Welcome to the January 2021 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.

Brain Implants Enable Man to Simultaneously Control Two Prosthetic Limbs With 'Thoughts'
Johns Hopkins Medicine Newsroom
December 8, 2020

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) have helped a quadriplegic man use his mind to control a pair of prosthetic arms, thanks to a brain-computer interface that uses artificial intelligence to automate a portion of the robotic control. Robert Chmielewski, who was paralyzed after a surfing, had six electrodes implanted in his brain and now has the ability to feed himself and perform other simple tasks using robotic appendages that detect signals from those electrodes. Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Pablo Celnik said this "is a clear step forward to achieve more complex task control directly fed from the brain."

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Australian Researchers Identify Facebook Mobile Data Can Be Used for Covid-19 Tracing
ZDNet
Aimee Chanthadavong
January 6, 2021

Researchers at Australia's universities of Melbourne, Adelaide, New South Wales, and Monash University have determined that Facebook mobility data could be used to trace Covid-19 from identified hotspots. The researchers used information from Facebook's Data for Good program calculating how many individuals moved between locations in subsequent eight-hour intervals during three outbreaks, to ascertain how real-time mobility patterns from aggregate mobile phone data could forecast transmission risks. The researchers said each case used Facebook mobility data to estimate future transmission patterns, followed by an analysis of the degree to which the estimates correlated with subsequent case data. According to the research team, "For community transmission scenarios, our results demonstrate that mobility data adds the most value to risk predictions when case counts are low and spatially clustered."

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In Georgia, Center for People with Disabilities Doubles as Google User-Testing Hub
The Wall Street Journal
Katie Deighton
December 27, 2020

Google and other companies are using the Champions Place facility in Georgia for people with physical disabilities as a user-research center for incubating accessible products. Google said it has supplied the facility with hardware that provides residents with voice control over their environments, such as the Nest Hub Max, which users can command to operate items like blinds and doors. The company also has provided Liftware eating utensils for people with tremors and limited hand and arm movements, developed by Google parent Alphabet's Verily life-sciences division. Google also is providing certain residents with smart jackets that let wearers control smartphone applications by brushing a sensor woven into the cuff. Some facility residents are testing Project Euphonia, an effort to train voice-recognition technology to understand people with impaired speech.

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High-Five or Thumbs-Up? Device Detects Which Hand Gesture You Want to Make
UC Berkeley News
Kara Manke
December 21, 2020

A device developed by engineers from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), Switzerland's ETH Zurich, and Italy's University of Bologna combines wearable biosensors with artificial intelligence (AI), in order to recognize hand gestures based on electrical signals detected in the forearm. The device incorporates a flexible cuff that reads signals at 64 points on the forearm, which are directed to a chip programmed with an AI algorithm that can associate signal patterns with specific hand gestures. The researchers trained the algorithm to identify 21 different gestures, and the cuff's hyperdimensional AI is able to self-update with new data. UC Berkeley's Ali Moin said, "Prosthetics are one important application of this technology, but besides that, it also offers a very intuitive way of communicating with computers."

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Study IDs Four Things That Make People Feel Good About Using Chatbots
NC State University News
December 15, 2020

Researchers at North Carolina State University (NC State) identified four factors—convenience, information, entertainment, and social presence—that predict user satisfaction with customer service chatbots. They also determined that a positive chatbot experience was associated with customer loyalty. To determine how chatbots, which use artificial intelligence (AI) to address customer needs, affect the user experience and how consumers feel about brands, the researchers surveyed 1,064 U.S. consumers who had used a chatbot from at least one of 30 U.S. brands with the highest regarded chatbot services. Among other findings, the researchers said perceived privacy risk, such as the belief that shared information could be misused, was associated with reduced customer satisfaction. NC State's Yang Cheng said, "Companies need to pay attention to these results as they invest in AI-driven chatbot services."

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EU Pushes for 'Right to Disconnect' From Work at Home
Associated Press
December 2, 2020

EU lawmakers voted 31-to-6 in favor of a "right to disconnect" from the Internet and email, arguing that disconnecting from work should be a fundamental right. As one-third of EU residents currently work remotely, largely due to coronavirus restrictions, members of the European Parliament's Employment Committee are calling on the European Commission to establish rules permitting residents to disconnect from work without facing repercussions from their employers for not being connected all the time. Said Maltese Socialist lawmaker Alex Agius Saliba, "The Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we work and we must update our rules to catch up with the new reality."

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Reactive Video Playback That You Control with Your Body
Lancaster University (U.K.)
December 11, 2020

Computer scientists from Lancaster University in the U.K., Stanford University, and the FX Palo Alto Laboratory have created a video playback system controlled by body movement. The Reactive Video system can dynamically adapt to duplicate a viewer's bodily position and match playback speed to their movements. The system combines a Microsoft Kinect sensor, skeleton-tracking software, and probabilistic algorithms to identify the position and movement of joints and limbs, then matches and compares this with the instructor's movements in the video. Lancaster's Christopher Clarke said, "By using this system, we can post-process existing instructional video content and enhance it to dynamically adapt to users, providing a fundamental shift in how we can potentially interact with videos."

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Focus on Human Factor in Designing Systems
Queensland University of Technology (Australia)
December 9, 2020

Researchers from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia and Paderborn University in German determined that human overconfidence is a challenge that must be considered when designing systems that involve people interacting with technology. Their study examined the impact of human decisions on engineered systems, specifically how people behaved when piloting a drone. The researchers found that frequent feedback about the quality of piloting decisions could result in poor performance, and that people often overestimate their ability at a task. QUT's Daniel Quevedo said that unlike machines, humans do not necessarily improve performance in response to immediate and frequent feedback. Said Quevedo, "The current work exposes the human as an under-observed source of errors in human-in-the-loop control systems."

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Why Older Adults Use (And Do Not Use) Password Managers
The George Washington University
January 7, 2021

Researchers at The George Washington University (GWU) and the University of Maryland Baltimore County polled older adults on their use of password managers to find drivers and barriers to adoption. Compared with a 2019 study on adoption among younger adults, the latest research found security concerns appear to outweigh the perceived advantages of password managers among older adults. GWU’s Adam J. Aviv said, "Once older adults did adopt a password manager, they were more positive about their experience compared to their younger counterparts. This may be due to a higher burden for older adults to adopt, such that a successful adoption leads to higher satisfaction and increased usage."

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Study Suggests Smart Assistant Design Improvements for Deaf Users
Penn State News
Jessica Hallman
January 7, 2021

Deaf and hard-of-hearing users regularly use smart assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri in homes, workplaces, and mobile devices, according to Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) researchers. From interviews, Penn State's Johnna Blair and Saeed Abdullah learned such users employed smart assistants for daily tasks, like checking the weather, setting, reminders and initiating global positioning system directions. Blair said these findings highlight the need for more inclusive design, and offers an opportunity for the hearing impaired to more actively contribute to the research and development of new systems. The researchers suggested future design features could better accommodate hearing needs, like customizable voice traits, tangible data about common commands and error codes, and better visual feedback. Said Blair, "By empathizing with these users, we want to highlight new design features that can make smart assistants more accessible to hearing needs."

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Scientists Develop Novel Self-Healing Human-Machine Interactive Hydrogel Touch Pad
Chinese Academy of Sciences Ningbo Institute of Material Technology and Engineering
December 10, 2020

Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have developed a novel self-healing interactive touch pad based on transparent nanocomposite hydrogels. The transparent, stretchable polyzwitterion-clay hydrogels provide 98.8% transmittance and fracture strain surpassing 1500%; they may be mounted with pressure-sensitive adhesive to curved or flat insulating substrates, including glass, wood, and cotton fabric. The CAS team also adopted a surface-capacitive touch system for the touch pad, which generates a uniform electrostatic field by applying the same voltage to all corners of the device. This enables perception of finger position by measuring the current value in all four corners of the hydrogel. The scientists found when hydrogel touch pads were used with computers for drawing, writing, and playing electronic games, they demonstrated “high-resolution and self-healing input functions.”

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How a Simple Smell Test Could Curb Covid-19, Help Reopen the Economy
CU Boulder Today
Lisa Marshall
December 9, 2020

University of Colorado, Boulder and Yale School of Medicine researchers think a simple smell test could help diminish the spread of Covid-19 at less expense than sophisticated screening exams. The new test uses five scratch-and-sniff squares; users must identify each scent and enter their answers into a smartphone, which either tells them their sense of smell is unimpaired, or instructs them to get tested for the virus. The researchers predicted the impact of smell-testing in several hypothetical situations via mathematical modeling, using the sniff-test as a screening tool. Testing every three days curbed infection more effectively than weekly polymerase chain reaction tests, at a fraction of the cost. Yale's Derek Toomre said, "We hope that it would allow for a fast and easy test that anyone can take anywhere and can be applied to anyplace that is using temperature screening as an inexpensive way to help avoid shutdowns, keep businesses open, and decrease the terrible human toll."

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Can Social Networks Help Us Be More Creative?
University of Rochester
December 9, 2020

Researchers at the University of Rochester contend social media platforms could help users become more creative by using algorithms to steer them to people with different ideas and interests. The researchers asked study participants to devise unusual uses for commonplace items, and let them see other participants' ideas, to determine who they would want to "follow" for creative inspiration. The researchers found most participants opted to follow peers with the most creative ideas, and that sharing the same sources of inspiration resulted in participants' independently generated ideas becoming similar to one another. Said Rochester's Raiyan Abdul Baten, “We confirmed that following highly creative peers indeed helped people generate novel ideas themselves—the intuition being, if you bump up against out-of-the-box ideas, chances are higher that you will be able to combine your own ideas with ideas you didn’t originally think of. Such creative recombinations can lead to further novel ideas.”

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