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My first and last blog post
Feb 1st
Hi! I am Sanne Verbaan, a third year Human Technology student from the Netherlands. I have been an intern at LiSC for the last 5 months and today is my last day. So hi and bye!
Most of you who read this will not know what Human Technology is. Human Technology deals with all kinds of human-technology interaction and tries to enhance user-friendly interfaces. I will eventually become a ‘soft’ engineer, mainly interested in human factors and behaviour, but with enough technical education to be able to communicate with developers/designers. I’ve been taught from basic usability studies to broad investigations on the societal demands on technological innovations. The focus is on ICT, building environment and product design. As an HT-engineer I know that the situations in which technicians design a product, service or interface are pretty complex. At the end of my study I will not only know how the end users think, but also how the designers think and how those minds can be brought together.
During my time at LiSC I assisted in the ENACT, Eat,Cook,Grow and KillaWhatts project. In the ENACT project I worked together with Shaun Lawson, Conor Linehan, Sue Jamison-Powell and Andy Garbett. The goal of this project is to set up a new way of Computerized Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for people suffering from insomnia.My work in the ENACT project involved the set up of the usability testing for the mobile phone application. The usability trials are still running at the moment.
In Eat,Cook,Grow I worked together with Shaun Lawson and Jaz Choi from the Queensland University in Australia. Eat,Cook,Grow is a project on sustainable food. The main goal of the is toraise people’s awareness of healthy and ecological food options with nutritional data and educational information. Shaun and I were in charge of recruiting participants for the website I8Dat and the focus group. Together with Jaz we had a really interesting focus group, and the analyses showed lots of usable data.When I am back in The Hague, I will run the I8Dat trial in The Netherlands!
Killawhats is a project on energy usage in student courts on the Lincoln University Campus. The goal of the project is to reduce the amount of energy students use by introducing the students of various courts with a Facebook application that monitors the energy usage per court.On this project I worked together with Derek Foster. Originally I was going to be in charge of the recruitment and the focus group, but the project got postponed.
I also worked on a literature review oncognitive behavioral therapy for people suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome after sexual abuse and what the possibilities and requirements are to set up an online group cognitive behavioral therapy.
I want to thank everyone in LiSC, I had a really great time and would love to come back when I finish Human Technology.
Plate & Rate: Using technology to help monitor food intake
Jan 31st
Finding new, engaging and understandable ways to visualise food intake and the data associated with it, is something that many people wish for. The process of recording and monitoring the food you eat is fraught with issues that can deter many people, one of these simply being that people forget, others include the recall process – looking back over the choices you made and processing the data associated with it. With obesity in the UK at high levels and set to rise, it seems like the next logical step to take is to use technology to make it easier for people to monitor their food intake. While letting an application takes care of the data processing and giving the user clear and concise information about their diet.
To see if this is the case and technology can enhance the monitoring and nutritional processing side of a person’s diet, my final year project will look at this. Being a Web Technology student a web application was developed, Plate and Rate lets users upload images of the food, other users of the application then rate and tag these food choices for how closely they believe they match the NHS Eat Well plate.
Plate and Rate makes it easy for you to tag the content, all you have to do is increase or decrease the size of the segments in a pie chart for how much of that food type you think is in the plate you’ve been given to rate. Plate and Rate then collates all of this data and gives you information back on how well you did.
Firstly, Plate and Rate tells you how close you were to the guideline for each plate you uploaded and awards you points for how well you did. Then, the application collates all of your plate data and creates an ‘overall plate’ this is every plate you have uploaded mashed together into one big plate which you can then compare to the guideline. Plate and Rate then plots how far away from the guideline you were for each meal you uploaded allowing for an overview and a progression on how you did. The application also allows for you to view your uploads for the past 7 days for finer control. Plate and Rate also awards you points for how accurately you rated other people’s plates, letting you gain ideas and enhancing your knowledge of balanced meals. This work carries on where a previous project left off – read the results of that project here.
This is currently very exciting and promising research for the future and lets you make it easier to see the food you’re eating over a period of time, simply by uploading images and using the application. The trial is expected to run for three weeks and if you’d like to participate then please visit http://chrisborrowdale.co.uk/participate/ and complete the form. Here you’ll be asked a few questions to assess your current eating habits – to get an even spread of participants.
If you have any queries then please feel free to contact me at chris@chrisborrowdale.co.uk
Social Receipt Project
Jan 27th
Social Receipt is a research project being undertaken by Tom Leeman, a third year computer science student from the University of Lincoln. The aim of his research is to help understand how technology may be used to make positive changes to our dietary health behaviour in an engaging and social environment. After all, humans are social creatures, we live to talk about everything and anything – including our shopping receipts!
Tom is currently looking for some participants who wouldn’t mind taking part in his study for a few weeks. His research involves using a website called Social Receipt over the course of a month where you will be expected to take a photo of your supermarket shopping receipts each time you visit a supermarket and share these photos on the site.
Each participant is encouraged to comment on other participants’ receipts and rate them on the overall nutritional healthiness of the food items which they have bought as being either red (unhealthy), amber (moderately healthy) and green (healthy).
If this sounds like something you might be interested in, you should check out the Social Receipt website available at http://tom.thesocialapp.co.uk where you may learn more about the project and sign up to the research. However, you will not be able to log-in until the research has started. An email will be sent to everyone in advance of the research starting so you won’t miss out!
Tom is also available for contact if you have any questions or would like further information about the project. His email address is tom@tom.thesocialapp.co.uk.
“Power of Minds” Hack for Honda
Nov 25th
Last weekend I was privileged to be invited to participate in a commercial hack day as part of Honda’s “Dream Factory” initiative. Hosted at the Guardian offices and organised by Rewired State, the hack saw 23 developers from across the country feverishly developing prototypes and concepts based on the brief supplied by Honda.
This brief was based on the brand message for the new Honda Civic, which is “If we never venture into the unknown, how do we get anywhere new?”, along with “The Power of Dreams” and the four key attributes of “Quality, Technology, Design and Evolution”. Needless to say this brief was much more vague than developers usually expect, so there was a lot of early panic trying to decipher a brand message into something that does something.
I ended up working on two hacks over the weekend. Based on the message, it seemed like perhaps we should take these metaphorical brand messages entirely literally, making something that literally used the power of dreams, or literally helps people venture into the unknown.
The Corridor of Dreams
After a long discussion with Gareth Lloyd and Kevin Harman (one of Honda’s “Cultural Engineers“), Gareth and I worked on an art installation we called “The Corridor of Dreams”.
This piece is meant to be integrated into a corridor wall, and is triggered when a person moves near the installation. The corridor then does some analysis of the movement and appearance of the individual, and attempts to ascertain what a possible dream might be. This dream is then rendered in the form of a pixellated icon that appears in a thought bubble as the person passes by. This is timed so that to an external observer, the subject is “dreaming” the icon. For the subject themselves, they are exposed to the dream out of the corner of their eye. In this way, it provokes the individual to reflect on their dreams in the context of the mundane corridor, and remind them to resituate themselves in terms of life goals and priorities.
The Corridor of Dreams
In the time of the hack day, we didn’t have time to get it as mature as we liked, but it did function, and we had many people using the corridor during the day. These users were partly intentional, by judges and participants of the event, but since it was situated in a “working” corridor in the Guardian offices, many Guardian employees were also exposed to the piece.
Provoking with Dreams
The actual implementation was far more complicated than it might seem. The corridor used a range of different technologies that were frankly painful to integrate.
Working on the Dreams
We used the LEGO NXT brick with ultrasonic sensors to detect movement (in order to trigger the event), a USB webcam to capture the image of the approaching individual, OpenCV to analyse the content of the image and an Arduino-powered “Peggy” display Gareth constructed, in order to create the dream display. This was all plumbed together using Python, and deployed on John Bevan‘s Ubuntu Nettop.
Get Lost
As the corridor of dreams was under construction, I (perhaps foolishly) started work on a second hack based on the idea of serendipity. At CHI this year, the closing plenary by Ethan Zuckerman was on the topic of serendipity in social media. He complained that social media tries too hard to surround us with a bubble of content we have been algorithmically calculated to enjoy. He argues for the importance of serendipity and exposing yourself to truly different experiences. Based on this, and the Honda Civic message of “If we don’t venture into the unknown, how do we get anywhere new?”, the concept was created.
GetLostBot is a free service that challenges you to break your routine and explore new places. Once you sign up, GetLostBot will quietly keep an eye on the places you visit. If it feels that you are going to the same places too often, it will send you a challenge. When this happens, you will receive a message with some mysterious walking directions. Follow these to discover a place nearby that you have never been to before!
@GetLostBot's Twitter feed
Mysterious Walking Directions...
GetLostBot uses the Foursquare API to track user checkins and examines recent behaviour. If the user has fallen into a routine, it finds a nearby location they haven’t visited and creates a challenge for them. It sends the user a tweet or email with a link to an unmarked map with walking directions to the new place. Importantly, it doesn’t tell the user where they will end up! The user is forced to “venture into the unknown” and follow the directions in an adventurous spirit.
The app is online here – go sign up!
Demos
All the developers were brought together on the Sunday afternoon to demo creations. There were some extraordinarily cool apps developed, including safety systems for bikes, live collaboration services and even a demonstration of ethernet delivered over chicken wire!
Intense Demo Session
One of my favourite apps was “Don’t Break My Heart” by Rain Ashford – a wearable bike light that changed colour and beats-per-minute based on proximity. A cyclist wearing it on their back would give simple feedback to drivers following behind when they get too close.
Don't Break My Heart
There were a ton of cool apps, and you can find out more about them on the Rewired State hack summary page.
The first prize was deservedly won by Jordan Hatch for his Orchestra brainstorming tool. This is a really neat system that gives people 3 minutes to come up with points around a discussion, then reveals them at the end. The idea of “sparing a couple of minutes” for collaboration and implementing a scaffold for it is extremely powerful.
Four apps were also selected to go on to public vote in the Guardian website for a further prize. My Get Lost app was selected as the winning app within the “Evolution” category! This is a great honour, and hopefully this exposure will lead to many more people engaging with serendipity and getting lost more often!
The Guardian has written up the event here.
Research presentation: ENACT background
Nov 1st
Below are the slides for a talk I gave at the Lincoln School of Computer Science Research Seminar on October 26th 2011. The talk describes the potential of technology to provide useful support for mental and emotional health issues and provides background to our ongoing EPSRC funded project called ENACT.
Abstract: Mental and Emotional health difficulties are a leading cause of disability worldwide. Interestingly, studies have consistently shown that interpersonal relationships and social support can play a vital role in emotional health and wellbeing. Technologies that effectively support emotional wellbeing are likely to offer significant benefits, both for individuals and for society as a whole. This talk will discuss the potential of social media such as social networking sites, online games and mobile phone applications to provide social support for the emotional wellbeing of users, as well as the design constraints inherent in doing so. The EPSRC-funded project called “Exploring social Networks to Augment Cognitive behaviour Therapy (ENACT),” which is being lead by the Lincoln Social Computing research centre, will be discussed as an example of work in this field.
We’re slowly sticking all our presentations online
Aug 16th
Having ignored Bens recommendation for years and years, we have finally got around to posting conference presentations on slideshare. There’s a bar on the side with a shortcut to a few of them. You can see all of them here —>>> HERE!
The Bin Diaries are going live…
Jul 27th
We are looking to recruit a small number of participants to be involved in trialling a ‘Bin diary’, or to take part in a short focus group.
Participants need to be between 18 and 25, and have access to the internet. Preference given to those who like cake! Please see the link for details below- and note the chance to win iTunes vouchers!
Skype and Facebook
Jul 15th
The recent announcement that Facebook would be integrating Skype into the social network platform caught my attention. Chat on Facebook has great advantages in that it alleviates your cognitive load (essentially meaning you don’t have to remember great swathes of information) and it allows you to multitask.
Your previous conversations with your Facebook friend are displayed within the text chat window when you chat to them. You don’t have to refresh your memory as to what you were discussing the last time you communicated. I often chat to people whom I haven’t talked to in a while and some whom I am not particularly emotionally close to. This record allows me to talk to my friends without awkward pauses whilst I think “did they break up with so and so?” etc. This also reduces the potential for embarrassing faux pas.
Multitasking, supposedly a chiefly female skill (I have my doubts on the veracity of this claim), is something for which Facebook is particularly suited. I can have conversations with several people at once (one of my Facebook friends is remarkably adept at spotting this however – “Oi are you talking to someone else?!” is a typical response). I can be working on a word document, I can be coding some data, or I can be watching television and still carry out a semblance of a conversation with someone on Facebook (knowing that they are probably doing exactly the same thing).
Now the crux of this post; video messaging is a very private, directed thing. There is no record of your previously “face to screen to face” conversation, the capacity to multitask is severely reduced. I can have a very lazy Sunday morning, breakfast in bed, MacBook perched on my lap, and can pop on Facebook to catch up on the news. I can chat to people on there and they won’t know that I am in my tattiest PJs, hair akin to a birds nest and (because of a particularly late night) mascara burdened eyes producing a very good Alice Cooper impression. There would be absolutely no way I would even consider Skyping at that particular moment.
Photo by Laura Brown, Flickr
I predict we will only see a small number of select groups of people using Skype over Facebook. There will be those people who are geographically distant to each other such as friends who have emigrated. There will also be those who use Facebook chat for more intimate reasons, anyone who has ever used Chat Roulette will have probably encountered the more, erm, explicit uses of video chat. You will of course have people using it for much more innocent reasons – parents showing off new babies to friends and relatives, grandparents checking in with their grandchildren at university etc.
It is not just the goals of use that will have an impact on the adoption of Skype over Facebook. For someone who isn’t technically literate, Skype is a relatively complicated thing to set up, it also requires a webcam. Most laptops and netbooks have this functionality built in, but someone with a desktop pc may have to source this. Even easy access and relative expertise does not guarantee use. I have an iPhone, my husband has an iPhone. We could feasibly video call each other. This would allow for a supposedly richer experience, we would be able to see each other’s expressions and supposedly gain more meaning from our conversation. We have both had video message functionality for more than a year. We have never had a video chat. Whilst I would quite happily use Skype for professional purposes – a situation where I am selling my skills and knowledge, I would feel very uncomfortable using it in a social situation, particularly when communicating with acquaintances.
So it will be interesting to see who uses Skype, and whether its integration with Facebook actually produces a new set of individuals who prefer video communication to text in every day online conversations. We may also find that in 40 years’ time video communication is the norm just as telephone communication is today.
Hello from a new LiSC team member!
Jun 20th
My name is Sue Jamison-Powell and I started working in LiSC as a Research Assistant at the beginning of May. I am a psychologist working on the ENACT Project with Shaun Lawson, Conor Linehan and Andy Garbett. I specialise in online social relationships and social networks. My thesis examined the way that social networking websites and social communication technology influences our social relationships and impacts upon the processes involved in developing and maintaining online relationships. I am also very interested in the process of defriending. I recently presented at a Psychology in the Pub meeting at The Showroom in Sheffield where I talked about my research which examined how people decide to defriend others, and their reactions to both defriending and being defriended. It’s an interesting area, and one that is really only pertinent to online relationships; although my theory posits that breaking the connection online (you either are or are not present in someone’s friends’ list on Facebook for instance) is reminiscent of deciding to end a romantic relationship. There doesn’t seem to be any room for weak ties within online social networks, with one of the main reasons given for defriending another being lack of contact or lack of real connection. Where offline acquaintanceships gradually drift apart, on Facebook they have a definite end. A link to my presentation can be found here.
All the researchers working on the ENACT Project recently met up in London. It was a valuable meeting, especially for me, being a newcomer to the group. It was great to see the initial results of our first work package and see how well our individual work packages fit together. The ENACT Project is using a social media platform to deliver online therapy. Existing online delivery works very well, with similar results to offline methods of delivery, however we are planning to introduce social media elements which will encourage engagement with the package and allow for interactivity between users. I was delighted to accept the position with LiSC as it will allow me to draw upon my previous work which looks at how emotional closeness and trust is formed between individuals interacting in online spaces.
I have been here for just six weeks now and am impressed by the dynamism of this research group. In addition to our weekly meetings where we discuss ongoing research within the department I have attended a brilliant workshop on Sustainable Air Travel, Behaviour Change and Social Media. This multidisciplinary workshop, held in Lincoln, highlighted the ways in which social media can be used to raise awareness of sustainability in travel, and begin to alter the behaviour of users and providers of air travel. It was a good opportunity to look at some of the research which didn’t necessarily fall into my “area of interest” but was very relevant to some of the work I will be doing with the ENACT Project team in terms of behaviour change.
So yes, a new team member – I hope to be making some somewhat more exciting blog posts over the weeks to come!
Smart Energy and the Internet of Things
Jun 12th
It’s been a while since I last posted so have likely gone overboard with content, but here goes anyway! I recently attended the ‘Smart Energy: generation, supply and consumption’ workshop held by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) which was focused on the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) and what the implications and possibilities are for the energy sector. The workshop was well attended with almost 70 delegates split roughly 50/50 between people from industry and academia. For LiSC this was a great opportunity to see how both sides are collaborating towards innovating and commercialising in the domain of the IoT and energy. For connected devices such as smart meters it brings new experiences for consumers in how they can better understand and act on their energy consumption across a range of devices; from washing machines to mobile phones to vehicles. So first of all, what is this IoT all about?
The IoT is the idea of practically any object, including people, sharing information (via networked sensors) about their current state; for example location, energy usage or activity data sent to the cloud that can enhance our physical and digital experiences. It could be argued that the IoT is the latest evolution of ubiquitous/pervasive computing now being realised by inexpensive sensors and technology platforms that weren’t available as little as a few years ago. Adam Greenfield’s insightful book ‘Everyware’ published back in 2005 is a good read, albeit rather verbose, on the concept of IoT and the interaction of citizens with omnipresent networked devices. In a recent interview he admits the book didn’t see the iPhone coming and the rapid game-changing experience that came with it, but really, who could have foreseen that in its entirety? Last year I was lucky enough to participate in a ‘Walkshop’ (a quirky spin on the workshop) by Adam in the city of Oulu, Finland whilst attending the UBI Summer School. Each Walkshop involves a tour of a city with a view to finding the various networked devices in the city urbanscape and attempt to decipher (as a group) their purpose and impact on citizens. In Oulu we found wind powered storm covers, obscured cameras, large interactive situated displays, pedestrian crossing sensors embedded in pavements and the usual plethora of CCTV cameras. Interestingly, when we turned our own sensors (cameras) on a street facing CCTV camera we invited the attentions of an irate security guard intent on being aggressive towards our ‘sousvelliance’….
Ed Borden from Pachube recently posted a succinct overview of the IoT over on the Pachube blog titled ‘The Open Data Steamroller’ and includes the nice illustration below of what the IoT is by moving away from ‘closed’ machine to machine data silos over to open data for consumption. LiSC’s Electro-Magnates project utilises the Pachube platform to store near-real time energy data from the University of Lincoln, effectively opening up the data for public consumption using open standards. We hope to have a few more universities on board with us shortly to push their energy data to Pachube and are in talks with Lincolnshire County Council as they will have nearly 1000 smart meters coming online over the summer from the county’s schools. In addition to our own open data efforts at LiSC, Joss Winn, also from Lincoln University is co-ordinating a team working towards making various components of university-generated data open and ready for consuming via API’s.
The TSB Smart Energy workshop was worth attending and generated some useful data for our Electro-Magnates project. With the workshop having a strong industry presence there was discussion based around the potential creation of new business models that can benefit consumers more to optimise their energy usage. For example a smart meter connected to the IoT could allow a consumer to regularly change their tariff simply by selecting a new deal online and downloading the tariff to the smart meter instantly. Fine grain control of appliances by smart meters could be enabled to control/recommend which times energy-intensive devices can be used to limit peak demand and cost. Another task at the workshop was to envisage the types of objects we would like to see connected by the IoT. Aside from the obvious choices such as fridges, washing machines and heating there was some outside the box thinking with the top three non-energy object choices being people, animals and vehicles, something we at LiSC are actively aware of and will discuss a little shortly! Perhaps the most hotly debated topic at the workshop were the privacy and security issues surrounding energy data from smart meters, do the utilities own the data or the householder? More importantly, does the householder have complete access and control over their energy data? These are important questions for the consumers and will no doubt be parleyed with for some time.
At LiSC we are no strangers to the IoT revolution and have ran several studies that incorporate it with the inclusion of open datasets. Maurizio Pilu, a lead technologist at the TSB, said in his keynote at the workshop that when you mix the IoT with open datasets then “magic will happen”. We couldn’t agree more as this is exactly what lots of our own research does! Our domestic energy research has used various IoT devices such as the Wattson energy monitor and the Current Cost Bridge then mashed the energy data from these devices with datasets from social media networks and music services to enhance the end-users digital and lifestyle experiences. We also demonstrated the use of an embodied IoT agent (Nabaztag) providing aversive feedback on energy consumption. Other recent IoT innovations from our group include the Fearsquare and the forthcoming Tweeting Cats projects. Fearsquare mashes UK crime data with location data from mobile devices, thereby creating a unique experience and an opportunity to investigate citizens’ perceptions of crime in their daily localities. Through our links with animal behaviour experts we are looking at ways to enhance human-animal interaction through RFID tags worn by cats which expose eating/toileting behaviours and also through social media to increase connectedness between humans and companion animals.
Around the world the power of the IoT is helping empower citizens, in New York for example public sensors are being used to inform residents when the sewage system is close to overflow and to make an informed decision on their water usage. In Japan citizens are empowered by aggregating crowd-sourced radiation sensor data and calling for more evacuations in some areas. Plants are even benefiting from the IoT by giving them the right amount of water and light. These examples just highlight the diversity and huge untapped potential in creating unique user experiences by mixing IoT sensor data with open datasets.
I don’t think any blog post of mine would be complete without a mention of beer! After the workshop I made an obligatory visit to the Euston Tap and sampled the Meantime IPA on tap, a great beer. They also had the friendly face of Brewdog on display with their Ripetide and Hardcore IPA, both excellent beers!
Derek