DCog-HCI Lab @ UCSD

Welcome to the Distributed Cognition and Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego. The Dcog-HCI Lab is directed by Professors Jim Hollan and Ed Hutchins.

Currently there is a shift in cognitive science toward a view of cognition as a property of systems that are larger than isolated individuals. This extends the reach of cognition to encompass interactions between people as well as interactions with resources in the environment. Members of the Dcog-HCI lab are dedicated to developing the theoretical and methodological foundations engendered by this broader view of cognition and interaction.

We are united in the belief that distributed cognition promises to be a particularly fertile framework for designing and evaluating augmented environments and digital artifacts. A central image for us is environments in which people pursue their activities in collaboration with the elements of of the social and material world. Our core research efforts are directed at understanding such environments: what we really do in them, how we coordinated our activity in them, and what role technology should play in them.

Recent News

TraumaPen Paper accepted at PervasiveHealth
Our paper, in collaboration with Aleksandra Sarcevic at Drexel University, and Randall Burd at the Children Hospital in Washington D.C. was accepted at PervasiveHealth 2012, which will be held at UCSD at the end of May.

2 full papers accepted at CHI 2012

Our Tap & Play and Digital Ethnography full papers were accepted at CHI 2012

Recent Publications

A.M. Piper, N. Weibel and J. Hollan, TAP & PLAY: An End-User Toolkit for Authoring Interactive Pen and Paper Language Activities, Proc. CHI 2012, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Austin, TX, USA, May 2012, Accepted
Hybrid paper-digital interfaces are a promising approach for supporting language activities. The familiarity of pen and paper makes it a particularly attractive media for many user groups, including young children. Digital pens enhance interaction with traditional paper content by playing and recording audio and recognizing handwriting and gestures. Currently, generating custom interactive paper documents involves some programming, limiting its use by many user groups (e.g., educators and families) who might especially benefit from application of hybrid paper-digital interfaces in their practices. To address this need, we developed an end- user Toolkit for Authoring Pen and Paper Language Activities (TAP & PLAY). This paper describes the iterative development of the toolkit, its accessibility for novice non-technical users, and use in three different contexts for early language learning. We demonstrate and document the system’s usability, generality, and utility for people who want to create and tailor their own custom interactive paper-based language activities.

N. Weibel, A. Fouse, C. Emmenegger, W. Friedman, E.Hutchins, and J. Hollan, Digital Pen and Paper Practices in Observational Research, Proc. CHI 2012, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Austin, TX, USA, May 2012, Accepted
Researchers from many disciplines are taking advantage of increasingly inexpensive digital video to capture extensive records of human activity in real-world settings. The ability to record and share such data has created a critical moment n the practice and scope of behavioral research. While recent work is beginning to develop techniques for visualizing and interacting with integrated multimodal information collected during field research, navigating and analyzing these large datasets remains challenging and tools are especially needed to support the early stages of data exploration. In this paper we describe digital pen and paper practices in observational research and their integration with ChronoViz, a tool for annotating, visualizing, and analyzing multimodal data. The goal is to better support researchers both in the field, while collecting data, and later in the lab, during analysis. We document the co-evolution of notetaking practices and system features as 28 participants used the tool during an 18-month deployment.

Aleksandra Sarcevic, Nadir Weibel, Jim Hollan and Randall Burd, TraumaPen: A Paper- Digital Interface for Information Capture and Display, In Proceedings of PervasiveHealth 2012, International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, San Diego, CA, USA, May 2012.
We conducted a study in a pediatric trauma center to elicit design requirements for the TraumaPen system—a mixed paper-digital interface using a digital pen and a wall display—to support situation awareness during trauma resuscitation. In this paper, we describe the field research that informed the initial system prototype and then present findings from two studies in which the prototype was used to further explore the application area. Our results showed the potential for digital pen technology in supporting teamwork in the dynamic and safety-critical setting of the trauma bay, but also revealed several limitations of this technology. We conclude by discussing challenges and requirements for the use of paper-digital interfaces in assisting fast-paced, collaborative work processes.

N. Weibel, A. Fouse, C. Emmenegger, S. Kimmich and E. Hutchins, Let's Look at the Cockpit: Exploring Mobile Eye-Tracking for Observational Research on the Flight Deck, Proc. ETRA 2012, ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, Santa Barbara, USA, March 2012, Accepted
As part of our research on multimodal analysis and visualization of activity dynamics, we are exploring the integration of data produced by a variety of sensor technologies within ChronoViz, a tool aimed at supporting the simultaneous visualization of multiple streams of time series data. This paper reports on the integration of a mobile eye-tracking system with data streams collected from HD video cameras, microphones, digital pens, and simulation environments. We focus on the challenging environment of the commercial airline flight deck, analyzing the use of mobile eye tracking systems in aviation human factors and reporting on techniques and methods that can be applied in this and other domains in order to successfully collect, analyze and visualize eye-tracking data in combination with the array of data types supported by ChronoViz.

Events

DCog-HCI (see all)

Ubicomp Meeting: Witch Doctor

Ubiquitous Computing and Social Dynamics Research Group Meetings

Witch Doctor (Stephen)

(click for details)

Tue, May 22nd, 4:00pm-5:00pm (CSE 3109)
(1 day, 10 hours from now)

DCog-HCI Lab Meeting - Aleksandra Sarcevic

Wed, May 23rd, 10:15am-11:15am (SSRB 100)
(2 days, 4 hours from now)

Ubicomp Meeting: Documents on the Interactive Spaces

Ubiquitous Computing and Social Dynamics Research Group Meetings

Tracking Documents on the Interactive Spaces (Ryan)

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Tue, May 29th, 4:00pm-5:00pm (CSE 3109)
(1 week, 1 day from now)

DCog-HCI Lab Meeting - Whitney

Wed, May 30th, 10:30am-12:00pm (SSRB 100)
(1 week, 2 days from now)

Department Events (see all)

Elsi Kaiser (CRL talk)

Using hands and eyes to investigate conceptual representations: Effects of spatial grouping and event sequences on language production

In this talk, I present some of our recent work investigating how the human mind represents (i) relations between events in different domains (using priming to probe effects of motor actions on discourse-level representations) and (ii) relations between objects in different domains (effects of grouping in the visual domain and in language, on the prosodic level). Segmenting stimuli into events and ...

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Tue, May 22nd, 4:00pm-5:00pm (CSB 280)
(1 day, 10 hours from now)

Wa! Speaker Series

Mon, May 28th, 12:00pm-1:00pm
(1 week from now)

CRL talk

Tue, May 29th, 4:00pm-5:00pm (CSB 280)
(1 week, 1 day from now)

UCSD (see all)

Angela Yu (CSE talk)

Decisions, decisions, decisions! Insights from the Brain

Whether interpreting sensory inputs, choosing motor actions, or allocating cognitive resources, the brain is constantly confronted with the challenge to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, which arises from incomplete sensory information, imperfect motor controllers, noisy neuronal communication, and intrinsic stochasticity and non-stationarity in the behavioral environment. The omnipresence of uncertainty necessitates answers to two key questions. (1) How does the brain represent various sources of imprecise information? (2) How does the ...

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Mon, May 21st, 11:00am-12:00pm (EBU3B, Room 1202)
(5 hours, 20 minutes from now)