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Domestic Objects are emerging as a source for embedding ubiquitous computer technologies. The current focus on single objects or a singular function neglects people's diverse functional use of domestic objects and their cultural significances at home. Based on ethnographic interviews, this paper reports how people utilize domestic objects in relation to activities and domestic spaces. The paper concludes with some design considerations for ubiquitous computer devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A range of research has pointed to empirical studies of the use of domestic materials as a useful insight when designing future interactive systems for homes. In this paper we describe how we designed a system from the basis of lessons from such studies. Our system applies the CASOME infrastructure (context-aware interactive media platform for social computing in the home) to construct a system supporting distributed and collaborative handling of digital materials in a domestic context. It contains a collective platform for handling digital materials in the home and also contains a range of connected interactive surfaces supporting the flow of digital materials around the physical home. We discuss applications and use scenarios of the system, and finally, we present experiences from lab and field tests of the system. The main contribution of the paper is that it illustrates how insights from empirical studies can be realized in a concrete system design, and it highlights how colocated, connected and social media use is an area which needs further exploration in concrete systems design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the nature and current state of evolution of privacy laws in India. India is an emerging economy, but the Indian ITeS environment has already emerged into a mature and highly competitive destination to outsource a variety of business processes from technically advanced nations. There is, however, a tension that exists between the IT industry's needs and the Indian societal needs in general. One of the causes of such tension pertains to the issue of privacy. An important facet of the IT industry is information privacy — an aspect demanded and expected by its global customers. But the notion of privacy is hardly global. Different countries have different notions of privacy, often based on cultural norms, resulting in widely differing privacy laws. This paper studies the evolution and development of privacy laws from the context of four main players, namely, the law and legal environment, governmental policies, the IT industry and the citizenry of India. The study shows that while India has made several strides in matching the privacy needs of its global clientele, there are several areas which require further work. To some extent, the democratic structure in India, as well as its security needs have made it difficult and cumbersome to enact privacy laws, and more work is required in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the relationship between usability and aesthetics with students and older people. A common mechanical domestic appliance, the can opener, was chosen as a proxy for future digital products. The experiments involved comparing the rated usability of can openers that had been painted to make them more or less aesthetically pleasing. Experiment 1 tested students' ratings of beauty and usability. Experiment 2 similarly tested an elderly population on their ratings before and after use. In general, the products rated more beautiful were rated as more usable. To avoid the possibility that rating a product for its aesthetic qualities could somehow affect its subsequent rating for usability, Experiment 3 repeated Experiment 2 but products were only rated for usability. In Experiments 1 and 3 the manipulation of product features associated only with aesthetic qualities of the product (painting the can openers) also significantly affected ratings of usability. The results are related to Hassenzahl's model of user experience, and interpreted in terms of the holistic evaluation of product features in judgements of hedonic and pragmatic attributes. The results confirm and extend previous findings and highlight the importance of aesthetic considerations as well as usability in all forms of design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A framework of usability factors is presented which serves as a basis for the thorough research of usability issues in the context of smart home systems. Based on well accepted approaches taken from the literature, various aspects related to usability are identified as significant for the implementation and future development of smart home systems. Finally, the partly existing prototypical installation of a smart home system is discussed and scenarios for future investigations are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding current issues and experiences with technologies in the home, and the relationships with work and school in how technologies are managed in the home, can be useful for anticipating issues with next generation technologies. This paper contributes to this understanding through in-home studies with ten UK households. Case data is presented that both reinforces current understandings about access to expertise in the workplace and school, and presents new understandings that further unpack the ways in which the technology in the home influenced by work and school. We also discuss the more subtle ways in which technologies get into the home, and how they are managed and maintained through people's exposure to technologies, skills and expertise outside of the home. Given the increasing interest in ubiquitous technologies for the home, as played out in next generation home automation and home monitoring scenarios, we argue that such discussions are timely reminders, raising interesting questions about how these future technologies will come into the home and how people will gain the exposure and experience to help manage them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the study aimed at giving a new direction to Photographs, keeping in mind the growing needs of the people and enriching day-to-day experience vis-à-vis paper based photograph. A survey was conducted which revealed few startling but interesting facts as to what more the end-user wants than a mere ‘physical paper-based photograph'. This paper talks about the survey, response by the participants, results derived from them, current work and future direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Awareness within work environments should not be seen limited to important work-related information, activities and relationships. Mediating somewhat casual and engaging encounters related to non-work issues could also lead to meaningful and pleasurable experiences. This paper explores a design approach to support playfully mediated social awareness within an academic environment. Using ethnographic exploration and understanding the current and aspired practices, we provide details of two broad (and some times overlapping) categories of interaction for supporting and enhancing playfully mediated social awareness amongst staff members: 1) Self-Reflections and 2) Casual Encounters. We implement these two categories of interaction in an intelligent, asynchronous, large screen display called Panorama, for the staff room of our computer science department. Panorama attempts to mediate noncritical, non-work related information about the staff-members in an engaging manner to enhance social awareness within the department. We particularly emphasize on the soft design issues like reflections, belonging, care, pleasure and playfulness utilized in our design approach. The result of a two-phase assessment study suggests that our conceptualization of social awareness and the Panorama application has the potential to be easily incorporated into our academic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper illustrates how communication experiments may be carried out in a domestic recreational context. Participants situated in their homes were connected into group telephone conversations and simply asked to "chat and enjoy yourselves". Following the conversation, participants provided Likert scale ratings of the experience. In addition, the conversations were recorded and analysed. A total of 211 participants took part in two experiments. Telephone groups had an average size of five people, each speaking in the same conversation from their individual homes. Comments from the participants and Likert rating scales indicated that it was a positive recreational experience. The primary manipulation in each experiment was intended to encourage spontaneous co-involvement of all of the group. In Experiment 1 this was done by changing the way participants were introduced to the group, in Experiment 2 the group was made more salient by providing each member with a list of names. Open ended responses obtained from telephone interviews with participants in Experiment 1 were used to construct a questionnaire for Experiment 2 to measure presence, involvement and communication efficacy. The measures extracted from transcripts included the average length of utterances and equality of contribution as well as a new measure, the number of lines to the first "flow episode" in the transcript. While neither of the manipulations produced significant effects on Likert scale ratings made after the sessions or the measures extracted from transcripts, the paper is able to recommend the measures used and to provide practical advice for other investigators seeking to run communication experiments in a recreational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ubiquitous computing has come a long way since Weiser introduced the concept in 1988 where he put forward some ideas as to how the future of computing would allow us to interact more freely. Today this paradigm of computing is affecting us in more than one way from homes, to offices, to travel, to even the way we are presenting ourselves, with smart clothes embedded with technology. When it comes to the home environment we look at objects as personal attributes and form a close relationship with them. Today the PC has become a personal communication tool, which is being used for variety of purposes like Internet browsing, shopping, photo sharing. The combination of Internet and digital photography has allowed people to share photos with friends and families who are geographically separated. And when we look at smart homes of the future we expect networking and the Internet to form the central hub for information for the homeowners, hence providing an environment for anytime anywhere computing. We aim to provide a ubiquitous photo sharing environment for the smart home of the future which will allow the users to receive, store, and distribute images between various devices and allow them to attach emotions and personal feelings to pictures in a convenient and enjoyable way, as home is a place where we express most of our emotions. This paper provides the design scenario of how the photo-sharing environment will be built and evaluates how social relationships can be enhanced by the use of digital data related to emotions and photographs. We will look at the factors, which govern the use of digital image technology to provide the level of social interaction and entertainment expected within the smart home to support positive ways of living. We believe that a photo-sharing environment for a smart home could help people in providing important reminders and alerts during critical family events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present material from an ongoing ethnographic investigation of family life. Drawing on selected fieldwork materials, we look at the ways families deal with household clutter, and in particular how clutter can be contained in bowls and drawers. Based on this research, a case is made for rethinking digital media management in domestic settings. We argue that existing solutions, largely based around the PC, inhibit the casual storage and loose organization of content, properties afforded in both bowls and drawers. We explore a design perspective that aims to address this by building on physical properties of the bowl, using salient properties from fieldwork material to sketch out an early concept of an augmented bowl designed to hold physical and digital content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The artefact or object-based models commonly used in interaction design for describing users are inadequate for understanding the complexity and variability of online consumer behaviour, while traditional models of consumer behaviour do not reflect the user's ability to shape their shopping experience online. To address this gap a framework has been developed for modelling online consumer behaviour and in this paper this framework is used to develop a survey of online grocery shopping in the UK. Analysis of the survey reveals several issues of concern, particularly dissatisfaction with product search capabilities and a conflict between the online consumer's desires for both empowerment and experimentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents critical issues concerning the community sensitive personal health information system in rural India, from an industrial design perspective. Literature in current ICT based applications, point to the fact that, current efforts related to personal health information dissemination have gained limited acceptance at community level among rural population. This is probably due to limited understanding of community sensitive information needs, societal structure and user beliefs of the rural community. To understand the underlying social values and users beliefs related to personal health information (PHI), a preliminary study including field interviews and review of currently deployed ICT projects was conducted. This paper presents the preliminary results, indicating several social and design challenges towards the development of a PHI system. Further the paper proposes a design framework, which includes design as a primary tool to shape existing user beliefs to positively influence the technology acceptance process of PHI system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a case study of developing and using community knowledge management software. The context of the case study is a school. During a training workshop staff at a school was introduced to a community knowledge management system. The intent was for them to use it for lesson planning and discussions. Instead, they built a series of applications that they could use to make the school administration more efficient. These applications consisted of Admission, Library, Store and Personnel Management. This case study demonstrates that the ICT need for the next billion is to provide them with systems that they can customize and manage for their needs. An anticipated domino effect would be that they help customize applications for their neighbors' needs, thereby narrowing a digital divide caused by the mystification of application development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses active teaching and learning strategies that have been used in the TeNeT Online tutorials [1]. The focus of these tutorials is to enable rural students to pass the Standard X examination. The highlight of the tutorial is the use of the Question and Answer format. This problem-solving approach is evident in its three-pronged format: Learn, Practice and Test. Every module is based on questions and answers. In the learn mode, students learn the steps to answer a question and thus the concepts behind it. In the practice and evaluation modes, students can test their knowledge and understanding. This approach enhances the element of interactivity in these tutorials. Combined together, the elements of interactivity and problem-solving have made the tutorials a healthy supplement to conventional class rooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an investigation of how Awareness Systems can support communication between busy parents and young children at school. The study involved the deployment and test of a rudimentary awareness system so that surveying opinions and wishes regarding this type of technology would be grounded upon concrete experiences. The prototype was installed in a classroom for two weeks and connected five families with their children. Overall, parents appreciated receiving awareness information and did not experience it as an undesirable distraction. Both they and their children did not experience privacy problems. They raised concerns about the possibility of children becoming more dependent upon their parents from such technology and stated they would not want to receive information that they would not be able to react upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following worldwide tendencies, the patterns of usage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Mexico are being influenced by increasing affordability. In this work we present the results of a study on the use and adoption of ICTs to support daily life in residential communities conducted in Tecamac, Mexico. There, neighbors were provided with computers and broadband internet access as part of the facilities. The study consists of analysis of interviews conducted in situ with members of the community. We mainly discuss incidents and situations beyond and around the use of technology such as the services neighbors need when moving in. This study provides some insights for the design and deployment of technology in real communities on a large scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Intelligent Tutoring Systems have been developed using different Artificial Intelligence techniques. In this paper we propose to use Reinforcement Learning for building an intelligent tutoring system to teach autistic students, who can't communicate well with others. In reinforcement learning, a policy is updated for taking appropriate action to teach the student. The main advantage of using reinforcement learning is that, it eliminates the need for encoding pedagogical rules. Various issues in using reinforcement learning for intelligent tutoring systems are discussed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a high level of abstraction,' social inclusion' can be defined as the extent to which an individual or community can fully participate in society and control their own collective destiny. There are large disparities in this, particularly in underdeveloped rural areas of the world. Information and communication technologies designed to address this disparity must take into account the many barriers in the use of technology that these communities face. We define an 'inclusive technology' as a technology which overcomes the barriers to using technology inherent within a given community and increases the opportunities available to that community. We propose a conceptual model and a set of heuristic measurements for examining the 'inclusiveness' of a technology with respect to a given community, and illustrate their use by applying them to two real-world projects. By proposing this model and set of measurements, we hope to achieve a better understanding of'development projects' and create a systematic process and a framework to assist software engineers in designing and evaluating software based services intended to reduce the Digital Divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DesiCrew is a unique Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) initiative that provides high volume data related services at an affordable cost from rural areas across India. The model provides cost cutting alternatives to urban clients and new sources of income and employment to the villagers, by leveraging Internet technology. The DesiCrew central team in Chennai manages training of rural workforce, distribution and monitoring of work, quality control and client interaction all remotely. In this paper, we describe the Rural BPO model and one specific application, data entry of forms. We describe the software, Pegasus, developed for this purpose and explain the management of the distributed workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can have dramatic impact on poverty alleviation for rural women and for achieving socio economic development goals. Rural women need to treat ICTs as an empowerment tool and a means to a living. The use of mobile communication devices and internet are changing the way agricultural activities are managed by farmers nowadays. Rural women's lack of mobility and less hands-on computer experience might hinder women's welfare and empowerment. This paper analyses how use of the telephony (both cellular and land line), internet and other ICTs can benefit rural women in educational, business and economic sector. Women in rural India and rural South Africa were marginalized partly due to their lack of ability in being vocal when it comes to empowering themselves using ICTs due to cultural norms in India, and apartheid in South Africa. Over the years, unlike other developing countries, the above-mentioned countries have its unique ICT projects meant for empowering rural women. This paper is driven from the authors' commitment for rural development and rural women empowerment. It highlights different low-cost ICT initiatives and strategies taken by women's organizations, various companies and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for rural women empowerment. The paper also highlights various factors influencing use of internet and mobile phone adoption by rural women. Various bottlenecks for the community projects, factors de-motivating the use of mobile phones and internet by rural women and possible solutions for these are also mentioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]