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With the mobile phone turning into a lifelogging device alongside with the prevalence of wearables, people are able to record, store, and make sense of their daily activities. Using such insights, applications can help monitor physiological data, motivate behavior change, but also create new ways to aid human memory: mobile devices not only allow us to create records of information, but also present us with proactive reminders and instant access to information relevant to the current situation and context serving as cognition support and for retrospection. This workshop brings together practitioners, designers and researchers with the goal of exploring the requirements, challenges and possibilities of mobile cognition, i.e. how to track activities beyond the physical realm, make sense of that data and feed it back to the user in meaningful ways to augment human cognition.
We are thrilled to announce our keynote speaker: m.c. schraefel, phd, cscs, ceng, fbcs @mcphoo. m.c. holds the post Professor of Computer Science and Human Performance at the University of Southampton, UK, where she also holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair, co-sponsored with Microsoft Research. She's also a visiting scientist and researcher at MIT's Decentralised Information Group. At Southampton, m.c. leads the Wellth Lab (tinyurl.com/wellthieee to tinyurl.com/wellthinteractions) to explore the role of interactive technology to make better normal. As part of her work in Wellth, m.c. is also a certified strength and conditioning, nutrition and functional neurology coach. www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~mc follow @mcphoo
Here is a little teaser on her keynote:
What is mobile cognition? If someone said that we are just computational devices; that we are simply driven by data to process that data against various context determined algorithms, and come up with results, we might object to the paucity of such a framing: where is imagination? discernment or insight, the non-computational processes? So what is mobile cognition? If someone said that the focus of our interactive systems designs is to support what we do with either our brains or our bodies, would we object as much as to the above assertion about being computational systems? would we rail against the impossibility of such a distinction? what is mobile cognition? What new and necessary challenges does this framing - of mobile of cognition of mobile cognition - enable us to explore, better than any other framing? What does it include? What does it exclude? How do we assess the efficacy of this framing? Does it celebrate you and me, or does it attempt to construct "users" and subjects? Does it replace the need for knowhow and reps, or build skills, knowledge, practice? Does it focus on individual "behaviour change" or strive to make better normal at all levels? What is the phenomenology and epistemology of mobile cognition? Is mobile integral or accidental? Does it assert a body / mind distinction or move first from an understanding of the neuro- checmical- physical- brain/body complex system? What can we do better for the world for framing a domain of study as "mobile cognition"? Do some of these questions seem worth exploring to you? In this keynote, i'll frame a few of these challenges around how i've been working through them, and will look forward to see what we can do in the workshop to explore them more deeply or broadly to create something memorable, meaningful and absolutely amazingly inspirationally fantastic.
The ubiquity of mobile devices has lead to variety of ways to track, make sense of, and influence daily human activities. The proliferation of the quantified-self movement has inspired both the research community as well as commercial products to come up with new mobile devices: activity trackers, such as Fitbit, bio-physiological data recording like the Zephyr BioHarness, media capturing, and the plentitude of sensors integrated in today’s smartphones allow for rich data collection. Especially fitness and health tracking has become a popular use case for smartphone apps for monitoring and motivating behavior change. But there is more to activity tracking than logging physical data: already early versions of smartphones included a rich set of productivity tools, such as personal calendars, reminders, or todo lists. As humans we have learned to outsource cognitive tasks and make use of coherent cognitive systems, also known as distributed cognition (Hollan et al., 2000). Mobile devices allow us to quantify our cognitive activities, so we can track mental processes, such as reading or learning. This may help us to optimize our mental fitness and overall well-being (Kunze et al. 2013) and further allow us to reminisce and engage in retrospection for memory strengthening. We define mobile cognition as the approach of activity tracking beyond the physical realm in the wild, making sense of the resulting data, and feeding it back to the user to augment human cognition. Thereby mobile devices are key components for sensing, processing and turning data into actionable information with the goal of supporting cognitive processes and especially human memory.
This workshop aims at exploring the requirements, challenges and possibilities of mobile cognition and its application realm. We focus on mobile technologies that help collect and analyze lifelog data and provide applications for augmenting human cognition: this includes sensor technologies for deriving people’s activities, algorithms to mine this data and different ways of presenting that information to the user. Further, we are interested in the social, economical and ethical implications that such technologies entail (Bohn et al., 2004). With the development of a focused research agenda we want to lay down the path to a better understanding of human memory in a mobile context with the potential to have a transformational impact on many aspects of life, such as work, family, health and education. The goal of this workshop is to discuss visions and concrete approaches for developing mobile technologies that nurture the augmentation of human cognition.
Therefore, we address the following objectives:
To tackle the challenges of augmenting human cognition, we will focus on the following themes:
The goal of the WMC 2015 workshop is to explore the requirements, challenges and possibilities of mobile cognition, i.e. how to track activities beyond the physical realm, make sense of that data and feed it back to the user in meaningful ways to augment human cognition. The above-mentioned themes will be used as a starting point for the discussion and group analysis. However, we will also pay attention to new themes possibly emerging from presentation and discussions.
Workshop candidates are requested to send a position paper (4-8 pages in the ACM SIGCHI non-archival Extended Abstracts template (landscape format)) to the organizers about their research and link to the workshop theme. Participants will be selected on the basis of the relevance of their work and interests and familiarity with the WMC workshop topics. Accepted submissions will be included in the MobileHCI 2015 Adjunct Proceedings and listed in the ACM Digital Library.
Submit your position paper to:
Tilman Dingler is a researcher at the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems at University of Stuttgart. He focusses on concepts and applications in the field of Pervasive Computing, thereby developing embedded devices and software for context-aware systems that put users and their context at the center. Tilman holds a Diploma in Media Computer Science from the University of Munich, a Master’s degree in Web Science from the University of San Francisco and an Honors degree in Technology Management from the Center for Digital Technology and Management in Munich. Before starting his PhD, Tilman was developing software for TinyCo and Yahoo!.
Evangelos Niforatos is a researcher at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland. His main research interests lie in the area of Ubiquitous Computing, where he develops methods and tools for supporting episodic memory recall. Evangelos holds a 4-year degree in Informatics and a Master diploma in Computer Networks and Communications, both obtained from Ionian University in Greece. He has previously worked as a research assistant at Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute in Portugal, in a joint collaboration with CGI for delivering innovative service design.
Agon Bexheti is a PhD student and researcher at the Faculty of Informatics of Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland. He is working on the RECALL project funded by the European Union. Agon’s current research is in developing secure human memory augmentation systems preserving privacy of users. He holds a master degree in Communication Systems from EPFL and wrote his master thesis at the Wearable Computing Lab in ETH Zurich.
Florian Alt is a professor in the Group for Media Informatics at the University of Munich. His research interests are at the crossroads of pervasive computing and HCI, including ubiquitous interactive systems with a focus on interaction with large displays in public spaces, 3D displays, and usable security on mobile devices.