While it is often critical for indoor-location- and proximity-aware applications to know whether a user is in a space or not (e.g., a specific room or office), a key challenge is that the difference between standing on one side or another of a doorway or wall is well within the error range of most RF-based approaches. In this work, we address this challenge by augmenting RF-based localization and proximity detection with active ultrasonic sensing, taking advantage of the limited propagation of sound waves. This simple and cost-effective approach can allow, for example, a Bluetooth smart-lock to discern whether a user is inside or outside their home. We describe a configurable architecture for our solution and present experiments that validate this approach but also demonstrate that different user behavior and application needs can impact system configuration decisions. Finally, we describe applications that could benefit from our solution and address privacy concerns.

Despite work on smart spaces, nowadays a lot of knowledge work happens in the wild: at home, in coffee places, trains, buses, planes, and of course in crowded open office cubicles. Conducting web conferences in these settings creates privacy issues, and can also distract participants, leading to a perceived lack of professionalism from the remote peer(s). To solve this common problem, we implemented CamaLeon, a browser-based tool that uses real-time machine vision powered by deep learning to change the webcam stream sent by the remote peer: specifically, CamaLeon dynamically changes the "wild" background into one that resembles that of the office workers. In order to detect the background in wild settings, we designed and trained a fast UNet model on head and shoulder images. CamaLeon also uses a face detector to determine whether it should stream the person's face, depending on its location (or lack of presence). It uses face recognition to make sure it streams only a face that belongs to the user who connected to the meeting. The system was tested during a few real video conferencing calls at our company where 2 workers are remote. Both parties felt a sense of enhanced co-presence, and the remote participants felt more professional with their background replaced.

Responding to requests for information from an application, a remote person, or an organization that involve documenting the presence and/or state of physical objects can lead to incomplete or inaccurate documentation. We propose a system that couples information requests with a live object recognition tool to semi-automatically catalog requested items and collect evidence of their current state.

Computational notebooks have become a major medium for data exploration and insight communication in data science. Although expressive, dynamic, and flexible, in practice they are loose collections of scripts, charts, and tables that rarely tell a story or clearly represent the analysis process. This leads to a number of usability issues, particularly in the comprehension and exploration of notebooks. In this work, we design, implement, and evaluate Albireo, a visualization approach to summarize the structure of notebooks, with the goal of supporting more effective exploration and communication by displaying the dependencies and relationships between the cells of a notebook using a dynamic graph structure. We evaluate the system via a case study and expert interviews, with our results indicating that such a visualization is useful for an analyst’s self-reflection during exploratory programming, and also effective for communication of narratives and collaboration between analysts.

As our landscape of wearable technologies proliferates, we find more devices situated on our heads. However, many challenges hinder them from widespread adoption---from their awkward, bulky form factor (today's AR and VR goggles) to their socially stigmatized designs (Google Glass) and a lack of a well-developed head-based interaction design language. In this paper, we explore a socially acceptable, large, head-worn interactive wearable---a hat. We report results from a gesture elicitation study with 17 participants, extract a taxonomy of gestures, and define a set of design concerns for interactive hats. Through this lens, we detail the design and fabrication of three hat prototypes capable of sensing touch, head movements, and gestures, and including ambient displays of several types. Finally, we report an evaluation of our hat prototype and insights to inform the design of future hat technologies.

Searching collaboratively for places of interest is a common activity that frequently occurs on individual mobile phones, or on large tourist-information displays in public places such as visitor centers or train stations. We created a public display system for collaborative travel planning, as well as a mobile app that can augment the display. We tested them against third-party mobile apps in a simulated travel-search task to understand how the unique features of mobile phones and large displays might be leveraged together to improve collaborative travel planning experience.

Historically, people have interacted with companies and institutions through telephone-based dialogue systems and paper-based forms. Now, these interactions are rapidly moving to web- and phone-based chat systems. While converting traditional telephone dialogues to chat is relatively straightforward, converting forms to conversational interfaces can be challenging. In this work, we introduce methods and interfaces to enable the conversion of PDF and web-based documents that solicit user input into chat-based dialogues. Document data is first extracted to associate fields and their textual descriptions using meta-data and lightweight visual analysis. The field labels, their spatial layout, and associated text are further analyzed to group related fields into natural conversational units. These correspond to questions presented to users in chat interfaces to solicit information needed to complete the original documents and downstream processes they support. This user supplied data can be inserted into the source documents and/or in downstream databases. User studies of our tool show that it streamlines form-to-chat conversion and produces conversational dialogues of at least the same quality as a purely manual approach.

SlideDiff is a system that automatically creates an animated rendering of textual and media differences between two versions of a slide. While previous work focuses either on textual or image data, SlideDiff integrates text and media changes, as well as their interactions, e.g. adding an image forces nearby text boxes to shrink. Provided with two versions of a slide (not the full history of edits), SlideDiff detects the textual and image differences, and then animates the changes by mimicking what a user would have done, such as moving the cursor, typing text, resizing image boxes, adding images. This editing metaphor is well known to most users, helping them better understand what has changed, and fosters a sense of connection between remote workers, making them feel as if we edited together. After detection of text and image differences, the animations are rendered in HTML and CSS, including mouse cursor motion, text and image box selection and resizing, text deletion and insertion with its cursor. We discuss strategies for animating changes, in particular the importance of starting with large changes and finishing with smaller edits, and provide evidence of the utility of SlideDiff in a workplace setting.

Tutorials are one of the most fundamental means of conveying knowledge. Ideally when the task involves physical or digital objects, tutorials not only describe each step with text or via audio narration but show it as well using photos or animation. In most cases, online tutorial authors capture media from handheld mobile devices to compose these documents, but increasingly they use wearable devices as well. In this work, we explore the full life-cycle of online tutorial creation and viewing using head-mounted capture and displays. We developed a media-capture tool for Google Glass that requires minimal attention to the capture device and instead allows the author to focus on creating the tutorial's content rather than its capture. The capture tool is coupled with web-based authoring tools for creating annotatable videos and multimedia documents. In a study comparing standalone (camera on tripod) versus wearable capture (Google Glass) as well as two types of multimedia representation for authoring tutorials (video-based or document-based), we show that tutorial authors have a preference for wearable capture devices, especially when recording activities involving larger objects in non-desktop environments. Authors preferred document-based multimedia tutorials because they are more straightforward to compose and the step-based structure translates more directly to explaining a procedure. In addition, we explored using head-mounted displays (Google Glass) for accessing tutorials in comparison to lightweight computing devices such as tablets. Our study included tutorials recorded with the same capture methods as in our access study. We found that although authors preferred head-mounted capture, tutorial consumers preferred video recorded by a camera on tripod that provides a more stable image of the workspace. Head-mounted displays are good for glanceable information, however video demands more attention and our participants made more errors using Glass than when using a tablet, which was easier to ignore. Our findings point out several design implications for online tutorial authoring and access methods.

Video telehealth is growing to allow more clinicians to see patients from afar. As a result, clinicians, typically trained for in-person visits, must learn to communicate both health information and non-verbal affective signals to patients through a digital medium. We introduce a system called ReflectLive that senses and provides real-time feedback about non-verbal communication behaviors to clinicians so they can improve their communication behaviors. A user evaluation with 10 clinicians showed that the real-time feedback helped clinicians maintain better eye contact with patients and was not overly distracting. Clinicians reported being more aware of their non-verbal communication behaviors and reacted positively to summaries of their conversational metrics, motivating them to want to improve. Using ReflectLive as a probe, we also discuss the benefits and concerns around automatically quantifying the “soft skills” and complexities of clinician-patient communication, the controllability of behaviors, and the design considerations for how to present real-time and summative feedback to clinicians.

For tourists, interactions with digital public displays often depend on specific technologies that users may not be familiar with (QR codes, NFC, Bluetooth); may not have access to because of networking issues (SMS), may lack a required app (QR codes), or device technology (NFC); may not want to use because of time constraints (WiFi, Bluetooth); or may not want to use because they are worried about sharing their data with a third-party service (text, WiFi). In this demonstration, we introduce ItineraryScanner, a system that allows users to seamlessly share content with a public travel kiosk system.

In this paper, we describe DocHandles, a novel system that allows users to link to specific document parts in their chat applications. As users type a message, they can invoke the tool by referring to a specific part of a document, e.g., “@fig1 needs revision”. By combining text parsing and document layout analysis, DocHandles can find and present all the figures “1” inside previously shared documents, allowing users to explicitly link to the relevant “document handle”. Documents become first-class citizens inside the conversation stream where users can seamlessly integrate documents in their text-centric messaging application.

The proliferation of workplace multimedia collaboration applications has meant on one hand more opportunities for group work but on the other more data locked away in proprietary interfaces. We are developing new tools to capture and access multimedia content from any source. In this demo, we focus primarily on new methods that allow users to rapidly reconstitute, enhance, and share document-based information.

In this paper we describe DocuGram, a novel tool to capture and share documents from any application. As users scroll through pages of their document inside the native application (Word, Google Docs, web browser), the system captures and analyses in real-time the video frames and reconstitutes the original document pages into an easy to view HTML-based representation. In addition to regenerating the document pages, a DocuGram also includes the interactions users had over them, e.g. mouse motions and voice comments. A DocuGram acts as a modern copy machine, allowing users to copy and share any document from any application.

Most teleconferencing tools treat users in distributed meetings monolithically: all participants are meant to be connected to one another in the more-or-less the same manner. In reality, though, people connect to meetings in all manner of different contexts, sometimes sitting in front of a laptop or tablet giving their full attention, but at other times mobile and involved in other tasks or as a liminal participant in a larger group meeting. In this paper we present the design and evaluation of two applications, Penny and MeetingMate, designed to help users in non-standard contexts participate in meetings.

We present MixMeetWear, a smartwatch application that allows users to maintain awareness of the audio and visual content of a meeting while completing other tasks. Users of the system can listen to the audio of a meeting and also view, zoom, and pan webcam and shared content keyframes of other meeting participants' live streams in real time. Users can also provide input to the meeting via speech-to-text or predefined responses. A study showed that the system is useful for peripheral awareness of some meetings.

Remote meetings are messy. There are an ever-increasing number of support tools available, and, as past work has shown, people will tend to select a subset of those tools to satisfy their own institutional, social, and personal needs. While video tools make it relatively easy to have conversations at a distance, they are less adapted to sharing and archiving multimedia content. In this paper we take a deeper look at how sharing multimedia content occurs before, during, and after distributed meetings. Our findings shed light on the decisions and rationales people use to select from the vast set of tools available to them to prepare for, conduct, and reconcile the results of a remote meeting.

Establishing common ground is one of the key problems for any form of communication. The problem is particularly pronounced in remote meetings, in which participants can easily lose track of the details of dialogue for any number of reasons. In this demo we present a web-based tool, MixMeet, that allows teleconferencing participants to search the contents of live meetings so they can rapidly retrieve previously shared content to get on the same page, correct a misunderstanding, or discuss a new idea.

Web-based tools for remote collaboration are quickly becoming an established element of the modern workplace. During live meetings, people share web sites, edit presentation slides, and share code editors. It is common for participants to refer to previously spoken or shared content in the course of synchronous distributed collaboration. A simple approach is to index with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) the video frames, or key-frames, being shared and let user retrieve them with text queries. Here we show that a complementary approach is to look at the actions users take inside the live document streams. Based on observations of real meetings, we focus on two important signals: text editing and mouse cursor motion. We describe the detection of text and cursor motion, their implementation in our WebRTC-based system, and how users are better able to search live documents during a meeting based on these detected and indexed actions.

Tutorials are one of the most fundamental means of conveying knowledge. In this paper, we present a suite of applications that allow users to combine different types of media captured from handheld, standalone, or wearable devices to create multimedia tutorials. We conducted a study comparing standalone (camera on tripod) versus wearable capture (Google Glass). The results show that tutorial authors have a slight preference for wearable capture devices, especially when recording activities involving larger objects.

As video-mediated communication reaches broad adoption, improving immersion and social interaction are important areas of focus in the design of tools for exploration and work-based communication. Here we present three threads of research focused on developing new ways of enabling exploration of a remote environment and interacting with the people and artifacts therein.

Video Text Retouch is a technique for retouching textual content found in many online videos such as screencasts, recorded presentations and many online e-learning videos. Viewed through our special, HTML5-based player, users can edit in real-time the textual content of the video frames, such as correcting typos or inserting new words between existing characters. Edits are overlaid and tracked at the desired position for as long as the original video content remains similar. We describe the interaction techniques, image processing algorithms and give implementation details of the system.

Distributed teams must co-ordinate a variety of tasks. To do so they need to be able to create, share, and annotate documents as well as discuss plans and goals. Many workflow tools support document sharing, while other tools support videoconferencing, however there exists little support for connecting the two. In this work we describe a system that allows users to share and markup content during web meetings. This shared content can provide important conversational props within the context of a meeting; it can also help users review archived meetings. Users can also extract shared content from meetings directly into other workflow tools.

Online video is incredibly rich. A 15-minute home improvement YouTube tutorial might include 1500 words of narration, 100 or more significant keyframes showing a visual change from multiple perspectives, several animated objects, references to other examples, a tool list, comments from viewers and a host of other metadata. Furthermore, video accounts for 90% of worldwide Internet traffic. However, it is our observation that video is not widely seen as a full-fledged document; dismissed as a media that, at worst, gilds over substance and, at best, simply augments text-based communications. In this piece, we suggest that negative attitudes toward multimedia documents that include audio and video are largely unfounded and arise mostly because we lack the necessary tools to treat video content as first-order media or to support seamlessly mixing media.

Video content creators invest enormous effort creating work that is in turn typically viewed passively. However, learning tasks using video requires users not only to consume the content but also to engage, interact with, and repurpose it. Furthermore, to promote learning with video in domains where content creators are not necessarily videographers, it is important that capture tools facilitate creation of interactive content. In this paper, we describe some early experiments toward this goal. A literature review coupled with formative field studies led to a system design that can incorporate a broad set of video-creation and interaction styles.