Alan Chamberlain

University of Nottingham | Notts · School of Computer Science

This paper reports on a field study of small market in Wales undertaken as part of broader research project aimed at developing IT solutions to support rural enterprise. The project is predicated on the assumption that the primary challenge facing rural enterprise is that of scale and that IT solutions could and should add value by enabling growth....

An introduction to the special issue of 'The Turn to The Wild' is provided. The introduction reveals that the phrase 'in-the-wild' is becoming popular again in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), describing approaches to HCI research and accounts of user experience phenomena that differ from those derived from other lab-based methods. Re...

This study examines the development of a mobile phone-based pervasive game that related its user's environmental footprint. It discusses the design challenges, development and evaluation of the prototype game in order to identify the key strategies and mechanisms that relate to the production of pervasive systems for mass participation. Designing t...

We explore transdisciplinary collaborations between artists and roboticists across a portfolio of artworks. Brendan Walker's Broncomatic was a breath controlled mechanical rodeo bull ride. Blast Theory's Cat Royale deployed a robot arm to play with a family of three cats for twelve days. Different Bodies is a prototype improvised dance performance...

While prosocial behaviour is often described as behaviour intended to help and benefit others, it is primarily considered through an anthropocentric lens in that the others in question are principally humans. In this research, we consider designed systems whereby the prosocial benefits relate primarily to non-human actants, and although people may...

This second international workshop on explainable AI for the Arts (XAIxArts) brought together a community of researchers in HCI, Interaction Design, AI, explainable AI (XAI), and digital arts to explore the role of XAI for the Arts. Workshop held at the 16th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C 2024), Chicago, USA.

We reflect on the design of a multispecies world centred around a bespoke enclosure in which three cats and a robot arm coexist for six hours a day during a twelve-day installation as part of an artist-led project. In this paper, we present the project’s design process, encompassing various interconnected components, including the cats, the robot a...

While ethical challenges are widely discussed in HCI, far less is reported about the ethical processes that researchers routinely navigate. We reflect on a multispecies project that negotiated an especially complex ethical approval process. Cat Royale was an artist-led exploration of creating an artwork to engage audiences in exploring trust in aut...

Spatial Computing integrates technologies like Mixed Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and the Global Positioning System, enabling immersive, natural, and intelligent multi-modal interactions in physical and virtual spaces. With the huge potential to benefit users in multiple scenarios (e.g., gaming, education, design, and healthcare), Spatial Comp...

Co-located collaborative shared augmented reality (CS-AR) environments have gained considerable research attention, mainly focusing on design, implementation, accuracy, and usability. Yet, a gap persists in our understanding regarding the accessibility and inclusivity of such environments for diverse user groups, such as deaf and Hard of Hearing (D...

Cat Royale is an artist-led exploration of trustworthy autonomous systems created by the TAS Hub's creative ambassadors Blast Theory. A small community of cats inhabits a purpose built `cat utopia' at the centre of which a robot arm tries to enrich their lives by playing with them. We initially present the design of Cat Royale as an autonomous syst...

Chatbot-based tools are becoming pervasive in multiple domains from commercial websites to rehabilitation applications. Only recently, an eleven-item satisfaction inventory was developed (the ChatBot Usability Scale, BUS-11) to help designers in the assessment process of their systems. The BUS-11 has been validated in multiple contexts and language...

Crowdsourcing in China is a thriving industry. Among its most interesting structures, we find crowdfarms, in which crowdworkers self-organize as small organizations to tackle macrotasks. Little, however, is known as to which practices these crowdfarms use to tackle the macrotasks, and this goes hand in hand with the current practice of the HCI rese...

Chatbot-based tools becoming pervasive in multiple domains from commercial websites to rehabilitation applications. Only recently an eleven-item satisfaction inventory was developed (the chatBot Usbaliy Scale, BUS-11) to help designers in the assessment process of their systems. The BUS-11 has been validated in multiple contexts and languages i.e.,...

Live performers often describe "playing to the audience" as shifts in emphasis, timing and even content according to perceived audience reactions. Traditional staging allows the transmission of physiological signals through the audience's eyes, skin, odor, breathing, vocalizations and motions such as dancing, stamping and clapping, some of which ar...

The Bot Usability Scale (BUS) is a standardised tool to assess and compare the satisfaction of users after interacting with chatbots to support the development of usable conversational systems. The English version of the 15-item BUS scale (BUS-15) was the result of an exploratory factorial analysis; a confirmatory factorial analysis tests the repli...

Standardised tools to assess a user’s satisfaction with the experience of using chatbots and conversational agents are currently unavailable. This work describes four studies, including a systematic literature review, with an overall sample of 141 participants in the survey (experts and novices), focus group sessions and testing of chatbots to (i)...

Studies of identity and location-based social networks (LBSN) have tended to focus on the performative aspects associated with marking one's location. Yet these studies often present this practice as being an a priori aspect of locative media. What is missing from this research is a more granular understanding of how this process develops over time...

An Erratum to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-021-01574-9

This paper, based on a reflective approach, presents several insights and lessons learned from the design, development, and deployment of a location-based social network and a location-based game. These are analyzed and discussed against the life-cycle of our studies, and range from engaging with the participants, to dealing with technical issues w...

Crowdsourcing is a new value creation business model. Annual revenue of the Chinese market alone is hundreds of millions of dollars, yet few studies have focused on the practices of the Chinese crowdsourcing workforce, and those that do mainly focus on solo crowdworkers. We have extended our study of solo crowdworker practices to include crowdfarms...

In recent years, machine learning has developed rapidly, enabling the development of applications with high levels of recognition accuracy relating to the use of speech and images. However, other types of data to which these models can be applied have not yet been explored as thoroughly. Labelling is an indispensable stage of data pre-processing th...

Recent research highlights the potential of crowdsourcing in China. Yet very few studies explore the workplace context and experi- ences of Chinese crowdworkers. Those that do, focus mainly on the work experiences of solo crowdworkers but do not deal with issues pertaining to the substantial amount of people working in ‘crowdfarms’. This article ad...

Expressions of territoriality have been positioned as one of the main reasons users alter their behaviors and perceptions of spatiality and sociality while engaging with location-based social networks (LBSN). Despite the potential for this interplay to further our understanding of LBSN usage in the context of identity, very little work has actually...

This chapter outlines some key approaches towards understanding the unremarkable. It focuses first on a sociological orientation to the everyday world as key to the enterprise, and then on a variety of complimentary approaches for elaborating or surfacing the unremarkable character of everyday life. It considers the kinds of data resources that are...

Over recent years the term ‘in the wild’ has increasingly appeared in publications within the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The phrase has become synonymous with a range of approaches that focus upon carrying out research-based studies reporting on user behaviour in ‘natural’, ‘situated’ contexts, in distinction to lab-based studies. T...

We present an ongoing project using Joshua Steele's symbolic notation to represent prosody in Eighteenth Century dramatic performances. We discuss the sonification of the original notation to simulate the work and how it can be used to support other experiments. Drawing on two experimental models and their different methodologies, we consider how t...

We report on the design and deployment of systems for the performance of live score accompaniment to an interactive movie by a Networked Musical Ensemble. In this case, the audiovisual content of the movie is selected in real time based on user input to a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). Our system supports musical improvisation between human perfor...

This chapter explores the space of Brain-Computer Interaction as a tool to enhance storytelling within cinema, as a means to overcome some of the main critiques of interactive film in terms of interaction and immersion in the media. Using the Performance-led Research in the Wild methodology, we create complete professionally-made experiences to exp...

Guitars are physical instruments that require skillful two-handed use. Their use is also supported by diverse digital and physical resources, such as videos and chord charts. To understand the challenges of interacting with supporting resources at the same time as playing we conducted an ethnographic study of the preparation activities of working m...

Disabled people face many barriers to access in all areas of life, including creative expression. With music making, a lack of accessible instruments can be a major barrier, as well as environmental factors. The Strummi is an accessible instrument based on the guitar, designed as a technology probe to explore the technical and cultural role of guit...

In recent years, mobile phone technology has taken tremendous leaps and bounds to enable all types of sensing applications and interaction methods, including mobile journaling and self-reporting to add metadata and to label sensor data streams. Mobile self-report techniques are used to record user ratings of their experiences during structured stud...

An AI-Based Design Framework to Support Musicians’ Practices (workshop paper presentation)

The practice of working musicians extends beyond the act of performing musical works at a concert. Rather, a significant degree of individual and collaborative preparation is necessitated prior to the moment of presentation to an audience. Increasingly, these musicians call upon a range of digital resources and tools to support this 'living' proces...

Despite of its long history, opera as an art form is constantly evolving. Composers have never lost their fascination about it and keep exploring with innovative aesthetics, techniques, and modes of expression. New technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR), Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are steadily having an impact upon the world of o...

This paper presents research based on the creation and development of two Brain Controlled Interface (BCI) based film experiences. The focus of this research is primarily on the audio in the films; the way that the overall experiences were designed, the ways in which the soundtracks were specifically developed for the experiences and the ways in wh...

We describe a series of informal exercises in which we have put algorithms in the hands of human performers in order to encourage a human creative response to mathematical and algorithmic input. These 'interventions' include a web-based app, experiments in physical space using Arduinos, and algorithmic augmentation of a keyboard.

This note introduces the notion of immersive technologies, accompanies a presentation and by starting to think about the nature of such systems we develop a position that questions existing preconceptions of immersive technologies. In order to accomplish this, we take a series of technologies that we have developed at the Mixed Reality Lab and pres...

The idea of No-Input Mixing may appear at first difficult to understand, after all there is no input, yet artists, performers and sound designers have used a variety of approaches using such feedback systems to create music. This paper uses ethnographic approaches to start to understand the methods that people employ when using no-input systems, an...

The paper presents reflections on understanding the issues of designing locative sonic memory-scapes. As physical space and digital media become ever more intertwined, together forming and augmenting meaning and experience, we need methods to further explore possible ways in which physical places and intangible personal content can be used to devel...

This paper outlines some of the issues that we will be discussing in the workshop “The Design of Future Music Technologies: ‘Sounding Out’ AI, Immersive Experiences & Brain Controlled Interfaces.” Musical creation, performance and consumption is at a crossroads, how will future technologies be affected by exciting and innovative new developments in...

The idea of No-Input Mixing may appear at first difficult to understand, after all there is no input, yet artists, performers and sound designers have used a variety of approaches using such feedback systems to create music. This paper uses ethnographic approaches to start to understand the methods that people employ when using no-input systems, an...

Envision a future where the physical and digital become seamlessly intertwined producing unbounded possibilities from interactions with autonomous cars to the advent of smart cities. Tools and methods to explore the design and development of such emergent hybrid spaces will need to be highly inclusive involving engineers, social scientists, up to c...

This short paper presents the initial research insights of an ongoing research project that focuses upon understanding the role of landscape, its use as a resource for designing interfaces for musical expression, and as a tool for leveraging ethnographic understandings about space, place, design and musical expression. We briefly discuss the emergi...

We report on the design, premiere and public evaluation of a multifaceted audience interface for a complex non-linear musical performance called Climb! which is particularly suited to being experienced more than once. This interface is designed to enable audiences to understand and appreciate the work, and integrates a physical instrument and stagi...

Open Access Link - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00779-017-1066-5. . . . . . . . . When we initially thought about running a special theme on the Internet of things, we were motivated; as many are e.g. [11, 9, 15, 10], by a concern with the threat to privacy that accompanies the widespread rollout of connected devices. Edith Ramire...

New technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR), Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are steadily having an impact upon the world of opera. The evolving use of performance-based software such as Ableton Live and Max/MSP has created new and exciting compositional techniques that intertwine theatrical and musical performance. This poster present...

This poster describes a compositional technique that used crowd-sourced midi clips in order to develop a piece of music, which was later performed. This work in progress highlighted some of the issues facing the designers of systems that enable the ‘crowd’ to compose. INTRODUCTION Can the crowd get creative? And what sort of tools might be used to...

We present initial work that explores the use of sonification to represent Joshua Steele’s symbolic notation. This provides a manner of overhearing a previous performance and testing the method’s reproducibility and uncertainties within it.

Human-Like Computing technologies are intelligent systems that interact with people in human-like way. By bringing together the disciplines of Artificial Intelligence, Ethnography and Interaction Design, and applying them in a real world context we are able to understand some of the ways that such technologies can be applied. This work in progress...

ABSTRACT Audio-based mobile technology is opening up a range of new interactive possibilities. This paper brings some of those possibilities to light by offering a range of perspectives based in this area. It is not only the technical systems that are developing, but novel approaches to the design and understanding of audio-based mobile systems are...

Self-identity in mobile location-based social networks (LBSN) is a relatively underexplored topic. In this paper, we present our initial understandings on the role that LBSN play in the self-identity of its users and introduce a relationship between self-identity and expressions of territoriality in LBSN. Our work presented in this paper is based o...

With the increasing popularity of mobile video games, game designers and developers are starting to integrate geolocation into video games. Popular location-based games such as Ingress or Pokémon Go have millions of users, yet little is known about how the use of such games influences the nature of a user’s interaction with other users and their ph...

Rationale There has been little chance for researchers, performers and designers in the UK to come together in order to explore the use and design of new and evolving technologies for performance. This workshop examines the interplay between people, musical instruments, performance and technology. Now, more than ever technology is enabling us to au...

This piece brings together, participation, algorithmic composition and augmentation (as a mechanism by which people can work together to augment and support a composer’s workflow). The performance is about understanding the ways in which composition and performance can be understood, socially, aesthetically and scientifically. This performance beco...

This paper expands upon our previous work, and starts to unpack notions of autonomy and control in musical composition and performance-based systems. The term autonomous has become synonymous with technologies such as "autonomous vehicles" and "drones", while notions of control have mainly been raised in respect to the "control" of industrial syste...

The existing sonification of networks mainly focuses on security. Our novel approach is framed by the ways in which network traffic changes over the national JANET network. Using a variety of sonification techniques, we examine the user context, how this sonification leads to system design considerations, and feeds back into the user experience.

Abstract - link in text The paper presents reflections on understanding the issues of designing of locative sonic memory-scapes. As physical space and digital media become ever more intertwined, together forming and augmenting meaning and experience, we need methods to further explore possible ways in which physical places and intangible personal c...

...While current industry solutions largely put emphasis on encryption as a privacy-preserving measure, there is more to privacy than the confidentiality of data at rest or in motion [7]. Furthermore, encryption often will not stop industry accessing personal data [13], and metadata can be as or more revealing than data itself [1]. Thus, in conside...

With the increasing popularity of mobile video games, game designers and developers are starting to integrate geolocation information into such games. Although popular location-based games (LBGs) such as Ingress and Pokémon Go have millions of users, research still needs to be carried out to fully understand the ways in which such games impact upon...

We report lessons from iteratively developing a music recognition system to enable a wide range of musicians to embed musical codes into their typical performance practice. The musician composes fragments of music that can be played back with varying levels of embellishment, disguise and looseness to trigger digital interactions. We collaborated wi...