Here is a sampling of the projects STAR group researchers are conducting.

Decision Making surrounding Recording and Surveillance Technologies

David Nguyen, Gabriela Marcu, Gillian Hayes, Khai Truong (University of Toronto), James Scott (Microsoft Research), and Marc Langheinrich (ETH Zurich)

Tools for electronic recording have become easier to use, less expensive, and more pervasive in recent years. As a result, just when people think they understand a technology enough to react to it - avoiding or embracing it – new technologies are invented and deployed, making it nearly impossible for even the most technologically savvy to keep up. During design and initial product

introduction, many different stakeholders make important choices that affect the ways in which these technologies might be perceived, used, and sometimes rejected. However, no matter what choices these stakeholders make, those people destined to encounter these technologies still choose to reject, live with, or appropriate these technologies based on their own understanding of them. Knowledge of how people make decisions about recording technologies based in both technical and social influences is critically missing today. This project contributes to ongoing research in privacy and security, ubiquitous computing, and technology and policy studies.

This work is supported in part by the collaboration with Microsoft Research Cambridge.

A recent paper from this work will be presented at Ubicomp 2008:

An Empirical Investigation of Concerns of Everyday Tracking and Recording Technologies

David H. Nguyen

Alfred Kobsa

Gillian R. Hayes

Surveillance, Gaze, and other forms of “Looking” in Second Life

Lilly Irani, Gillian Hayes, and Paul Dourish

Online communities like second life can be a great place for people to develop relationships, and explore who they are and who they want to be, even when faced with labels, diagnoses, and other challenges in the offline world.  This project focuses on the ways identity, privacy, self-presentation, and interaction all interplay in online communities.

A recent paper from this work will be presented at CSCW 2008:

Situated Practices of Looking: Visual Practice in an Online World

Lilly S. Irani

Gillian R. Hayes

Paul Dourish

Tecnologies for Chidlren with Autism

Mohammed Monibi, Gabriela Marcu, Sen Hirano, Sam Kaufman, Donald Patterson, Gillian Hayes, Gondy Leroy (Claremont Graduate University), and Gianlucco DeLeo (Old Dominion University)

Visual schedules and choice boards are tools used in current best practices for helping children with autism and other special needs. These non-verbal kids need help communicating their choices, understanding time and activities, and so on. We are working with Windows SmartPhone, Linux small displays, and large touchscreen-enabled platforms to develop solutions that ease these burdens, provide logging and visualizations of data, and help automate some of the features of using these communication techniques.

This work is supported by AutismSpeaks Innovative Technologies For Autism program.

This work is also supported through a generous equipment donation from Nokia Research Palo Alto.

This work was presented at IDC as a poster at the main conference and at the Design for Children with Special Needs Workshop:

Mocotos:  Mobile Communications Tools for Children with Special Needs

Mohamad Monibi

Gillian R. Hayes

Interactive and Intelligent Visual Communication Systems

Gillian R. Hayes

Donald J. Patterson

Mohamad Monibi

Sam Kaufman

This work was also presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research as a poster:

Design of Interactive Visual Scheduling Systems

Sam Kaufman

Donald J. Patterson

Gillian R. Hayes

We are also investigating how novel recording technologies, like the Microsoft SenseCam can be used to augment communication between non-verbal children with autism and their caregivers - including both parents and teachers.

This work is supported in part by technical assistance and equipment through a collaboration with Microsoft Reserach Cambdridge.

Mobile Technologies for Assisted Exercise with Newborn Premature Infants

Gillian Hayes, Dan Cooper (UCI Medical School), Dana Gravem (UCI Medical Center), Julia Rich (Institute for Clinical and Translational Science) and many others from the UCI Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

This project examines the role that novel mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies can play in record-keeping in support of at home exercise interventions to help premature infants gain weight in the months after leaving the NICU. We are addressing three major challenges. First, technological interventions must be developed that support better record keeping and associated visualization and hypothesis testing to allow caregivers to understand the impacts of their pharmaceutical and behavioral interventions. Second, these interventions must be understood in the short-term to support testing of clinical efficacy and also over the lifetime of these patients whose chronic conditions can span several decades. Third, the focus of these technologies must be not only on capturing and allowing access to appropriate data but also in accomplishing these goals while easing the extensive burden on families. An intitial prototype system makes use of the MyExperience platform from the University of Washington on Windows SmartPhones to support logging and communication between clinicians and researchers.  This software is available in both English and Spanish to support the growing and diverse population in Southern California.

Technologies for Healthy Kids

Silvia Lindtner, Dan Cooper (UCI Medical School), and Gillian Hayes

Childhood obesity, anorexia, eating disorders, and other health concerns plague our nation’s middle school children.  This project works to engage kids in learning about health and nutrition through fun, playful interactions.

This work is supported by a Collaborative Research Initiation Award from UCI.

UbiPlay and Locative Storytelling

Silvia Lindtner, Josef Nguyen, Nick Noack, and Gillian Hayes

UbiPlay and Smart Toys involve building sensing in toys and mobile devices. Manipulation of the objects can be linked to a digital representation such as a virtual world or an online game, thus creating an interplay between physical interaction and virtual spaces. Games have often been used to stimulate physical activity in children and adults. With this project we will allow children explore the intricacies of sensors, mobile technology and the Internet, while motivating them to interact and collaborate and physically move in their everyday settings. We will collaborate with medical centers and schools to inform the application design. This project involves design and development on mobile devices and with sensors (e.g. GPS, biometric sensors).

The work on locative storytelling to support children making healthy decisions about eating and exercise was presented at IDC as a demo.

LoRy: A Locative Story Game to Encourage Playful and Social Learning (Demo)

Nicholas Noack - University of California Irvine

Silvia Lindtner - University of California Irvine

Josef Nguyen - University of California Irvine

Gillian R. Hayes - University of California Irvine

GroupMind

(Patrick Shih, David Nguyen, David Redmiles, and Gillian Hayes)

Brainstorming is a collaborative activity. GroupMind is a large group display that will connect to participants' laptops (local and remote) to foster brainstorming. Our current exploration uses mindmaps (also called concept maps) as the underlying mechanism for brainstorming. Development has involved retooling an open-source, single-user java application to be multi-user.  We conducted multiple in-lab experiments to understand GroupMind’s impacts on brainstorming activities and are continuing to explore how this and other technologies can support group collaborative creativity activities.