Albrecht Schmidt's User Interface Engineering Blog: Great Links, References, and Resources

I really like Albrecht Schmidt's User Interface Engineering blog.

Albrecht Schmidt is a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen who focuses his research on "novel user interfaces and innovative applications enabled by ubiquitous computing." Dr. Schmidt previously headed something called the "Embedded Interaction Research Group" at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.

Albrecht Schmidt will be working in collaboration with Chris Kray's group at the Culture Lab at Newcastle University in the UK. The work will focus on creating and building interactive appliances. He also mentioned the work of Jayne Wallace, one of the researchers at the Culture Lab, who creates digital jewelry.

The best thing about Albrecht's recent post was his short list of references:

[1] Wallace, J. and Press, M. (2004) All this useless beauty The Design Journal Volume 7 Issue 2 (PDF)

[2] Jayne Wallace. Journeys. Intergeneration Project.

[3] Kern, D., Harding, M., Storz, O., Davis, N., and Schmidt, A. 2008. Shaping how advertisers see me: user views on implicit and explicit profile capture. In CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 3363-3368. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1358628.1358858

Another recent post that I like was "Teaching, Technical Training Day at the EPO". The following topics were covered during a training event at the European Patent Office in Munich, Germany:

• Merging the physical and digital (e.g. sentient computing and dual reality [1])
  
• Interlinking the real world and the virtual world (e.g. Internet of things)
  
• Interacting with your body (e.g. implants for interaction, brain computer interaction, eye gaze interaction)
  
• Interaction beyond the desktop, in particular sensor based UIs, touch interaction, haptics, and Interactive surfaces
  
• Device authentication with focus on spontaneity and ubicomp environments
  
• User authentication focus on authentication in the public
  
• Location-Awareness and Location Privacy

I liked the references that Dr. Schmidt posted, given my growing interest in topics related to interactive wireless sensor networks:

[1] Lifton, J., Feldmeier, M., Ono, Y., Lewis, C., and Paradiso, J. A. 2007. A platform for ubiquitous sensor deployment in occupational and domestic environments In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on international information Processing in Sensor Networks (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, April 25 - 27, 2007). IPSN '07. ACM, New York, NY, 119-127. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1236360.1236377

[2] Naohiko Kohtake, et al. u-Texture: Self-organizable Universal Panels for Creating Smart Surroundings. The 7th Int. Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp2005), pp.19-38, Tokyo, September, 2005. http://www.ht.sfc.keio.ac.jp/u-texture/paper.html

[3] Schwesig, C., Poupyrev, I., and Mori, E. 2004. Gummi: a bendable computer. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vienna, Austria, April 24 - 29, 2004). CHI '04. ACM, New York, NY, 263-270. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/985692.985726

[4] Wigdor, D., Forlines, C., Baudisch, P., Barnwell, J., and Shen, C. 2007. Lucid touch: a seethrough mobile device. InProceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Newport, Rhode Island, USA, October 07 - 10, 2007). UIST '07. ACM, New York, NY, 269-278. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1294211.1294259

[5] Campbell, A. T., Eisenman, S. B., Lane, N. D., Miluzzo, E., Peterson, R. A., Lu, H., Zheng, X., Musolesi, M., Fodor, K., and Ahn, G. 2008. The Rise of People-Centric Sensing. IEEE Internet Computing 12, 4 (Jul. 2008), 12-21. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MIC.2008.90

If you take a peek at the Culture Lab website, be sure to look at the Ambient Kitchen, designed to support older people with memory difficulties:

The Ambient Kitchen probably be a great way to help busy families get meals on the table, too!

Also look at Jayne Wallace's digital jewelry website The following pictures are of a neckpiece that triggers digital visits of silent film sequences on digital displays in its vicinity:

Some of Jayne's digital jewelry was created in response to "physical, clinical, social, and emotional dynamics of memory loss".

I hope you enjoy exploring Albrecht Schmidt's User Interface Engineering blog and the Culture Lab website!