Research

Reef

The potential and challenges of inferring thermal comfort at home using commodity sensors (2015)

Chuan-Che Jeff Huang, Rayoung Yang, Mark W Newman.

In Proceedings of UbiComp ‘15

For decades, researchers have investigated ways to infer human thermal comfort. Studies have usually required cumbersome sensors and human observers, making them inappropriate for use in naturalistic settings such as the home. Emerging wearable and smart home sensing devices offer the opportunity to develop new models of thermal comfort based on data collected in-situ. To explore this opportunity, we deployed a sensing system in seven homes and collected self-report data from 11 participants for four weeks. Our system captures many factors employed in previous thermal comfort research, as well as new factors (e.g., activity level, sweat level). Machine learning-based models derived from the collected data show improvement over previous techniques, however significant prediction errors remain. In analyzing these errors we identify six problems that pose challenges for inferring comfort in the wild. Based on our findings, we suggest techniques to improve future in-situ thermal comfort modeling efforts.

paper | website

Olegoru: A Soundscape Composition Tool to Enhance Imaginative Storytelling with Tangible Objects (2015)

Chuan-Che Jeff Huang, Yu-Jen Lin, Xinda Zheng, Mark W Newman, Sile O’Modhrain.
In Proceedings of TEI ‘15 (WIP)

Learning storytelling is beneficial for children's development. Various tools have been proposed to expand the set of materials children can use to compose their stories. However, most previous research focuses on enhancing the visual aspect of storytelling and underexplores the acoustic elements needed for children's stories. In this paper, Olegoru1, a sound composition tool in the form of magic gloves and soul stones, is proposed to augment children's storytelling when using physical objects. Children can create contextual and regional sound effects as well as event-based acoustics through speech, non-verbal and gestural interaction, and could potentially enable children to create more immersive story-worlds. To investigate the technical feasibility of such tool, a preliminary prototype was built that accepts a limited number of vocalized sound effects and vocabulary.

paper | website

StoneSoup: Community Sharing of Social Media Streams (2015)

Gaurav Paruthi, Chuan-Che Jeff Huang, Mark W. Newman.

Technical Report

Community displays facilitate interaction and increase awareness in collocated communities. In this work, we designed and developed a community driven proactive display system that detects the nearby users and allow its users to personalize content for the display. We have used findings from existing literature to create a community display system that is well-suited for an existing student community. Moreover, we expand the design space for proactive community displays to reduce the burden of updating content, provide greater realtime control, and allow greater exploration of community content and community members.

paper | website