Wednesday, March 21, 2012

DIS paper accepted!!!

We are happy to inform you that your paper

 207 - Kolab: appropriation & improvisation in mobile tangible collaborative interaction

has been accepted to DIS 2012 Long and Short Papers .

We received 449 papers which is about 150 more papers than DIS 2010, and many more than anticipated. We were able to accept only 89 papers due to the time and venue restrictions (so, the acceptance rate was just less than 20%).


This is a good day. 

typing recognition.

One of my research projects ( which is more web than ubicomp) is the development of an on-line compiler for students. One of the problems we have is 'knowing' the student is the one who did the work and the one who turns up for the exam.

For a while I've been wondering about something which looks at mouse and keyboard timing to 'recognise' you. The idea is if you look at the timing of key downs and the inter-key timing for typing on a keyboard it might tell you 2 things
    1. let you discriminate you from someone else and
    2. let you get some inkling about that persons emotional state  ( something for affective computing).

This work on passwords suggests someone has made a full time career out of that idea ( which is great). They want to build a password system without passwords - nice and very user friendly. Eventually they will realise you can have a system which identifies people by their clicking so giving an 'online' identity. This stops someone being kicked out of a forum for abusive behaviour then coming back as someone else ( or  logging on multiple times as different people).

Going back to students for a second - the ability to recognise a student typing code would be a boon. In an exam they have to prove who they are so if we can capture their ID for the exercises then we can check that on line students are who they say they are.





Thursday, March 15, 2012

Friday, March 9, 2012

Smartphones, the internet and the smart energy revolution

Some HCI people worry about not having much to do on green issues. I'm believe the reverse - and this is a good example.  Nice to think that a reinvention of thermostat could save 20% of the energy a home uses.

I would like to learn more about how it works.