Mark D. Dunlop

University of Strathclyde · Department of Computer and Information Sciences

Mobile text entry has become an integral part of our daily life. We regularly input text on smartphones, laptops, desktops and increasingly on smartwatches, VR systems, interactive tabletops/walls, and kiosks. This text entry is done in all social settings, from solo individuals writing private notes, through social networking in bars with friends,...

This SIG advances the study of mobile user interfaces for the aging population. The topic is timely, as the mobile device has become the most widely used computer terminal and at the same time the number of older people will soon exceed the number of children worldwide. However, most HCI research addresses younger adults and has had little impact o...

The primary focus of our workshop is on exploring ways to enable inviscid text entry on mobile devices. In inviscid text entry, it is the user's creativity that is the text-creation bottleneck rather than the text entry interface. The inviscid rate is estimated at 67 wpm while current mobile text entry methods are typically 20-40 wpm. In this works...

The widespread day-to-day carrying of powerful smartphones gives opportunities for crowd-sourcing information about the users' activities to gain insight into patterns of use of a large population in cities. Here we report the design and initial investigations into a crowdsourcing approach for sudden decelerations to identify dangerous road section...

Text entry remains key to many tasks on touchscreen smartphones and is an important factor in the usability of such devices. The known problems of text entry can be particularly acute for older adults due to physical and cognitive issues associated with ageing. In a study of mobile text entry the authors employed a variety of participatory design a...

The ageing process can interfere considerably with the use of mobile devices, e.g. due to changes in vision, attention, and motor control. Designing mobile technology with older adults poses its own challenges. In the absence of a complete methodology for working with older users, researchers and designers are often left to improvise their own meth...

Through our participatory design with older adults a need for improved error support for texting on smartphones emerged. Here we present the MaxieKeyboard based on the outcomes from this process. The keyboard highlights errors, auto-corrections and suggestion bar usage in the composition area and gives feedback on the keyboard on typing correctness...

The aim of this project is to design and build a system to aid patients in their rehabilitation after suffering a stroke. A stroke is one of the most serious conditions that an individual can suffer from, and the rehabilitation is often a long and difficult process. For many with movement effects, the sit-to-stand exercise is an important step in r...

Meeting the target of 8000 steps/day, as recommended by many national governments and health authorities, can provide considerable physical and mental health benefits and is seen as a key target for reducing obesity levels and improving public health. However, to optimize the health benefits, walking should be performed at a “moderate” intensity. W...

The primary focus of our workshop is to challenge the expanding text entry community to move beyond the mobile phone and start exploring novel and emerging technologies, designing systems for non-traditional users, and expand into unexplored domains and contexts of use. We hope to engage in setting a new agenda for our research community through th...

Smart watches provide users with access to many applications directly from their wrists, without the need to touch their smartphones. While applications such as email, messaging, calendar, and social networking provide views on the watch, there is normally no text-entry method, so users cannot reply on the same device. Here, the authors introduce t...

Many countries have an increasingly aging population. In recent years, mobile technologies have had a massive impact on social and working lives. As the size of the older user population rises, many people will want to continue professional, social and lifestyle usage of mobiles into 70s and beyond. Mobile technologies can lead to increased communi...

This PVA-shortpaper introduces an enhancement to the Keystroke-Level Model (KLM) by extending it with three new operators to describe interactions on mobile touchscreen devices. Based on Fitts's Law we modelled a performance measure estimate equation for each common touch screen interaction. Three prototypes were developed to serve as a test enviro...

The need for text entry on smartphones and other touch-screen devices is key for many tasks and also a key factor in the usability of these devices. Physical and cognitive issues associated with age can aggravate the task of text entry for older adults. Technological exclusion due to low usability can present a significant problem both for social a...

On touchscreen devices such as smartphones and tablets, text entry remains key to many tasks and is an important factor in the usability of such devices. The physical and cognitive issues associated with ageing can make the known problems of text entry particularly acute for older adults. Poor usability can present a significant problem for older a...

Text entry is an active and growing research domain. Our SIG serves three purposes. First, to strengthen the text entry community by bringing text entry researchers working in the human-computer interaction, natural language processing and augmentative and alternative communication communities together in one room. Second, to promote CHI as a natur...

Smartwatches now provide users with access to many applications on smartphones direct from their wrists, without the need to touch their smartphone. While applications such as email, messaging, calendar and social networking provide views on the watch, there is normally no text entry method so users cannot reply on the same device. Here we introduc...

In this paper a study was done regarding improving form control and navigation on mobile devices. An observational study of census counters for the Egyptian Agricultural Survey was conducted. This country-wide survey is currently conducted by professional counters using large (100×35 cm double sided) complex paper forms that require manual transcri...

This paper reports the design, development and feedback from the initial trial of the Taeneb City Guide project developing tourist information software on Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) handheld computers. Based on the users' requirements for electronic tourists guides already published in the literature, the paper focuses on the three main techn...

The need for text entry on smartphones and other touch-screen devices is key for many tasks and also a key factor in the usability of these devices. Physical and cognitive issues associated with age can aggravate the task of text entry for older adults. Technological exclusion due to low usability can present a significant problem both for social a...

Smart-watches provide users with access to many applications on smartphones direct from their wrists, without the need to touch their smartphone. While applications such as email, messaging, calendar and social networking provide views on the watch, there is normally no text entry method so users cannot reply on the same device. Here we introduce o...

Our workshop serves two purposes. First, to bring text entry researchers working in the human-computer interaction (HCI), natural language processing (NLP) and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) communities together at CHI. Second, we will set three major grand challenges for text entry research: a) removing the performance bottleneck...

Multi-touch interaction, in particular multi-touch gesture interaction, is widely believed to give a more natural interaction style. We investigated the utility of multi-touch interaction in the safety critical domain of maritime dynamic positioning (DP) vessels. We conducted initial paper prototyping with domain experts to gain an insight into nat...

In recent years public health has become of great concern, in particular the personal and national economic burden resulting from increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Sedentary lifestyles are particularly serious for young people who are badly affected by obesity problems that impact on their current and future lives. In an effort to tackle thi...

Mobile phone keyboards can be categorized as unambiguous (one key per letter) or ambiguous (multiple letters per key). In this poster we present QWERTH: a semi-ambiguous keyboard for English in which we have grouped keys together that are less likely to cause prediction problems, while keeping some other keys unique. This has allowed us to in...

Dynamic positioning (DP) systems are complex systems that challenges the operator’s mind during complex offshore DP operations. It is both mentally demanding and the operator has to maintain constant situation awareness to be able to react in time to safety-critical situations. The research design that will be presented in this work-in-progress pap...

This paper presents a new optimization technique for keyboard layouts based on Pareto front optimization. We used this multifactorial technique to create two new touchscreen phone keyboard layouts based on three design metrics: minimizing finger travel distance in order to maximize text entry speed, a new metric to maximize the quality of spell cor...

Our workshop has three primary goals. The first goal is community building: we want to get text entry researchers that are active in different communities into one place. Our second goal is to promote CHI as a natural and compelling focal point for all kinds of text entry research. The third goal is to discuss some difficult issues that are hard or...

Without Abstract

Modern text entry systems, especially for touch screen phones and novel devices, rely on complex underlying technologies such as error correction and word suggestion. Furthermore, for global deployment a vast number of languages have to be supported. Together this has raised the entry bar for new text entry techniques, which makes developing...

Null-hypothesis statistical testing has been seriously criticized in other domains, to the extent of some advocating a complete ban on publishing p-values. This short position article aims to introduce the argument to the mobile-HCI research community, who make extensive use of the controversial testing methods.

In this paper we describe the design concept, prototype development, and initial findings for a mobile guide supporting serendipitous exploration of a city. The system will allow a tourist to freely explore a new city, while providing them with peace of mind to not accidentally walk past attractions they desire to see. We have developed a proximity...

Text entry on mobile devices (e.g. phones and PDAs) has been a research challenge since devices shrank below laptop size: mobile devices are simply too small to have a traditional full-size keyboard. There has been a profusion of research into text entry techniques for smaller keyboards and touch screens: some of which have become mainstream, while...

Pervasive services may be defined as services that are available to any client (anytime, anywhere). Here we focus on the software and network infrastructure required to support pervasive contextual services operating over a wide area. One of the key requirements is a matching service capable of assimilating and filtering information from various so...

Achieving independence whilst attempting a journey involving long distance navigation still remains a significant challenge for the visually impaired community. In this chapter the contribution that might be made by context-aware computing is explored. The first half of the chapter investigates different aspects of the long distance navigation prob...

Predictive text entry provides a fast way to enter text on phones and other small devices. Early work on predi ctive text entry highlighted that the reaction time for c hecking the screen dominates text entry times. Improving accura cy of predictions brings a downside: as prediction gets b etter, users will drop the slow operation of checking the s...

Text entry on mobile devices (e.g. phones and PDAs) has been a research challenge since devices shrank below laptop size: mobile devices are simply too sm all to have a traditional full-size keyboard. There has been a profusion of research into text entry techni ques for smaller keyboards and touch screens: some of which have become mainstream, whi...

Null­hypothesis statistical testing has been seriously criticised in other domains, to the extent of some advocating a complete ban on publishing p­values. This short position paper aims to introduce the argument to the mobile­HCI research community, who make extensive use of the controversial testing methods.

This paper investigates text entry on mobile devices using only five-key. Primarily to support text entry on smaller devices than mobile phones, this method can also be used to maximise screen space on mobile phones. Reported combined Fitt's law and keystroke modelling predicts similar performance with bigram prediction using a five-key keypad as c...

We described in earlier publications the principles of a system where Internet content would be pre-cached, based on contextual information obtained from a user’s electronic calendar. The model for such a system envisioned a set of cooperating agents, distributed on a user’s desktop and mobile device, which would be responsible for making decisions...

This paper describes the first steps of a research project directed towards human computer interaction (HCI) within the maritime environment and on maritime equipment. The focus is at this stage mainly on interaction with Dynamic Positioning Systems (DP) and how new interaction styles can be introduced to make the interaction more efficient and les...

Tourism has been a key driver for mobile applications. This short paper presents the design and initial evaluation of a mobile phone based visualisation to support skiers. Paper piste maps often prove difficult for skiers and provide no natural way of assessing the mountain conditions while on the slope. They are physically large and difficult to m...

Figure 1: samples of AdapTex use in Word Mobile This demonstration introduces AdapTex: a new text entry system that suggests words and phrases to the user based on the current textual context of use, the user's history and an initial corpus analysis. User studies show that Adaptex speeds up text entry while reducing errors.

Capturing, defining, and modeling the essence of context are challenging, com- pelling, and prominent issues for interdisciplinary research and discussion. The roots of its emergence lie in the inconsistencies and ambivalent definitions across and within different research specializations (e.g., philosophy, psychology, pragmatics, linguistics, comp...

In recent years, there has been an escalation of orientation and wayfinding technologies and systems for visually impaired people. These technological advancements, however, have not been matched by a suitable investigation of human- computer interaction (e.g. designing navigation aids for people who form different cognitive maps for navigation). T...

On the Internet, there is an uneasy tension between the security and usability of authentication mechanisms. An easy three-part classification is: "something you know" (e.g. password); "something you hold" (e.g. device holding digital certificate), and "who you are" (e.g. biometric assessment) [9]. Each of these has well-known problems; passwords a...

Motivated by the need to access internet content on mobile devices with expensive or non-existent network access, this paper discusses the possibility for contextual information extracted from electronic calendars to be used as sources for Internet content predictive retrieval (pre-caching). Our results show that calendar based contextual informati...

This paper presents an initial study into the viability of text entry on a watch face using four alphabetic buttons and a central space key. The study includes a technical evaluation of likely error rates using a large text corpus and user studies on palmtop emulated mobile phone and watch. The results, though in favour of the phone pad, are encour...

This paper presents a study into the effectiveness of our algorithm for automatic categorisation of real users' diary entries, as a first step towards personal Internet content pre-caching on mobile devices. The study reports an experiment comparing trial subjects allocations of 99 diary entries to those predicted by a keyword-based algorithm. Whil...

In the near future Internet access will be commonly available in two forms to most palmtops: wide bandwidth of a low-cost land-based connection while docked, and limited capacity expensive wireless connections while mobile. The coming 3G networks will help the bandwidth but the disparity of connection cost and bandwidth between docked and undocked...

Document collections often display either internal structure, in the form of the logical arrangement of document components, or external structure, in the form of links between documents. Structured document retrieval systems aim to exploit this structural information to provide users with more effective access to structured documents. To do this,...

This article shows that, in systems that allow access to nonmatching documents (e.g., hybrid hypertext and information retrieval systems), the strength of the effect of giving relevance feedback varies between matching and nonmatching documents. For positive feedback the results shown here are encouraging, as they can be justified by an intuitive v...

Introduction In recent years, there has been an escalation of application areas of mobile context-aware computing, all of which offer great potential to support and enhance the activities of people in their daily lives. Our work has been motivated by a particularly challenging activity: supporting visually impaired people to navigate through new su...

This paper presents two palmtop applications: Taeneb CityGuide and Taeneb ConferenceGuide. Both applications are centred around Starfield displays on palmtop computers – this provides fast, dynamic access to information on a small platform. The paper describes the applications focussing on this novel palmtop information access method and on the use...

The automatic construction of hypertext is an important part of the hypertext authoring process. In this paper, we present a methodology for the automatic creation of links for news hypertext which is tailored to the domain of newspaper archives. The suggested framework is conceptualized with the notions of stories and threads, which are substories...

It is estimated that 7.4 million people in Europe are visually impaired [1]. Limitations of traditional mobility aids (i.e. white canes and guide dogs) coupled with a proliferation of context-aware technologies (e.g. Electronic Travel Aids, Global Positioning Systems and Geographical Information Systems), have stimulated research and development in...

The most common method for assessing the worth of an information retrieval (IR) system is through precision and recall graphs. These graphs show how precise an IR engine is when working at fixed levels of recall. This paper introduces number-to-view graphs, a new graphing method based on an early evaluation measure, which supplement precisionrecall...

Context-aware technology has stimulated rigorous research into novel ways to support people in a wide range of tasks and situations. However, the effectiveness of these technologies will ultimately be dependent on the extent to which contextual interactions are understood and accounted for in their design. This study involved an investigation of co...

This paper shows that, in systems that allow access to non-matching documents (e.g. hybrid hypertext and information retrieval systems), the strength of the effect of giving relevance feedback varies between matching and non-matching documents. For positive feedback the results shown here are encouraging as they can be justified by an intuitive vie...

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) phones are a growing relevant part of the mobile market, and the number of WAP services offered is rapidly increasing. Usability is crucial for these services, which must be easily operated on small screens and keyboards. ...

It is estimated that 7.4 million people in Europe are visually impaired [1]. Limitations of traditional mobility aids (i.e. white canes and guide dogs) coupled with a proliferation of context-aware technologies (e.g. Electronic Travel Aids, Global Positioning Systems and Geographical Information Systems), have stimulated research and development in...

Evaluation in information retrieval (IR) has focussed largely on noninteractive evaluation of text retrieval systems. This is increasingly at odds with how people use modern IR systems: in highly interactive settings to access linked, multimedia information. Furthermore, this approach ignores potential improvements through better interface design....

The field of information retrieval (IR) traditionally addressed the problem of retrieving text documents from large collections by full-text indexing of words. It has always been characterised by a strong focus on evaluation to compare the performance of alternative designs. The emergence into widespread use both of multimedia and of interactive us...

This paper presents a model for retrieval of images from a large World Wide Web based collection. Rather than considering complex visual recognition algorithms, the model presented is based on combining evidence of the text content and hypertext structure of the Web. The paper shows that certain types of query are amply served by this form of repre...

Ahlberg and Shneiderman's Starfield displays have been shown to provide fast and convenient access to large collections of data. However, the standard design requires a large, high-resolution, colour screen. This paper presents the results of a short project investigating this visual information seeking technique on a monochrome palmtop.

Mobile phone networks are increasingly supporting the transmission of textual messages between mobile phones and between mobile phones and other services. This paper describes the current text entry method on mobile phones and describes a new text entry method using a single key-press per letter together with a large dictionary of words for disambi...

This paper reports the design and development of the Diceman Query Application. This is the end-user query application for a video indexing and retrieval project based on the Diceman architecture for distributed internet content exchange using MPEG-7 and agent negotiation. The query application was developed to support different search strategies o...

Typically in a large organisation much expertise and knowledge is held informally within employees' own memories. When employees leave an organisation many documented links that go through that person are broken and no mechanism is usually available to overcome these broken links. This matchmaking problem is related to the problem of finding potent...

Several research groups have addressed the problem of retrieving vector graphics. This work has, however, focused either on domain-dependent areas [1,2] or was based on very simple graphics languages. Here we take a fresh look at the issue of graphics retrieval in general and in particular at the tasks which retrieval systems must support. The pape...

“Time is money”, especially if you are downloading web pages over low-bandwidth telephone lines. All too often this investment goes unrewarded. Users simply cannot extract relevant information from the mass of data that is being provided over the Internet. This information saturation is exacerbated by the problems of electronic gridlock. The increa...