Theme: Human-centred system architectures
Recent technological advances in location sensing, storage, mobile computing power, network connectivity, and cloud computing infrastructures enable new user experiences that impact traditional views of computer systems design.
For some tasks asking where processing takes place will become irrelevant, making computing more like a utility; while for other tasks the actual location of digital data remains emotionally significant. From a human perspective, though much of what is done with computing requires the utility of enormous processing power, those doings are not best thought of as merely utilitarian. When someone posts to their social network, or when they create and store a Microsoft Word file, or when they take and send digital images from their mobile phones, it is not the required processing power that is foremost in their minds. It is not the computer as utility that is at issue. People don't say 'I would have done this if it had been as simple as turning on and off a tap'. Other things matter. It is the management of social affairs, the completing of a work task for someone, or the giving and receiving of visual gifts between friends over coffee, that is at issue. Hence the human perspective on computing, on its role, design and functioning is crucial to computer systems design.
People
Phil Gosset
Publications
- Eno Thereska, Phil Gosset, and Richard Harper, Multi-structured redundancy, in HotStorage, USENIX, June 2012
- William Odom, Abigail Sellen, Richard Harper, and Eno Thereska, Lost in Translation: Understanding the Possession of Digital Things in the Cloud, in ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , ACM, 5 May 2012
- Michelle L. Mazurek, Eno Thereska, Dinan Gunawardena, R.Harper, and James Scott, ZZFS: A hybrid device and cloud file system for spontaneous users, in Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'12), USENIX, February 2012
- Helena M. Mentis, Siân E. Lindley, Stuart Taylor, Paul Dunphy, Tim Regan, and Richard Harper, Taking as an Act of Sharing, in Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, ACM, February 2012
- Richard Harper, Eno Thereska, Sian Lindley, Richard Banks, Phil Gosset, William Odom, Gavin Smyth, and Eryn Whitworth, What is a File?, no. MSR-TR-2011-109, 1 October 2011



