Blaine Price | The Open University (original) (raw)

Papers by Blaine Price

... to the fact that programming environment designers did not provide appropriate visualizationt... more ... to the fact that programming environment designers did not provide appropriate visualizationtools. The second theme was that, even though several vendors were represented at the workshop, there was a need to increase the awareness of SV among software developers and ...

The supplemental proceedings of the conference on Integrating technology into computer science education: working group reports and supplemental proceedings - ITiCSE-WGR '97, 1997

Can we find effective substitutes for face-to-face teaching, especially for student-led problem s... more Can we find effective substitutes for face-to-face teaching, especially for student-led problem sessions and collaborative practical work? Although Internet technology and the WWW have been hailed as a panacea for education, and distance education in particular, few people are making effective use of the technology or demonstrating scalable examples, especially in terms of replacing face-to-face teaching. This paper presents some models attempted and lessons learned in large-scale Internet teaching on Computing courses. type of submission: paper conference themes:

It is proposed that vocabularies for representing complex systems with interacting agents have a ... more It is proposed that vocabularies for representing complex systems with interacting agents have a natural lattice hierarchical structure. We investigate this for the example of simulated robot soccer, using data taken from the RoboCup simulation competition. Lattice hierarchies provide symbolic representations for reasoning about systems at appropriate levels. We note the difference between relational constructs being humansupplied versus systems that abstract their own constructs autonomously. The lattice hierarchical representation underlies both.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

Complexity science is characterised by computational irreducibility, chaotic dynamics, combinator... more Complexity science is characterised by computational irreducibility, chaotic dynamics, combinatorial explosion, co-evolution, and multilevel lattice hierarchical structure. One of its main predictive tools is computer-generated distributions of possible future system states. This assumes that the system can be represented inside computers. Robot soccer provides an excellent laboratory subject for complexity science, and we seek a lattice hierarchical vocabulary to provide coherent symbolic representations for reasoning about robot soccer systems at appropriate levels. There is a difference between constructs being human-supplied and them being abstracted autonomously. The former are implicitly lattice-hierarchically structured. We argue that making the lattice hierarchy explicit is necessary for autonomous systems to abstract their own constructs. The ideas are illustrated using data taken from the RoboCup simulation competition.

This paper presents a framework which allows users flexible control of the disclosure of their pe... more This paper presents a framework which allows users flexible control of the disclosure of their personal information in a generic ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) environment. It incorporates an economics-based approach which allows users to relax their privacy constraints explicitly in order to receive services.

With the first commercial release of a simple lifelogging camera this year and the continued grow... more With the first commercial release of a simple lifelogging camera this year and the continued growth of cheap computing and memory, it is clear that multimedia lifelogging will soon be commonplace. In this paper I argue that lifelogging presents new challenges for studying privacy and usability and that new methodologies to elicit privacy requirements will be needed.

The long-term future of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) for the teaching of programming is se... more The long-term future of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) for the teaching of programming is severely hampered by weaknesses which prevent ITSs from scaling up to cater for either a wide audience or a broad curriculum. The weaknesses include an emphasis on toy examples, the use of instruction-based (as opposed to guided discovery-based) teaching, a lack of attention to user interfaces, and the belief that it is possible to create a comprehensive bug catalogue. We propose an alternative approach, based on examining the needs of expert programmers, and considering a pedagogical trajectory which caters for development from novice to expert. The common thread through this trajectory is "Software Visualization", a collection of techniques which allows beginners to see the innards of program execution clearly, and at the same time allows experts to view high level program abstractions which help them home in quickly on buggy code. We re-work some well known examples from the ITS community, and show how our approach scales up to handle a more sophisticated problem involving a 7,500 line operating system.

Designers seeking to improve human-computer interfaces, particularly those concerned with program... more Designers seeking to improve human-computer interfaces, particularly those concerned with programming environments, often assume that "graphics" will always result in an improvement over "text." Such claims are especially difficult to assess, given that people have used the terms "text" and "graphics" in different and conflicting ways throughout the literature. This paper suggests a preliminary, consistent terminology for discussing "graphical interfaces" (including so called "visual programming systems") to highlight some of the issues involved in using "graphics" in notations and interfaces. It discusses evidence from empirical studies showing that using "graphics" doesn't necessarily lead to improvement and may introduce its own problems. The paper concludes with a discussion of the successful integration of "graphics" and "text."

Although Internet technology and the WWW have been hailed as a panacea for education, and distanc... more Although Internet technology and the WWW have been hailed as a panacea for education, and distance education in particular, few people are making effective use of the technology or demonstrating scalable examples, especially in terms of replacing face-to-face teaching. The Open University (UK) is one of the most successful distance teaching universities in the world and this paper presents some of the models attempted and lessons learned from large-scale Internet teaching on computing courses.

Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and services - MobileHCI '10, 2010

We describe the "Privacy-Shake", a novel interface for managing coarse grained privacy settings. ... more We describe the "Privacy-Shake", a novel interface for managing coarse grained privacy settings. We built a prototype that enables users of Buddy Tracker, an example location sharing application, to change their privacy preferences by shaking their phone. Users can enable or disable location sharing and change the level of granularity of disclosed location by shaking and sweeping their phone. In this poster we present and motivate our work on Privacy-Shake and report on a lab-based evaluation of the interface with 16 participants.

Mobile privacy concerns are central to Ubicomp and yet remain poorly understood. We advocate a di... more Mobile privacy concerns are central to Ubicomp and yet remain poorly understood. We advocate a diversified approach, enabling the cross-interpretation of data from complementary methods. However, mobility imposes a number of limitations on the methods that can be effectively employed. We discuss how we addressed this problem in an empirical study of mobile social networking. We report on how, by combining a variation of experience sampling and contextual interviews, we have started focusing on a notion of context in relation to privacy, which is subjectively defined by emerging socio-cultural knowledge, functions, relations and rules. With reference to Gieryn's sociological work, we call this place, as opposed to a notion of context that is objectively defined by physical and factual elements, which we call space. We propose that the former better describes the context for mobile privacy.

The Windows Vista personal firewall provides its diverse users with a basic interface that hides ... more The Windows Vista personal firewall provides its diverse users with a basic interface that hides many operational details. However, concealing the impact of network context on the security state of the firewall may result in users developing an incorrect ...

peer-reviewed How can we best explore the range of users’ reactions when developing future techno... more peer-reviewed How can we best explore the range of users’ reactions when developing future technologies that may be controversial, such as personal healthcare systems? Our approach in ContraVision uses futuristic videos, or other narrative forms, that convey both negative and positive aspects of the proposed technology for the same scenarios. This work presents a new methodology for eliciting reactions to future technology using contrasting positive and negative representations to elicit elusive concerns such as privacy and identity. SFI

Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '10, 2010

How can we best explore the range of users' reactions when developing future technologies that ma... more How can we best explore the range of users' reactions when developing future technologies that maybe controversial, such as personal healthcare systems? Our approach -Contravision -uses futuristic videos, or other narrative forms, that convey either negative or positive aspects of the proposed technology for the same scenarios. We conducted a users study to investigate what range of responses the different versions elicited. Our findings show that the use of two systematically comparable representations of the same technology can elicit a wider spectrum of reactions than a single representation can. We discuss why this is so and the value of obtaining breadth in user feedback for potentially controversial technologies.