Understanding and supporting mobile application usage

In recent years mobile phones have evolved significantly. While the very first cellular phones only provided functionality for conducting phone calls, smartphones nowadays provide a rich variety of functionalities. Additional hardware capabilities like new sensors (e.g.~for location) and touch screens as new input devices gave rise to new use cases for mobile phones, such as navigation support, taking pictures or making payments. Mobile phones not only evolved with regard to technology, they also became ubiquitous and pervasive in people\u27s daily lives by becoming capable of supporting them in various tasks. Eventually, the advent of mobile application stores for the distribution of mobile software enabled the end-users themselves to functionally customize their mobile phones for their personal purposes and needs. So far, little is known about how people make use of the large variety of applications that are available. Thus, little support exists for end-users to make effective and efficient use of their smartphones given the huge numbers of applications that are available. This dissertation is motivated by the evolution of mobile phones from mere communication devices to multi-functional tool sets, and the challenges that have arisen as a result. The goal of this thesis is to contribute systems that support the use of mobile applications and to ground these systems\u27 designs in an understanding of user behavior gained through empirical observations. The contribution of this dissertation is twofold: First, this work aims to understand how people make use of, organize, discover and multitask between the various functionalities that are available for their smartphones. Findings are based on observations of user behavior by conducting studies in the wild. Second, this work aims to assist people in leveraging their smartphones and the functionality that is available in a more effective and efficient way. This results in tools and improved user interfaces for end-users. Given that the number of available applications for smartphones is rapidly increasing, it is crucial to understand how people make use of such applications to support smartphone use in everyday life with better designs for smartphone user interfaces.Mobiltelefone haben sich innerhalb der letzten Jahre signifikant weiterentwickelt. Während erste Modelle lediglich Sprachtelefonie zur Verfügung stellten, ermöglichen heutige Smartphones vielseitige Dienste. Technologische Fortschritte, wie beispielsweise GPS-Lokalisierung und berührungsempfindliche Displays, haben neue Einsatzbereiche für Mobiltelefone eröffnet, wie solche als Navigationsgerät oder als Fotoapparat. Doch nicht nur in Bezug auf die Technologie haben sich Mobiltelefone weiterentwickelt, sondern auch in der Verbreitung ist die Anzahl der Geräte enorm gestiegen. Sie werden allgegenwärtig im täglichen Leben genutzt, da sie ihre Anwender bei verschiedensten Aufgaben unterstützen können. Das Aufkommen von Vetriebsplattformen für die Verbreitung mobiler Software erlaubt es dem Anwender selbstständig Modifikationen an der Funktionalität seines Geräts vorzunehmen und dieses an persönliche Zwecke und Ansprüche anzupassen. Bisher ist wenig darüber bekannt, wie sich Anwender die Vielfalt zu Verfügung stehender Applikationen zu Nutze machen. Als Folge daraus gibt es bisher nur rudimentäre Unterstützung für Anwender, die Vielfalt von Applikationen effektiv und effizient einzusetzen. Diese Dissertation ist durch den Wandel des Mobiltelefons vom reinen Kommunikationsgerät hin zum multifunktionalen Werkzeug motiviert. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, Systeme für die Unterstützung einer besseren mobilen Applikationsnutzung zu entwickeln, deren Design auf dem neuen Verständnis von Benutzerverhalten beruht, das durch empirische Studien gewonnen wird. Diese Dissertation hat einen zweiteiligen Beitrag: Zum einen werden theoretische Erkenntnisse dazu erarbeitet, wie Anwender die Applikationsvielfalt nutzen, installierte Applikationen auf ihren Geräten organisieren, neue Applikationen entdecken und zwischen diesen in der Ausführung wechseln. Die Erkenntnisse hierzu beruhen auf der empirischen Beobachtung von Nutzungsverhalten. Zum anderen hat diese Arbeit ingenieurwissenschaftliche Ziele dahingehend, die Anwender von Applikationen dabei zu unterstützen, ihre Smartphones sowie deren Funktionsvielfalt effektiver und effizienter einzusetzen. Dieser Beitrag resultiert in der Beschreibung implementierter Systeme und verbesserter Benutzerschnittstellen für Anwender. Angesichts der rapide wachsenden Zahl zur Verfügung stehender mobiler Applikationen ist es wichtig, zu verstehen wie Endanwender diese nutzen, denn nur so kann die Nutzung von Smartphones gebrauchstauglicher und einfacher gestaltet werden

Establishing the design knowledge for emerging interaction platforms

While awaiting a variety of innovative interactive products and services to appear in the market in the near future such as interactive tabletops, interactive TVs, public multi-touch walls, and other embedded appliances, this paper calls for preparation for the arrival of such interactive platforms based on their interactivity. We advocate studying, understanding and establishing the foundation for interaction characteristics and affordances and design implications for these platforms which we know will soon emerge and penetrate our everyday lives. We review some of the archetypal interaction platform categories of the future and highlight the current status of the design knowledge-base accumulated to date and the current rate of growth for each of these. We use example designs illustrating design issues and considerations based on the authors’ 12-year experience in pioneering novel applications in various forms and styles

The intention to use mobile digital library technology: A focus group study in the United Arab Emirates

IGI Global (“IGI”) granted Brunel University London the permission to archive this article in BURA (http://bura.brunel.ac.uk).This paper presents a qualitative study on student adoption of mobile library technology in a developing world context. The findings support the applicability of a number of existing constructs from the technology acceptance literature, such as perceived ease of use, social influence and trust. However, they also suggest the need to modify some adoption factors previously found in the literature to fit the specific context of mobile library adoption. Perceived value was found to be a more relevant overarching adoption factor than perceived usefulness for this context. Facilitating conditions were identified as important but these differed somewhat from those covered in earlier literature. The research also uncovered the importance of trialability for this type of application. The findings provide a basis for improving theory in the area of mobile library adoption and suggest a number of practical design recommendations to help designers of mobile library technology to create applications that meet user needs

Interaction platform-orientated perspective in designing novel applications

The lack of HCI offerings in the invention of novel software applications and the bias of design knowledge towards desktop GUI make it difficult for us to design for novel scenarios and applications that leverage emerging computational technologies. These include new media platforms such as mobiles, interactive TV, tabletops and large multi-touch walls on which many of our future applications will operate. We argue that novel application design should come not from user-centred requirements engineering as in developing a conventional application, but from understanding the interaction characteristics of the new platforms. Ensuring general usability for a particular interaction platform without rigorously specifying envisaged usage contexts helps us to design an artifact that does not restrict the possible application contexts and yet is usable enough to help brainstorm its more exact place for future exploitation

The future of technology enhanced active learning – a roadmap

The notion of active learning refers to the active involvement of learner in the learning process, capturing ideas of learning-by-doing and the fact that active participation and knowledge construction leads to deeper and more sustained learning. Interactivity, in particular learnercontent interaction, is a central aspect of technology-enhanced active learning. In this roadmap, the pedagogical background is discussed, the essential dimensions of technology-enhanced active learning systems are outlined and the factors that are expected to influence these systems currently and in the future are identified. A central aim is to address this promising field from a best practices perspective, clarifying central issues and formulating an agenda for future developments in the form of a roadmap

Examining the role of smart TVs and VR HMDs in synchronous at-a-distance media consumption

This article examines synchronous at-a-distance media consumption from two perspectives: How it can be facilitated using existing consumer displays (through TVs combined with smartphones), and imminently available consumer displays (through virtual reality (VR) HMDs combined with RGBD sensing). First, we discuss results from an initial evaluation of a synchronous shared at-a-distance smart TV system, CastAway. Through week-long in-home deployments with five couples, we gain formative insights into the adoption and usage of at-a-distance media consumption and how couples communicated during said consumption. We then examine how the imminent availability and potential adoption of consumer VR HMDs could affect preferences toward how synchronous at-a-distance media consumption is conducted, in a laboratory study of 12 pairs, by enhancing media immersion and supporting embodied telepresence for communication. Finally, we discuss the implications these studies have for the near-future of consumer synchronous at-a-distance media consumption. When combined, these studies begin to explore a design space regarding the varying ways in which at-a-distance media consumption can be supported and experienced (through music, TV content, augmenting existing TV content for immersion, and immersive VR content), what factors might influence usage and adoption and the implications for supporting communication and telepresence during media consumption

Deep Learning in the Automotive Industry: Applications and Tools

Deep Learning refers to a set of machine learning techniques that utilize neural networks with many hidden layers for tasks, such as image classification, speech recognition, language understanding. Deep learning has been proven to be very effective in these domains and is pervasively used by many Internet services. In this paper, we describe different automotive uses cases for deep learning in particular in the domain of computer vision. We surveys the current state-of-the-art in libraries, tools and infrastructures (e.\,g.\ GPUs and clouds) for implementing, training and deploying deep neural networks. We particularly focus on convolutional neural networks and computer vision use cases, such as the visual inspection process in manufacturing plants and the analysis of social media data. To train neural networks, curated and labeled datasets are essential. In particular, both the availability and scope of such datasets is typically very limited. A main contribution of this paper is the creation of an automotive dataset, that allows us to learn and automatically recognize different vehicle properties. We describe an end-to-end deep learning application utilizing a mobile app for data collection and process support, and an Amazon-based cloud backend for storage and training. For training we evaluate the use of cloud and on-premises infrastructures (including multiple GPUs) in conjunction with different neural network architectures and frameworks. We assess both the training times as well as the accuracy of the classifier. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the trained classifier in a real world setting during manufacturing process.Comment: 10 page