This paper describes a novel design activity that was used to gather insights into security requirements for a mobile application for children. The study is described and design solutions that emerged following analysis of the children’s contributions are presented.

In this paper we look at four different interpretations of the term ‘Ubiquitous Computing’ - many computers; people using them much of the time; embedded computers, and ‘invisible’ systems - and consider how the two more specialist interpretations are being undermined by the other two. We explain how the increased manifestation of computers in our environment alters the ways in which we should consider how to design ubiquitous systems. There are some specific implications for design of interfaces to artefacts containing embedded computers and these are discussed in the context of recent work on Projected Cognition.

The characteristics that identify a good game are hard to define and reproduce, as demonstrated by the catalogues of both successes and failures from most games companies. We have started to address this by undertaking a grounded theoretical analysis of reviews garnered from games, both good and bad, to distil from these common features that characterize good and bad games. We have identified that a good game is cohesive, varied, has good user interaction and offers some form of social interaction. The most important factor to avoid is a bad pricing. Successfully achieving some of these good factors will also outweigh problems in other areas.

We analyze the results of a survey distributed to heavy users of social networking website on current mobile communications practices regarding location disclosure. We discovered that deception on location disclosure is a common practice amongst this demographic. We also discovered privacy issues of location are reduced in line with cue accuracy. From these results we generate design guidelines for mobile awareness applications that utilize location; which when shared in a controlled manner has been shown to be a powerful awareness cue. We support this approach with insights into the social behavior of deception in location disclosure showing that active online social network users are more open to revealing location, but more likely to be deceptive. We present the results applied to a mobile user interface for a location-based mobile awareness system that allow user’s location cue and disclosure accuracy to be modified.

In this proposal the authors describe an exciting panel for CHI 2008 on Longitudinal Usability Data Collection. Collecting usability data over time is increasingly becoming best practice in industry, but lacks "thought leadership" in the current literature -- very few articles or books exist addressing the topic. To inspire academic research and share best practices with practitioners, we propose a panel to debate some key questions that arose from the CHI 2007 SIG on the same topic.

CiteULike is a collaborative tagging web site which lets users enter academic references into a database and describe these references using tags (categorizations of their own choosing). We looked at the tagging behavior of people who were describing four frequently entered references. We found that while people tend to agree on a few select tags, people also tend to use many variants of these tags. This lack of consensus means that the collaborative aspect of tagging is not as strong as may have been suggested in the past.

An understanding of how people in social networks consume news media by and about their friends shows that information overload is soon going to be a major problem for many participants. Users dislike manually prioritizing their friendships to help organize this data, and this leads us to develop a new interface to help users to find the news that most interests them by providing a visual representation of social proximity, in which friends most visited and those most likely to be met offline we prioritized.

This paper describes how an e-learning product for teenagers was developed using design sessions based on a participatory design approach. The product, in the form of a computer game, is the outcome of a project that aims to improve teenagers' emotional intelligence. The specific user group is from institutes for pupils that had previously been excluded from mainstream education. The novelty in the approach is that participants were involved in designing a tool that was intended to modify their emotional behaviour - for this discussion, it is the participation in the process that is critical, less so the end product. The project and the design approaches are described and the participatory activity is reflected on. The benefits resulting from the design sessions were bi-directional: the engagement with the prospective users was valuable both for the actual contribution to the product design and as an experience for the participants.

In this paper we describe the analysis of the outcomes of a design session with children. Designing with children is often considered an inspirational activity mainly useful for the designers to get first hand insights of the users’ world. For this study we attempt an analytical approach to the results of a specific design session where children used low-tech prototyping to design the content of an interactive interface for a museum context. This analysis helped to inform the design of the specific product but was also useful to investigate methods of interpreting qualitative data of this kind. The analysis showed that the design method employed enabled the children to consider design features but also demonstrated that in some areas the children had only a limited understanding. Results from this work will be used to improve, and describe future design sessions.

In a study of activity and usage of comparatively complex configurations – where users have multiple screens and/or multiple computers – we have noticed that accounts of what is being observed and reported are tricky to unify within a coherent framework. In this paper we look in detail at one such setting, where a complex office configuration has the machines well spread out in a structure designed by an individual for themselves. The layout also permits pairs of users to work collaboratively and clear cases of co-operative working are observed. In order to describe this successfully, we have extended the distributed cognition approach to capture notions of intent. This Projected Cognition, as we have termed it, allows us to provide a richer description of intent, activity and context.

Wireless location is of increasing importance in context-aware systems. We have developed a wireless location positioning system that can use multiple algorithms for providing estimates of device location, and we present a case study of the system in use with a building. We show that combining two algorithms allows us to provide improved accuracy over one algorithm alone, and draw some general purpose conclusions regarding location determination in real-world environments.

This paper provides details of an in-depth investigation into how racing sailors use information displays and devices, and shows that these devices act as communication loci and instigators of action. The paper presents a detailed look at how sailors use instrumentation on their boats for both their own performance and as the foci for developing a shared understanding: this is a detailed study of computer-supported cooperative work in a new environment. We present a brief summary of the ways that technology has pervaded the environs of sailing yachts, and analyze how this has affected the activities of the crew and altered the relationship between the sailors and their environment. We introduce a taxonomy of information processing levels that allows us to understand what information is currently presented and in what form, and provides a basis for us to consider future developments in the field. After presenting the study and some analysis of the use of existing technology, we present a new design that addresses some of the issues identified, and evaluate its impact. The systems are analysed from the perspective of assisting people to improve their performance in training and in race situations. We use a combination of observation, discussion and personal reflection in undertaking the study.

In this paper we consider ways in which images collected in the field can be used as to support sense-making. Weick's concept of sense-making is applied to the capture of images. A study is reported in which visitors to an open-air museum were asked to take photographs of aspects of the site that they found interesting. Photographs were taken using a bespoke application in which a webcam and global positioning system device, attached to a small tablet computer, are used to capture tagged images. Tagging is supported by the use of a simple menu that allows users to classify the images.

The movement of music from physical discs to digital resources managed on a computer has had an effect on the listening habits of users. We explore using the potential of the innate synaesthesia that some people report feeling between colour and mood in a novel interface that enables a user to explore their music collection and create musical playlists in a more relevant way. We show that there is a reasonable degree of consistency between users’ associations of colour and music, and show that an indirect descriptor can aid in the recall of music via mood, making playlist generation a simpler and more useful process.

Recent research has suggested that affective embodied agents that can effectively express simulated emotion have the potential to build and maintain long-term relationships with users. We present our experiences in this space and detail the wide array of design and evaluation issues we had to take into consideration when building an affective embodied agent that assists users with improving poor dietary habits. An overview of our experimental progress is also provided.

This study presents interview based case studies of users who work with multiple computers as well as multiple displays. Such users have not been studied before. The behaviour is discussed in terms of both technical and cognitive dimensions, and we identify the importance of having multiple carets and the complexity of multi-tasking and how it can be supported across multiple machines in a way not possible on a single system.

First came teachers: Plato spoke, asking questions – as did Socrates (giving rise to the Socratic method). People gathered, discussed, thought, reasoned, and were enlightened. Then came books. People read, thought, reasoned, and were educated. We then had teachers: talking, and using books, to instil knowledge in students, who listened, and read, and discussed, and wrote, and became educated. Then came e-teaching: like teaching, only on computers. People found it slightly harder to get to grips with, were sometimes educated, often frustrated, and were occasionally educated. The came e-learning: structured, personalised education based on personal abilities and interests. People were a little put off by their e-teaching experiences, but gave it a go, and it worked reasonably well for some of them – though the complexity of systems, the frustrations of computers, were still there. Then came m-learning – learning on mobile devices – and when people worked out that presenting large quantities of material on a small screen was sub-optimal, and that there were better things to do with mobile devices than focus on their least effective features, like their display or memory, we gained context- and location-sensitive systems, which provided relevant content tailored to individuals, and provided a rich and rewarding educational experience – at least in the laboratory. But with all these systems, different forms of learning were supported in different ways, and students adopted different learning styles and approaches to maximise their benefits from the technologies. Educators realise this, and propose that blended approaches to learning are used, since different topics, styles and learners benefit differently from the alternative approaches. For best effect, history has shown us that new technologies do not tend to best support existing practices; instead, they open up new opportunities for alternative learning that suits the medium more. Books widened participation; e-teaching tried to present books and schoolroom teaching on a computer, and failed, whereas proper e-learning utilised the multimedia capabilities of the system, and related it to models of user knowledge acquisition and self-testing and presented tailored programmes that suited users. Mobile learning has come into its own now that it better understands the nature of mobility (devices and users) and plays to the strengths of context, location, and immediate presentation of relevant and interesting information. So the interesting question is, where will we go next? What form of learning should we be considering for the next step beyond mobile learning? From both a technological and a social perspective, the next step beyond mobility is ubiquity: a vision of the world in which multitudinous devices are embedded in the everyday world, around our persons, and in the devices we carry. These systems communicate with each other and with us, connecting us every closer to a digital web in which information, the environment, other participants and ourselves are closely interwoven. If we try to present educational approaches that we currently use into this new mesh of interpersonal, interwoven information spaces, we are doomed to fail. Interaction in this new world is different – it is mediated as if by magic by multitudinous systems, many of which we have little or no comprehension of, and it is these differences in interaction that occurred at each of the historical shifts in approaches to education and learning. Current educational dilemmas present us with an insight into these issues. Questions have become less meaningful in today’s educational landscape: Google can answer a question, with no knowledge acquired by the student. Essays can be produced from essay banks, with the student participating in the learning process not one iota. However, knowing how to use information tools has become critical. In the ubiquitous future, it is quite likely that information is an easily accessible resource – if you know how to get to it. Facts become merely items to be accessed, rather than knowledge to be acquired. Knowing how to find out information, how to manipulate it, how to condense it; these will become key skills. Verifying information is reputable, understanding its veracity, assessing quality and reliability, combining and presenting it with conciseness and precision: these will be the key skills that separate the good from the bad, the innovative from the plodders. If you know how to access information, what information to trust, and how to combine and present it, then actually knowing anything will become irrelevant: details can be provided by the back end systems, by the environment. Deciding how best to access and fuse the different, conflicting and potentially overwhelming quantity of data will be a distinguishing feature of the new learning agenda. Finding new ways of seeing things, being creative, providing new perspectives on the world and our place in will become more important. Though maybe it was always thus?

Blogging can be used to enhance education by encouraging reflective practice. We present a study in which a final year HCI course was constructed around regular blogging activity. We discuss the role of blogs in providing a social mechanism for the student body and in acting as a conduit between classroom and practical examples. We analyze the blogs from a quantitative and qualitative perspective, and show that the students found it a useful and effective addition to their learning.

This paper presents an account of the nature inspired design research network. It discusses the potential benefits of researching and adopting nature inspired approaches in design. It summarises the topics discussed in the network, which include evolution, growth and development, emergence and self organization, robustness, natural structures, and human design behaviour and performance; and it reports on the activities of and experiences with the network.

Research into developing socially intelligent embodied agents has increased over the last decade with the main focus being on how they can enhance humancomputer interaction. However, little research has concentrated on the potential they have to manipulate our behavior for unethical purposes. A discussion is provided highlighting the main dangers associated with embodied agents. Suggestions for reducing these risks are then provided, along with a brief discussion regarding the need for further research.

The movement of music from physical discs to digital resources managed on a computer has had an effect on the listening habits of users. We present the results of a survey to quantify these changes, and identify problems with the creation and management of playlists, a mechanism which users use to organize and guide their listening experiences. We describe the design of a system to help automate the creation of playlists, using colour associations to guide the choice of music. We demonstrate that there is a reasonable degree of consistency between user’s associations of colour and music, despite their personal views that everyone will be different, and evaluate the system with a set of users.

E-Science offers a special set of challenges for interactive systems designers. Whilst e-science has many different meanings, its key characteristics are that it deals with science that is distributed, asynchronous, and involves multiple participants (whether they be scientists or data gatherers). This makes it inherently different to desktop systems for single or a few users, and so we need to consider whether existing design approaches are adequate. This paper outlines three areas in which e-science and usability combine in interesting ways.

We discuss the details of the architecture, design, and acceptability of a system created to support mobile blogging, called SmartBlog. The process of blogging is often an instant-response mode of writing that provides its own challenges for systems that aim to support it.SmartBlog was developed from a technologically inspired design approach towards creating new artifacts, which we outline.

In the mobile learning context, it is helpful to consider context awareness and adaptivity as two sides of the same coin. The purpose of the adaptivity and context awareness is to better support a variety of learners, given that they may have very different skills and motivations to learn in varying contexts. The recent research on adaptivity and context awareness has turned towards supporting pervasive environments and this is coupled with the increasing trend in seeing learning environments from an informal learning perspective. Introducing mobility to learning in a meaningful way emphasizes the role of the contextual factors, and learning as an informal activity. In this paper are presented experiences of developing an adaptive and context aware mobile learning system, with examples of other systems underlining the development towards supporting pervasive learning environments. We then consider approaches for the future development of systems supporting pervasive learning environments.

Context-awareness can greatly enhance the usability of mobile devices by making it possible for users to continue with other activities without having to pay too much attention to the device. At the same time contextaware applications can provide timely support for user activities by responding to changes in the user’s state and acting accordingly. We describe our work on developing a generic context awareness architecture that is being deployed in a gallery space to enhance learner engagement with the gallery exhibits. Our system makes use of contextual information to determine what content should be displayed on the device. Users can also navigate this content by explicitly changing their context in the dimensions of physical location and dwell time. Visitors have the opportunity to physically interact with the abstract information layer that is overlaid on the gallery space. The system also actively encourages movement in the gallery by identifying links between paintings. We describe our architecture, implementation, and the design challenges faced in deploying this system within a gallery.

It is recognised that creating effective, usable interactive systems is a highly non-trivial task. One approach to supporting developers and designers is through the use of HCI design patterns - this is now recognised as an effective way to produce usable systems. Design patterns capture the key elements of a design, providing a library of approaches that are known to work, though most design patterns are at best only semi-formal, providing outline structures that are filled in with discursive text and/or images. In this paper we present a UML/OCL model of design patterns that captures not only the characteristics of the system but also its interface representation, and provide examples of how it can be used. This approach is shown to be flexible and very powerful. We focus on modelling a design pattern at a high level of abstraction, producing a template, or metamodel representation, from which specific UML instantiations can be refined. This approach immediately captures the relationships between similar designs, showing the connections between related conceptual elements. The approach goes further, however; from a specific UML model, we can derive code that implements the relevant design pattern. The role of OCL is to represent constraints on the model, allowing us to define more tightly the behaviour and representational aspects of the design pattern. This paper discusses the reasoning behind the approach and our initial results in modeling design patterns using UML.

Creating and maintaining blogs is an increasingly common activity, in which users share personal thoughts and observations via the web. We want to understand whether users want to blog when out and about, and have designed and developed a mobile blogging client that allows users to share their experiences via their mobile phone, and have integrated it with the multimedia and networking capabilities of the device to provide a flexible, powerful, personal system. We discuss and evaluate the system and its design.

Reflective practice is recognised as a useful tool to support a wide variety of learning opportunities and approaches (Schon, 1983), providing a period of reflection on action and drawing out key lessons learned. Supporting such introspection about learning is as useful in mobile learning; potentially, even more so in informal, unstructured scenarios that often occur in a mobile setting, where a deeper understanding of the things learnt comes about after the event and not during it. Weblogs have been used to support reflective practice, but often there is a long delay between experiencing a learning episode whilst out and about, and being able to record the key elements of it and reflect on it. To address this problem, we have developed a mobile blogging client that runs on a smartphone, which allows the learner to record the event at the time, using the phone’s multimedia capabilities – photos, sound, text and so on, and to enter their thoughts and impressions and reflections immediately, and post these to their blog. This approach captures the more immediate stream-of-consciousness style that is prevalent in blogging (Nardi et al., 2004 , Nardi, Schiano and Gumbrecht, 2004 ), and produces a system that is always available and therefore supports the immediate, ad-hoc nature of mobile learning experiences more effectively. This paper discusses the design and architecture of the system, discusses it in relation to other more limited approaches (Nokia, 2003, Gratton, 2004), and reports on its use in mobile blogging.

Is the second paragraph dead? Technology and users are tending to create and consume information in ever decreasing chunks, forcing content creators to create shorter fragments of text and other media. This paper examines this phenomenon, and provides examples of where and why this is happening. It examines the role of metadata, and how this can be used to provide effective, personalized communication in a fragmented digital world.

Blogs have become very popular recently[1, 2], as a fast, easy to use way of sharing your thoughts with others on the internet. Because of their web-based nature, they encourage external referencing to other sites, and communities of interest grow up, sharing information and opinions[3, 4]. They have recently become of interest to educationalists, who see their potential as tools for supporting student sharing of information, for engaging them with the subject by using cool new technology and relating their work to the outside world, and, by the very nature of the blogging activity, supporting reflective practice[5]. To investigate this, we studied 160 students on an HCI course over a semester, who were asked to use blogging as a tool for their learning. Students were asked to work in groups of five to produce a shared blog that referred to things in the real world that were related to HCI, usability, and the specific topics they were studying. In addition, they used the blogs to record information on a specialist topic that they were being asked to research and present. The aim of the blogs was to be formative, not summative, though a small number of marks were assigned to this activity to ensure participation. We present the results of our evaluation of their blogging activities in two forms: Quantitative: number of postings, size of postings, number of internal references, number of external references, number of comments, and so on Qualitative: quality of writing, relevance to material, evidence of learning, evidence of progression to deeper levels of understanding, evidence of reflective learning. We also put these results into the wider context of the web-directed learning approach first discussed at this workshop last year[5, 6]. In addition, we have just completed a final year HCI course, whose design and style has been influenced by the second year course discussed above. We discus how these influences have manifested themselves, the changes made for a more advanced course, and the lessons learned. We also look at how effective and efficient the overall approach is, and highlight the key factors that make it successful, and the main advantages and disadvantages of the approach.

Art explores and expresses our aesthetic relation to our environment and ourselves. However, since the rise of photography, the value ascribed to art’s representative power has waned and in its place are explorations of the poetics of each piece, the way in which an object’s materiality intervenes in the space (and time) in which it is sited, authorship, the role of the viewer and so on. In 2D media, these subjects have been explored in many ways. Mark Rothko, concerned with the search for the sublime, created vast modernist works than aimed to stupefy the viewer into a response to the hidden ‘divine’. Picasso’s light paintings subverted the photograph’s modus operandi by generating an image over time, rather than in a single snapshot instant. Many artists working in video explore directly the way in which time and image can interact. These concerns offer themselves uniquely to the development of a ‘new’ medium – an exploration of the way in which ambient information can be represented in a visual, 2D (or perhaps 3D) format. In technologically enhanced modern life, there are many pieces of information relating to the environment, the workplace, the tasks and requirements of users that we can collect, collate and represent - but how do we visualise them? In particular, 2D representations that are aware of individuals and alter their properties according to the relationships between them are interesting. We are not focused on providing a direct mapping between information and representation, but on the creation of a representation of what might be termed the ‘mood’ of a place, and in the modifications that occur as users interact indirectly with the artefact. This brings the viewer into direct interaction with the artwork, something that has been carried out by digital artists within a gallery or studio environment, but which has not yet transgressed the boundaries of the gallery walls. This defines ambient art: representations of complex environmental and user information that reflect their surroundings as well as simply being displayed in them. This paper presents the rationale for exploring ambient art, details the basic technical infrastructure, and discusses our experiences with using the system.

The MOBIlearn project aims to develop a re-usable architecture for delivering mobile learning experiences. A key component of this architecture is a context-awareness subsystem that is intended to tailor the content and options made available to a learner, depending on their current situation, preferences, and learning history. The context awareness subsystem has been developed alongside a hierarchical model of context, and has been subjected to formative evaluation. A major input to the context awareness system comes from an ultrasound tracking system that has been developed at the University of Birmingham. This tracking system is being deployed along with the context awareness system to support learners in a visit to an art museum. The system is intended to offer not only content but also recommendations of collaborative activities based on physical and contextual proximity We describe our system and outline our plans for evaluation in the museum setting.

The complex usage of mobile devices coupled with their limited resources in terms of display and processing suggests that being able to understand the context of the user would be beneficial. In this paper we present a model that describes context as a dynamic process with historic dependencies. This model allows us to i) build a useful, understandable context-aware system in collaboration with content creators and stakeholders; ii) describe this set-up with other system developers; iii) represent the current context state to users and allow them make changes where necessary.

The MOBIlearn project aims to develop a reusable architecture for delivering mobile learning experiences. A key component of this architecture is a context-awareness subsystem that is intended to tailor the content and options made available to a learner, depending on their current situation, preferences and learning history. The context-awareness subsystem has been developed alongside a hierarchical model of context, and has been subjected to formative evaluation. With reference to our context model, preliminary user trials and input from museum staff, we describe the planned deployment of this system in an art museum learning scenario.

The prevalence of drugs in modern society has increased dramatically in recent years and consequently a growing proportion of the population is now likely to drive under the influence of drugs. It is well documented that alcohol and drugs can act alone and in combination to impair cognitive functions, especially those related to driving. Due to this increasing problem, the Police Scientific Development Branch has been tasked with producing a device that is capable of screening driver impairment at the roadside. While driving simulators and on-the-road assessments of driving performance can be used to record impairment, these procedures tend to be costly and impractical for wide-scale application. A portable, reliable, cost-effective device manufactured for roadside use is needed to aid police officers in detecting impairment in drivers. Pen and paper impairment tests are extensively used in medical trials to gauge a subject’s level of impairment due to a treatment. Tests such as the Gibson Spiral Maze, where subjects are instructed to use a stylus to trace a path through a maze as rapidly and as accurately as possible, are well documented and are proven methods of measuring impairment in human subjects. The downfall, however, of these tests are the prolonged marking times and the dependency on the maker’s interpretation of the rules. This lack of consistency is an overriding factor why these tests are not practicable for roadside use. To combat such problems some traditional pen and paper tests have been computerised for use on a PC. This, however, creates a new problem as the user’s ability to interact with a machine is also being assessed. Pen and paper is nearly 4,000 years old and is still a popular and convenient method of recording information. Using a new stylus device that digitally stores the xy co-ordinates a pen traverses, a computer program has been created to accurately, efficiently and consistently calculate a subject’s score from a traditional pen and paper test. Anoto Group AB is a Swedish hi-tech company with unique solutions for transmission of hand-written text from paper to digital media, scanning of printed text and intelligent camera surveillance. All products are based on digital camera technology and image processing in real time. The new technology works by using Anoto Functionality and a sophisticated Logitech pen with in-built memory, processor and IR camera. As the subject writes onto a page the pen records the movements, which are then transmitted to a computer to calculate the users score. This paper describes how the technology has been applied to well established paper and pen tests in order to develop a screening test for driver impairment which may be used at the roadside. This form of impairment testing should not discriminate against or intimidate any member of the general public as a computerised test may do.

Context-aware mobile learning systems rely on the availability of information about a mobile user. One of the most obvious aspects of context is location (Small, Smailagic and Siewiorek 2000), and several methods exist to determine a user’s position, varying not just in the accuracy of the information they provide, but also in the extent to which they intrude on the user’s experience. Issues with intrusiveness also arise when this information is used. For instance, a user may not necessarily want content in their browser automatically updated whenever they change position, or when they are busy with other activities. This paper describes the ongoing development of a testbed to explore some of these methods and issues by modelling a mobile learning scenario involving a visit to an art gallery. A user with a mobile device will have the most relevant content made available as he or she moves around the gallery.

Haiku is a data mining system which combines the best properties of human and machine discovery. An self organising visualisation system is coupled with a genetic algorithm to provide an interactive, flexible system. Visualisation of data allows the human visual system to identify areas of interest, such as clusters, outliers or trends. A genetic algorithm based machine learning algorithm can then be used to explain the patterns identified visually. The explanations (in rule form) can be biased to be short or long; contain all the characteristics of a cluster or just those needed to predict membership; or concentrate on accuracy or on coverage of the data. This paper describes both the visualisation system and the machine learning component, with a focus on the interactive nature of the data mining process, and provides case studies to demonstrate the capabilities of the system.

We describe our efforts to engage a large HCI class using a variety of teaching styles, methods, and resources. With larger classes, practical work to illustrate key HCI issues becomes less feasible. This course was run using a series of short, primer lectures in combination with student presentations and a number of web-based resources (including a weblog, bulletin board, and web links). Many students found this approach beneficial, and they gained a lot. Overall, the course was a success, but some students still expected a more traditional lecture-based course, and did not make the best use of the resources we offered. We consider the implications and possibilities for using a variety of methods for teaching HCI to larger groups and give some pointers to ways in which this approach can be improved.

The complex usage of mobile devices coupled with their limited resources in terms of display and processing suggests that being able to understand the context of the user would be beneficial. In this paper we present a model that describes context as a dynamic process with historic dependencies. We also describe software architecture to support this model, and evaluate its effectiveness in a mobile learning scenario. Preliminary results from our evaluation suggest important issues for consideration in the continuing development of context aware systems and interfaces, including the need for appropriate representation of contextual data to the user, and maintaining a balance between effective support and intrusion.

This paper describes the design and implementation of an intelligent messaging system to allow students and lecturers to communicate better with each other when office-based interactions fail.

Detecting impairment is particularly difficult in people, and is especially important if they are in charge of a vehicle. We describe how we have augmented the familiar and unchallenging medium of pen and paper by using a digital pen coupled with established paper tests in order to develop a screening device for driver impairment which may be used at the roadside. This form of impairment testing does not isolate or intimidate any member of the general public as a computerized test may do, and proves to be highly acceptable and accurate. Results presented show that impairment can be detected, but that the current tests are not discriminatory enough.

Modern technologies support us learning in an ever-increasing number of situations, and mobile learning is moving from the feasible to the accessible. We identify some key characteristics for systems that support the user, and then go on to describe a software architecture that supports system intelligence and has all the necessary features to provide mobile learners with timely, simple, and relevant information.

In this paper, we present a design study that describes how we used a web-based bulletin board system to support children who suffer from cystic fibrosis. Their illness tends to make them feel socially isolated, and face-to-face group meetings are not possible, and hence we looked to the internet to provide a suitable infrastructure for us to build a supportive community dedicated to this patient group, which could provide support, information and a social meeting place of which they could feel an important part of. We discuss the design issues that faced us in trying to create such a community for this group of users.

It is often argued that in everyday society our sense of community is being eroded. This is particularly relevant for learners, who may find that they have fewer opportunities to interact with colleagues and so become isolated in their learning activities. Whilst it may be true that less people spend time chatting on street corners or in coffee rooms, the decline of human interaction is overstated since they have often shifted their communication to digitally-enabled routes. [more in article]

This position paper presents a perspective on the problems of finding information on the internet. The context of the interaction and the nature of the internet make the search activity very different in the electronic space compared to the physical world. We identify some of the behaviours commonly encountered in search situations, and identify the issues that arise. We also present an overview of a system developed to help resolve those problems.

In a modern University, traditional teaching methods are hard to sustain. There are an increased number of students from a wider spectrum of intellectual ability taking more courses. Educators have increasing pressures on their time to both prepare and present material, whilst institutions have resource limitations. To deliver the appropriate material, we require educational techniques that are student-centred, offering flexible learning, that are involving, and maximise the exposure of students to different approaches to information dissemination and presentation. The web offers itself as a medium, tool and platform to deliver such new material, and has seen increasing use over the past few years. However, to take advantage of this technology, we require new tools that can help us exploit it to the full. This paper explores the design and use of a few simple aids that all share the properties of providing dynamic information and content in the web environment to aid its use as an educational medium. The tools are not themselves complex since the focus has been on providing functionality as easily and as quickly as possible; however, they have proved themselves useful over the past few years of testing.

This paper describes a system that uses visualisation to assist a user in dealing with the information returned from a search engine. The user's queries, and the documents they return, are represented by a 3D spatial structure that shows their relationships and provides a way of accessing and exploring the documents retrieved. It is implemented to work with the New Zealand Digital Library, a set of large document collections that is available over the Web. The visualisation scheme is a Java applet that is updated dynamically whenever the user makes a new search, and can be browsed alongside the search engine

The W3 is a vast collection of geographically distributed, essentially unorganised information, and whilst there is likely to be the answer to your question out there, it can be impossible to find it. Worse, once you have discovered relevant information, it is unclear where to go next to find further information, and even when you choose an interesting path, rediscovering one that you noticed earlier is difficult. Users become lost in the maze of hypertext links, and need support in navigating the web.

It is becoming increasingly important that support is provided for users who are dealing with complex information spaces. The need is driven by the growing number of domains where there is a requirement for users to understand, navigate and manipulate large sets of computer based data; by the increasing size and complexity of this information and by the pressures to use this information efficiently. The paradigmatic example is the World Wide Web, but other domains include software systems, information systems and concurrent engineering. One approach to providing this support is to provide sophisticated visualisation tools which lead the users to form an intuitive understanding of the structure and behaviour of their domain and which provide mechanisms which allow them to manipulate objects within their system. The paper describes such a tool and a number of visualisation techniques that it implements.

Agents are becoming widespread in a variety of computer systems and domains, but often appear to have little in common with each other. In this paper we look at different agent systems and identify what a generic agent should be composed of. We also identify the characteristics of a task that make it worthy of an agentbased approach. We then discuss the implications for the interaction of using agents, that is, the notion of a balanced interface, and briefly look at how an agent-based approach assists in two very different application domains.

This paper describes the bathymetric imaging and processing of the GLORI

The trace of user interactions with a system is the primary source of data for on-line user modelling and for many design and research experiments. This trace should really be analysed as a time series, but standard time series techniques do not deal well with discrete data and fuzzy matching. Techniques from machine learning (neural nets and inductive learning) have been applied to this analysis but these are limited to fixed size patterns and fail to deal properly with the trace as a time series. Many of the notations used to describe the system dialogue (e.g. CSP, production systems) and the user's behaviour (e.g. GOMS, grammars) can be regarded as describing non-deterministic finite state machines. Such a representation forms a key to using machine learning techniques, focussed on the state transitions.