Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing 2020/21

This is a reading of Cecchinato et al.'s short paper "Smartwatches: the good, the bad and the ugly?" The full text of this paper is available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702613.2732837

This week we are introducing the concept of wearable computing. We will cover some of the challenges of developing wearables from technical and non-technical perspective. We'll also talk a little about 'Wear OS by Google' (which is Google's rebranded 'Android Wear'). Smartwatches in particular were predicted to have had an explosion in use; they've not disappeared by any means, but they've not become the next 'must have' that everyone keeps with them all the time. Why is this?

This is a reading of Chan et al.'s excellent paper on microgesture elicitation. You can access a PDF of the reading from Canvas or from the ACM.

Back in Week 2 we talked about the challenges of interaction in mobile and ubiquitous computing contexts. And this week we're coming back to it in a different way – gestures. Gestures are often thought of as being a natural part of communication. Could they be a good fit for contexts were a keyboard and mouse is not really appropriate? This week we'll be covering some of the conceptual aspects surrounding gesture-based computing as well as some of the technical challenges involved.

This is a reading of John Krumm's "A survey of computational location privacy" paper from Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. It's quite old now, but I think it still gives a really good introduction to privacy concerns surround location-based services and reviews a variety of computational techniques for reducing the chances of data leakage. Full paper: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00779-008-0212-5.pdf

One of the biggest and most important topics in mobile and ubiquitous computing is privacy and security. Having lots of devices transmitting huge amounts of telemetry all over the world comes with a number of privacy and security challenges. We'll start off by considering a 'local' or on-person threat to privacy in the form of RFID cards. Then we'll cover a little on cloud-based computing and the privacy and security challenges there. We'll finish by thinking about user perspectives on security and how these can be represented in preferences.

By Cecchinato, Gould and Pitts. This article is about telemtry-based workplace tracking and its implications for the wellbeing of workers. It reviews previous literature from sociological and HCI traditions and ends with thoughts on how workers might be able to collectively bargain over data collection in a way that evens the power imbalance common in workplace 'bossware'.

By Ferreira, Kostakos and Dey, this paper introduces the AWARE framework for building context-aware systems and conducting in situ sensor-based research.

This week we're focusing on telemetry. Telemetry is a really critical part of ubiquitous computing systems; it's the label for how we collect, transport and store data collected both through sensors and from people. Telemetry supports context building, which can improve the awareness of particular applications. But there are limitations to telemetry too – we have to make sure that what we can measure is a reliable proxy for what we want to understand. We also have to be attuned to the massive privacy implications of mass automated telemetry collection.

This is a classic contribution by Steve Benford and colleagues. The article is about the deployment of a complex location-based game platform. The focus of this paper is specifically on the breakdowns experienced by players and how this influenced playing styles and perspectives on the game. It is critical for us because it is a demonstration of the idea of seamfulness; sometimes you can't fix all the issues and you need to instead focus on designing around them.

This week we're going to be covering one of the most salient aspects of context-aware computing: location. We're going to start off by discussing existing location-sensing technologies, such as GPS (and related services) as well as less well-known technologies from the history of ubiquitous computing. We're also going to cover aspects of Android location sensing and privacy and security implications of location-sensing technologies.

This is a reading of Fisher et al.'s oft-cited paper on the timing and workload of mobile notifications. The full paper is available in the ACM Digital Library: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2037373.2037402

We get lots of notifications on our mobile devices from all kinds of services. Sometimes we suffer from 'notification overload'. Why do notifications disrupt us in this way? In this podcast we'll be learning how psychological theory can help us to understand the sources of notification overload. We'll also discuss how notifications can be made more user friendly, whether through smart management systems or careful design.

In this podcast I read Anind Dey's 'Context-aware Computing' chapter from John Krumm's Ubiquitous Computing Fundamentals. Although this reading is quite long (over an hour), Dey provides a lot of detail on the history of context-aware computing as well as discussing practical aspects of developing context-aware systems.

This week we're covering two slightly separate topics. First, we will cover context-awareness in ubiquitous computing. Context-awareness is a tricky thing to define, but we're still going to think about the kinds of properties a context aware system should have. In the second part of this podcast we're going to be focusing on web-based APIs and why we use them. We'll cover REST, Webhooks and API-First design along the way.

This is a reading of Wiseman et al.'s "User Your Words" paper, published at CHI 2016. The paper can be viewed in the ACM Digital Library: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2858036.2858377 The paper is about developing pairing codes for digital radios. Numeric, alphanumeric and word-based codes are considered and tested in an experiment.

This week we're going to be thinking about how we can interact with ubiquitous computing technologies. This includes typing on touchscreens (and very small screens), pairing devices and interacting with devices without traditional user interfaces.

In this episode I read Mark Weiser's extremely influential Scientific American article, "The Computer for the 21st Century".

This week I introduce the module. We start off with a short history of the evolution of computing over the decades. Next, you'll hear about how mobile phones have become the dominant ubiquitous computing technology. The main part of the podcast finishes by introducing some of the kinds of 'ubicomp' research that we're going to touch on throughout the module. As this podcast will, hopefully, get you moving, I thought it'd be good to finish the episode by talking to Prof Anna Cox from the UCL Interaction Centre about the effect that the pandemic has had on our activity levels and how technology can help us get moving.