Talks that were given at Idiap

Access to information is one of the most crucial aspects of everyday life. As computation becomes ubiquitous and our environment is enriched with new possibilities for communication and interaction, the existing infrastructure of science, business, and social interaction is confronted with the difficult challenges of supporting complex tasks, mediating networked interactions, and managing the increasing availability of digital information and technology. Despite the tremendous development in terms of both new digital devices and novel interaction techniques that we all witnessed during the last years, it is almost unbelievable how paper documents and pen-based interaction still represent a very important way of interacting with both physical and digital information spaces. In an effort of re-thinking what pen and paper user interfaces (PPUI) mean in a modern world, we are studying multi-modal interactions of pen+ a range of tangible devices at the intersection of the physical and the digital worlds.

In this talk I will present my latest research around pen- and paper-computing, looking at how multimodal interaction with this “very old” technology enables a range of novel affordances and supports communication and interaction.
In the first part of the talk, I will speak about the development of new systems and prototypes that encompasses pen and other modalities, such as speech and gestures, different devices, such as smart phones, tablets, high-resolution wall displays, as well as different domains such as healthcare, accessibility, data visualization and interaction, social networks, augmented office environments, and communication for early education, older adults and other specific populations. I will present some examples of the prototypes we developed and some brief extracts of the data we collected about their usage in the wild.

The second part of the talk will focus on pen- and paper-based techniques and tools to get richer access to multimodal data in various contexts. While a new generation of inexpensive digital recording devices and storage facilities is revolutionizing data collection in behavioral science, one of the main obstacles to fully capitalizing on this opportunity is the huge time investment required for analysis using current methods. To address this analysis bottleneck we developed ChronoViz, a system providing synchronized interactive visual representations of multiple data streams. By using two multimodal datasets (a recent study of pilot/co-pilot interaction in a Boeing 787 simulator, and an ongoing learning analytics research project), I will present how the analysis tool works and how the integration of paper-based annotations, analysis, and interactions as part of the tool itself enable the exploration of new exciting methods for observational research.

Brief Bio Dr. Nadir Weibel is a Post-doctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego, member of both the Distributed Cognition and Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and the Ubiquitous Computing and Social Dynamics research group. He holds a Bachelor and Master in Computer Science from ETH Zurich (Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH), and a Ph.D. in Computer Science also from ETH Zurich. During his Ph.D, he explored new ways of enhancing a seemingly mundane, but ubiquitous, resource such as paper to support everyday work, interaction and collaboration as a member of the Global Information Systems research group at ETH.
His current research is situated at the intersection of computer science, communication, and social sciences, studying the cognitive consequences of the introduction and the deployment of interactive multimodal and tangible devices. His main interests ranges from software engineering to human computer interaction, including computer supported collaborative work, mobile and ubiquitous computing. In his work he is developing theory and methods, designing representations, implementing prototypes, and evaluating the effectiveness of interactive physical-digital systems in order to understand the broader design space in which they are situated. He is currently collaborating with researchers at UCSD, Stanford, Berkeley, Drexel University, Children’s Hospital in Washington DC, TU Darmstadt, INRIA Paris / Université Paris Sud and Telecom Paristech.

Abstract: An important question in behavioral epidemiology and public health is to understand how individual behavior is affected by illness and stress. Although changes in individual behavior are intertwined with contagion, epidemiologists today do not have sensing or modeling tools to quantitatively measure its effects in real-world conditions. We propose a novel application of ubiquitous computing. We use mobile phone based co-location and communication sensing to measure characteristic behavior changes in symptomatic individuals, reflected in their total communication, interactions with respect to time of day (e.g., late night, early morning), diversity and entropy of face-to-face interactions and movement. Using these extracted mobile features, it is possible to predict the health status of an individual, without having actual health measurements from the subject. Finally, we estimate the temporal information flux and implied causality between physical symptoms, behavior and mental health.

Bio: Anmol Madan recently completed his PhD at the MIT Media Lab, with Prof. Alex Pentland. Currently, he is working as a post doctoral researcher at Northeastern University and Harvard University with Prof. David Lazer. He has received honors from the MIT 100k Competition and the MIT Enterprise Forum for various startup-related ideas. His research interests are in modeling human behavior using large-scale mobile phone sensor datasets, using applied machine learning and data mining methods. You might have also read about his research in popular media like CNN, BBC, New York Times, Wired, BusinessWeek and Slashdot.