Petr Slovak | Tu Wien (original) (raw)
Papers by Petr Slovak
Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI 2014, 2014
The role of empathy has come to prominence in HCI as the community increasingly engages with issu... more The role of empathy has come to prominence in HCI as the community increasingly engages with issues in medical, health and emotionally charged contexts. In such settings empathizing with others is crucial in understanding the experience of living with specific conditions, or in being sensitive to the concerns and emotions of potentially vulnerable participants. Researchers in these areas become implicated in designing new tools and technologies that support empathic relations. This workshop therefore aims to build an interdisciplinary community of researchers, designers and practitioners to share and discuss their work and the challenges they encountered when establishing empathic relationships within health or care contexts. We will work towards developing a richer conceptual and practical understanding of empathic engagement and design methods in this context to support and shape an agenda for future research.
Well-developed interpersonal skills are crucial for all social interactions. However, understandi... more Well-developed interpersonal skills are crucial for all social interactions. However, understanding how interpersonal skills are taught or learned, and how technology can play a part in this, is yet an under-researched area in CSCW and HCI research. To start addressing this gap, our research explores the learning processes of counselling students, for whom developing interpersonal skills forms a fundamental part of their university education. We followed an iterative process to gain an in-depth understanding of a specific counselling program in the UK, combining interviews and low-fidelity technology prompts. Overall, 26 participants comprising tutors, students and expert counsellors took part. Our findings first provide insights into the highly collaborative and social learning process of the students. We highlight the complexity of interpersonal reflection as a crucial process for developing counselling skills, and identify the challenges to learning that students face. Second, we build on this understanding to draw out empirically grounded design considerations around opportunities for technology innovation in this setting.
Social and emotional skills are crucial for all aspects of our everyday life. However, understand... more Social and emotional skills are crucial for all aspects of our everyday life. However, understanding how digital technology can facilitate the development and learning of such skills is yet an under-researched area in HCI. To start addressing this gap, this paper reports on a series of interviews and design workshops with the leading researchers and developers of 'Social and Emotional Learning' (SEL) curricula throughout the US. SEL is a subfield of educational psychology with a long history of teaching such skills, and a range of evidence based curricula that are widely deployed. We identify the shared challenges across existing curricula that digital technology might help address: the support for out-of-session learning, scaffolding for parental engagement, and feedback for the curricula developers. We argue how this presents an opportunity for mutually beneficial collaborations, with the potential for significant real-world impact of novel HCI systems, but can also inform future HCI work on related social and emotional skills topics.
Advances in biosensing make it possible to include heart rate monitoring in applications and seve... more Advances in biosensing make it possible to include heart rate monitoring in applications and several studies have suggested that heart rate communication has potential for improving social connectedness. However, it is not known how people understand heart rate feedback, or what issues need to be taken into account when designing technologies including heart rate feedback. To explore this, we created a heart rate communication probe that was used in two qualitative in-lab studies and a two-week field trial in participants' homes. Results show that heart rate feedback is a strong connectedness cue that affects the interaction in various ways, depending on a number of interrelated factors. In particular, we found two distinct categories of effects: heart rate as information and heart rate as connection. We propose two mechanisms that could explain these observations and draw out the implications they have for future use of heartbeat communication to support social connectedness or other aspects of social interaction.
Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) is a visual formalism for the description of communication behavio... more Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) is a visual formalism for the description of communication behaviour of distributed systems. An MSC specifies relations between communication events with partial orders. A situation when two visually ordered events may occur in any order during an execution of an MSC is called a race and is usually considered as a design error. While there is a quadratic time algorithm detecting races in a finite communication behaviours called Basic Message Sequence Charts (BMSCs), the race detection problem is undecidable for High-level Message Sequence Charts (HMSCs), an MSC formalism describing potentially infinite sets of potentially unbounded behaviours. To improve this negative situation for HMSCs, we introduce two new notions: a new concept of race called trace-race and an extension of the HMSC formalism with open coregions, i.e. coregions that can extend over more than one BMSC. We present three arguments showing benefits of our notions over the standard notions of race and HMSC. First, every trace-race-free HMSC is also race-free. Second, every race-free HMSC can be equivalently expressed as a trace-race-free HMSC with open coregions. Last, the trace-race detection problem for HMSC with open coregions is decidable and PSPACE-complete. Finally, the proposed extension of coregions allows to represent in a visual fashion whether an arbitrary number of racing events in the usual MSC formalism are concurrent or not.
Videoconferencing has emerged as a popular method of remote communication. The design of a videoc... more Videoconferencing has emerged as a popular method of remote communication. The design of a videoconferencing environment strongly influences the communication efficiency and user satisfaction. Various studies on perceived effects of videoconferencing environments and their parameters have been done, however, they primarily focused on dyadic conversation. This paper describes an exploratory study on the effects on remote groups communication. Beginning with the standard environment, a videoconferencing design has been developed iteratively according to information obtained from the experimental group. Two new videoconferencing environment designs are introduced to suit the group conversation needs better and bring the group videoconference closer to face-to-face communication.
In this paper we describe a quantitative study of a group-to-group videoconferencing environment ... more In this paper we describe a quantitative study of a group-to-group videoconferencing environment called GColl that provides a compromise between the need for preserving non-verbal cues and the requirements of low-cost and flexibility. We have compared the task process and outcome of participants interacting over an environment analogous to common commodity solutions, those using face-to-face communication, and groups communicating over
We present a videoconferencing tool, GColl, which aims to support collaboration among remote grou... more We present a videoconferencing tool, GColl, which aims to support collaboration among remote groups of participants. GColl supports mutual gaze as well as partial gaze awareness for all participants, while still retaining a modest technical requirements: a camera and an echo-canceling microphone at each site; and a laptop with two USB cameras for each user. The environment is also easily
In this paper, we present GColl, a group-to-group videoconferencing environment concept, which ai... more In this paper, we present GColl, a group-to-group videoconferencing environment concept, which aims to provide a natural communication channel even for ad-hoc groups or other teams that require frequent changes in the number of participants or videoconferencing locations. GColl supports mutual gaze as well as partial gaze awareness for all participants while still retaining very modest technical requirements: a camera and an echo-canceling microphone at each site; and a notebook with two USB cameras for each user. A working prototype is available for download.
Previous work has shown that supporting trust via computer-mediated communication can be a challe... more Previous work has shown that supporting trust via computer-mediated communication can be a challenge, especially among strangers. In this paper, we report on an experiment comparing two group-to-group video-conferencing environments and face-to-face communication in their ability to support trust and mutual cooperation in a social dilemma task. There are pronounced differences in participant behaviour between the two video-conferencing designs, indicating
Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI 2014, 2014
The role of empathy has come to prominence in HCI as the community increasingly engages with issu... more The role of empathy has come to prominence in HCI as the community increasingly engages with issues in medical, health and emotionally charged contexts. In such settings empathizing with others is crucial in understanding the experience of living with specific conditions, or in being sensitive to the concerns and emotions of potentially vulnerable participants. Researchers in these areas become implicated in designing new tools and technologies that support empathic relations. This workshop therefore aims to build an interdisciplinary community of researchers, designers and practitioners to share and discuss their work and the challenges they encountered when establishing empathic relationships within health or care contexts. We will work towards developing a richer conceptual and practical understanding of empathic engagement and design methods in this context to support and shape an agenda for future research.
Well-developed interpersonal skills are crucial for all social interactions. However, understandi... more Well-developed interpersonal skills are crucial for all social interactions. However, understanding how interpersonal skills are taught or learned, and how technology can play a part in this, is yet an under-researched area in CSCW and HCI research. To start addressing this gap, our research explores the learning processes of counselling students, for whom developing interpersonal skills forms a fundamental part of their university education. We followed an iterative process to gain an in-depth understanding of a specific counselling program in the UK, combining interviews and low-fidelity technology prompts. Overall, 26 participants comprising tutors, students and expert counsellors took part. Our findings first provide insights into the highly collaborative and social learning process of the students. We highlight the complexity of interpersonal reflection as a crucial process for developing counselling skills, and identify the challenges to learning that students face. Second, we build on this understanding to draw out empirically grounded design considerations around opportunities for technology innovation in this setting.
Social and emotional skills are crucial for all aspects of our everyday life. However, understand... more Social and emotional skills are crucial for all aspects of our everyday life. However, understanding how digital technology can facilitate the development and learning of such skills is yet an under-researched area in HCI. To start addressing this gap, this paper reports on a series of interviews and design workshops with the leading researchers and developers of 'Social and Emotional Learning' (SEL) curricula throughout the US. SEL is a subfield of educational psychology with a long history of teaching such skills, and a range of evidence based curricula that are widely deployed. We identify the shared challenges across existing curricula that digital technology might help address: the support for out-of-session learning, scaffolding for parental engagement, and feedback for the curricula developers. We argue how this presents an opportunity for mutually beneficial collaborations, with the potential for significant real-world impact of novel HCI systems, but can also inform future HCI work on related social and emotional skills topics.
Advances in biosensing make it possible to include heart rate monitoring in applications and seve... more Advances in biosensing make it possible to include heart rate monitoring in applications and several studies have suggested that heart rate communication has potential for improving social connectedness. However, it is not known how people understand heart rate feedback, or what issues need to be taken into account when designing technologies including heart rate feedback. To explore this, we created a heart rate communication probe that was used in two qualitative in-lab studies and a two-week field trial in participants' homes. Results show that heart rate feedback is a strong connectedness cue that affects the interaction in various ways, depending on a number of interrelated factors. In particular, we found two distinct categories of effects: heart rate as information and heart rate as connection. We propose two mechanisms that could explain these observations and draw out the implications they have for future use of heartbeat communication to support social connectedness or other aspects of social interaction.
Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) is a visual formalism for the description of communication behavio... more Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) is a visual formalism for the description of communication behaviour of distributed systems. An MSC specifies relations between communication events with partial orders. A situation when two visually ordered events may occur in any order during an execution of an MSC is called a race and is usually considered as a design error. While there is a quadratic time algorithm detecting races in a finite communication behaviours called Basic Message Sequence Charts (BMSCs), the race detection problem is undecidable for High-level Message Sequence Charts (HMSCs), an MSC formalism describing potentially infinite sets of potentially unbounded behaviours. To improve this negative situation for HMSCs, we introduce two new notions: a new concept of race called trace-race and an extension of the HMSC formalism with open coregions, i.e. coregions that can extend over more than one BMSC. We present three arguments showing benefits of our notions over the standard notions of race and HMSC. First, every trace-race-free HMSC is also race-free. Second, every race-free HMSC can be equivalently expressed as a trace-race-free HMSC with open coregions. Last, the trace-race detection problem for HMSC with open coregions is decidable and PSPACE-complete. Finally, the proposed extension of coregions allows to represent in a visual fashion whether an arbitrary number of racing events in the usual MSC formalism are concurrent or not.
Videoconferencing has emerged as a popular method of remote communication. The design of a videoc... more Videoconferencing has emerged as a popular method of remote communication. The design of a videoconferencing environment strongly influences the communication efficiency and user satisfaction. Various studies on perceived effects of videoconferencing environments and their parameters have been done, however, they primarily focused on dyadic conversation. This paper describes an exploratory study on the effects on remote groups communication. Beginning with the standard environment, a videoconferencing design has been developed iteratively according to information obtained from the experimental group. Two new videoconferencing environment designs are introduced to suit the group conversation needs better and bring the group videoconference closer to face-to-face communication.
In this paper we describe a quantitative study of a group-to-group videoconferencing environment ... more In this paper we describe a quantitative study of a group-to-group videoconferencing environment called GColl that provides a compromise between the need for preserving non-verbal cues and the requirements of low-cost and flexibility. We have compared the task process and outcome of participants interacting over an environment analogous to common commodity solutions, those using face-to-face communication, and groups communicating over
We present a videoconferencing tool, GColl, which aims to support collaboration among remote grou... more We present a videoconferencing tool, GColl, which aims to support collaboration among remote groups of participants. GColl supports mutual gaze as well as partial gaze awareness for all participants, while still retaining a modest technical requirements: a camera and an echo-canceling microphone at each site; and a laptop with two USB cameras for each user. The environment is also easily
In this paper, we present GColl, a group-to-group videoconferencing environment concept, which ai... more In this paper, we present GColl, a group-to-group videoconferencing environment concept, which aims to provide a natural communication channel even for ad-hoc groups or other teams that require frequent changes in the number of participants or videoconferencing locations. GColl supports mutual gaze as well as partial gaze awareness for all participants while still retaining very modest technical requirements: a camera and an echo-canceling microphone at each site; and a notebook with two USB cameras for each user. A working prototype is available for download.
Previous work has shown that supporting trust via computer-mediated communication can be a challe... more Previous work has shown that supporting trust via computer-mediated communication can be a challenge, especially among strangers. In this paper, we report on an experiment comparing two group-to-group video-conferencing environments and face-to-face communication in their ability to support trust and mutual cooperation in a social dilemma task. There are pronounced differences in participant behaviour between the two video-conferencing designs, indicating