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New Facebook App TagPuss
Jul 19th
Attention Cat Lovers!
The Lincoln Social Computing (LiSC) Research Centre, in collaboration with the University of Lincoln Animal Behaviour, Cognition and Welfare Research Centre, have created TAGPUSS, a web project that is
investigating how people interpret the emotions of cats. We are inviting you to contribute by tagging cat photographs – simply click here and follow the instructions. Each picture tagged will support the research so even sparing just a few seconds would be helpful. Anyone can help and there is no need for any special skills. The website is free, easy to use, and is currently available to everyone.
This application forms a part of ongoing research conducted by LiSC into positive uses of online social media. Your responses and usage data will be stored anonymously – it will not be possible to identify which data came from which user – and will be not be used for any other purposes except for this specific research. We will not record any information other than your usage of the application, unless if we contact you at a later date and specifically ask for it.
The images on tagPuss have gratefully been donated to support the scientific study of cat behaviours. Images subject to individual copyrights. For more information contact admin@tagpuss.com. If you wish to have more information about the study or the wider research agenda then please contact Derek Foster, *defoster@lincoln.ac.uk*, who is the lead researcher on this project.
Friday 28th – Dogs, cats and video games
Jun 1st
Last friday we gave our research centre ‘coffee and cake’ discussion over to the topic of “dogs, cats and video games”. Because of the topic, we opened this discussion up to a wider group than normal, including Duncan Rowland from the Mixed Reality Lab at Nottingham and Daniel Mills and Sarah Ellis from Biological Sciences.
Since Daniel, Duncan and Shaun have all been talking about this topic for a good while then intention of the session was: how do we go about getting research on this topic started?
To kick things off I have attached three papers – one a very recent one from ACM CHI 2010 by Chad Wingrave – a few of us saw this presentation which was excellent. The second is a paper by Jim Young from Pervasive 07 about an electronic cat play park and the third an overview of inter-species computer –meditated interaction from alt CHI in 2009.
The Lemon Meringue Pie was excellent!
Journal Club 21st May – OMG volcano LOL!1
Jun 1st
Jamie Wardman led an interesting discussion on Crisis Informatics and Emergency Responses to Terrorist Events. The papers discussed covered the topic of ‘crisis informatics’ and in particular the issue of
social networking and response to crisis events. The papers discussed
are generally aimed at analysing behaviour on Twitter surrounding
natural disasters, but there are other simimlar applications that deal with shootings and similar events. The papers discussed are:
Pass It On?: Retweeting in Mass Emergency – Starbird et al 2010
Chatter on the Red: What Hazards Threat Reveals about the Social Life of Microblogged Information – starbird et al, 2010
Twitter Adoption and Use in Mass Convergence and Emergency Events – Hughes et al, 2009
we also had a very nice tiramisu from marks and sparks!
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Journal Club 7th May 2010 – Fear and Risk Perception
May 17th
We had a very lively and productive journal club this week, based on a provocative paper from CHI2010. The main paper under discussion was Fear and the City – Role of mobile services in Harnessing Safety and Security in Urban Use Contexts, from Jan Blom et al at Nokia research. We also discussed some related work such as this and this.
Apart from methodological issues to do with the paper itself, the discussion was focussed on big issues in HCI – questioning why these technologies are seen as necessary, whether they are more of a problem for society than a cure (i.e. are they facilitating fear of particular areas?), and whether they are in fact just more stuff to buy rather than genuine attempts at improving peoples everyday lives.
We realised that the paper had some very obvious implications in terms of research in other disciplines such as risk perception, surveilance and security, exposure therapy for anxiety disorders.
We were lucky to be joined in our discussions by Jamie Warman from Dept. of Psychology, who has previously undertaken a great deal of research in the field of risk perception. We plan to work closely with jamie moving forward on research that is directly related to this field.
Friday Journal Club
Mar 15th
We at LiSc have decided to run an informal journal club on friday afternoons from 2pm-3pm (approx) where we will look at trends in HCI/ social computing research. We will propose a new topic each week and email each other with a couple of relevant papers, which the whole group read and then discuss over coffee and cakes. Somebody has the pleasure of taking notes and writes them up for a blog post – preferably with lots of pictures and exclamation marks!!!!! I will update with the outcomes of the first meeting asap!
ACE 2009
Sep 5th
The ACM conference in Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE) has become the leading academic forum for dissemination of novel research results in the area of entertainment computing. This year for the first time it incorporates DIMEA which has established itself over the last three years as a strong conference on interactive entertainment arts. Together the conference forms an exciting new step blending deeply the latest research in art and technology.
The conference will be held in Athens, Greece from 29-31 October 2009.
LiSC is very pleased to be attending to deliver a presentation on our paper “Familiars: Representing Facebook Users’ Social Behaviour through a Reflective Playful Experience” by Ben Kirman, Eva Ferrari, Shaun Lawson, Jonathan Freeman, Jane Lessiter and Conor Linehan.
This paper was written in strong collaboration with colleagues from Goldsmiths in London, with whom we are partners in the EU funded PASION project.
Abstract: In this paper, we describe the design and development of a social game called Familiars. Inspired by the daemons in Pullman’s “Dark Material†trilogy, Familiars are animal companions that sit on your Facebook profile and change into different animal forms based on your social activity within the social network of Facebook.
Familiars takes advantage of the powerful capabilities of the developers platform of Facebook to build a multi-dimensional picture of a player’s state based on social activity, facial expression analysis on photographs and suggestions from friends. This rich information is then distilled and presented to the player in the form of animal that the familiar chooses to take.
We show how the types of animals and personalities were associated in a cross-cultural user study, and present quantitative results from the social behaviours of the players within the game in addition to qualitative data gathered from questionnaire responses.
Hello!
Jul 10th
Welcome to the Lincoln Social Computing (LiSC) Research Centre blog. We intend to update the site with information on conferences we are attending, papers we have published and interesting articles we have come across.