Y!RB Brain Jam: Antti Oulasvirta - Interpreting and acting on mobile awareness cues November 2, 2007

Free and open to the public, followed at 4pm with a Social Jam that includes refreshments - and beer. It would be helpful if you mark attending/watching above.

Interpreting and acting on mobile awareness cues
Antti Oulasvirta, PhD (Cognitive science)
Postdoctoral scholar, UC Berkeley, School of Information
Research scientist, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Finland

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 various sensor data available in present-day ubicomp platforms, there is a much broader range of possibilities to automatically construct and transmit real-time indicators of other people’s undertakings, whereabouts, and intentions. In this talk, I present findings from several field studies of awareness cues, covering systems such as ContextContacts (predecessor of Jaiku), CoMedia, and mGroup.

In the presentation I attempt to answer several key questions:
- Usefulness: What awareness cues are good for
- Selection: Are some cues "better" than others? E.g., is "location" more useful than "social" cues?
- Integration: How to design cues as part of a larger media application?
- Interpretation: What are the contents of such interpretations and how much "beyond" the literal meaning of an awareness cue can users go?
- Mobility: How does mobility of the user shape the selection and interpretation of cues?
- "Awareness" versus "social inference": Implications to how we should think about awareness in general.

BIO
Antti Oulasvirta is a a Research scientist at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT and a Postdoctoral scholar at iSchool, UC Berkeley, where his stay is supported by Fulbright. Antti's research interests are related to new cognitive skills required in the information age and, in general, new cognitive scientific problems arising at the "era of ubicomp". The goal of his work has been to explicate central psychological principles and to draw implications to design and engineering, an approach to HCI that is called user psychology. Antti received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Univ. Helsinki in 2006.

Homepage: http://www.hiit.fi/u/oulasvir

Official Website: http://whyrb.com