Worse Than Spam: Issues In Sampling Software Developers

Background: Reaching out to professional software developers is a crucial part of empirical software engineering research. One important method to investigate the state of practice is survey research. As drawing a random sample of professional software developers for a survey is rarely possible, researchers rely on various sampling strategies. Objective: In this paper, we report on our experience with different sampling strategies we employed, highlight ethical issues, and motivate the need to maintain a collection of key demographics about software developers to ease the assessment of the external validity of studies. Method: Our report is based on data from two studies we conducted in the past. Results: Contacting developers over public media proved to be the most effective and efficient sampling strategy. However, we not only describe the perspective of researchers who are interested in reaching goals like a large number of participants or a high response rate, but we also shed light onto ethical implications of different sampling strategies. We present one specific ethical guideline and point to debates in other research communities to start a discussion in the software engineering research community about which sampling strategies should be considered ethical.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of the 2016 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2016), ACM, 201

Understanding Public Evaluation: Quantifying Experimenter Intervention

Public evaluations are popular because some research questions can only be answered by turning “to the wild.” Different approaches place experimenters in different roles during deployment, which has implications for the kinds of data that can be collected and the potential bias introduced by the experimenter. This paper expands our understanding of how experimenter roles impact public evaluations and provides an empirical basis to consider different evaluation approaches. We completed an evaluation of a playful gesture-controlled display – not to understand interaction at the display but to compare different evaluation approaches. The conditions placed the experimenter in three roles, steward observer, overt observer, and covert observer, to measure the effect of experimenter presence and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of each approach

Implementing Ethics for a Mobile App Deployment

This paper discusses the ethical dimensions of a research project in which we deployed a personal tracking app on the Apple App Store and collected data from users with whom we had little or no direct contact. We describe the in-app functionality we created for supporting consent and withdrawal, our approach to privacy, our navigation of a formal ethical review, and navigation of the Apple approval process. We highlight two key issues for deployment-based research. Firstly, that it involves addressing multiple, sometimes conflicting ethical principles and guidelines. Secondly, that research ethics are not readily separable from design, but the two are enmeshed. As such, we argue that in-action and situational perspectives on research ethics are relevant to deployment-based research, even where the technology is relatively mundane. We also argue that it is desirable to produce and share relevant design knowledge and embed in-action and situational approaches in design activities

Glimpses of the future: designing fictions for mixed-reality performances

No abstract available

Brain-controlled cinematic interactions

Interactive films have been around for almost a century, yet they have suffered repeatedly from critical, commercial and interactional failings. We propose that brain-computer interfaces can offer interactions with narratives and encourage cinematic engagement by minimising active control. We ask what are the problems inherent to interactive cinema? Can real-time interactions via a brain-computer interface (BCI) construct cinematic content? And how do groups of individuals experience brain-controlled cinema designed for individual, shared or distributed control? Our review of related work motivates the interactional choice of using Passive BCI with real-time cinematic construction to synchronise rhythms of the viewers blinking, Attention and Meditation to the rhythms of cinema. We use the Performance Led Research in-the-Wild methodology to probe public deployments of our films, and we describe user interactions in-the-Wild during screenings of multiple designs of two interactive films: three single user, three multi user, and a live score performance. Our descriptions of BCI mappings to cinematic techniques and production strategies to produce interactive content efficiently contributes to the understanding of practical interactive cinema production. In our results we define 1) different stages of control; discovery, conscious and unconscious, 2) awareness of the affective loop, 3) a shifting prominence of engagement between the narrative, the visual qualities and the agency of users’ interactions. We offer a dynamic view of control; people’s experiences are shifting from awareness of their self, the film, and their control. Our hyper-scanning multi-user study introduces the concept of effects moving across groups, working together to produce engaging experiences, and instances of group members disrupting other’s experience by deciding to unilaterally take control of the film. Our discussion contributes to our understanding of passive interactions with narrative systems. Our research contributions include our insights into seven designs of two brain-controlled films. We define two taxonomies, of control and group control, and produce insights into value to audiences of brain-controlled films. We show the development of affective loops of physiological response and cinematic content, and provide new design directions and practical implications for interactive filmmakers

Brain-controlled cinematic interactions

Interactive films have been around for almost a century, yet they have suffered repeatedly from critical, commercial and interactional failings. We propose that brain-computer interfaces can offer interactions with narratives and encourage cinematic engagement by minimising active control. We ask what are the problems inherent to interactive cinema? Can real-time interactions via a brain-computer interface (BCI) construct cinematic content? And how do groups of individuals experience brain-controlled cinema designed for individual, shared or distributed control? Our review of related work motivates the interactional choice of using Passive BCI with real-time cinematic construction to synchronise rhythms of the viewers blinking, Attention and Meditation to the rhythms of cinema. We use the Performance Led Research in-the-Wild methodology to probe public deployments of our films, and we describe user interactions in-the-Wild during screenings of multiple designs of two interactive films: three single user, three multi user, and a live score performance. Our descriptions of BCI mappings to cinematic techniques and production strategies to produce interactive content efficiently contributes to the understanding of practical interactive cinema production. In our results we define 1) different stages of control; discovery, conscious and unconscious, 2) awareness of the affective loop, 3) a shifting prominence of engagement between the narrative, the visual qualities and the agency of users’ interactions. We offer a dynamic view of control; people’s experiences are shifting from awareness of their self, the film, and their control. Our hyper-scanning multi-user study introduces the concept of effects moving across groups, working together to produce engaging experiences, and instances of group members disrupting other’s experience by deciding to unilaterally take control of the film. Our discussion contributes to our understanding of passive interactions with narrative systems. Our research contributions include our insights into seven designs of two brain-controlled films. We define two taxonomies, of control and group control, and produce insights into value to audiences of brain-controlled films. We show the development of affective loops of physiological response and cinematic content, and provide new design directions and practical implications for interactive filmmakers