Author Archives: Lana Yarosh

About Lana Yarosh

Svetlana “Lana” Yarosh is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Department at University of Minnesota. Her research in HCI focuses on embodied interaction in social computing systems. Lana is currently most proud of being one of the inaugural recipients of the NSF CRII award, of her best papers at CHI 2013 and CSWC 2014, and of receiving the Fran Allen IBM Fellowship. Lana has two Bachelors of Science from University of Maryland (in Computer Science and Psychology), a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Institute of Technology, and two years of industry research experience with AT&T Labs Research.

Favorite IDC Papers on Family Communication

Posted on by
Reply

One of my favorite conferences, Interaction Design and Children (IDC) is going to be in NYC this year! Full papers are called for on January 22nd and I hope to see a lot of great stuff this year (definitely excited about the paper I will be submitting :-)). In the meantime, I wanted to reflect on some of my favorite IDC papers of all time. These are the ones that have directly influenced my own work and I wanted to share them with others who are interested in family communication technologies.

The first paper is about Mediated Intimacy in Families and it is a qualitative investigation of how parents and children build closeness. Dalsgaard et al. emphasize the importance of emotional and physical expressiveness in all relationships. But they also found differences: parents and children build closeness through play together and care provided by the parent for the child, rather than through reciprocal exchanges and setting of public and private boundaries (as in strong-tie relationship). These insights led quite directly to the work that I’ve done with the ShareTable, where my goal was supporting the kinds of care and play activities that might be done remotely.

Freed et al. used a doll house to investigate how children think about remote communication. This image is from their paper and belongs to the authors.

Freed et al. used a doll house to investigate how children think about remote communication. This image is from their paper and belongs to the authors.

The second paper is about children connecting with peers through tangible characters in doll houses. Freed et al. built a pair of doll houses where toys could call each other, mail letters, and videochat with each other. This is a cool idea and an interesting way of investigating how children think about remote communication. The dollhouse approach turned out to be quite compelling to the kids, with most of them engaging in some level of shared play and finding the experience engaging. I had already been engaging with the idea of communicating through play, but seeing this work eventually inspired me to think about physical arrangements for videochat that could support narrative and pretend play.

Raffle et al. investigated asynchronous messaging with toddlers. This image is from their paper and belongs to the authors.

Raffle et al. investigated asynchronous messaging with toddlers. This image is from their paper and belongs to the authors.

The last paper is about asynchronous messaging with preschoolers. If you had asked me before this paper was published whether I thought that asynchronous communication with toddlers would work, I would probably have been very dubious. It’s just not that easy to communicate remotely and it seems much easier to connect with a person than with a message! I have to say that this paper has changed my mind. It presents three prototypes for asynchronous contact that thoughtfully explore what it may look like to engage toddlers with remote relatives asynchronously. This hasn’t led me to do a new paper or a new project (yet), but it reminded me not to underestimate the power of creative ideas and the ability of children to adapt to new ways of connecting.

If you like these papers, you might thing about checking out IDC in NYC this year. I’ll definitely be there, so let me know if you want to meet up.

Top HCI Venues According to Google

Posted on by
1

I was avoiding real work online and I stumbled across an interesting area of Google Scholar. Turns out they’ve calculated the h5-index of various publication by subfield and HCI is one of the sub-areas featured. It’s obviously not perfect, for example, CHI appears as two different conferences depending on how people cited it, but it’s still fascinating.

First, I’m especially grateful that this list has exposed me to a publication with which I wasn’t familiar but that I find quite relevant and fascinating: the journal of Computers in Human Behavior. Just a quick skim through the top 20 papers suggests that there might be a lot of good stuff that I’ve been overlooking in my searches. I do wonder why a lot of these papers haven’t appeared on my previous related work investigations (of say, video game addiction)? Am I not using the right search terms?

Second, I found it interesting that the results don’t seem to closely match another list gathered of average citations per paper. I tend to trust the Google results more as they have a more nuanced metric and the results seem more believable (at least in terms of CHI being very high on the list and the major conferences being represented). Also, the Google list only includes the last 5 years of publications rather than the whole corpus of each venue, so I think it gives a more accurate idea of the way things currently stand.

Lastly, I wanted to do a quick clustering of the top ten cited papers in CHI, CSCW, and UbiComp over the last 5 years to figure out what we’re citing the most. I picked these 3 conferences because I’ve actually been to these, so I feel a bit more comfortable doing this classification.

  • CHI seems to care the most about social networking sites (3/10 papers). Otherwise, there is a lot of variety in the top cited papers, including: crowdsourcing, activity sensing to support fitness, surface computing, and end-user programming. There were else some reflection and vision papers on this list, which wasn’t the case for the other two conferences. I guess CHI especially likes talking about the big picture.
  • CSCW seems to also mostly care about social networking sites (5/10 papers), especially Twitter (3 out of those 5). Disaster response, social search, crowds and wikipedia, and input devices for collaboration each have some representation on that list too. But, I’m most psyched that family videochat is on that list as well. It’s not my paper, but it’s nice to know that people care about my topic. Though CSCW has been exploring non-work domains, it is still the only conference with any top papers explicitly focusing on work environments (2/10 papers).
  • Ubicomp is obsessed with sensing what people are doing and where they are doing it, with 3 papers on activity recognition, 2 on location sensing, and 1 on sensing events over power lines. But apparently, Ubicomp also cares about useful contexts for sensing with papers about sensing activities or location is order to support family awareness, sustainability, and health. This is confirming my earlier assertion that it should change its name to SensorComp.

I hope you find these lists as interesting as I did. Were you surprised by anything you saw (or didn’t see) there?

Reflecting on the ShareTable Deployment

Posted on by
2

The ShareTable was my Ph.D. thesis project and the paper about its deployment will be presented at CSCW 2013. Since everything is officially accepted, I thought that I’d give y’all a preview of the paper and summarize a few of our findings. I’m also going to give an overview of our process, which may be helpful to other students who are in the same boat.

A diagram of the system components and photos of the ShareTable in the homes of participants.

We wanted to address two common issues in remote parent-child communication that we discovered through interviews with divorced families: (1) children don’t feel empowered to initiate the interaction and (2) its hard to have a longer interaction because just talking is boring for the child. To address these challenges, we designed and deployed the ShareTable — a system that provides easy-to-initiate videochat and a shared tabletop task space — in four divorced households.  We compared the families’ previous communication practices (from a 2-3 week diary baseline study) with their use of the ShareTable system. Throughout the month of its use, the families employed the ShareTable to participate in shared activities, share emotional moments, and communicate closeness through metaphorical touch. The amount of parent-child communication more than doubled for both families because doing activities together was more compelling than just talking. Additionally, children initiated a much greater proportion of conversations over the ShareTable than they had previously done with the phone. However, the ShareTable did also introduce new concerns over privacy and new sources of conflict about appropriate calling practices between the parents. Overall, our experience showed that the combination of videochat and an activity space provided a compelling medium for communication with young children. A similar approach may be useful with other types of geographically-separated families, as well as in supporting children in remote play and learning.

I also wanted to reflect a bit on the whole process. While I was working on this project, I frequently felt frustrated and like things weren’t moving along fast enough. Indeed, there were a lot of times that I ended up backtracking on ideas, rewriting the code (twice completely ), and reconsidering the best way to approach the whole idea. However, reflecting back on it, that’s a kind of progress as well and perhaps that’s what research is all about. Indeed, even in the slowest of years, I made some progress on the overall idea. Sketches (while they almost seemed a waste of time while I was doing them) turned out to be a great way of getting early feedback on my ideas, considering alternatives, and most importantly attracting good people to this project. The design would not have been possible without Stephen Cuzzort, Hina Shah, Hendrik Mueller, Brian Di Rito, and Berke Atasoy. The implementation would not have happened without Stephen Cuzzort, Jee Yeon Hwang, Sanika Mokashi, Shashank Raval, Duane Rollins, Jasjit Singh, and Anthony Tang (even if not everybody’s code ended up in the final system). And there was no way I could have deployed it in the homes without Sanika Mokashi, Yi Han, Eugene Medynskiy, Kurt Luther, David Quigley, Caleb Southern, and Jay Summet (there was a lot of truck driving and furniture-moving involved!). And, of course, my advisor Gregory Abowd was there every step of the way.

The process of developing this system took several years, granted with a lot of side projects and learning along the way.

So, if you are currently a Ph.D. student and you’re feeling like you’re climbing a never-ending mountain, keep at it, you’ll feel great when you reach the top! In the meantime, try to find good people to help. Even though it’s only my name on the thesis, the giant list of names above shows that I couldn’t have done it alone. Ask for help when you need it!