ISD Lecture
Speaker(s): Antti Oulasvirta, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
Tuesday, April 1, 2008, 5:00pm-6:00pm
202 South Hall

Abstract

Already in the mid-1970’s the combination of finger and talk enabled Unix users to find out who's online and to chat with them. Thanks to wireless networks and various sensors available in present-day mobile platforms, a broad range of possibilities has emerged to mediate discussion and support it by automatically constructed real-time indicators of conversants' undertakings, whereabouts, and intentions. These indicators are called awareness cues. In this talk, I present findings from several studies of systems that leverage these capabilities: ContextContacts: Mobile awareness cues integrated into a phonebook; Jaiku: A microblogging service utilizing mobile awareness cues; CoMedia: A mobile group media system with awareness cues. I discuss principles of designing awareness cues for mobile awareness systems, and show benefits from having them.

Bio

Antti Oulasvirta is a postdoctoral scholar at the School of Information and a research scientist at the Ubiquitous Interaction Research Group (UIx), Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), Finland. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Helsinki, Department of Psychology, in 2006.