Current Researchers: David Nguyen, Alex Bretana, and Gillian Hayes

Past Collaborators: Gabriela Marcu, Brian Sone, Aurora Bedford, Gillian Hayes, Khai Truong (University of Toronto), James Scott (Microsoft Research), and Marc Langheinrich (ETH Zurich)

Project: 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

Gillian had the privilege of joining Gary McGraw, Kim DeVries, Jim Routh, and Avi Ruben in a great panel at RSA.  The panel was largely about how to negotiate Acceptable Use Policies and technical infrastructure for security given the mounting pressure for people in the workplace–especially those who are on the younger side of things–to make use of these tools, as part of their work and as part of multi-tasking.  Gillian also talked a bit about the challenges of and opportunities for educating people about these issues, especially when they are really young.  Meg’s great work on both Acceptable Use Policies in schools and teaching kids about identity, security, and privacy is highly related to these issues as well.

This panel has generated some online chatter:

The Computer World article did a great job of describing some of the generation gap issues in the workplace today and how these manifest in policies around technology and security.  They also translated it into Portuguese (at least we think they did, we can’t read that article.  InfoSecurity also provided some interesting commentary on the panel.  Finally, the CyLab blog from CMU gave probably the most detailed reporting on the event, even going so far as to describe our skits.  For those of you who weren’t there, yes, thats right, there were two skits…. thankfully, they were authored by Gary’s brother Walt McGraw, with help from Gary and Jim.  So, they turned out to be pretty funny, despite the limited acting experience of Gillian and the rest of the panel.

Youth are faced with complex choices about whether and how to share personal information online and offline. To inform these decisions, students need meaningful experiences with managing personal information and the technologies that are becoming central in everyday life.

We will create an interactive exhibit called “Identity Detectives” through which children (K-6) will construct knowledge about personal information to encourage “safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology” (www.iste.org).

We hope to install this exhibit at a location like the Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, California. This museum—founded to provide “hands-on” learning experiences involving science, math, and technology—holds over 100 interactive exhibits, where visitors learn about myriad scientific concepts. Students of all ages engage with exhibits and construct meaning about scientific concepts along with families and school groups.

The center is an ideal site for a new technology-driven exhibit. Many exhibits already contain novel technologies to support interactions necessary for in-depth learning about science. However, exhibits about technology are not as prevalent.

To build conceptual understanding of personal information, students will:
• Recognize biological and cultural identifiers
• Explore how identity makes each person unique and a community diverse

To learn about privacy and security in technology, students will:
• Engage with online information solicitation
• Interact with tracking and recording technologies (e.g., RFID, biometrics, bar codes)

The exhibit provides students opportunities to establish respect for personal information—the foundation for responsible, informed sharing. Combining technological knowledge and character-building activities, this experience is an alternative to the reactionary stance usually taken toward perceived and actual risk to youth safety.

This work enables evaluation of new immersive, tactile, and collaborative learning experiences. The proposed exhibit will strengthen understanding of the interactions students have with materials, peers, and educators in a constructivist environment. Findings from this work will influence the design of learning technologies to reflect, support and strengthen these interactions.

Please comment on our work at the MacArthur Digital Learning competition http://www.dmlcompetition.net/pligg/story.php?title=544#c1037

Researchers: Lilly Irani, Gillian Hayes, and Paul Dourish

Project: 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 was presented at CSCW 2008:

Irani, L., Hayes, G.R., Dourish, P., Situated Practices of Looking: Visual Practice in an Online World. To appear in the Proceedings of CSCW 2008. San Diego, CA. November 2008.

On the 42nd episode of The Silver Bullet Security Podcast, Gary chats with Gillian Hayes, Assistant Professor in Informatics at the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine. Gary and Gillian discuss how much people really need to know about security going on behind the scenes, how usability affects the health records security, whether or not surveillance changes how 20-somethings act in public (including on the net), and how having more women technologists positively impacts the humanization of technology.

Privacy Piracy is a radio show dedicated to issues of privacy and digital identity.  Host Mari Frank interviewed Gillian on Sept. 16 2009.  You can listen to the interview here.

INTERVIEW

Gillian Hayes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her research is in Human Computer Interaction, with emphases on ubiquitous computing and computer supported cooperative work. She focuses on recording technologies for education and healthcare, investigating issues of usability, usefulness and social impact of technology on feelings about surveillance, privacy, and control of data.

David Nguyen, Gabi Marcu, and Gillian Hayes have been spending some time “across the pond” this summer studying reactions to Microsoft SenseCam by secondary stakeholders. This work is in collaboration with Khai Truong at the University of Toronto, James Scott at Microsoft Research, and Marc Langheinrich at ETH Zurich. The results have been fascinating, and we are digging into why people might react differently to these ubicomp recording technologies in different countries, and how those differences might be taken into account by policy makers and technology designers in the future.

An Empirical Investigation of Concerns of Everyday Tracking and Recording Technologies
David H. Nguyen, Alfred Kobsa, Gillian R. Hayes

Abstract: “This paper presents an exploration and analysis of attitudes towards everyday tracking and recording technologies (e.g., credit cards, store loyalty cards, store video cameras). Interview participants reported being highly concerned with information privacy. At the same time, however, they also reported being significantly less concerned regarding the use of everyday technologies that have the capabilities to collect, process, and disseminate personal information. We present results from this study that both identify and begin to explain this discrepancy.”