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Today’s computer user is inundated with information, and making
sense of this growing mountain of material is becoming an overwhelming
task. We believe that more powerful methods for presenting the information
users need to make sense out of can greatly reduce cognitive load. Also,
by exploring elegant, subtle,
peripheral awareness techniques, we strive to preserve the user’s
task flow and minimize interruption.
In addition, information is presented to us with little to no
regard for our current cognitive state. We may be deep in thought,
only to be interrupted and “lured away” from the task at hand. We
are exploring the use of non-invasive, sensing
technologies
that might give us a read as to the user’s cognitive state. This
will allow us to better ascertain whether or not to let information
“through” to the user at various points in time, instead of
interrupting them and reducing their task flow.
It’s often difficult to remember what one was doing after an
interruption, as well as retrieve prior work contexts or reflect
upon how one has spent their time while computing. We are developing
new visualizations of task flow, built on top of our personal
vibelogger, MyVibe.
Our user interface designs do not scale well to the available
screen real estate. Windows are hard to access on very large or
heterogeneous displays, like Tablets and non-touch-enabled devices.
Notifications come up where one is not attending, and windows open
in unexpected places or are improperly sized for their contents. Our
group desires to position and scale the presentation of a user's
information clusters appropriately for the real estate and devices
available. We intend to invent new solutions for how to make
important content available and easy to interact with on any device,
and on any surface. Our adaptive layout solutions span various
applications, from web browsing to software
development environments to
SmartPhones.
Mobile technology has allowed us to better track many statistics
about our own behaviors as these personal devices are with us all
the time. A segment of our group is exploring the use of mobile
technology to track health-related information,
using wearable health monitoring devices, mobile phones and the
computer.
As more and more of our information becomes digital, the
computer can be used to store memories for the user that can be used
for reminding, reminiscing, and sharing with others. A large
collaboration between our group, BARC and MSR Cambridge, called
Memex, concerns novel methods for analyzing streams of media about a
user’s life, in addition to developing new visualization and
intelligent summarization methods for these digital memories.
We run user studies to both understand what user problems are in
our research areas, as well as to evaluate our new designs against
existing techniques.
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