Welcome to the May 2017 SIGCHI edition of ACM TechNews.

ACM TechNews - SIGCHI Edition is a sponsored special edition of the ACM TechNews news-briefing service focused on issues in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). This service serves as a resource for ACM-SIGCHI Members to keep abreast of the latest news in areas related to HCI and is distributed to all ACM SIGCHI members the first Tuesday of every month. ACM TechNews is a benefit of ACM membership and is distributed three times per week on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays to over 100,000 ACM members from over 100 countries around the world. ACM TechNews provides timely coverage of established and emerging areas of computer science, the latest trends in information technology, and related science, society, and technology news. For more information on ACM TechNews and joining the ACM, please click. The Interactions mobile app is available for free on iOS, Android, and Kindle platforms. Download it today and flip through the full-color magazine pages on your tablet or view it in a simplified low-bandwidth text mode on your phone. And be sure to check out the Interactions website, where you can access current and past articles and read the latest entries in our ever-expanding collection of blogs.

People Find Changes in User Interfaces Annoying
Aalto University
April 12, 2017

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have created a visual learning model to test how easy or difficult it is to learn user interfaces that have been changed. "We examined how much time users at different stages of learning need in order to find the functionalities, and how learning progresses," says Aalto's Jussi Jokinen. The researchers integrated mathematical models and the psychological underpinnings of learning and then quantified participants' gaze and the duration they spent looking for user interface functionalities. They also tracked changes in the paths of gazes as learning progressed, and how searching for functionalities accelerated with users' accumulating experience. Jokinen says the model can demonstrate how interface designers must balance efficiency with learnability, and "assess automatically and fast how easily a new user interface can be learned." The research will be presented this month at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017) in Denver, CO.

Full Article

Providing Haptics to Walls, Heavy Objects in Virtual Reality by Means of Electrical Muscle Stimulation
Hasso Plattner Institute (Germany)
April 25, 2017

Researchers at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany have developed a system to impart haptic sensations to virtual reality (VR) walls and other heavy objects. The system electrically stimulates up to four distinct muscle groups, combining them to emulate a range of effects. Users can wear the system in a backpack equipped with a medical-grade 8-channel muscle stimulator controlled via USB from within the VR simulator. The system is used in conjunction with a head-worn display and a motion-capture solution. Flaws in sustaining haptic believability of the initial version led to alternative designs, including a soft-object model that used a low cut-off signal so users could penetrate virtual objects by about 10 cm. A repulsion object design reduced the electrical muscle simulation pulse's duration. "Our main contribution is the concept of providing haptics to walls and other heavy objects by means of [pain-free] electrical muscle stimulation," the researchers say.

Full Article

How Microsoft Is Designing an Interface for People Who've Never Used Computers
Co.Design
Mark Wilson
April 18, 2017

Researchers at Microsoft Edge and Pixel Lab are piloting the Accent program in Guatemala to test a computer interface on a group of women who have never previously used a computer. The browser-based interface features short, flash-card-inspired lessons, and minimal iconography for the purpose of teaching women who only speak the rare Q'eqchi dialect to read and write in Spanish. The Accent software had to support the Internet without Internet access, and this was done using a single laptop to sync with others, uploading and downloading progress only when it could be brought to a connected network. The program's interface includes what Pixel Lab's Robby Ingebretsen calls a "speech bubble with a Wi-Fi symbol": a button that, when tapped, reads out instructions and letters onscreen in Q'eqchi. "One of the goals of this program, on top of [Spanish] literacy, was technical literacy," Ingebretsen says.

Full Article

Food Photos Help Instagram Users With Healthy Eating
UW Today
Jennifer Langston
April 26, 2017

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) conducted a study on how Instagram users post photos of food to monitor and improve their diets. "The benefit of photos is that it's more fun to do than taking out a booklet or typing hundreds of words of description in an app," says UW's Christina Chung. "Plus, it's more socially appropriate for people who are trying to track their diets to snap a photo of their plate when they're out with friends." Study participants said social and emotional support from, and a sense of accountability to, other Instagram users and followers helped them maintain their diet and fitness objectives. The researchers say they will use the results of their study to design tools to support healthy habits. The study will be presented this month at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017) in Denver, CO.

Full Article

Controlling a Robot Is Now as Simple as Point and Click
Georgia Tech News Center
Jason Maderer
April 24, 2017

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have designed a simple and efficient remote-control robot interface for non-expert operators. Users only have to point at and click on an item and then select a grasp technique, and the robot performs the rest of the work. Georgia Tech professor Sonia Chernova says tests of the system showed the point-and-click method was less error-prone than a traditional interface, enabling users to execute tasks faster and more reliably. The method only offers a camera view, which supports a simpler user interface. Once the operator clicks on a region of an item, the robot's perception algorithm analyzes the object's surface geometry to see where the gripper should be positioned. The user chooses from a menu of suggested grasp techniques, and the robot executes the command. The research was presented in March at the Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2017) in Vienna, Austria.

Full Article

Learn a Language While You Wait for Wi-Fi
MIT News
Rachel Gordon
April 17, 2017

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed "WaitSuite," a set of apps that tests people on vocabulary words while they are unoccupied, such as when they are waiting for an instant message or to connect to a Wi-Fi network. WaitSuite works with five daily tasks, including waiting for a Wi-Fi connection, for emails to download, for an instant message, for an elevator to arrive, or for content on a phone to load. "WaitSuite is embedded directly into your existing tasks, so that you can easily learn without leaving what you were already doing," says MIT's Carrie Cai. WaitSuite's apps include "WiFiLearner," which delivers a learning prompt when it detects a user's computer is searching for a Wi-Fi link. The researchers will present WaitSuite this month at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017) in Denver, CO.

Full Article

Geeking Out in the Golden Years
UCSD News (CA)
Inga Kiderra
April 18, 2017

University of California, San Diego professor Philip Guo has conducted the first known study of older adults learning computer coding. Guo wants to make programming broadly accessible to people of all ages. He polled users of his Python Tutor online education platform and found older adults are driven to learn coding for various reasons, including gaining continuing education for their current employment, personal enrichment, and pursuing opportunities they missed when they were younger. "Social implications range from providing engaging mental stimulation to greater gainful employment from the comfort of one's home," Guo says. He proposes customizing coding tools and curricula for older learners, and avoiding a patronizing attitude in marketing products to this demographic. Guo also stresses the benefits of implementing repetition and frequent examples for older learners. Guo will present his research this month at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017) in Denver, CO.

Full Article

UH Professor Sees Into the Future of Human-Computer Interaction
The Daily Cougar (TX)
Isabel Pen
April 11, 2017

University of Houston professor Zhigang Deng thinks eye contact may hold the key to more advanced human-computer interaction. "I'm trying to understand human behavior from a computational standpoint and, based on the results, understand how humans and computers can work together," Deng says. He is approaching behavioral science from a new perspective by using computers to map people's eye movements and recording them on camera. Computers then process the data to produce a quantitative representation of how humans use eye contact to enable communication when multiple persons participate in a conversation. Deng is applying the research to computer-generated human avatars. He thinks the technology could dramatically enhance the look and feel of video games in terms of avatar realism; his team envisions virtual people that exhibit human-like behaviors without requiring painstaking graphic animation. Deng also says the research could revolutionize virtual education, training, and medicine.

Full Article

Monitoring Troubles of the Heart
USC News
Amy Blumenthal
April 14, 2017

Researchers at the University of Southern California's Dornsife and Viterbi campuses have developed a mobile-sensing system that could enable couples to predict each other's emotions. The team used multimodal ambulatory measures to create a system to identify intra-couple conflict with machine-learning algorithms developed with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation. The algorithm culls data from several sources, including wearable devices, mobile phones, and physiological signals to evaluate couples' emotional states. The algorithm was as much as 86-percent accurate in its ability to detect conflict episodes. The researchers think this is the first case of passive modal computing being collected and used to spot conflict behavior in daily life. The team next plans to use the technique to predict conflicts and suggest early intervention, and ultimately they think it can be used to analyze other relationships, such as a parent-child dynamic.

Full Article

Professor Designs Search and Rescue Devices
Las Cruces Sun-News (NM)
Minerva Baumann
April 22, 2017

New Mexico State University professor Zachary Toups is developing human-computer interfaces designed to aid urban search-and-rescue operations, using a CAREER award and an earlier related grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Toups says he is using the NSF funding to create custom-built wearable computers to support the mission of the Texas Task Force 1 response team. He also says the research will employ mixed-reality training simulations that integrate virtual and physical-world environments. Toups says his initial NSF grant was used to focus efforts on wearables that can support search and rescue as science migrates from multiple humans piloting a single drone to one human directing numerous drones. The CAREER award will concentrate on complementary wearable interfaces for human search-and-rescue teams, and Toups expects his work will lead to a design catalog of interfaces and best practices for designing wearable and mixed-reality interfaces.

Full Article

Gaming Helps Personalized Therapy Level Up
Penn State News
Kimberly Cartier
April 19, 2017

Pennsylvania State University (PSU) researchers are employing machine learning to train computers to use game features developed for personalized mental- and physical-therapy regimens. "We want to understand the human and team behaviors that motivate learning to ultimately develop personalized methods of learning instead of the one-size-fits-all approach that is often taken," says PSU professor Conrad Tucker. The team assessed the most effective approach for gamifying the completion of a physical task by incorporating game features such as scoring, avatars, challenges, and competition in a virtual reality (VR) setting. As participants physically avoided obstacles while navigating a virtual environment, the system recorded their body positions and then mirrored their movements with an avatar in VR. The researchers developed a predictive algorithm to accurately rate the potential utility of various game features, and then tested how well each feature prompted participants when completing tasks.

Full Article

Melding Mind and Machine: How Close Are We?
The Conversation
James Wu; Rajesh P.N. Rao
April 9, 2017

There has been much progress in advancing brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, with many recent innovations focused on improving the lives of people with severe physical impairments. The most refined BCIs, bidirectional BCIs, both record from and stimulate the nervous system, and strengthen links between two brain regions or between the brain and the spinal cord. However, much work must be done before such interfaces are seamless, intuitive, and completely non-invasive. Another challenge for accurately reading neural signals lies in the way the mind is organized into a vast and always-changing communications network. Nevertheless, the future of BCI technology is optimistic, given the brain's flexibility and adaptability in learning to use and become acclimated to BCIs. A project at the University of Washington's Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering aims to build a co-adaptive bidirectional BCI in which the electronics are constantly learning and communicating with the brain as it learns.

Full Article