We present BackTap, an interaction technique that extends the input modality of a smartphone to add four distinct tap locations on the back case of a smartphone. The BackTap interaction can be used eyes-free with the phone in a user's pocket, purse, or armband while walking, or while holding the phone with two hands so as not to occlude the screen with the fingers. We employ three common built-in sensors on the smartphone (microphone, gyroscope, and accelerometer) and feature a lightweight heuristic implementation. …

Published at UIST 2013 Adjunct

First-person point-of-view (FPPOV) images taken by wearable cameras can be used to better understand people's eating habits. Human computation is a way to provide effective analysis of FPPOV images in cases where algorithmic approaches currently fail. However, privacy is a serious concern. We provide a framework, the privacy-saliency matrix, for understanding the balance between the eating information in an image and its potential privacy concerns. Using data gathered by 5 participants wearing a lanyard-mounted smartphone, we show how the framework can be used to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of four …

Published at Ubicomp 2013 and SenseCam 2013

One of the remaining challenges of ubiquitous computing today is the availability of programming tools for non-academic users, including designers and people with basic programming experience, to program ubiquitous experience in the environment. Inspired by the vision and challenges discussed by Dr. Abowd in his paper What next, ubicomp? Celebrating an Intellectual Disappearing Act, we built ARubi, a system with mixed augmented reality (AR) and graphical user interface (GUI) designed for prototyping context-aware applications. …

Finalist at Convergence Innovation Competition 2013

Vibro-direction is a wearable system, attached in part to waist and knee, that creates a random sequence of stimuli and then generates and tracks them until completion of an experiment. Here, stimuli are vibrations that occur on either right or left side on the back of an hearing-impaired experimenter when she taps on a smartphone. Vibration indicates her the side she needs to turn to while conducting experiments with infants to measure active engagement. This system was built to replace an expensive experimental setup consisting of a foot pedal, signal …

Used by Dr. Singleton in a study

Our goal is to generally explore how students generally finance their secondary education and the nature of the institutions they may choose to attend. We display related factors such as loans, grants and personal contributions. While we assume variables of interest will relate to student demographic (gender, income, location, etc.), particular schools (size of school, cost of attendance, etc.) and student loans (average debt incurred), we use a set of data that may expose other unexpected factors. Overall, our system is not intended to be a decision making tool, but …

Showcased at Computation and Journalism Symposium 2013