Ted Selker - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Ted Selker

Abstract. Two kinds of discourse typically define scientific productions: logical (epistemology o... more Abstract. Two kinds of discourse typically define scientific productions: logical (epistemology of science) and rhetorical (sociology of science). We suggest that research projects can also be analyzed as poetical productions. While rhetorical strategies anticipate controversies and deploy techniques to defend projects and findings, poetical practices deepen the cultural and symbolic dimensions of technologies. Based on use cases that show different ways the poetics come to bear on research and development projects in information technology (IT), we discuss the play on words and images and how they contribute to the definition and creation of a new technology within research projects. Three cases of poetical practices are presented: naming technologies, christening projects, and designing logos. We give examples of naming and project identity formation to underscore how such a poetic stance impacts projects. Images and words help people imagine what the technology is about by giving...

Shouldn't the future be a place where our graphical interfaces disencumber computer use? We s... more Shouldn't the future be a place where our graphical interfaces disencumber computer use? We should be developing a library of graphical presentation and interface techniques relative to where they are useful. We should work to make things respect the ergonomic and psychophysical realities of people. We should work to make things that look like what they do or represent. When these goals over constrain design, we need good teaching tools - prosthetics - to help the user share the designer's vision. When should the user interface should slink out of the way to allow us to focus our attention on our tasks and when should it be stylish and playful? The sea-green institutional paint of the 50s was supposed be a relaxing color. Interfaces also might suffer from being offensively bland. We choose and use things to make a social statement of status, style, and knowledge. This paper discusses how tools should give designers the latitude to create brand and style statements, while mak...

This paper shows that a Smartphone’s accelerometers can corroborate metrics of quality of daily l... more This paper shows that a Smartphone’s accelerometers can corroborate metrics of quality of daily living. A HTC G1 application was created to capture hand tremor. The application was tested on volunteer participants, both with and without known hand tremor. Experiments were run to assess the application’s ability to distinguish tremor for a participant and between participants. The application was also used to test if it could corroborate self report of sleep quality. Our experiments were able to use the Smartphone accelerometers to easily distinguish tremor frequency and frequency change between people with diagnosed hand tremor and those that did not have it. Showing hand tremor on a mobile device has the potential to help those with hand tremor track and gain greater understanding of the tremor’s manifestation over time. Such an understanding could aid in diagnosis and provide those with hand tremor indications of lifestyle factors that exacerbate or relieve certain types of tremor...

2020 IEEE 44th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), 2020

People struggle to invent safe passwords for many of their typical online activities, leading to ... more People struggle to invent safe passwords for many of their typical online activities, leading to a variety of security problems when they use overly simple passwords or reuse them multiple times with minor modifications. Having different passwords for each service generally requires password managers or memorable (but weak) passwords, introducing other vulnerabilities [1], [2]. Recent research [3], [4] has offered multiple alternatives but those require either rote memorisation [5] or computation on a physical device[6], [7]. This paper describes a secure and usable solution to this problem that requires no assistance from any physical device. We present the Cue-Pin-Select password family scheme that requires little memorisation and allows users to create and retrieve passwords easily. It uses our natural cognitive abilities to be durable, adaptable to different password requirements, and resistant to attacks, including ones involving plain-text knowledge of some passwords from the ...

In everyday life, we perform several activities in our periphery of attention. For example, we ar... more In everyday life, we perform several activities in our periphery of attention. For example, we are aware of what the weather is like and we can routinely wash our hands without actively thinking about it. However, we can also easily focus on these activities when desired. Contrarily, interactions with computing devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, usually require focused attention, or even demand it through flashing displays, beeping sounds, and vibrations used to alert people. Hence, these interactions move more unpredictably between periphery and center of attention compared to non-computer-mediated activities. With the number of computers embedded in our everyday environment increasing, inevitably interaction with these computers will move to the periphery of attention. Inspired by the way we fluently divide our attentional resources over various activities in everyday life, we call this type of interaction “peripheral interaction.” We believe that considering and e...

Conference calls represent a natural but limited communication channel between people. Lack of vi... more Conference calls represent a natural but limited communication channel between people. Lack of visual contact and limited bandwidth impoverish social cues people typically use to moderate their behavior. This paper presents a system capable of providing timely aural feedback enabling meeting participants to check themselves. The system is able to sense and recognize problems, reason about them, and make decisions on how and when to provide feedback based on an interaction policy. While a hand-crafted policy based on expert insight can be used, it is non-optimal and can be brittle. Instead, we use reinforcement learning to build a system that can adapt to users by interacting with them. To evaluate the system, we first conduct a user study and demonstrate its utility in getting meeting participants to contribute more equally. We then validate the adaptive feedback policy by demonstrating the agent's ability to adapt its action choices to different types of users.

Creativity and Interface

Communications of The ACM, 2002

Información del artículo Creativity and Interface.

The “technology” to be supervised in voting processes is the process itself. No one particular de... more The “technology” to be supervised in voting processes is the process itself. No one particular device can be a magic bullet to ensure secure voting. Process failures occur in every step of the voting process, including the technical steps voters take as they register, check in to polling sites, receive their ballots, solicit human technical assistance with voting hardware, and entrust their ballots to election staff. Process failures in these and other areas are currently a greater threat to accurately measuring voter intention than direct security breakdowns or vulnerabilities of voting devices themselves.

For voters who cannot read a graphical ballot, audio-based voting systems currently in use can pr... more For voters who cannot read a graphical ballot, audio-based voting systems currently in use can provide a private and independent path for entering the first and last names of write-in candidates, but the process tends to be slow, difficult to comprehend, and inaccurate. Challenges range from technical and procedural to cognitive and emotional, and have led, at times, to disenfranchisement, according to the Government Accountability Office’s 2013 Statement before the National Council on Disability. Entering candidate names without difficulty is crucial to the fairness — and ultimate legal standing — of our election system. To resolve these issues, we developed and tested three novel audio interfaces that enable navigation and selection of characters through simple techniques that allow users to linearly access an alphabet for the purpose of typing a specific name. A number of factors were found to improve character input speed, input accuracy, and user comfort, including using as few...

This paper presents the “extremity” approach to creating user-interface experiences. We describe ... more This paper presents the “extremity” approach to creating user-interface experiences. We describe a class of dataacquisition systems called “extremity-computing devices” and their broad implications to user-interface design scenarios. These devices are used to interface sensors and effectors in wearable-computer applications. Instead of wearing a complete computer, outfitted with interface, storage, and processing components, a user needs only to wear sensors attached to a small microcontroller-based device with rudimentary user interface, local storage, and off-body transfer. Users access data externally, on a device of their choice: hand-held, laptop, or desktop computer, cell phone, etc. We have used extremity devices to gather physiological and motion data, surrounding temperature and lighting conditions, proximity, and the identity of people and objects nearby. We have utilized data gathered by these devices in applications in the areas of education, research, healthcare, and en...

There are many problems around us need to be solved by human agents. It is very challenging to pe... more There are many problems around us need to be solved by human agents. It is very challenging to persuade people to change behavior implicitly, especially for solving public problems. We leverage persuasive mechanism for increasing incentives to change human behavior in a problem solving framework. By linking feedback to the actions, we've been able to increase the incentives to trigger behavior change. We deploy two persuasive feedback system in a building to support energy-saving scenario. By integrating sound feedback to window closing behavior to make people aware of the energy problem in the public space.

A pointing device which can be operated from typing position avoids time loss and distraction. We... more A pointing device which can be operated from typing position avoids time loss and distraction. We have built and investigated force-sensitive devices for this purpose. The critical link is the force-tomotion mapping. We have found principles which enable a force joystick to match the function and approach the performance of a mouse in pure pointing tasks, and to best it in mixed tasks, such as editing. Examples take into account task, user strategy and perceptual-motor limitations.

Ted Selker selker@media.mit.edu Caltech/MIT Voting Project Overview Computers are important in ev... more Ted Selker selker@media.mit.edu Caltech/MIT Voting Project Overview Computers are important in every aspect of modern life. Automatic tabulating machines are designed to be the most consistent and reliable counting approach invented. Still, questions of reliability, security and auditability persist. Ken Thompson and others have shown that, like other carelessly composed processes, computer programs can harbor potentially criminal activity. To be useful for voting, software must simplify and improve the ability to record and report intentions. Best practices must be used in creating important software to guard against bugs and malware. In spite of the fact that malware can be hidden in any program, there are ways to assure that it is not impacting the operation of the software. First, test vectors must allow testing of the software in every conceivable situation. Second, demonstrations can be arranged to show that it is running correctly when it is actually used. Third, computers ca...

Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '95, 1995

In-keyboard isometric joysticks can give better performance than mice for mixed typing/pointing t... more In-keyboard isometric joysticks can give better performance than mice for mixed typing/pointing tasks. The continuing challenge is to improve such devices to the point that they are preferable even for pure pointing tasks. Previous work has improved joystick performance by considering user perception and motor skills. This paper considers the dynamics of the pointing operation. A dynamic transfer function for an isometric joystick is described which amplifies changes in the applied force to increase responsiveness without loss of control. User tests show a 7.8 +/-3.5% performance improvement over a standard non-dynamic joystick. This feature has been incorporated into the TrackPoint III from IBM.

AI Magazine, 2012

The AAAI-11 workshop program was held Sunday and Monday, August 7–18, 2011, at the Hyatt Regency ... more The AAAI-11 workshop program was held Sunday and Monday, August 7–18, 2011, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco in San Francisco, California USA. The AAAI-11 workshop program included 15 workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. The titles of the workshops were Activity Context Representation: Techniques and Languages; Analyzing Microtext; Applied Adversarial Reasoning and Risk Modeling; Artificial Intelligence and Smarter Living: The Conquest of Complexity; AI for Data Center Management and Cloud Computing; Automated Action Planning for Autonomous Mobile Robots; Computational Models of Natural Argument; Generalized Planning; Human Computation; Human-Robot Interaction in Elder Care; Interactive Decision Theory and Game Theory; Language-Action Tools for Cognitive Artificial Agents: Integrating Vision, Action and Language; Lifelong Learning; Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition; and Scalable Integration of Analytics and Visualization. This article presents...

Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2016

Human performance falls off predictably with excessive task difficulty. This paper reports on a s... more Human performance falls off predictably with excessive task difficulty. This paper reports on a search for a task load estimation metric. Of the five physiological signals analyzed from a multitasking study, only pupil dilation measures correlated well with real-time task load. The paper introduces a novel task load estimation model based on pupil dilation measures. We demonstrate its effectiveness in a multitasking driving scenario. Autonomous mediation of notifications using this model significantly improved user task performance compared to no mediation. The model showed promise even when used outside in a car. Results were achieved using low-cost cameras and open-source measurement tools lending to its potential to be used broadly.

Accelerometer-based RemoteDroid

This paper demonstrates opportunities for reducing errors with orienting graphical interface for ... more This paper demonstrates opportunities for reducing errors with orienting graphical interface for voting. We have built many interfaces to explore opportunities for keeping voters aware of the selections they have made and are making. Tests of our best prototypes show that missed races and incorrect selection errors are greatly reduced with orienting graphics. The interface reduces errors significantly while extending the time required to vote.

A proposed Voter Verifiable Paper Trail (VVPT) includes a printed ballot as a receipt that a vote... more A proposed Voter Verifiable Paper Trail (VVPT) includes a printed ballot as a receipt that a voter can view to verify their vote before leaving an electronic voting machine. This method is also supposed to insure the accuracy of the recorded vote by allowing the tally to be checked later by counting the collected receipts. This paper considers problems with ergonomics, logistics, security, fraud, and mechanical fragility with using VVPT. Ergonomic problems are introduced by the receipt having a different layout than the ballot, difficulty remembering previous selections to make the verification, by the extra step it introduces after making selections and by it not working well for sightless people. Logistics problems include difficulties in collecting and organizing the receipts, transporting them, and reading and reconciling them with electronic tallies. Security issues include the possibility that receipts can be systematically misprinted in a way that cannot be detected and that hand counting will not easily detect fraud. Mechanical problems include printer breakdowns and supplies running out. VVPTs could add problems by being questioned in various ways or though the development of computer programs that defraud the VVPT systematically. VVPTs do not address existing sources of disenfranchisement such as registration problems, equipment and ballot problems, and polling place problems. Experiments and elections have yet to establish that people can in fact verify their ballots using a paper receipt. Effective approaches for accurately counting the paper receipts for auditing purposes have not been established either. Proving that an election correctly records and transmits the intention of the voter is worthwhile. Computers are the first technology that can easily report voting results in multiple formats. Simple systems-verification solutions are possible. Parallel voting and time shifted testing require no extra equipment. Voter Verified Audio Transcripts would simplify voting and improve audit security by presenting verification as feedback during the selection process rather than post hoc auditing. .

New Paradigms for Computing (Introduction to the Special Section)

Cacm, 1996