Researchers have developed many novel input technologies for various computing devices with different kinds of applications. However, only a few of them (e.g., mouse, touch) get popular and are merged into people’s daily life and work. This may due to several reasons:

1. Lack of easy, intuitive and durable muscle group control (e.g., fine and coarse)
2. The input technology’s output is not robust enough
3. Lack of specific mechanism employed by current main stream input technologies (e.g., clutching to extend the range)
4. High requirements on computing devices (e.g., back of device input needs sensors on the devices back)
5. Lack of killing applications (e.g., Iphone games make mobile tilt input popular, but others still lack of killing applications)

This research will dig into the reasons behind it and try to refine current novel input technology. The potential outcomes of this research are :

1. Refined novel input technology as a main input streams for some new applications
2. Refined novel input technology as a additional input streams for some existing applications

Stereoscopic 3D displaying technologies have been commercialized recently, signified by the introduction of 3D TVs of various parties. Autostereoscopic 3D displaying technologies (that does not require wearing of glasses) are also showing market potentials. With the technologies available at hand, this series of projects aims to explore possibilities to provide interactive experiences with these stereo 3D presentations.
Specifically, two (less considered) aspects are investigated:

Traditional mobile interaction requires users’ visual attention. But in many mobile scenarios such as walking, running, or driving, visual attention or feedback is not always available. Due to this, the mobile interaction based on visual feedback often cannot work very well. Thus, kinds of eyes-free interactive systems were developed to provide alternative solutions by leveraging non-visual input (e.g. gestures) or output (e.g. audio feedback) modalities. However, two fundamental problems for eyes-free are not solved very well:

1) how eyes-free should be defined, measured and evaluated; and
2) how to evaluate the affect of different scenarios.

As a result, current eyes-free systems are often cannot be operated by starting from eyes-free interactions. In addition, despising the constraints of specific scenarios often decreased the usability of these systems because they often cannot perform well even in the scenarios where they were expected well. In other words, current researchers despise users themselves and the characteristics of the scenarios where users are. Therefore, our research will focus on solving these two fundamental problems to help future researchers in this field. The premise is to understand users. In particular, users’ basic capabilities in different scenarios decide whether eyes-free interaction is feasible and the related implementation. Thus, we hope we can provide common design considerations of eyes-free interactive techniques and at the same time establish common principles of evaluations in mobile contexts by conceptualizing the term “eyes-free” in mobile contexts, exploring and understanding users’ capabilities in different circumstances.

Learning and using complex software has shown to be a challenging and often frustrating task. It is important to get to know what types of questions average users have for current software and how they seek help. A main channel of information, that a user can now utilize when encountering problems, is online help forums. Despite numerous research about online discussion sites, there is little examining the communication activities from a software learning perspective.

In this project, we located three popular commercial software applications’ online forums based on the software’s complexity, popularity and varying forum community sizes. We first addressed a statistic analysis of threads across the three forums within a 12-month time window. This analysis characterized the three forums from their efficiency to software learning help. Then a content analysis was performed to 1200 threads randomly selected from the 12-month period. It categorized general questions, and revealed common communication patterns as well as recurrent problems faced by forum users in the help seeking process. To provide further insights into these issues, we report on the results of a set of questionnaires to users of these forums. We believe that the analysis and insights will provide important guidelines and implications for the future development of effective community-based software learning tools.

Survey is a very common tool used for research across all fields. More often that not, it can be pretty difficult to get survey respondents as people typically view survey as boring and too tedious to fill up. The only way to attract respondents is to offer monetary incentives. QuizForSurvey hopes to change this stale perception of surveys and to make it fun and exciting again. Even better still, this time round, no begging is required to get enough respondents for your survey. What we aim to achieve here is to incorporate quiz elements into surveys and to make it enjoyable for respondents, with results which can be used by researchers. Now both researchers and respondents are satisfied. Talk about killing two birds with one stone!

QuizRoo on Facebook

Silver Computing is a project from the NUS HCI Lab to explore the issue of designing for elderly people in the field of Human Computer Interaction. This research is supported by a grant by the NUS Young Investigator’s Award.

Our mission is to make better interaction techniques of computers for elderly people. We are working on 2 projects:

1. Adaptive Interface: creating a multi-dimensional adaptive interface, which can adapt to the user’s visual, auditory and cognitive abilities in order to make it easier to use the interface
2. Silver Traveller: a design project on elderly and travelling, where we would like to participate in elderly people’s activities related to travelling to understand the problems and challenges they face

Adaptive Interface

In order to meet the needs of aging computer users, novel interfaces are required for the elderly so that they can contribute to, and function in, a society that is increasingly dominated by information technology.

We understand aging as a multi-dimensional, non-uniform and individualized process, hence, there is a need for technology to address these characteristics of aging.

Our project aims to create a multi-dimensional adaptive interface for the aged. It will consist of 2 software components:

• Comprehensive diagnostic tool: a set of diagnostics tests to assess the effect of aging on operating computing tasks by testing the users with common user interface tasks using a set of conventional and unconventional input devices.
• Adaptive interface optimizer: based on the individual user’s ability and the input devices he/she posesses, the optmizer makes appropriate adjustments to the existing interface to make it easier to use.

(Click for a larger image)

Xiaoning Ma, Xin Yang, Shengdong Zhao, Chi-Wing Fu, Ziquan Lan, Yiming Pu

This paper proposes to put domestic robots as buddies on our contact lists, thereby extending the use of social media in interpersonal interaction further to human-robot interaction (HRI). In detail, we present a robot management system that employs complementary social media platforms for human to interact with the vacuuming robot Roomba, and a surveillance robot which is developed in this paper on top of an iRobot Create. The social media platforms adopted include short message services (SMS), instant messenger (MSN), online shared calendar (Google Calendar), and social networking site (Facebook). Hence, our system can provide a rich set of user-familiar, intuitive and highly-accessible interfaces, allowing users to flexibly choose their preferred tools in different situations. An in-lab experiment and a multi-day field study are also conducted to study the characteristics and strengths of each interface, and to investigate the users’ perception to the robots and behaviors in choosing the interfaces during the course of HRI.

Additional information:
With increasing popularity of social media platforms that connect humans, this project proposes to portray dom estic robots as buddies on the contact list of family members, thereby extending social connections among humans further to domestic robots. This approach can contribute a more social, user familiar, and natural interface for interacting with domestic robots, especially for non-technical users. With advancement in robot technologies, we envision the potentials of our approach as a practical and natural interaction style with robots, more easily to be adopted by the public.

Paper

Robots in my Contact List

Haimo Zhang, Shengdong Zhao

Browsing the web has been shown to be a highly recurrent activity. Aimed to optimize the browsing experience, extensive previous research has been carried out on users’ revisitation behavior. However, the conventional definition for revisitation, which only considers page loading activities by monitoring http requests initiated by the browser, largely underestimates users’ intended revisitation activities with tabbed browsers. Thus, we introduce a goal-oriented definition and a refined revisitation measurement based on page viewings in tabbed browsers. An empirical analysis of statistics taken from a client-side log study showed that although the overall revisitation rate remained relatively constant, tabbed browsing has introduced new behaviors warrant future investigations.

Video

Paper
Haimo Zhang, Shengdong Zhao: Measuring web page revisitation in tabbed browsing. ACM CHI 2011: 1831-1834

Yinsheng Zhou, Graham Percival, Xinxi Wang, Ye Wang, Shengdong Zhao

Composition, listening, and performance are essential activities in classroom music education, yet conventional music classes impose unnecessary limitations on students’ ability to develop these skills. Based on in-depth fieldwork and a user-centered design approach, we created MOGCLASS, a multimodal collaborative music environment that enhances students’ musical experience and improves teachers’ management of the classroom. We conducted a two-round system evaluation to improve the prototype and evaluate the system: Improvements were made based on the results from an iterative design evaluation, in which a trial system was implemented. The system then underwent a second round of evaluation through a three-week between-subject controlled experiment in a local primary school. Results showed that MOGCLASS is effective in motivating students to learn music, improving the way they collaborate with other students as well as helping teachers manage the classroom.

Video

Paper
Yinsheng Zhou, Graham Percival, Xinxi Wang, Ye Wang, Shengdong Zhao: MOGCLASS: evaluation of a collaborative system of mobile devices for classroom music education of young children. ACM CHI 2011: 523-532

Don Sim Jianqiang, Xiaojuan Ma, Shengdong Zhao, Jing Ting Khoo, Swee Ling Bay, Zhenhui Jiang

Volunteering is an important activity that brings great benefits to societies. However, encouraging volunteerism is difficult due to the altruistic nature of volunteer activities and the high resource demand in carrying them out. We have created a Facebook game called “Farmer’s Tale” to attract and make it easier for people to volunteer. We evaluated people’s acceptance to this novel idea and the results revealed great potential in such type of games.

Addition information:
Farmer’s Tale is a Facebook game which aims to promote volunteerism in Singapore. From the Individual Giving Survey 2010 by the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre, the volunteerism rate in Singapore is 23.3%. Compared to the U.K. and the U.S., Singapore is lagging far behind as they have a volunteering rate of 48% and 44% respectively. Thus there is definitely a need to promote volunteerism as we believe that a strong society has to be rich not only in material capital but also in social capital. Jumping on the hot bandwagon of social media platforms, we hope to attract more young adults to volunteer in Singapore. The game (under alpha testing mode) is now available on Facebook.

Farmer’s Tale on Facebook

Video

Paper
Don Sim Jianqiang, Xiaojuan Ma, Shengdong Zhao, Jing Ting Khoo, Swee Ling Bay, Zhenhui Jiang: Farmer’s tale: a facebook game to promote volunteerism. ACM CHI 2011: 581-584

Xiaole Kuang, Haimo Zhang, Shengdong Zhao, Michael J. McGuffin

One of the fundamental tasks for analytic activity is retrieving (i.e., reading) the value of a particular quantity in an information visualization. However, few previous studies have compared user performance in such value retrieval tasks for different visualizations. We present an experimental comparison of user performance (time and error distance) across four multivariate data visualizations. Three variants of scatterplot (SCP) visualizations, namely SCPs with common vertical axes (SCP-common), SCPs with a staircase layout (SCP-staircase), and SCPs with rotated axes between neighboring cells (SCP-rotated), and a baseline parallel coordinate plots (PCP) were compared. Results show that the baseline PCP is better than SCP-rotated and SCP-staircase under all conditions, while the difference between SCP-common and PCP depends on the dimensionality and density of the dataset. PCP shows advantages over SCP-common when the dimensionality and density of the dataset are low, but SCP-common eventually outperforms PCP as data dimensionality and density increase. The results suggest guidelines for the use of SCPs and PCPs that can benefit future researchers and practitioners.

Additional information:
Scatter plot is an information visualization technique that can present multivariate data and claimed to be useful in revealing relationship between two dimensions in the data. Another technique called parallel coordinate plot is inherently designed to have the advantage of being able to trace a particular data tuple across multiple (>2) dimensions. In this project, we aim to investigate the advantage and differences between the two visualization techniques. Specifically for the current phase, we focus on value retrieval tasks, in which the user is required to determine the value of a data tuple along one dimension given its value on another dimension. Our methodology is mainly based on GOMS (Goal, Operator, Method, and Selection criteria) method, in which we try to determine the basic operators required to achieve the task and their cost in terms of performance time. We hope to reveal the advantage of PCP over SP in a systematic approach that guides future information visualization applications in selecting the best techniques according to the specific tasks.

Paper
Xiaole Kuang, Haimo Zhang, Shengdong Zhao, Michael J. McGuffin (2012). Tracing Tuples Across Dimensions: A Comparison of Scatterplots and Parallel Coordinate Plots. EuroVis2012

Shengdong Zhao, Fanny Chevalier, Wei Tsang Ooi, Chee Yuan Lee, Arpit Agarawal

The copy-paste command is a fundamental and widely used operation in daily computing. It is generally regarded as a simple task but the process can become tedious when frequent window switching is required to copy-paste across different documents. Auto-completion is another popular operation aimed at reducing users’ typing effort. It contrasts to copy-paste by allowing for text completion without switching windows. However, the available content for completion is predefined. We introduce AutoComPaste, an enhanced auto-completion technique for cross-document copy-paste. AutoComPaste allows users to copy-paste different granularity of text from all opened documents without window switching. Our theoretical analysis and empirical study show that AutoComPaste nicely complements traditional copy-paste techniques and outperforms the traditional copy-paste techniques when users have knowledge of the content to be copied.

Video

Paper
Shengdong Zhao, Fanny Chavier, Wei Tsang Ooi, Chee Yuan Lee, Arpit Agarwal (2012). AutoComPaste: Auto-Completing Text as an Alternative to Copy-Paste. To appear in AVI2012 (8 pages)