Locating the 'big hole' in HCI research

In a recent Interactions article, “The Big Hole in HCI Research,” Vassilis Kostakos argued that HCI lacks persistent “motor themes,” based on a co-word analysis of keywords sections from the past 20 years of CHI papers. HCI as a discipline, it is argued, “simply roll[s] from topic to topic, year after year, without developing any of them substantially.” In this analysis, motor themes—based on clusters of recurring keywords over time—are described as a critical feature of healthy disciplines. Motor themes represent commonly addressed topics that constitute the research mainstream and therefore are essential to creating a disciplinary core. Summarizing his work from a recent CHI paper, Kostakos characterizes the absence of these themes from HCI as “a very worrying prospect for a scientific community.” These concerns seem to be echoed by events at recent CHI conferences, such as the appearance since 2011 of yearly panels or workshops on “replication” (RepliCHI), and the Interaction Science SIG of CHI 2014. While my view contrasts with the proponents of what one might label as the “scientific programme,” the emergence of increased debate about the very idea of HCI—what its work does, could, or should look like academically—feels like a valuable activity and is probably long overdue. Here, I want to talk about two matters that are core to the discussion: the relationship between science and HCI, and, more broadly, the disciplinarity of HCI

Identifying Agile Requirements Engineering Patterns in Industry

Agile Software Development (ASD) is gaining in popularity in today´s business world. Industry is adopting agile methodologies both to accelerate value delivery and to enhance the ability to deal with changing requirements. However, ASD has a great impact on how Requirements Engineering (RE) is carried out in agile environments. The integration of Human-Centered Design (HCD) plays an important role due to the focus on user and stakeholder involvement. To this end, we aim to introduce agile RE patterns as main objective of this paper. On the one hand, we will describe our pattern mining process based on empirical research in literature and industry. On the other hand, we will discuss our results and provide two examples of agile RE patterns. In sum, the pattern mining process identifies 41 agile RE patterns. The accumulated knowledge will be shared by means of a web application.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Highly charged ions: optical clocks and applications in fundamental physics

Recent developments in frequency metrology and optical clocks have been based on electronic transitions in atoms and singly charged ions as references. These systems have enabled relative frequency uncertainties at a level of a few parts in $10^{-18}$. This accomplishment not only allows for extremely accurate time and frequency measurements, but also to probe our understanding of fundamental physics, such as variation of fundamental constants, violation of the local Lorentz invariance, and forces beyond the Standard Model of Physics. In addition, novel clocks are driving the development of sophisticated technical applications. Crucial for applications of clocks in fundamental physics are a high sensitivity to effects beyond the Standard Model and Einstein's Theory of Relativity and a small frequency uncertainty of the clock. Highly charged ions offer both. They have been proposed as highly accurate clocks, since they possess optical transitions which can be extremely narrow and less sensitive to external perturbations compared to current atomic clock species. The selection of highly charged ions in different charge states offers narrow transitions that are among the most sensitive ones for a change in the fine-structure constant and the electron-to-proton mass ratio, as well as other new physics effects. Recent advances in trapping and sympathetic cooling of highly charged ions will in the future enable high accuracy optical spectroscopy. Progress in calculating the properties of selected highly charged ions has allowed the evaluation of systematic shifts and the prediction of the sensitivity to the "new physics" effects. This article reviews the current status of theory and experiment in the field.Comment: 53 pages, 16 figures, submitted to RM

VR/Urban: spread.gun - design process and challenges in developing a shared encounter for media façades

Designing novel interaction concepts for urban environments is not only a technical challenge in terms of scale, safety, portability and deployment, but also a challenge of designing for social configurations and spatial settings. To outline what it takes to create a consistent and interactive experience in urban space, we describe the concept and multidisciplinary design process of VR/Urban's media intervention tool called Spread.gun, which was created for the Media Façade Festival 2008 in Berlin. Main design aims were the anticipation of urban space, situational system configuration and embodied interaction. This case study also reflects on the specific technical, organizational and infrastructural challenges encountered when developing media façade installations

Drawing Big Graphs using Spectral Sparsification

Spectral sparsification is a general technique developed by Spielman et al. to reduce the number of edges in a graph while retaining its structural properties. We investigate the use of spectral sparsification to produce good visual representations of big graphs. We evaluate spectral sparsification approaches on real-world and synthetic graphs. We show that spectral sparsifiers are more effective than random edge sampling. Our results lead to guidelines for using spectral sparsification in big graph visualization.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017

Implications for Adoption

In this paper we explore the motivations for, and practicalities of, incorporating ‘implications for adoption’ into HCI research practice. Implications for adoption are speculations which may be used in research projects to scrutinize and explore the implications and requirements associated with a technology’s potential adoption in the future. There is a rich tradition within the HCI community of implementing, demonstrating, and testing new interactions or technologies by building prototypes. User-centered design methods help us to develop prototypes to and move toward designs that are validated, efficient, and rewarding to use. However, these studies rarely shift their temporal focus to consider, in any significant detail, what it would mean for a technology to exist beyond its prototypical implementation, in other words how these prototypes might ultimately be adopted. Given the CHI community’s increasing interest in technology-related human and social effects, the lack of attention paid to adoption represents a significant and relevant gap in current practices. It is this gap that the paper addresses and in doing so offers three contributions: (1) exploring and unpacking different notions of adoption from varying disciplinary perspectives; (2) discussing why considering adoption is relevant and useful, specifically in HCI research; (3) discussing methods for addressing this need, specifically design fiction, and understanding how utilizing these methods may provide researchers with means to better understand the myriad of nuanced, situated, and technologically-mediated relationships that innovative designs facilitate

Secondary Use of Aspen Cavities by Tree-Roosting Big Brown Bats

To further explore natural roost-site selection by temperate bats, we examined the use of tree roost sites by big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) in the West Block of Cypress Hills Provincial Park, Saskatchewan, an area where the number of human structures is limited. In this area, we found big brown bats roosted exclusively in cavities of trembling aspen trees (Populus tremuloides), despite the availability of cavities in snags of conifer trees. Most cavities had been excavated and previously used by yellow-bellied sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus varius). The use of aspens by sapsuckers relates to the relatively soft wood and susceptibility to heart rot of these trees, which provide ideal conditions for nesting: decayed heartwood with a firm sapwood shell. Orientation of cavity entrances was close to due south. The width of bats and the width of cavity entrances differed, suggesting that bats are not using roosts for protection from predators or exclusion of competitors. Bats showed fidelity to a particular group of roost trees because, despite roost switching, bats reunited in subsequent roost sites. During the day, temperatures in aspen cavities were approximately 50C cooler than in cavities of conifer snags. Microclimate differences, including temperature, may be why aspen cavities are selected over available cavities in conifer snags. All of the randomly selected cavities in aspen that we searched showed evidence of use by bats, which suggests roost sites for big brown bats in southwestern Saskatchewan may be a limiting resource