A Cuddly Human Interface

 Interesting look at new user interfaces, from the ACM, which has long looked at Human Consumer Interfaces (HCI) 

Featured ACM Member: Yuta Sugiura

Yuta Sugiura is an Associate Professor at Keio University in Yokohama, Japan. His research interests include human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and medical informatics. He has served as a program committee member for various international conferences, including ACM UIST, TEI, and SIGGRAPH ASIA E-Tech.

Sugiura was the recipient of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ/ACM) Award for Early Career Contributions to Global Research. He was recognized for his pioneering work in user interfaces and ubiquitous computing and for his recent focus on medical-engineering collaboration.

How did you initially become interested in human-computer interaction and, specifically, in user interfaces?

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a multidisciplinary field of study. Unlike other technologies, HCI has been solving visible and tangible problems related to people and exploring how technology can be better applied to people. This is very interesting to me, and I can think of myself as a designer who has the power to use technology to develop interesting systems that solve real-life problems that people encounter.

Since the birth of the mouse and keyboard, people have become familiar with user-interface technology to interact with machine systems. As the only bridge between machine systems and humans, the user interface has great significance in the entire field of human-computer interaction. Research to promote the development of user interface technology enables more people to enjoy the benefits of technological advances.

Your work with Cuddly User Interface (Cuddly UI) focuses on finding new ways for computers to understand human physical gestures. How will this area of research shape smart homes in the future? What are some important technical challenges that need to be overcome in this area?

The Cuddly UI focuses on the application of soft interface technology. I proposed combining soft objects around the user (e.g., sofa, pillow, etc.) with sensor technology to build a friendlier and ubiquitous interaction interface. In addition, using soft objects also improves the user's acceptance of the interface and we can enable the soft materials to make a display. For example, we can use the robotic device to change the direction of the fiber on the carpet to show the graphics.

When it comes to smart homes, current intelligent home systems still use an explicit way to interact (e.g., remote control, voice control, etc.). Using Cuddly UIs can bring more implicit interactions to the user. This interaction with the Cuddly User Interface can be a more convenient, ubiquitous, and low-cost way to learn to interact with the computer system. For example, we can expect remote communication using the Cuddly UI. A person operates the soft objects (e.g., a toy or cushion) in their home, and the other can receive the toy’s movement. In addition, it is common and natural for people to come into contact with soft interfaces. It may also record many users' mood states invisibly. For example, a person may hammer the sofa when angry or hug a pillow tightly when watching a horror movie. These behaviors can be recorded by the intelligent Cuddly UI, which can analyze the emotional state to change its morphology (e.g., hardness) into feedback for the user.

Interaction with the Cuddly UI is still highly dependent on sensor technology and machine-learning techniques. Following a basic development paradigm, the system design must follow data collection and classifier training processes. The degree of user customizability is low. Therefore, the next step to focus on is reducing the system’s development cost to increase the user’s customizability so that each user can rely on their habits to design the interaction.  ...   " 

Gesture Sensing Armband

In Engadget:    Have been looking at applications of gestural interfaces to analytics  " ....  Muscle-sensing Myo gesture armband will be on Amazon this quarter ... For those who aren't already familiar with the Myo, it consists of eight muscle-sensing modules that you strap onto the widest part of your forearm, which then lets the device detect your hand gestures. These include squeezing your fist, spreading your hand, waving your hand left or right, rotating your fist, or something as minute as a quick pinch with your thumb and another finger (which can be set to activate or pause the Myo). On top of that, there's the combination of a gyroscope, an accelerometer and a magnetometer to detect your arm motion.   ... "  

An Evolution of Wearables

Thad Starner, who we followed from his days at MIT, now a Prof at Ga Tech, discusses the history and evolution of wearbles.  In Computing Now.   Excellent details are included.  " ... Thad Starner, who has been wearing a "homebrew" computer with a head-up display as part of his daily life since 1993, discusses why it has taken so long for wearables to capture consumer interest. He discusses the various challenges of designing wearable systems and presents five different phases of head-mounted displays, illustrating how improvements in technology allowed progressively more useful and usable devices. ... " 

Related, we hear today about the reported restructuring of the Google Glass project at Apple.  Is this evidence of its demise?   My discussions with futurists and developers shows that Glass now  focuses on hands-free, narrow task specific oriented applications.  Not general consumer browsing awareness. And thus shrinking in volume.

Cognitively: How People Can and will Cooperate with Computers

Computers have already markedly changed the way we do work, in just a few decades.   Three sources below that show how we are taking another major step forward, by cooperating with computers, and working along side them in new and exciting ways.

 Shyam Sankar: The rise of human-computer cooperation  TED Talk.
Brute computing force alone can’t solve the world’s problems. Data mining innovator Shyam Sankar explains why solving big problems (like catching terrorists or identifying huge hidden trends) is not a question of finding the right algorithm, but rather the right symbiotic relationship between computation and human creativity.  (With a bow to J. C. R. Licklider)

Professor Ed Hess at the Darden Graduate School of Business, U of Va, writes about how AI 
could change the work humans do and how they are managed

From the Cognitive Systems Institute, via Jim Spohrer: An excellent cognitive computing repository   Updating examples of our work in progress.

GUI Package for R Analytics

A GUI package for R analytics.   From what is called the PLS institute.  Now taking a closer look at R for packaging solutions for analytics.  Ideas?

Human Computer Interaction: Present and Future

In Computing Now:  Very good,  extensive view of the topic. Increasingly important was we use systems in new ways. Current and future trends.

" ... Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a multidisciplinary research area focused on interaction modalities between humans and computers; sometimes, the more general term human-machine interface (HMI) is used to refer to the user interface in a manufacturing or process-control system. In other words, the HCI discipline investigates and tackles all issues related to the design and implementation of the interface between humans and computers. Due to its nature and goals, HCI innately involves multiple computer science-related disciplines (image processing, computer vision, programming languages, and so on) as well as disciplines related to human sciences (ergonomics, human factors, cognitive psychology, and so on). Research about HCI primarily concerns the design, implementation, and assessment of new interfaces to improve the interaction between humans and machines. The term improve can be related to several aspects, including intuitiveness of use and interface robustness ... "  

Tamagotchi Emerges Again in Gamification

More than a dozen years ago we looked at Bandai's Tamagotchi pets as a potential model for consumer engagement.  The basic idea was an early look at what we now call gamification.  Or using gaming principles in improve interaction between people and machines.   Looking back at my notes of the time, the Tamagothci model, and the principles we lernde, were not far wrong.   The idea worked well and powerfully in carefully focused areas. Much less so in others.  I think there are still some excellent gamification learnings to to gained from them.   I had  lost track of their popularity or even availability, but it turns out they are now back, not unexpectedly as smartphone Apps.  Thinking of them as Apps is a useful, compact way of taking the experiment further.  How will this work differently from the way they were delivered then?  That will provide new ways of comparing physical versus virtual emotional engagement.  Has Bandai looked at this?