We Need To Talk About Clippy

Clippy
Everyone who used MS Office between 1997 and 2003 remembers Clippy.  He was a help avatar designed to interact with the user in a way that was both personable and predictive.  He was a friendly sales assistant combined with a butler who anticipated all your needs.  At least, that was the idea.  In reality, Clippy fell well short of those expectations, he was probably the most loathed feature of those particular operating systems; he even featured in this Time Magazine list of world’s worst inventions, a list that also includes Agent Orange and the Segway.

In an ideal world, Clippy would have responded to user behaviour in ways that were intuitive, timely and helpful.  In reality, his functionality was limited, his appearance often intrusive and his intuition was way off. Clippy irritated so completely that his legacy lives on over ten years later.  If you describe the concept of an intelligent adaptive interface to most people, half of them recall the dreadful experience of Clippy and the rest will probably be thinking about HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  With those kinds of role models, it’s not difficult to understand why users are in no great hurry to embrace intelligent adaptation at the interface.

In the years since Clippy passed, the debate around machine intelligence has placed greater emphasis on the improvisational spark that is fundamental to displays of human intellect.  This recent article in MIT Technology Review makes the point that a “conversation” with Eugene Goostman (the chatter bot who won a Turing Test competition at Bletchley Park in 2012) lacks the natural “back and forth” of human-human communication.  Modern expectations of machine intelligence go beyond a simple imitation game within highly-structured rules, users are looking for a level of spontaneity and nuance that resonates with their human sense of what other people are.

But one of the biggest problems with Clippy was not simply intrusiveness but the fact that his repertoire of responses was very constrained, he could ask if you were writing a letter (remember those?) and precious little else.

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Can Physiological Computing Create Smart Technology?

smart

The phrase “smart technology” has been around for a long time.  We have smart phones and smart televisions with functional capability that is massively enhanced by internet connectivity.  We also talk about smart homes that scale up into smart cities.  This hybrid between technology and the built environment promotes connectivity but with an additional twist – smart spaces monitor activity within their confines for the purposes of intelligent adaptation: to switch off lighting and heating if a space is uninhabited, to direct music from room to room as the inhabitant wanders through the house.

If smart technology is equated with enhanced connectivity and functionality, do those things translate into an increase of machine intelligence?  In his 2007 book ‘The Design Of Future Things‘, Donald Norman defined the ‘smartness’ of technology with respect to the way in which it interacted with the human user.  Inspired by J.C.R. Licklider’s (1960) definition of man-computer symbiosis, he claimed that smart technology was characterised by a harmonious partnership between person and machine.  Hence, the ‘smartness’ of technology is defined by the way in which it responds to the user and vice versa.

One prerequisite for a relationship between person and machine that is  cooperative and compatible is to enhance the capacity of technology to monitor user behaviour.  Like any good butler, the machine needs to increase its  awareness and understanding of user behaviour and user needs.  The knowledge gained via this process can subsequently be deployed to create intelligent forms of software adaptation, i.e. machine-initiated responses that are both timely and intuitive from a human perspective.  This upgraded form of  human-computer interaction is attractive to technology providers and their customers, but is it realistic and achievable and what practical obstacles must be overcome?

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Reflections on first International Conference on Physiological Computing Systems

international-conference-on-physiological-computing-systems-phycs-logo

Last week I attended the first international conference on physiological computing held in Lisbon.  Before commenting on the conference, it should be noted that I was one of the program co-chairs, so I am not completely objective – but as this was something of a watershed event for research in this area, I didn’t want to let the conference pass without comment on the blog.

The conference lasted for two-and-a-half days and included four keynote speakers.  It was a relatively small meeting with respect to the number of delegates – but that is to be expected from a fledgling conference in an area that is somewhat niche with respect to methodology but very broad in terms of potential applications.

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What kind of Meaningful Interaction would you like to have? Pt 1

A couple of years ago we organised this CHI workshop on meaningful interaction in physiological computing.  As much as I felt this was an important area for investigation, I also found the topic very hard to get a handle on.  I recently revisited this problem in working on a co-authored book chapter with Kiel on our forthcoming collection for Springer entitled ‘Advances in Physiological Computing’ due out next May.

On reflection, much of my difficulty revolved around the complexity of defining meaningful interaction in context.  For systems like BCI or ocular control, where input control is the key function, the meaningfulness of the HCI is self-evident.  If I want an avatar to move forward, I expect my BCI to translate that intention into analogous action at the interface.   But biocybernetic systems, where spontaneous psychophysiology is monitored, analysed and classified, are a different story.  The goal of this system is to adapt in a timely and appropriate fashion and evaluating the literal meaning of that kind of interaction is complex for a host of reasons.

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The Epoc and Your Next Job Interview

job-interview

Imagine you are waiting to be interviewed for a job that you really want.  You’d probably be nervous, fingers drumming the table, eyes restlessly staring around the room.  The door opens and a man appears, he is wearing a lab coat and he is holding an EEG headset in both hands.  He places the set on your head and says “Your interview starts now.”

This Philip K Dick scenario became reality for intern applicants at the offices of TBWA who are an advertising firm based in Istanbul.  And thankfully a camera was present to capture this WTF moment for each candidate so this video could be uploaded to Vimeo.

The rationale for the exercise is quite clear.  The company want to appoint people who are passionate about advertising, so working with a consultancy, they devised a test where candidates watch a series of acclaimed ads and the Epoc is used to measure their levels of ‘passion’ ‘love’ and ‘excitement’ in a scientific and numeric way.  Those who exhibit the greatest passion for adverts get the job (this is the narrative of the movie; in reality one suspects/hopes they were interviewed as well).

I’ve seen at least one other blog post that expressed some reservations about the process.

Let’s take a deep breath because I have a whole shopping list of issues with this exercise.

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Redundancy, Enhancement and the Purpose of Physiological Computing

glass_eeg

There has been a lot of tweets and blogs devoted to an article written recently by Don Norman for the MIT Technology Review on wearable computing.  The original article is here, but in summary, Norman points to an underlying paradox surrounding Google Glass etc.  In the first instance, these technological artifacts are designed to enhance human abilities (allowing us to email on the move, navigate etc.), however, because of inherent limitations on the human information processing system, they have significant potential to degrade aspects of human performance.  Think about browsing Amazon on your glasses whilst crossing a busy street and you get the idea.

The paragraph in Norman’s article that caught my attention and is most relevant to this blog is this one.

Eventually we will be able to eavesdrop on both our own internal states and those of others. Tiny sensors and clever software will infer their emotional and mental states and our own. Worse, the inferences will often be wrong: a person’s pulse rate just went up, or their skin conductance just changed; there are many factors that could cause such things to happen, but technologists are apt to focus upon a simple, single interpretation.”

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Data Trading, Body Snooping & Insight from Physiological Data

cardiac-monitor

 

If there are two truisms in the area of physiological computing, they are: (1) people will always produce physiological data and (2) these data are continuously available.  The passive nature of physiological monitoring and the relatively high fidelity of data that can be obtained is one reason why we’re seeing physiology and psychophysiology as candidates for Big Data collection and analysis (see my last post on the same theme).  It is easy to see the appeal of physiological data in this context, to borrow a quote from Jaron Lanier’s new book “information is people in disguise” and we all have the possibility of gaining insight from the data we generate as we move through the world.

If I collect physiological data about myself, as Kiel did during the bodyblogger project, it is clear that I own that data.  After all, the original ECG was generated by me and I went to the trouble of populating a database for personal use, so I don’t just own the data, I own a particular representation of the data.  But if I granted a large company or government access to my data stream, who would own the data?

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Big Physiological Data

I attended a short conference event organised by the CEEDs project earlier this month entitled “Making Sense of Big Data.”  CEEDS is an EU-funded project under the Future and Emerging Technology (FET) Initiative.  The project is concerned with the development of novel technologies to support human experience.  The event took place at the Google Campus in London and included a range of speakers talking about the use of data to capture human experience and behaviour.  You can find a link about the event here that contains full details and films of all the talks including a panel discussion.  My own talk was a general introduction to physiological computing and a statement of our latest project work.

It was a thought-provoking day because it was an opportunity to view the area of physiological computing from a different perspective.  The main theme being that we are entering the age of ‘big data’ in the sense that passive monitoring of people using mobile technology grants access to a wide array of data concerning human behaviour.  Of course this is hugely relevant to physiological monitoring systems, which tend towards high-resolution data capture and may represent the richest vein of big data to index the human experience.

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First International Conference on Physiological Computing

If there is a problem for academics working in the area of physiological computing, it can sometimes be a problem finding the right place to publish.  By the right place, I mean a forum that is receptive to multidisciplinary research and where you feel confident that you can reach the right audience.  Having done a lot of reviewing of physiological computing papers, I see work that is often strong on measures/methodology but weak on applications; alternatively papers tend to focus on interaction mechanics but are sometimes poor on the measurement side.  The main problem lies with the expertise of the reviewer or reviewers, who often tend to be psychologists or computer scientists and it can be difficult for authors to strike the right balance.

For this reason, I’m writing to make people aware of The First International Conference on Physiological Computing to be held in Lisbon next January.  The deadline for papers is 30th July 2013.  A selected number of papers will be published by Springer-Verlag as part of their series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science.  The journal Multimedia Tools & Applications (also published by Springer) will also select papers presented at the conference to form a special issue.  There is also a special issue of the journal Transactions in Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) on physiological computing that is currently open for submissions, the cfp is here and the deadline is 20th December 2013.

I should also plug a new journal from Inderscience called the International Journal of Cognitive Performance Support which has just published its first edition and would welcome contributions on brain-computer interfaces and biofeedback mechanics.

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Troubleshooting and Mind-Reading: Developing EEG-based interaction with commercial systems

With regards to the development of physiological computing systems, whether they are BCI applications or fall into the category of affective computing, there seems (to me) to be two distinct types of research community at work. The first (and oldest) community are university-based academics, like myself, doing basic research on measures, methods and prototypes with the primary aim of publishing our work in various conferences and journals. For the most part, we are a mixture of psychologists, computer scientists and engineers, many of whom have an interest in human-computer interaction. The second community formed around the availability of commercial EEG peripherals, such as the Emotiv and Neurosky. Some members of this community are academics and others are developers, I suspect many are dedicated gamers. They are looking to build applications and hacks to embellish interactive experience with a strong emphasis on commercialisation.

There are many differences between the two groups. My own academic group is ‘old-school’ in many ways, motivated by research issues and defined by the usual hierarchies associated with specialisation and rank. The newer group is more inclusive (the tag-line on the NeuroSky site is “Brain Sensors for Everyone”); they basically want to build stuff and preferably sell it.

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