Handling Inputs With Uncertainty (PhD Thesis Topic)

Modern input systems all assume that input occured exactly as recorded. That is, events almost always have fixed properties, and are dispatched to controls as so. New recognition-based inputs such as touch, natural interaction (think the Kinect), and speech all violate this assumption because all interpreted input comes with some degree of uncertainty. For my thesis I have developed a new way to model and dispatch these uncertain inputs, and I am currently exploring the ramifications of this new approach to input handling.

Publications for this project:

Julia Schwarz, Jennifer Mankoff, and Scott Hudson. 2011. Monte carlo methods for managing interactive state, action and feedback under uncertainty. In Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 235-244. download

Julia Schwarz, Scott Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff, and Andrew D. Wilson. 2010. A framework for robust and flexible handling of inputs with uncertainty. In Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '10). download

Phone as a Pixel: Enabling Ad-Hoc, Large Scale Displays using Mobile Devices

This is probably my favorite side project I've done so far. The idea is to allow a crowd of people to collectively create a giant display using their mobile phones. A camera watches the crowd and looks for flashing patterns identifying each individual phone. Once phones are identified, they can display a unique color or animation based on theirh location in the mosaic. The implementation is all web-based so any mobile device with a web browser can participate. I have to credit David Klionsky for his immense contributions to the implementation of the project.

Publications for this project:

Julia Schwarz, David Klionsky, Chris Harrison, Paul Dietz and Andy Wilson. Phone as a Pixel: Enabling Ad-Hoc, Large Scale Displays using Mobile Devices. To Appear in CHI 2012. download

TapSense: Enhancing Interaction on Touch Surfaces

Chris Harrison and I developed a touchscreen that detects not only where you're tapping, but how you're tapping . We do this by sticking a surface microphone on a touchscreen and listening to the sound your finger (or any other device) makes when you hit the surface. This enables interesting new interactions such as right click (tap using your knuckle or finger tip). Chris has a great writeup of the project here.

Publications for this project:

Chris Harrison, Julia Schwarz, and Scott E. Hudson. 2011. TapSense: enhancing finger interaction on touch surfaces. In Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 627-636. download

Understanding Credibility of Online Content

We make big decisions based on what we find online, and often forget that there is no curation process for webpages: anybody can put anything they want on the internet. As a result it's very important (but also very difficult!) to build tools to help people evaluate the credibility of web pages. I worked with Meredith Ringel Morris over the summer of 2010 to build such a tool, and found it to be effective when evaluating serach results. Later, Meredith did a follow up study about how people evaluate the credibility of tweets, which I was happy to help her with.

Publications for this project:

Meredith Ringel Morris, Scott Counts, Asta Roseway, Aaron Hoff, Julia Schwarz . Tweeting is Believing? Understanding Microblog Credibility Perceptions. To appear in CSCW '12. download

Julia Schwarz and Meredith Morris. 2011. Augmenting web pages and search results to support credibility assessment. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1245-1254. download

Cord Input

This was my first project as a PhD student! I got the idea while talking to my soon-to-be advisor during visit days. The idea is simple: turn your headphones into an input device. Make twisting, touching and tapping them do different things. A simple idea and I presented it to a full crowd! It was a great experience.

Publications for this project:

Julia Schwarz, Chris Harrison, Scott Hudson, and Jennifer Mankoff. 2010. Cord input: an intuitive, high-accuracy, multi-degree-of-freedom input method for mobile devices. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1657-1660. download

Reflections of Everyday Activity in Spending Data

This is the project that got me into research. It started with me building a carbon footprint calculator that only used your spending data to evaluate your carbon emissions. But I realized you could track more than just carbon emissions using spending data. The result was 3 web apps and a short note, my first! I have to thank my advisor Jen Mankoff for her help in writing this.

Publications for this project:

Julia Schwarz, Jennifer Mankoff, and H. Scott Matthews. 2009. Reflections of everyday activities in spending data. In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1737-1740. download