Communications of the ACM

Intelligent Computing in Personal Informatics: Key Design Considerations

An expanding range of apps supported by wearable and mobile devices are being used by people engaged in personal informatics in order to track and explore data about themselves and their everyday activities. While the aspect of data collection is easier than ever before through these technologies, more advanced forms of support from personal informatics systems are not presently available. This lack of next generation personal informatics systems presents research with an important role to fill, and this paper presents a two-step contribution to this effect. The first step is to present a new model of human cooperation with intelligent computing, which collates key issues from the literature. The second step is to apply this model to personal informatics, identifying twelve key considerations for integrating intelligent computing in the design of future personal informatics systems. These design considerations are also applied to an example system, which illustrates their use in eliciting new design directions.

Communications of the ACM: Volume 61 Issue 10, October 2018

Why Johnny Can't Unsubscribe: Barriers to Stopping Unwanted Email

A large proportion of email messages in an average Internet user's inbox are unwanted commercial messages from mailing lists, bots, and so on. Although such messages often include instructions to unsubscribe, people still struggle with stopping unwanted email. We investigated the user experience of unsubscribing from unwanted email messages by recruiting 18 individuals for via a lab study followed by semi-structured interviews. Based on unsubscribing practices of the study participants, we synthesized eight common unsubscription mechanisms and identified the corresponding user experience challenges. We further uncovered alternative practices aimed at circumventing the need to unsubscribe. Our findings reveal frustration with the prevailing options for limiting access to the self by managing email boundaries. We apply our insight to offer design suggestions that could help commercial providers improve the user experience of unsubscribing and provide users more control over the email they receive.

Quintary trees: a file structure for multidimensional datbase sytems

Peek: context sharing on request with notifications

Ever wondered if it was a good time to call your spouse, child, or friend? Do you sometimes just want to know if they are on their way to meet you? With Peek you can request the activity state (e.g. walking, in-vehicle, at-rest) and location of a phone when needed. Context is sent back automatically to people on the phone owner's pre-approved Peek contact list. The person being peeked at receives a notification that provides awareness of who peeked at them and when.

President's letter

CSCW '92 tutorials

The digital simulation of river plankton population dynamics

This paper deals with the development of a mathematical model for and the digital simulation in Fortran IV of phytoplankton and zooplankton population densities in a river using previously developed rate expressions. In order to study the relationships between the ecological mechanisms involved, the simulation parameters were varied illustrating the response of the ecosystem to different conditions, including those corresponding to certain types of chemical and thermal pollution. As an investigation of the accuracy of the simulation methods, a simulation of the actual population dynamics of Asterionella in the Columbia River was made based on approximations of conditions in that river. Although not totally accurate, the simulation was found to predict the general annual pattern of plankton growth fairly well and, specifically, revealed the importance of the annual velocity cycle in determining such patterns. In addition, the study demonstrates the usefulness of digital simulations in the examinations of certain aquatic ecosystems, as well as in environmental planning involving such examinations.

Access as a means of configuring cooperative interfaces

A systemic computation platform for the modelling and analysis of processes with natural characteristics

Computation in biology and in conventional computer architectures seem to share some features, yet many of their important characteristics are very different. To address this, [1] introduced systemic computation, a model of interacting systems with natural characteristics. Following this work, here we introduce the first platform implementing such computation, including programming language, compiler and virtual machine. To investigate their use we then provide an implementation of a genetic algorithm applied to the travelling salesman problem and also explore how SC enables self-adaptation with the minimum of additional code.