Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing 2020/21

This is a reading of Cecchinato et al.'s short paper "Smartwatches: the good, the bad and the ugly?" The full text of this paper is available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702613.2732837

This week we are introducing the concept of wearable computing. We will cover some of the challenges of developing wearables from technical and non-technical perspective. We'll also talk a little about 'Wear OS by Google' (which is Google's rebranded 'Android Wear'). Smartwatches in particular were predicted to have had an explosion in use; they've not disappeared by any means, but they've not become the next 'must have' that everyone keeps with them all the time. Why is this? 

This is a reading of Chan et al.'s excellent paper on microgesture elicitation. You can access a PDF of the reading from Canvas or from the ACM.

Back in Week 2 we talked about the challenges of interaction in mobile and ubiquitous computing contexts. And this week we're coming back to it in a different way – gestures. Gestures are often thought of as being a natural part of communication. Could they be a good fit for contexts were a keyboard and mouse is not really appropriate? This week we'll be covering some of the conceptual aspects surrounding gesture-based computing as well as some of the technical challenges involved.

This is a reading of John Krumm's "A survey of computational location privacy" paper from Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. It's quite old now, but I think it still gives a really good introduction to privacy concerns surround location-based services and reviews a variety of computational techniques for reducing the chances of data leakage. Full paper: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00779-008-0212-5.pdf

One of the biggest and most important topics in mobile and ubiquitous computing is privacy and security. Having lots of devices transmitting huge amounts of telemetry all over the world comes with a number of privacy and security challenges. We'll start off by considering a 'local' or on-person threat to privacy in the form of RFID cards. Then we'll cover a little on cloud-based computing and the privacy and security challenges there. We'll finish by thinking about user perspectives on security and how these can be represented in preferences.

By Cecchinato, Gould and Pitts. This article is about telemtry-based workplace tracking and its implications for the wellbeing of workers. It reviews previous literature from sociological and HCI traditions and ends with thoughts on how workers might be able to collectively bargain over data collection in a way that evens the power imbalance common in workplace 'bossware'.

By Ferreira, Kostakos and Dey, this paper introduces the AWARE framework for building context-aware systems and conducting in situ sensor-based research. 

This week we're focusing on telemetry. Telemetry is a really critical part of ubiquitous computing systems; it's the label for how we collect, transport and store data collected both through sensors and from people. Telemetry supports context building, which can improve the awareness of particular applications. But there are limitations to telemetry too – we have to make sure that what we can measure is a reliable proxy for what we want to understand. We also have to be attuned to the massive privacy implications of mass automated telemetry collection.

This is a classic contribution by Steve Benford and colleagues. The article is about the deployment of a complex location-based game platform. The focus of this paper is specifically on the breakdowns experienced by players and how this influenced playing styles and perspectives on the game. It is critical for us because it is a demonstration of the idea of seamfulness; sometimes you can't fix all the issues and you need to instead focus on designing around them.