Capturing, Exploring and Sharing People's Emotional Bond with Places in the City using Emotion Maps

The vision of ubiqitous computing is becoming increasingly realized through smart city solutions. With the proliferation of smartphones and smartwatches, alongside the rise of the quantified-self movement, a new technological layer is being added to the urban environment. This framework offers the possibility to capture, track, measure, visualize, and augment our experience of the urban environment. However, to that end, there is a growing need to better understand the triangular relationship between person, place, and technology. Urban HCI studies are increasingly focused on emotion and affect in order to create a better understanding of people's experience of the city, and investigate how technology could potentially play a role in augmenting this lived urban experience. For one example, artist Christian Nold used wearable technology to measure people's arousal levels as they walked freely through the urban environment, identifying locations in the city that evoked an emotional response from people. After these walks, people's arousal levels were superimposed on a map of the city and participants were asked to interpret their own data, resulting in aggregated, fully annotated, and beautifully visualized emotion maps of the city. Based on a systematic review of emotions maps in existing literature, this paper discusses the strengths, limitations and potential of capturing, representing, exploring and sharing this personal, geo-located emotion data with other people using emotion maps. This is part of a PhD project which seeks to understand how people's experiences of places in the urban environment are meaningful to them on a personal level. Although our analysis seems to indicate that emotion maps in their current form are only of limited efficacy in accurately capturing, representing and communicating the profound, complex emotional bond that people have with personally meaningful places in the city, there appears to be potential for the use of emotion maps as a provocation in a speculative design approach

How Was Your Day? evaluating a conversational companion

The “How Was Your Day” (HWYD) Companion is an embodied conversational agent that can discuss work-related issues, entering free-form dialogues that lack any clearly defined tasks and goals. The development of this type of Companion technology requires new models of evaluation. Here, we describe a paradigm and methodology for evaluating the main aspects of such functionality in conjunction with overall system behaviour, with respect to three parameters: functional ability (i.e., does it do the ‘right’ thing), content (i.e., does it respond appropriately to the semantic context), and emotional behaviour (i.e., given the emotional input from the user, does it respond in an emotionally appropriate way). We demonstrate the functionality of our evaluation paradigm as a method for both grading current system performance, and targeting areas for particular performance review. We show correlation between, for example, ASR performance and overall system performance (as is expected in systems of this type) but beyond this, we show where individual utterances or responses, which are indicated as positive or negative, show an immediate response from the user, and demonstrate how our combination evaluation approach highlights issues (both positive and negative) in the Companion system’s interaction behaviou

Interaction strategies for an affective conversational agent

The development of embodied conversational agents (ECA) as companions brings several challenges for both affective and conversational dialogue. These include challenges in generating appropriate affective responses, selecting the overall shape of the dialogue, providing prompt system response times, and handling interruptions. We present an implementation of such a companion showing the development of individual modules that attempt to address these challenges. Further, to resolve resulting conflicts, we present encompassing interaction strategies that attempt to balance the competing requirements along with dialogues from our working prototype to illustrate these interaction strategies in operation. Finally, we provide the results of an evaluation of the companion using an evaluation methodology created for conversational dialogue and including analysis using appropriateness annotation

Blended Spaces for Collaboration

In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of designing, developing, implementing and using a number of real world, functional, multi-touch enabled Interactive Collaborative Environments (ICEs). We created an ICE in our university in order to explore issues of interaction design and of user experience in these types of environment. This ICE has been in use for the last 4 years and has been the focus of a number of empirical studies and observations. In addition we have also undertaken considerable consultancy and contract research work for a range of commercial clients as they seek to deliver innovative environments for collaboration that suit their own needs for collaboration. These consultancies have included a mobile collaborative environment for a county police force in California, the redesign of a multinational pharmaceutical company’s meeting rooms, the design of an oil rig control system and an innovation centre for an international call centre. In this paper we aim to distill these experiences and to provide theoretical and practical advice for designers of ICEs. Our theoretical position derives from the application of conceptual integration, to create ‘blended spaces’ — environments where the design of physical and digital spaces are closely integrated. We have also identified five key themes of interaction in ICEs derived from our own observations and those of others who have been looking at collaboration over a number of years. We present these themes as a critical design framework, TACIT, that focuses on Territoriality, Awareness, Control, Interaction and Transitions in ICEs. We then present two case studies of the blended spaces and TACIT framework in use. The paper concludes by looking at the opportunities for creative collaboration that the next generation of interactive blended spaces provides

Evaluating Human-Machine Conversation for Appropriateness

Evaluation of complex, collaborative dialogue systems is a difficult task. Traditionally, developers have relied upon subjective feedback from the user, and parametrisation over observable metrics. However, both models place some reliance on the notion of a task; that is, the system is helping to user achieve some clearly defined goal, such as book a flight or complete a banking transaction. It is not clear that such metrics are as useful when dealing with a system that has a more complex task, or even no definable task at all, beyond maintain and performing a collaborative dialogue. Working within the EU funded COMPANIONS program, we investigate the use of appropriateness as a measure of conversation quality, the hypothesis being that good companions need to be good conversational partners. We report initial work in the direction of annotating dialogue for indicators of good conversation, including the annotation and comparison of the output of two generations of the same dialogue system. 1

Wizard of Oz Experiments for a Companion Dialogue System: Eliciting Companionable Conversation

Working within the EU funded COMPANIONS program, we report recent work with a Wizard of Oz (WoZ) dialogue collection system.COMPANION systems require complex models of dialogue, and new models of evaluation. Wizard of Oz dialogues give us a mechanism to explore both of these research issues. We describe a new corpus of companionable dialogues collected using our WoZ system