices
(2010). Vassilis Kostakos has served a Workshop Chair at the Ubicomp conference
(2010), and has organised several international workshops at Ubicomp (2011/12/13),
WWW (2012), CHI (2005), and NetSci (2008).
4
Plan
The workshop will be a 6 hour workshop. Participants will be selected through the
submission of short position papers on the themes of the workshop. Advertising will be
through the use of HCI mailing lists, such as SIGCHI. Papers will be reviewed by international experts and then a jury of the workshop organizers will select up to 15 participants. The workshop will start with a short Pecha Kucha talk from each participant. This
will be followed by brainstorming and prototyping of ideas based on an historical location-based dataset. We will consider writing up the results of the workshop as an ACM
Interactions article.
References
1. Komninos, A., Besharat, J., Ferreira, D., and Garofalakis, J. HotCity: Enhancing Ubiquitous
Maps with Social Context Heatmaps. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on
Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia, ACM (2013), 52:1–52:10.
2. McGookin, D. and Brewster, S. PULSE: the design and evaluation of an auditory display to
provide a social vibe. Proceedings of the CHI 2012, ACM (2012), 1263–1272.
3. Pielot, M., Poppinga, B., and Boll, S. PocketNavigator: vibro-tactile waypoint navigation for
everyday mobile devices. Proc. MobileHCI 2010, ACM Press (2010), 423–426.
4. Rost, M., Cramer, H., and Holmquist, L. Mobile Exploration of Geotagged Photographs. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, , 1–12.