Lab Meetings

SpecFlic will be a distributed cinema event that will be enacted over the course of a week here on the UCSD campus during the 2004-2005 academic year. Through research, discussion and interviews with scientists, engineers, social scientists and humanists engaged in today's "cutting edge" research at UCSD, I am creating a speculative fictional scenario around the university in 30 years. The overall goal is to open up discussion and debate around the impact of research at UCSD and encourage the development of social imagination.

As in Jean luc Godard's film "Alphaville," this performance of the future is played out in the landscape of the present (that is, the lingering past in the fiction)---a reminder that we are always already living in our future. The communication technologies we will employ (principally wireless PDAs with networked video and audio capabilities) serve as both performative props and communication devices. The current situation of technology hiccups and breakdowns (inevitable in the early adoption of any technology) is reflected in the fictional future where the fetish gadgets of today are transformed into long obsolete castoffs constantly being hacked in order to sustain their operability.

This brief talk will outline the formal, conceptual and technical challenges of SPECFLIC, and seeks to initiate critical feedback and solicit ideas and participation.

Wiki-based Development Site (in progress, but open to public):

http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~specflic

Adriene Jenik is a telecommunications media artist who has been working for over 15 years as an artist, educator, curator, administrator, and engineer. MAUVE DESERT: A CD-ROM Translation is Jenik's internationally acclaimed interactive road movie based on the novel Le Désert mauve by French Canadian author Nicole Brossard. From 1997-2002, Jenik joined with multi-media maven Lisa Brenneis & an internationally distributed troupe of online performers to create DESKTOP THEATER (www.desktoptheater.org), a series of live theatrical inventions in public visual chat rooms. DESKTOP THEATER's "waitingforgodot.com" has been written about extensively and is widely considered a key contribution to the internet performance cannon. Jenik is an Associate Professor of Computer & Media Arts in the Visual Arts Dept. at University of California, San Diego. Her current works (ActiveCampus Explorientation and SPEC-FLIC) instigate large-scale public art events over wireless networks.

Identifying which design constraints—limitations on what constitutes an acceptable solution to a design problem—do or do not apply to a particular design situation is key to how quickly and how well the design problem is solved. In this talk, I present a case study that explores how constraints for software and user interface design may be derived from knowledge of human cognition. The study yielded a set of design elements that are key to navigational cognition along with a set of constraints that describe how manipulations of these elements affect navigational performance. (By "navigation" I mean the task of determining where places and things are, how to get to them and actually getting there. My present focus is on support for human navigation within the environment under design.)

During the talk, I will demonstrate a navigational design for a spatial multiscale environment (Jazz) that is based on the derived design elements and constraints. I will also present results from user testing of this design that show significant increases in navigational performance, along with significant decreases in effort.

The immediate value of identifying design elements and constraints upon them lies in their explicit use in design. However, the greater benefit is expected to derive from embedding them in software development tools, such as application frameworks. Such embedding is anticipated to encourage designers and developers to focus on the "right" elements and ask the "right" questions, and to allow developers to work at a more appropriate level of abstraction.

Conventional web search involves typing in some text and receiving a linear list of text in return—a command-line text-based interface. This works well for simple, well defined searches conducted over narrow bandwidth with a simple answer (typically contained on a single Web page). It doesn't work well for extended searches with open-ended questions and it doesn't draw upon the power of graphical user interfaces. I will describe an extended line of research that has been examining the uses of visualization to present the results of search more effectively and to support knowledge building (both individual and collaborative) based on Web searching. We have also been examining the uses of data-mining techniques as a way to support "implicit collaboration" among a group of searchers, based on the application of association-rule algorithms to the trace data of the search processes of a group of searchers, in order to generate recommendations for future searches. I will demonstrate two search systems we have built, VisIT and VisSearch, and I will present data showing the impact of visualization and data mining on university students conducting open-ended web searches.

What conditions could facilitate a grand synthesis in behavioral sciences to rival those seen in the biological and physical sciences in the past century? The emergence of cognitive science and the converging view across multiple disciplines of human behavior as a complex dynamic interaction among biological, computational, cognitive, linguistic, social and cultural processes are important first steps toward synthesis. While empirical and theoretical work is rapidly advancing at the biological end of this continuum, understanding such a complex system also necessitates data that capture the richness of real world activity and analysis frameworks that can exploit that richness. Rapid advances in digital technology have created a critical moment in the practice and scope of behavioral research. Many researchers are taking advantage of the drop in cost of data collection equipment to acquire increasingly rich data collections. The main obstacle to fully exploiting this data is the huge cost of analysis using current methods and tools.

The presenters recently submitted this proposal to the National Science Foundation's Human and Social Dynamics competition for fiscal year 2004.