Welcome to the June 2019 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.

Believing Machines Can Out-Do People May Fuel Acceptance of Self-Driving Cars
Penn State News
Matt Swayne
May 8, 2019

A survey by researchers at Penn State University of 404 participants of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace found that more people may need to believe that machines can outperform humans (at least in some tasks) before they will accept self-driving cars. In the survey, respondents who had no trouble believing machines can outperform humans, a concept called posthuman ability, were more likely to accept the presence of driverless cars on the highway. The researchers also found that male respondents were more likely to accept self-driving cars than females, and liberals were significantly more accepting of self-driving cars when compared with conservatives.

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VisiBlends, a New Approach to Disrupt Visual Messaging
Columbia Engineering
Holly Evarts
May 8, 2019

Columbia University researchers have developed a flexible, user-friendly platform that transforms the creative brainstorming activity into a search function, and enables a statistically higher output of visually blended images. The VisiBlends system was designed to help those who are not professional designers to create visual blends for news and public services announcements. The platform combines a series of human steps, or "microtasks," with artificial intelligence and other computational techniques. The system also relies heavily on crowdsourcing. Said Columbia’s Lydia Chilton, “We wanted to deconstruct the process of building visual blends and see if there was a way we could make it more accessible to people by coupling the human element with computational methods.”

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Robots Take a Turn Leading Autism Therapy in Schools
The Wall Street Journal
Sumathi Reddy
May 20, 2019

Scientists, schools, and clinics are using robots and other technologies to help treat people with autism spectrum disorder. Robot maker Robokind sells machines designed for autistic students, and the company said its Milo model is currently used by about 400 schools in 37 U.S. states. Milo was designed to resemble a child, with humanlike facial movements and a chest screen that displays icons to help students with lessons. According to experts, robots and other tools have significant potential in helping children with autism gain social, emotional, and communication skills. More advanced efforts include a collaboration between Yale University and Carnegie Mellon University researchers on a system that identifies a person by voice, facial expression, or body posture. The system would be used to help create objective, sensitive measures to help doctors choose the most suitable therapy for children with autism, and to quantify the therapy's effectiveness in changing brain function.

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Wireless Movement-Tracking System Could Collect Health, Behavioral Data
MIT News
Rob Matheson
May 8, 2019

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a system that sends out a low-power radio-frequency (RF) signal; if it bounces off a person in the vicinity and back to its source, specialized algorithms analyze changes in the reflected signal and match them with specific individuals. The system, called Marko, traces each individual's movement around a digital floor plan, and matches movement patterns with other data to gain insights into how people interact with each other and the environment. Case studies of six locations in which the system has been used demonstrate Marko's ability to distinguish individuals based only on wireless signals, and revealed useful behavioral patterns.

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VR Comes to the Classroom
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Beth McMurtrie
May 28, 2019

Virtual reality (VR) is starting to be deployed in education, but experts say its benefit to learners will remain limited without a solid pedagogical platform. Said Stanford University's Jeremy Bailenson, "Start with a problem that needs to be solved, as opposed to, 'We have this cool VR thing and let's see how to use it.'" Hamilton College has been experimenting with three-dimensional (3D) scanners and printers, workstations that manage virtual graphic processing, and VR headsets. Hamilton educator Nhora Lucia Serrano taught a class that included designing literature-based VR worlds, to demonstrate how extended reality could enhance learning; the college's education-technology team also is developing a virtual environment so students can manipulate a 3D DNA model for classroom use.

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System by TU Graz Automatically Recognizes Pedestrians' Intent to Cross Road
Technical University of Graz (Austria)
Christoph Pelzl
May 27, 2019

Researchers at the Technical University of Graz (TU Graz) in Austria have developed a camera-based pedestrian traffic light system that recognizes pedestrians' intent to cross the street. TU Graz's Horst Possegger said the system also optimizes traffic flow. The system uses traffic-light-mounted cameras, and perceives persons within a visual field of eight by five meters. It makes decisions based on learning algorithms developed by the researchers, which were “educated” on global movement models and recorded data. Said Possegger, the system "requires one second to estimate the intention—after two seconds the estimation becomes reliable." The system broadcasts the perceived desire of one or more people to cross the street to a pedestrian light controller, which then chooses when the lights should change.

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Technology Used for Bedtime Stories, Research Suggests
Press Association (United Kingdom)
Nina Massey
May 22, 2019

The U.K. children's reading charity BookTrust found digital storytelling is replacing the use of books at bedtime. Almost half (49%) of 1,000 surveyed U.K. parents said they try to tell stories to their children at bedtime, but only 28% actually do so. Over a quarter (26%) of the survey group said they had attempted to use technology like virtual assistants to help relate bedtime stories, while two-thirds (65%) said they allow their children to engage with smartphones, tablets, YouTube, or TV, rather than reading to them at bedtime. Technology also is being used to supplement storytelling, with 53% of respondents admitting they would opt to use a smartphone, tablet, app, or YouTube for the job. Children's author Francesca Simon said, "Basically, you're sending your children the message that books aren't important to you, and is that really the message you want to send?"

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Take This App: Tech Firms Tackle Opioid Crisis With Software
Agence France-Presse
Rob Lever
May 18, 2019

Technology companies are trying to address the opioid crisis and related health problems with digital therapeutics delivered via smartphone. The new treatments could potentially supplement, and in some cases replace, pharmaceuticals to treat addiction and a range of other mental and physical health issues. For example, smartphone technology may be well suited for use in behavioral therapy for addiction, depression, and other disorders by making treatment more accessible and trackable by medical professionals, according to Pear Therapeutics researcher Yuri Maricich. The company received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for the reSET-O digital therapeutic 12-week cognitive behavioral therapy to treat opioid addiction, which it launched in January with Sandoz. Medical teams can monitor a patient's progress on the app’s dashboard. The goal of this and similar apps is to "reprogram" the brain's reward system after it has been altered by addictive substances.

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10 Years From Now, Your Brain Will Be Connected to Your Computer
ZDNet
Steve Ranger
May 29, 2019

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) promise the enhancement of a direct mind-computer link for sharing data or controlling devices. BMI developer Neuralink, backed by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, aims to create ultra-high-bandwidth "neural lace" devices to connect people and computers. One reason underlying Musk's interest in BMI is the hope the technology could allow humans to keep up with artificial intelligence. Juniper Research predicts BMI devices will expand beyond purely experimental medical use-cases to include consumer applications over the next decade, with shipments of BMI devices predicted to reach 25.6 million by 2030, up from roughly 350,000 this year.

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Passwords Serve a Personal Purpose
Victoria University Wellington
May 27, 2019

Researchers at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington and University of Waikato have found that people build their passwords from personal information for a variety of reasons. In surveys by the researchers, about half of the respondents said they infused their passwords with autobiographical memories, while about 10% said they infused their passwords with episodic future thoughts (simulations of events that might happen in the future). The researchers hypothesize that people use these strategies because they make the resulting passwords easier to remember. Said Victoria University of Wellington researcher Robbie Taylor, "People are trying to reduce the burden of remembering completely random passwords. People are potentially trading off security for ease of remembering."

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Online Identification Getting More and More Intrusive
The Economist
May 22, 2019

Traction is building for a new technique for identifying online users, known as behavioral biometrics. The technique depends on digital device measurements, like data from accelerometers and gyroscopic sensors, describing how users hold and carry their gadgets, and even how they walk. Analysis of these and other traits can then determine users' likely online habits. John Whaley at behavioral biometrics provider UnifyID said using software to read such device data can generate a person's "unique motion fingerprint." Purported benefits of behavioral biometrics include identifying signs of fraud being perpetrated, as flagged, for example, by shifts in keyboard typing patterns; however, when misused, the technology could become a vehicle for intrusive surveillance.

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Can Tech 'Objectively' Assess Pain?
Wired
Emma Grey Ellis
May 21, 2019

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has called for objectivity in assessing the experience of pain as part of an effort to curb the overprescription of opioids. The best way now available to precisely gauge someone's pain is simply to ask them about it. The NIH is encouraging research aimed at finding objective biomarkers of pain as part of its opioid-fighting HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-term) Initiative. For example, New York University researcher Janet Van Cleave has developed an Electronic Patient Visit Assessment (ePVA) for patients with head and neck cancers. The ePVA is essentially a survey on an iPad, but the results show such Web-based measurements can help improve survival among patients who are highly symptomatic.

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