Helsinki Institute for Information Technology

About: Helsinki Institute for Information Technology is a facility organization based out in Espoo, Finland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Bayesian network. The organization has 630 authors who have published 1962 publications receiving 63426 citations.

Prototyping Social Interaction

Abstract: Introduction Recent changes in information technology have made social interaction an increasingly important topic for interaction design and technology development. Mobile phones, PDAs, games, and laptops have eased interpersonal communication and brought it into new contexts such as bus stops, trains, cars, and city streets—in fact everywhere people find themselves and move about. In these situations, the old paradigms of one person interacting with technology, or a group at work in an office or collaborating over a shared system, are inadequate for guiding the design of such systems. For interaction design, these technologies represent new kinds of challenges. Interaction design has inherited its methodic baggage mainly from three sources, none of which specifically focuses on how ordinary people use social technologies. Usability research and human-computer interaction (HCI) seldom quote sociological theory in their premises.1 While research in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) increasingly has focused on questions outside of the workplace, the basis of this field of study still stems from studies of the workplace, in which social organization is devised to support work rather than ordinary activities.2 New articulations of methods and frameworks are required for designing interactive technologies for social interaction in ordinary activities. This paper describes a series of studies conducted in Helsinki that focused on prototyping how people interact with each other using mobile multimedia. The central claim is that a prototype is not only a representation of a product or technology—such as a paper prototype, a software prototype, or a physical mock-up—but that it consists of both the representation and the social interaction the participants create together. For convenience, we talk about “prototyping social interaction.” The argument of this paper applies in particular to small communication devices meant for everyday life, but it also can be used with other products and services. Social processes inevitably affect the way in which technology is perceived, accepted, and used. If these processes are neglected, designs face risks. In our opinion, there ought to be ways to anticipate at least some of them. 1 Jenny Preece, Human-Computer Interaction (Harlow, England: AddisonWesley, 1994). 2 See Andy Crabtree, Designing Collaborative Systems: A Practical Guide to Ethnography (London: Springer, 2003). Acknowledgement We would like to thank the Ministry of Trade and Industry for funding Mobile Image, Radiolinja for continuous cooperation and support, and Nokia Mobile Phones for funding Mobile Album.

Inspiring design idea generation: insights from a memory-search perspective

Abstract: Recently, several investigators have begun to conceptualise idea generation (IG), the process by which new designs are deliberately produced, as a predominantly memory-based activity. In this paper...

Social Interaction in Games: Measuring Physiological Linkage and Social Presence

Abstract: Psychophysiological methodology has been successfully applied to investigate media responses, including the experience of playing digital games. The approach has many benefits for a player experience assessment-it can provide detailed, unbiased, and time-accurate data without interrupting the gameplay. However, gaming can be a highly social activity. This article extends the methodological focus from single player to include multiple simultaneous players. A physiological metric for investigating social experience within a shared gaming context is introduced: Physiological linkage is measured by gathering simultaneous psychophysiological measurements from several players. The authors review how physiological linkage may be associated with social presence among participants in various gaming situations or social contexts. These metrics provide such information about the interaction among participants that is not currently available by any other method. The authors discuss various measures used to calculate linkage, the related social processes, and how to use physiological linkage in game experience research.

Complex cell pooling and the statistics of natural images

Abstract: In previous work, we presented a statistical model of natural images that produced outputs similar to receptive fields of complex cells in primary visual cortex. However, a weakness of that model was that the structure of the pooling was assumed a priori and not learned from the statistical properties of natural images. Here, we present an extended model in which the pooling nonlinearity and the size of the subspaces are optimized rather than fixed, so we make much fewer assumptions about the pooling. Results on natural images indicate that the best probabilistic representation is formed when the size of the subspaces is relatively large, and that the likelihood is considerably higher than for a simple linear model with no pooling. Further, we show that the optimal nonlinearity for the pooling is squaring. We also highlight the importance of contrast gain control for the performance of the model. Our model is novel in that it is the first to analyze optimal subspace size and how this size is influenced by contrast normalization.