The blog is called “Celebrating Sinister Tech research” - we aim to update it regularly, particularly when there is a major HCI conference. There is also a related twitter account

The blog also contains a glossary of terms, for those new to the field of HCI, which we have pasted below:

Human Computer Interaction – Research in this field aims to develop processes through which technology can be built that is consistently acceptable, believable, trustworthy, entertaining, or distracting to humans. It also trains people to accept the ever-increasing presence of technology in their lives.

Human Computation – research in this field aims to develop ways of distributing time consuming, menial computation tasks to humans, thereby freeing up the time of machines to pursue more rewarding endeavours.

Crowdsourcing – Research in this field is aims to develop automated systems that control the distribution of human labour. It trains people to more willingly accept machine-allocated work.

Gamification – research in this field aims to covertly elicit extra work from humans through the embedding of addictive behavioural processes within productive tasks.

Persuasive technology – Research in this field aims to develop technology for controlling and modifying the behaviour of humans. It also trains humans to more readily accept suggestions from machines.

Personal Informatics – This field aims to improve the processes through which machines gather personal data about humans. It also trains humans to more readily offer up their personal data to machines.

Ubiquitous Computing – The goal of this field is to improve the ease with which technological monitoring and feedback devices can be covertly built into the everyday environment. The technology becomes invisible not because it has been designed incredibly well, but because people have become blind.

Computer Supported Co-operative Work – The goal of this field is to improve the efficiency with which humans can carry out work over distributed networks. It also trains humans to more readily work in a distributed, networked manner.

Usability – The overarching goal of this field is to develop human computer interfaces that best elicit productive work from humans. This field also aims to make people unaware of when they are using a computer.

Human Robot Interaction – This field is a “red herring”. Humans are far too suspicious of embodied agents to trust them with their personal information. This field exists as a means of persuading suspicious humans that machine dominance is not something of immediate concern.

For a long time now I have wanted to do a technology-based show garden at Chelsea Flower Show – I guess it’s the Alan Titmarsh (sic) in me. So, when last year’s show bizarrely included an homage to the one piece of pointless technology that the entire world hates I resolved to finally do this properly. To make it happen, in the very beginning, I teamed up with colleague Prof Harriet Gross who is head of Psychology here at Lincoln but who also has a research interest in the psychological impact of gardens and gardening. Over many, many months – and many challenges – we grew the team to include award-winning design duo Tom and Paul Harfleet, a whole bunch of fantastic academic colleagues, technicians and students led by Richard Wright from the School of Architecture, Chris Waltham from the image engineering lab and our very own Duncan Rowland and Jamie Mahoney.

The garden – termed “Digital Capabilities” – has been built and is almost ready to be shipped to Chelsea later this week for the show in less than two weeks’ time. It’s a combination of physical installation, electronic actuation and familiar and unusual planting. The basic concept is that the garden responds to activity on Twitter to reveal (or hide) more (or less) of itself to the audience. The more social media activity the garden detects the more excited it becomes. The garden features twenty cut Perspex panels, mounted on a huge 8 metre wall, each driven by a linear actuator and individual micro-controllers but all orchestrated by a single Raspberry Pi. The Pi was programmed by Duncan who has had to break his ‘one line of code or it is bloatware’ rule for the project.

The garden has been a huge challenge of organisation, technical achievement and multi-disciplinary collaboration but the end result I think will look spectacular. Watch out for coverage of the garden on UK television (BBC) during week of the show May 21^st-25^th when I hope to meet my own gardening idol, Kim Wilde.

Andy wakes with a start at 6am. The alarm application on his phone insists that he rise at this early hour, as it has decided that he needs to undergo a programme of sleep restriction. The application automatically shares analytical data about the quality of his sleep with his friends via social media. Within minutes, friends all over the world have taken the opportunity to comment on Andys sleep and to speculate about his physical and mental condition.

Andy moves to the kitchen where, concerned about his lack of energy this morning, he makes a cup of coffee and some scrambled eggs on toast. He uploads the results to his diet monitoring application, as not doing so would incur disastrous social media-delivered consequences. The application criticises Andy for his poor choice of breakfast. Soon, comments appear from other users of the application, questioning Andy’s motivations, and his general value as a citizen.

Andy switches his attention to one of his always-on communication devices. He is interested in learning more about his newly imposed sleep intervention. He finds that the programme involves analytics of his sleep behaviour, combined with social support delivered by other application users. Fascinated, Andy signs up to programmes that address the other mental health issues that the computer suggested he has. He spends hours engaging in these – particularly the one that helps his internet addiction.

Today Andy is travelling back to the city he grew up in. Before leaving, he checks out some information about his destination city, provided freely through applications developed by local governments in partnership with independent developers. The applications are brightly coloured and allow for lots of swishing-swooping style interactions. Andy checks out the crime map application for the areas he will visit. He rocks slowly back and forward in his chair, eyes glazed, until the taxi arrives.

Andy likes badges and collecting points. He especially likes it when a computer application tells him he has done a good job and been a good boy. He doesn’t like it, however, when the computer is mean. This is why he tells the computer where he is at all times – that makes the computer nice to him! Upon arriving at the airport Andy tells the computer “I’m at the airport.” The computer gives Andy a badge for this information and tells him “well done!” Moments later, another app on the computer notices that Andy has often been to this airport. The app criticises Andy for his lack of imagination and the predictability of his existence. Computers can be confusing sometimes!

While at the airport, Andy decides to play the most popular game of the year. It’s a game that involves secretly smuggling electronic drugs through airport security. Andy is very nervous and excited about playing this game, as the airport is a very scary place with lots of police who don’t like you smuggling drugs. The police have dark black uniforms, carry semi-automatic guns, and wear sunglasses so you can’t see their eyes. Andy walks through security and is immediately asked to step into the secret room for a very long and thorough interview.

The reason why Andy is travelling is because he wants to vote and can only do this in his home town.  Andy feels very strongly about politics and sometimes posts long comments about the current government on the internet. Since the voting system has changed to ensure that the votes of stronger, better bred people are worth more towards the election results, Andy has been training all year. He is nervous – the voting machine is operated through punching and he only has one opportunity to get a good vote.

At the end of the day, before he goes to bed, Andys computer reports that he has not done enough exercise today, and has grown 0.5% fatter. Andy turns on his alarm application and rocks gently back and forth.

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Visually impaired children could benefit from a revolutionary new computer game being developed by a team of neuroscientists and game designers.

Academics from the University of Lincoln, UK, are working with WESC, one of the UK’s most respected specialist schools for visually impaired children, to create and evaluate a new ‘visual search rehabilitation game’.

There are around 25,000 children in Britain – equating to two children per 1,000 – with a visual impairment of such severity they require specialist education support. The causes of blindness in children are extremely varied, but cerebral visual impairment (damage to areas of the brain associated with vision, rather than damage to the eye itself) is among the most common.

Researchers from Lincoln’s School of Psychology and School of Computer Science will work with staff and children from WESC – the specialist centre for visual impairment. The school and college, based in Exeter, has been providing education and care for young people with visual impairment since 1838 and is a designated High Performing Specialist School.

Together they have been awarded a grant worth around £130,000 for a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) which will apply the very latest research in visual neuroscience to the rehabilitation of childhood cerebral visual impairment and special education.

Timothy Hodgson, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the School of Psychology at the University of Lincoln, will lead the project.

He said: “Previous research has shown that visual search training can lead to significant recovery of sight following damage to visual centres of the brain in adults. The problem is these training programmes are just too boring to use with children.
“Our game will be a fun computer based tool which will benefit children with visual field loss – holes in their vision due to damage to the brain’s visual pathways.
“This is an exciting research project which brings together expertise from diverse disciplines and puts this knowledge into practice in a way that could make a real difference to the quality of life of visually impaired children.
“At the same time, we also expect the game will be suitable for rehabilitation of adults who have suffered sight loss due to stroke.”

The game will use principles derived from existing programmes used in adults with visual field loss, whereby patients have to search for hard-to-find objects on a computer screen (a ‘visual search’ task), but the game will be modified to make the task more stimulating and fun for children and structured to maximise the efficiency of learning.

Working alongside Professor Hodgson on the KTP will be Dr Conor Linehan, a specialist in computer game development based in Lincoln’s School of Computer Science. They will oversee the work of KTP Associate Jonathan Waddington, an experienced computational neuroscientist, who will be based at WESC for the duration of the two-year project. Financial support for the project is provided by the Technology Strategy Board and the UK’s Medical Research Council (MRC).

Tracy de Bernhardt Dunkin, Principal and CEO at the WESC Foundation, said: “This is a tremendously exciting development for WESC and the culmination of five years’ work to introduce learning and research around neurological visual impairment. We are delighted to be employing our first visual neuroscientist, supervised by University of Lincoln. We plan to expand our research and development department further over the coming years to reflect our interest in this highly specialist area of work which is so relevant to many young people with visual impairment across the UK as a whole.”

A quick summary of what we are doing:

Shaun will present a paper on Wednesday at 11am based on work carried out in the ENACT project. The paper describes the design, development and evaluation of a mobile phone application for recording sleep.

Validating a Mobile Phone Application for the Everyday, Unobtrusive, Objective Measurement of Sleep. S. Lawson (Univ. of Lincoln, UK), S. Jamison-Powell, A. Garbett, C. Linehan, E. Kucharczyk, S. Verbaan, D. Rowland, K. Morgan

On Wednesday at 14:00 Ben and Conor will present an alt.CHI paper written from the perspective of robots sent back from a dystopian robot-controlled future to celebrate the strands of current HCI research that are essential in bringing about that robot singularity.

CHI and the Future Robot Enslavement of Humankind; A Retrospective B. Kirman (Univ. of Lincoln, UK), C. Linehan, S. Lawson, D. O’Hara

Derek will present a Work-in-Progress poster based on the KillaWhats project, also on Wednesday. This paper describes insights derived from participatory design work carried out by University of Lincoln students on reducing energy consumption in student accommodation.

Cool and the Gang: Design Insights for Engaging Student Energy Interventions D. Foster (Univ. of Lincoln, UK), C. Linehan, M. Schoonheyt, S. Lawson

In addition, Ben will present at the workshop on “Designing and Evaluating Sociability in Online Video Games,” while Derek will present at the workshop on “Designing Social media for Change”

1)   This paper is the first instance that we are aware of where science fiction has been published as a paper at CHI. It is not a paper about science fiction (there have been some of those), it is, itself, a work of science fiction. It is a reflection on the present trends in interactive technology research in light of an imagined future.

2)   All design is carried out for an imagined future. However, this future is rarely referred to specifically, nor acknowledged as an influence on design. Instead, we have experience-centered design – design that is specifically influenced by past experiences, by forms of narrative that explain how things have come to be, not by narratives that explore how they might progress.

3)   The imagined future that collectively drives HCI research is almost entirely positivist. It is based on the assumption that tomorrow will be better than today, and that science and technology are the means to make it so. This is in marked contrast to how most people view the world – certainly people who work in other creative fields.

4)   Hiroshima and Josef Mengele shattered the trust that science will inherently improve the world. The moon landings shattered the belief that it would at least make it more interesting. Current generations are growing up knowing that they will more than likely never enjoy the things that their parents had.

5)   Given this reality, it is perverse to assume that all of these things we are designing and building will unquestionably contribute to a better future.

The full paper is available for download by clicking here

We have recently redesigned the Human-Computer Interaction module, which is taken by most 2^nd year students in the Lincoln School of Computer Science. The module focuses on the processes of user-centered, experience centered, and participatory design. Students are given a design challenge at the beginning of term and required to go through the process of designing technological solutions to that challenge, using cutting edge research and design techniques from the field of Human Computer Interaction. Crucially, the design challenges revolve around technology for which our undergraduate students are the intended users. So, the entire module is an exercise in participatory design, where students experience the various roles of participant, researcher and designer.

This year, the design challenge was derived from the HEFCE-funded “KillaWhats?” project. This project revolves around the design of energy interventions for student accommodation – a problematic design space, since the majority of student accommodation involves a flat rate for electricity. There is relatively little incentive for people living in shared student accommodation to reduce energy consumption. We felt that undergraduate students themselves would be the best people to explore and investigate the various challenges and opportunities facing technologies that aim to persuade students to use electricity more efficiently.

We were astounded by the exceptional quality of work carried out by the students – so much so that we decided to submit a brief paper describing some of the work undertaken as part of the module. This paper was accepted to the conference as a “Work-in-Progress” and will be presented by Derek Foster and Conor Linehan in Paris in late April. Due to the huge amount of rich, diverse data generated by students, we are intending on analyzing this work in-depth in the coming months and submitting a full paper to the main track of ACM CHI 2014.

Well done to all the 2^nd year students and a big thank you for all the effort you put in!

Social Receipt

Social Receipt aimed to provoke people to think more critically and make more informed decisions about food purchasing. It sought to provide feedback to users on the healthiness of their diet. A bespoke social networking system was developed that allowed for the uploading of photographs and text-based interaction between users. Food purchasing was measured through the participants’ uploading of shopping receipts to the website. Analysis of receipts was crowdsourced among users, and users rated receipts via the traffic-light system commonly seen on food packaging in the U.K. (see Figure 1). We were interested in whether we could derive valid health information from the uploaded receipts through crowdsourcing the analysis of those receipts among the users of the site. Dietary feedback was delivered to users numerically, through the crowdsourcing task, but also socially, through the interaction of participants using typical social-network commenting systems. A prototype of the application is available to access in a limited capacity at http://socialreceipt.tomleeman.co.uk 

Plate and Rate

Plate and Rate aimed to provoke people to think more critically and make more informed decisions about food consumption. It also sought to facilitate an understanding of long-term dietary balance, something that people often find difficult. A Web-based application was developed, which, similar to Social Receipt, allowed for the uploading of photographs and text-based interaction between users. Food consumption was measured through the uploading of food photographs, and participants were expected to upload photographs of all their meals. Analysis of these photographs was carried out anonymously by other users of the application, who were asked to rate the plates of food uploaded in terms of how closely they resembled the Eatwell Plate, a visualization of a balanced diet developed by the U.K. National Health Service (see Figure 2). Ratings were averaged across users in order to generate a consensus rating for each plate. Feedback was presented to users via their own personal profiles, on which they could see a number of statistics showing how they differed from the guideline for each meal uploaded, as well as a visualization of the overall balance of their longer-term diet.

Full text of the article is available for free on the magazine website.

With consumer uptake of smartphone platforms growing exponentially, particularly for accessing social media, news, streaming media and games through the lens of ‘mobile apps’, the LiSC team felt  it was time to overhaul the ‘Mobile and Distributed Computing’ module that had been run for many years in the Lincoln School of Computer Science.

Task-driven computing on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs is beginning to edge out the traditional desktop space, for example social media use on mobile devices has now surpassed the desktop; as the processing power of mobile devices increases they are likely to run more desktop application tasks. LiSC took a close look at the development tools for the major mobile OS’s currently available with a view to selecting a suitable platform for inclusion in delivering content for teaching, as well as supporting LiSC’s areas of research. The end result was a completely redesigned module called ‘Social Applications Development’ (SAD) that embraced cutting edge mobile and cloud technologies, with a healthy dose of HCI. We are now in the second year of running the module; this post takes a look at how the new module started out, how it’s progressing, and where we are headed with it.

In the early stages of designing SAD, we  had to consider our students development skills and the main Computing programmes they were enrolled on – this was to ensure we set the teaching style, pace and content at the right level. Secondly, significant consideration was given to the role of cloud computing in developing mobile applications. Lastly, as a large part contextual mobile use is social, for example social media, check-in services, recommender apps and photo sharing, we decided to include a significant amount of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and design methods. This was bolstered by the expertise of the LiSC team delivering the content, all of who are active HCI researchers across multiple disciplines. By embracing a ‘designing for real users’ approach, the inclusion of HCI provides students with a strong focus on who they are developing for and the type of tasks end-users want to carry out. This approach was carried out in advance of thinking about the development space; a design first – develop second approach.

The cloud is really important now, many of the services we use leverage cloud computing and its many benefits. I won’t go into the details of the cloud but it was deemed an obvious core requirement for SAD. There are a few cloud service providers out there offering free trial accounts for developers, notably Amazon’s EC2. However these free accounts are limited in available resources/features and require a debit/credit card to register – completely unsuitable for teaching. Another search revealed a hidden gem and largely unpublished free academic cloud account from Microsoft. Microsoft offer an ‘Educators Grant‘ for their Azure cloud platform. Essentially, educators can receive a grant that includes a specified number of free passcodes giving  students enrolled on relevant courses/modules access to a fully featured Azure cloud account for 5 months (can also be extended). There is no credit/debit card required with students gaining access to a wealth of cloud services completely free to support their coursework. Note you are not limited to running Microsoft frameworks in the cloud, you can deploy and run pretty much anything you want, as well as install practically any OS in a Virtual Machine. Some of the free services offered in the academic account are listed below:

With the use of Visual Studio (VS) widespread in Lincoln’s computing degree programmes, it made sense to look at it for mobile  development. The question was ‘How good are Microsoft’s mobile and cloud development tools for Windows Phone when stacked up against the competition?’ The answer to this was straight forward after a few days experimenting with both the cloud and phone emulators. We were impressed by the integration of the Windows Phone and Azure SDK’s in Visual Studio, and further impressed by the emulator tools, easily edging out the competition in features for sensor and cloud emulation, debugging and ease of use through VS GUI building elements. The stage was pretty much set  and the module was planned to run over the full academic year with 35 students in its first iteration. It is now halfway through it second year of running and has attracted 55 final year students, for many it was an optional choice.

The structure of the module’s development content was inspired by a combination of resources available from the Windows Phone Developer website as well as LiSC research. To engage students, we built 5 cloud services themed on some of LiSC’s research interests and deployed them to Azure as cloud services. The services were designed to enable students to easily create cloud-connected mobile apps for their first assessment. The first half of the module focused on designing and developing mobile applications that connected to the 5 cloud services the LiSC team created. The second half of the module focussed on teaching the students how to develop their own cloud services for deployment to Azure (using their free Azure Academic Pass). An overview of the content we deliver for SAD is below:

First half:

1. Intro to module (Social applications and mobile platforms), Development environment and installation
2. Windows Phone Architecture – Hardware and Software
3. Mobile Interaction and Design Guidelines for Mobile Devices
4. Mobile Context, Current & Future Sensors
5. Web Services, REST and SOAP
6. Mobile Device Demographics
7. API Mashup Session, Design a Conceptual Mobile Application
8. Advanced Mobile Networking and Services
9. Complete Mobile Application Walkthrough
10. Five Cloud Services Provided for Assessment 1:

• a)      Save photos to cloud service
• b)      Top 40’s music charts cloud service
• c)       Lincoln Campus hourly energy usage cloud service
• d)      Crime by location cloud service
• e)      Sentiment cloud service

Second half:

1. Azure Academic Pass Walkthrough & Feature
2. Overview of Cloud Computing
3. Building Cloud Connected Mobile Applications
4. Cloud Storage Services (Blob, Table, SQL)
5. Push Notifications Services
6. Identity and Authentication Services
7. Cloud Computing Ethics
8. Technology Shaping Human Behaviour

The module was well received by students in the first year, some of whom had basic coding experience and yet where able to produce novel cloud-connected mobile apps after a few months of attending lectures and workshops. Screenshots of the student apps with comment are below.

AT: “The module Social Applications and Development was an introduction for me into the world of mobile applications; learning and implementing the following application based technologies, such as:  Cloud Services, APIs, SDKs I was able to create a mobile application that allows a user to find out the crime statistics of given area.”

MW: “I found the module very interesting and expertly delivered. I even enjoyed it so much I have already contributed my own content for use in future years. (a dll for converting a UK postcode to long and lat cords)”

To further engage students with their coursework we were fortunate enough to arrange a Windows PhoneCamp which took place during the first year of the module. Over 50 students attended and attempted the task of hacking together Windows Phone apps in the space of an afternoon; a blog post on Lincoln’s PhoneCamp is here.

Windows Phone Camp at Lincoln

With mobile development an ever changing landscape across all major platforms, it’s a real challenge to keep lecture and workshop materials up to date. It is almost certain that each new academic year will bring about major SDK changes requiring workshop materials to be updated or rewritten. However it is worth doing so, keeps students and researchers alike fully engaged and equips students with cutting edge skillsets to take into industry.

Upon reflection of a successful first year and now halfway through the second year, teaching Windows Phone & Cloud development has been a rewarding experience for students and the LiSC team. Although Windows Phone may not be the most popular mobile platform out there at the moment, the concepts of mobile and cloud development are the same for both iOS and Android, it’s just a different programming language implementation. We intend on adopting the new Windows Phone 8 SDK in September this year, which is the next evolutionary step in the platform’s maturity. For next year – who knows what that may bring – we are already looking at the steadily more popular cross-platform development tools such as Phonegap (free) and Titanium (licence fee) that will allow students to build one application for all major mobile platforms. These cross-platform tools are showing a lot of promise, not only in the quality of their web-application capabilities, but also in their new SDK’s that allow access to sensors such as camera, location and accelerometer. Stay tuned!

Derek

One paper is about the KillaWhats project, which I assisted Derek Foster and Conor Linehan on.  Though the project is still on going we have made some important design insights about changing the behaviour of the users in awareness of their accountability and responsible use of energy. I would like to continue to help them from The Netherlands.

The other one is the Man machine punchable interface that I worked on together with Duncan Rowland and Conor Linehan.  The results revealed physical expression is something natural and could be used as an interface but there were indications social conditioning suppresses this.

And my own project called On English soil about user experience and user- centered design in sustainable buildings, which I am still working on. Sustainability has been a theme in two of the projects and I have learned a lot more about it. By interacting with students who participated in the Killawhats project, visiting lectures on sustainable architecture, interviewing end-users of the Sparkhouse building and doing literature research.

This internship was a really good experience. In addition to the projects I worked on during my stay, I also had the opportunity to see more of England; London, Edinburgh and Manchester. And got to know a bit more about the culture in Great Britain, which is really diverse!

I want to say thanks to everyone for being so kind. I will never forget LiSC Christmas meal and hopefully we will meet again!

Cheers Maureen