'A Modern Up-To-Date Laptop' -- Vagueness in Natural Language Queries for Product Search

With the rise of voice assistants and an increase in mobile search usage, natural language has become an important query language. So far, most of the current systems are not able to process these queries because of the vagueness and ambiguity in natural language. Users have adapted their query formulation to what they think the search engine is capable of, which adds to their cognitive burden. With our research, we contribute to the design of interactive search systems by investigating the genuine information need in a product search scenario. In a crowd-sourcing experiment, we collected 132 information needs in natural language. We examine the vagueness of the formulations and their match to retailer-generated content and user-generated product reviews. Our findings reveal high variance on the level of vagueness and the potential of user reviews as a source for supporting users with rather vague search intents

EXTRA: Towards an efficient open platform for reconfigurable High Performance Computing

To handle the stringent performance requirements of future exascale-class applications, High Performance Computing (HPC) systems need ultra-efficient heterogeneous compute nodes. To reduce power and increase performance, such compute nodes will require hardware accelerators with a high degree of specialization. Ideally, dynamic reconfiguration will be an intrinsic feature, so that specific HPC application features can be optimally accelerated, even if they regularly change over time. In the EXTRA project, we create a new and flexible exploration platform for developing reconfigurable architectures, design tools and HPC applications with run-time reconfiguration built-in as a core fundamental feature instead of an add-on. EXTRA covers the entire stack from architecture up to the application, focusing on the fundamental building blocks for run-time reconfigurable exascale HPC systems: new chip architectures with very low reconfiguration overhead, new tools that truly take reconfiguration as a central design concept, and applications that are tuned to maximally benefit from the proposed run-time reconfiguration techniques. Ultimately, this open platform will improve Europe's competitive advantage and leadership in the field

"Alexa is a Toy": Exploring Older Adults' Reasons for Using, Limiting, and Abandoning Echo

Intelligent voice assistants (IVAs) have the potential to support older adults' independent living. However, despite a growing body of research focusing on IVA use, we know little about why older adults become IVA non-users. This paper examines the reasons older adults use, limit, and abandon IVAs (i.e., Amazon Echo) in their homes. We conducted eight focus groups, with 38 older adults residing in a Life Plan Community. Thirty-six participants owned an Echo for at least a year, and two were considering adoption. Over time, most participants became non-users due to their difficulty finding valuable uses, beliefs associated with ability and IVA use, or challenges with use in shared spaces. However, we also found that participants saw the potential for future IVA support. We contribute a better understanding of the reasons older adults do not engage with IVAs and how IVAs might better support aging and independent living in the future

Data Visualization for Medical Price Education and Transparency

<p>The health care system in the United States is changing rapidly. Individual patients are expected to become educated medical consumers making informed choices and paying for those choices. Many researchers and designers are studying how medical consumers understand their medical care, but there is an opportunity for meaningful design strategies using data visualization to help consumers understand how much they pay for their care. This thesis uses service and user-centered design methods and interactive data visualization to create systems that gather medical prices and display them back to users all with the goal of creating more educated medical consumers.</p

Our House, in the Middle of Our Tweets

Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, and other public social media sites have inspired lots of analysis of public geotagged posts. In order to understand these posts, it is important to know where their authors live. Based on a study of 195 prolific Twitter users in the Pittsburgh area, and their ground truth home locations, we show that simple algorithms can find about 80% of people’s home addresses within 1 kilometer. We show why this is near the upper bound of feasibility, show that studying as few as 10 tweets can achieve almost the same results, and discuss implications for future social media analyses

State of the Geotags: Motivations and Recent Changes

The widespread adoption of smartphones has made it possible for large numbers of people to geotag their social media posts. Past work has studied the reasons people tag their location and the ways they do so on location-based social networks like Foursquare. But it is unclear how well these findings generalize to other social media not centered on location, such as Twitter or Flickr. Through an analysis of public data and two surveys, we investigate why people geotag their photos, tweets, and other non-location-based social media. We found that their reasons are similar to those in location-based social networks. We also found several surprises due to the different nature of these platforms and the changes since location-based social networks were introduced. For example, people usually consciously geotag, though a significant portion geotags unintentionally; coordinate geotagging is changing to placetagging; and job-posting bots constitute a growing portion of public geotags

Experiential Qualities of Whispering with Voice Assistants

We present a Research through Design project that explores how whispering influences the ways people experience and interact with voice assistants. The research project includes a co-speculation workshop and the use of a design probe, which culminated in the production of a design fiction short film. Our design-led inquiry contributes with experiential qualities of whispering with voice assistants: creepiness, trust, and intimacy. Furthermore, we present how whispering opens up new dimensions of how and when voice interaction could be used. We propose that designers of whispering voice assistants should reflect on how they facilitate the experiential qualities of creepiness, trust, and intimacy, and reflect on the potential challenges whispering brings to the relation between a user and a voice assistant.QC 20200217</p