ISD Lecture
Mobile Awareness Services
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
5:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Antti Oulasvirta, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
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.
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.