871 research outputs found
How Push-To-Talk Makes Talk Less Pushy
This paper presents an exploratory study of college-age students using
two-way, push-to-talk cellular radios. We describe the observed and reported
use of cellular radio by the participants. We discuss how the half-duplex,
lightweight cellular radio communication was associated with reduced
interactional commitment, which meant the cellular radios could be used for a
wide range of conversation styles. One such style, intermittent conversation,
is characterized by response delays. Intermittent conversation is surprising in
an audio medium, since it is typically associated with textual media such as
instant messaging. We present design implications of our findings.Comment: 10 page
Making Space for Stories: Ambiguity in the Design of Personal Communication Systems
Pervasive personal communication technologies offer the potential for
important social benefits for individual users, but also the potential for
significant social difficulties and costs. In research on face-to-face social
interaction, ambiguity is often identified as an important resource for
resolving social difficulties. In this paper, we discuss two design cases of
personal communication systems, one based on fieldwork of a commercial system
and another based on an unrealized design concept. The cases illustrate how
user behavior concerning a particular social difficulty, unexplained
unresponsiveness, can be influenced by technological issues that result in
interactional ambiguity. The cases also highlight the need to balance the
utility of ambiguity against the utility of usability and communicative
clarity.Comment: 10 page
Asynchronous Remote Medical Consultation for Ghana
Computer-mediated communication systems can be used to bridge the gap between
doctors in underserved regions with local shortages of medical expertise and
medical specialists worldwide. To this end, we describe the design of a
prototype remote consultation system intended to provide the social,
institutional and infrastructural context for sustained, self-organizing growth
of a globally-distributed Ghanaian medical community. The design is grounded in
an iterative design process that included two rounds of extended design
fieldwork throughout Ghana and draws on three key design principles (social
networks as a framework on which to build incentives within a self-organizing
network; optional and incremental integration with existing referral
mechanisms; and a weakly-connected, distributed architecture that allows for a
highly interactive, responsive system despite failures in connectivity). We
discuss initial experiences from an ongoing trial deployment in southern Ghana.Comment: 10 page
Detecting User Engagement in Everyday Conversations
This paper presents a novel application of speech emotion recognition:
estimation of the level of conversational engagement between users of a voice
communication system. We begin by using machine learning techniques, such as
the support vector machine (SVM), to classify users' emotions as expressed in
individual utterances. However, this alone fails to model the temporal and
interactive aspects of conversational engagement. We therefore propose the use
of a multilevel structure based on coupled hidden Markov models (HMM) to
estimate engagement levels in continuous natural speech. The first level is
comprised of SVM-based classifiers that recognize emotional states, which could
be (e.g.) discrete emotion types or arousal/valence levels. A high-level HMM
then uses these emotional states as input, estimating users' engagement in
conversation by decoding the internal states of the HMM. We report experimental
results obtained by applying our algorithms to the LDC Emotional Prosody and
CallFriend speech corpora.Comment: 4 pages (A4), 1 figure (EPS
The Guidebook, the Friend, and the Room: Visitor Experience in a Historic House
In this paper, we describe an electronic guidebook prototype and report on a
study of its use in a historic house. Supported by mechanisms in the guidebook,
visitors constructed experiences that had a high degree of interaction with
three entities: the guidebook, their companions, and the house and its
contents. For example, we found that most visitors played audio descriptions
played through speakers (rather than using headphones or reading textual
descriptions) to facilitate communication with their companions
Practical Strategies for Integrating a Conversation Analyst in an Iterative Design Process
We present a case study of an iterative design process that includes a
conversation analyst. We discuss potential benefits of conversation analysis
for design, and we describe our strategies for integrating the conversation
analyst in the design process. Since the analyst on our team had no previous
exposure to design or engineering, and none of the other members of our team
had any experience with conversation analysis, we needed to build a foundation
for our interaction. One of our key strategies was to pair the conversation
analyst with a designer in a highly interactive collaboration. Our tactics have
been effective on our project, leading to valuable results that we believe we
could not have obtained using another method. We hope that this paper can serve
as a practical guide to those interested in establishing a productive and
efficient working relationship between a conversation analyst and the other
members of a design team.Comment: 11 page
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