archive for the ‘human computer interaction (HCI)’ category

Ubiquitous Computing: For business

19 April 2011 | Bo Begole

There’s a big gap in publications about technology business. There are technical books that explain the low-level details of technologies, how they work, and how to piece them together. There are vision books that describe how the world will change dramatically and inspire us to think beyond what we see today. Then there are business books that explain how to manage and operate technology companies. While such books provide comprehensive and complete explorations within their genre, they tend to gloss over the important aspects of the other genres. Technical books leave business readers wondering why a capability matters, business books lack technical novelty, and vision books leave us all wondering, “Um…okay. Now what?” With Ubiquitous Computing for Business, I try to bridge these gaps by describing a set of innovation case studies around ubiquitous computing and the business implications thereof...

Innovating when what you already have is “good enough”

6 April 2011 | Ted Selker, guest contributor

Why bother innovating when what we are already used to, we tend to use better? Innovation/ UI expert and former MIT Media Lab professor Ted Selker shares his thoughts on this topic (and the example of QWERTY keyboards) in this guest post...

Mythbusting: Corporate ethnography and the giant green button

20 December 2010 | Editor

Because ethnography provides a complete, nuanced, and valid picture of people’s practices, processes, and product use in context, it’s a powerful tool that can provide actionable insight and reduce corporate R&D risk. The pioneering use of social scientists in technology corporations -- often referred to as corporate ethnography -- has largely been attributed to, well, us. But this isn't intended to be a who-begat-whom post. We're just trying to set the record straight on the popular tale of ethnography at PARC, because the way the story unfolds reveals how powerful a tool it can be...

It’s time to reap the context-aware harvest

21 September 2010 | Bo Begole

It's ironic that following the invention of the Personal Computer workstation and laptop computers at PARC, researchers would then turn toward making the computer disappear. To most people at the time, having a single “personal” computer was a dream, but Mark Weiser and many others envisioned that we’d soon all have more than just one personal computer in our lives... Today, context awareness isn't about devices and location - it's about people getting things done.

Connecting information using context: Meshin

22 June 2010 | Meshin - Chris Holmes

Let’s face it: email is ripe for innovation. We rely on folders and keyword searches to sift through thousands of emails to locate buried messages and documents… but the problem goes beyond the inbox. Today’s business processes are more dynamic, more human-centric, ad hoc, unscripted, and loosely orchestrated – they represent the framework for our interactions with team members, business partners, and customers. The information that fuels these interactions is digital: emails, documents, web site links, database records, IMs, tweets, and so on. Keeping track of all this information in the context of a person, a partner or customer, or a particular activity is a TIME CONSUMING, MANUAL, CUMBERSOME process. And it’s only getting tougher.

Defining ubiquitous computing vs. augmented reality

2 March 2010 | Bo Begole

What's the difference between Ubiquitous Computing ("ubicomp") and Augmented Reality ("AR")? I hear this question often, and you could replace "augmented reality" in that question with any of the following buzzy paradigms for people-interacting-with-computers: Virtual Reality, Pervasive Computing, Mobile Computing, Wearable Computing, Multi-Device Interaction, Cloud Computing, Intelligent Systems, Ambient Intelligence, Context-Aware Computing, Adaptive Systems, Machine Perception, Social Computing, Smart Environments, Everyware, and so on. For the most part, I don’t find formal definitions useful; you can call it whatever suits your fancy. All that matters is that I understand what you mean when you use a term and that you understand what I mean when I use it. The attributes of a definition that carry lasting meaning are not technological properties (performance, cost, size, distribution, latency), but the core capabilities that the paradigm enables for usage.

The Web is finally starting to behave like a butler

19 January 2010 | Ellen Isaacs

When the Web was just beginning to take hold back in the mid-1990s, I remember thinking, “This is great for getting access to information, but it’s setting user interfaces back about 10 years.” It's now 15 years later, but I’m happy to say that we’ve caught up and are finally starting to surpass where we left off. The Web has moved from a face without a brain, to just a pretty face, to a helpful butler that supports users' tasks and anticipates their needs in an unobtrusive way.

Workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation: Reports

12 January 2010 | Sanjay Kairam

PARC recently hosted the first of two co-organized and NSF-funded workshops on Technology-Mediated Social Participation. Workshop reports addressing themes such as integrating theory across levels from the individual to the community; developing new methods of measuring social connections and social capital across networks; and building an infrastructure for reliable and responsible data collection are now available.

The Future of Technology-Mediated Social Participation

7 December 2009 | Pete Pirolli

Who would have thought that simple architectures for participation could rival the scale of results previously achieved only by massive private or public works projects? While we can get excited about the possibilities, we also have to be realistic. Most social technology efforts fail: for every Wikipedia, there are thousands of dead or dying wikis. The Workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation at PARC will bring together approximately 30 researchers from industry, academia, and government to draw up a scientific agenda and educational recommendations for a new era of social participation technologies. As individuals, we’re limited by how much we know or think about any of these things, which is why I’m hoping that participants on the panel and in the audience at this week’s PARC Forum can help. We see further when we stand on the shoulders of others.

Experts’ domain knowledge improves automated recommendations

9 November 2009 | Ellen Isaacs

It’s almost eerie how well the music website Pandora recommends music based on just one example of a favorite song. It does so by relying on human experts to characterize songs based on a large and musically sophisticated set of characteristics (melody, harmony, rhythm, orchestration, etc.). This approach -- of using human expertise to develop a rich set of attributes that deeply capture the essence of an item -- could be adapted to greatly improve the recommendations currently being offered in other domains, such as news, movies, hotels and so on. In our enthusiasm to develop automated recommendation systems, Pandora reminds us of the value of incorporating the intelligence of domain experts into the process.