SIGCHI Ireland

Large Conference Room, O’Reilly Institute, Trinity College Dublin, 12:00 Thursday 23rd February.

Designing for emotion and attention regulation
The last decade has witnessed a significant growth of HCI interest in affective and mindfulness technologies, with a focus on computerized therapy, or audio-visual interfaces for guided mindfulness meditation. In contrast, technologies leveraging primarily the body through biosensors or haptic actuators have received however less attention. This talk will provide an overview of my research in this space, illustrated through design exemplars of technologies supporting emotional awareness and regulation, as well those supporting attention regulation. Such work focuses on the exploration of bodily experienced and highlights novel design implications to inform the more sensitive design of future affective and mindfulness technologies. 

Corina Sas is Professor in Human-Computer Interaction with the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, UK.

Corina’s research focuses on technologies for wellbeing, mental health, and memory, and novel tools for designing them. Her work integrates wearable biosensors, mobile and lifelogging technologies with the aim to shape interaction design and user experience. Corina serves as Technical Program Co-Chair for ACM CHI 2024, the flagship Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference, Doctoral Consortium Co-Chair for ACM DIS 2023: Designing Interactive Systems, and has been Co-Chair for the ACM C&C 2021, 2022: Creativity and Cognition Conference, and British HCI Conference 2007. Corina is member of the Editorial Boards of the ACM Transactions in Human-Computer Interaction, and Taylor & Francis Human Computer Interaction journals. She has published over 200 papers, and her work received extensive media coverage as well as 5 Best Paper and Honourable Mention Awards. She also received several Awards for excellence in research leadership and has been investigator on grants totalling over £15 million, including the lead of two prestigious EC-funded Marie Curie Innovative Training Networks which provided interdisciplinary PhD training to 28 early career researchers. Corina supervised to completion 14 PhD students, and in 2021 was shortlisted by the UK Times Higher Education for the Outstanding Research Supervisor of the Year Award. 

Title: Introducing People with ASD to Crowd Work
Kotaro Hara, Singapore Management University

Large Conference Room, O’Reilly Institute, TCD, 12:00 25th October

Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are unemployed at a high rate, in part because the constraints and expectations of traditional employment can be difficult for them. Some aspects of crowd work, such as bypassing the social norms of a contemporary workplace, may be beneficial for people with ASD, enabling them to generate income through remote work. In this talk, I will first discuss our work in introducing people with ASD to remote work on a crowdsourcing platform-Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). We conducted a six-week long user-centered design study with three participants with ASD, assessing the abilities of our participants to search and work on micro-tasks available on AMT. Our findings suggest that people with ASD have varying levels of ability to work on micro-tasks, but are likely to be able to work on tasks like image transcription. In the latter part of the talk, I will discuss if crowd work could generate income sufficient to support workers. We recorded 2,676 workers performing 3.8 million tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our task-level analysis revealed that workers earned a median hourly wage of only ~$2/h, and only 4% earned more than $7.25/h (US federal minimum wage), suggesting the need of improvements in the design of the platform to create a more positive future for crowd work, particularly for those with ASD.

Luca Chittaro
Human-Computer Interaction Lab
University of Udine, Italy

ORI LCR, 29th August 12:00.

BIO: http://speakers.acm.org/speakers/chittaro_6402

ABSTRACT:
Virtual reality (VR) experiences and serious games, i.e. video games to further training and education objectives, are increasingly used in a variety of domains, including health and safety. However, compared to entertainment games, the design and evaluation of such applications is more complex because it needs to take into account additional, multidisciplinary factors (e.g., persuasive communication and attitude change). In this talk, I will introduce and illustrate how we addressed some of these factors, aiming at improving the theoretical grounding as well as the practical effectiveness of VR experiences and serious games for safety education. I will also demonstrate applications of the proposed ideas to real-world problems. In particular, I will illustrate in detail our projects on safety education of aircraft passengers, which have been supported by grants of the US FAA (Federal Aviation Administration).

Apps for Health and Wellbeing: Physical Exercise, Breathing, Mindfulness

Prof. Luca Chittaro

O’Reilly Institute, LCR, Trinity College Dublin, 12:00 August 24th.

Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Udine, Italy

Different activities that can be potentially embraced by almost any person such as physical exercise, deep and slow breathing or relaxation training have been shown to have beneficial effects on health and wellbeing. Mindfulness practice allows people to gain further advantages (e.g., in terms of psychological health, social relationships, and performance at various tasks) and has become the subject of a large amount of health research, with literally thousands of journal papers published. Nevertheless, people have difficulty in learning and/or in regularly engaging in such activities, no matter how beneficial they could be to them. For these reasons, our projects explore how to use computers (and especially mobile devices) to make these activities simpler to approach and more appealing, supporting people in engaging with and practicing them. This talk will present our main project, focusing on different applications we developed for respectively physical exercise, breathing training, relaxation training and mindfulness. For each application, I will also summarize the main findings of the studies we carried out to assess the effectiveness of the apps.

Nicholas Vanderschantz, University of Waikato, New Zealand

LCR, O’Reilly Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Weds 11 July 12:00

KidsQuestions: Assisting Children’s Digital Information Seeking

Abstract
Children struggle in a variety of ways with the contemporary technologies used in the classroom. Our investigations are aimed at supporting children’s digital information seeking. We hypothesise that an interaction model specifically designed to align with the inquiry-based pedagogies common in education today would be beneficial for children’s digital information search. We conducted a requirements analysis involving children, parents, and teachers, a range of user studies through which we identified the information seeking practices and the issues school children encounter when using contemporary digital information seeking technology. We implemented and explored a search engine interface prototype that was designed to align with the inquiry-based pedagogies that we observed. This presentation gives an overview of our observations and insights gained.