Saul Greenberg

The University of Calgary | HBI · Department of Computer Science

Abstract Ecological camera traps are increasingly used by wildlife biologists to unobtrusively monitor an ecosystems animal population. However, manual inspection of the images produced is expensive, laborious, and time‐consuming. The success of deep learning systems using camera trap images has been previously explored in preliminary stages. These...

Abstract This paper describes and explains design patterns for software that supports how analysts can efficiently inspect and classify camera trap images for wildlife‐related ecological attributes. Broadly speaking, a design pattern identifies a commonly occurring problem and a general reusable design approach to solve that problem. A developer ca...

Astral is a prototyping tool for authoring mobile and smart object interactive behaviours. It mirrors selected display contents of desktop applications onto mobile devices (smartphones and smartwatches), and streams/remaps mobile sensor data to desktop input events (mouse or keyboard) to manipulate selected desktop contents. This allows designers t...

Toolkit research plays an important role in the field of HCI, as it can heavily influence both the design and implementation of interactive systems. For publication, the HCI community typically expects toolkit research to include an evaluation component. The problem is that toolkit evaluation is challenging, as it is often unclear what 'evaluating'...

Interactive, smart objects-customized to individuals and uses-are central to many movements, such as tangibles, the internet of things (IoT), and ubiquitous computing. Yet, rapid prototyping both the form and function of these custom objects can be problematic, particularly for those with limited electronics or programming experience. Designers oft...

Transparent displays naturally support workspace awareness during face-to-face interactions. Viewers see another person's actions through the display: gestures, gaze, body movements, and what one is manipulating on the display. Yet we can design even better collaborative transparent displays. First, collaborators on either side should be able to di...

We-awareness is the socially recursive inferences that let collaborators know that all are mutually aware of each other’s awareness. While we-awareness is easy afforded in face to face collocated collaboration, it is much more difficult to design distributed groupware tools to provide equivalent capabilities: there can be no awareness unless it is...

Wall displays almost universally assume a mostly flat and static shape. We ask two questions: Would people choose a flat display for a given interaction scenario and, if not, what are the display shapes they actually prefer? We conducted a design study around these two questions. Our results show that participants designed different screen shapes t...

High-risk outdoor recreation allows its enthusiasts to reach unprecedented levels of adrenaline; it also contains risks and requires specific training (in part technological). In particular, its participants must be ready to react efficiently during an emergency or in response to an accident. Technological training grounds can simulate particular c...

High-risk outdoor recreation has been gaining interest around the world in the past years. While those activities allow their enthusiasts to reach unprecedented levels of adrenaline and adventure, they also contain risks and require specific training (in part technological). In particular, its participants must be ready to react efficiently during...

We present CipherCard, a physical token that defends against shoulder-surfing attacks on user authentication on capacitive touchscreen devices. When CipherCard is placed over a touchscreen’s pin-pad, it remaps a user’s touch point on the physical token to a different location on the pin-pad. It hence translates a visible user password into a differ...

Remote controls facilitate interactions at-a-distance with appliances. However, the complexity, diversity, and increasing number of digital appliances in ubiquitous computing ecologies make it increasingly difficult to: (1) discover which appliances are controllable; (2) select a particular appliance from the large number available; (3) view inform...

We present PhoneEar, a new approach that enables mobile devices to understand the broadcasted audio and sounds that we hear every day using existing infrastructure. PhoneEar audio streams are embedded with sound-encoded data using nearly inaudible high frequencies. Mobile devices then listen for messages in the sounds around us, taking actions to e...

Estimating angling effort on more than a few lakes can be prohibitively expensive using creel surveys and often requires finer-scale angler distribution data than aerial surveys can provide. An alternate method uses remote cameras to capture images of lakes at hourly intervals over long time periods. Technicians then visually analyze the thousands...

Over a billion people use social networking sites like Facebook to maintain awareness of their friends. Facebook's News Feed is the primary mechanism by which people are shown updates about their friends' daily activities on the site in the form of an algorithmically curated list of stories. This paper examines how people browse the News Feed, thei...

Download Free Sample In the everyday world, much of what we do as social beings is dictated by how we perceive and manage our interpersonal space. This is called proxemics. At its simplest, people naturally correlate physical distance to social distance. We believe that people’s expectations of proxemics can be exploited in interaction design to me...

Video chat systems such as Skype, Google+ Hangouts, and FaceTime have been widely adopted by family members and friends to connect with one another over distance. We have conducted a corpus of studies that explore how various demographics make use of such video chat systems in which this usage moves beyond the paradigm of conversational support to...

Site-based citizen science occurs when volunteers work with scientists to collect data at particular field locations. The benefit is greater data collection at lesser cost. Yet difficulties exist. We developed ScienceCaching, a prototype citizen science aid designed to mitigate four specific problems by applying aspects from another thriving locati...

The idea of integrating information of people’s or devices’ spatial relationships in interaction design is not new. However, this integration was only rarely done in the context of complete ubicomp ecologies comprising people, devices, and objects. Furthermore, the earlier work focused primarily on distance information (often only divided into disc...

This book opened with the idea that: we can leverage information about people’s and devices’ fine-grained proxemic relationships for the design of novel interaction techniques in ubicomp ecologies. we can leverage information about people’s and devices’ fine-grained proxemic relationships for the design of novel interaction techniques in ubicomp ec...

Other ubicomp systems have exploited a subset of the five dimensions of Proxemic Interactions we introduced in Chapter 4. Yet very few make use of all of them, let alone consider them as characterizing the interplay between entities in a ubicomp ecology. In this chapter, we describe six known ubicomp interaction design challenges. We use related wo...

SonicData is a technique for broadcasting data to smartphones via audio streams using phone's built-in microphone. SonicData augments an audio stream in the environment with nearly inaudible high-frequencies, allowing data to be sent to any smartphone in the vicinity using regular speakers and without any need for special hardware and software infr...

Proxemics theory explains peoples' use of interpersonal distances to mediate their social interactions with others. Within Ubicomp, proxemic interaction researchers argue that people have a similar social understanding of their spatial relations with nearby digital devices, which can be exploited to better facilitate seamless and natural interactio...

To be accepted and trusted by the public, proxemic sensing systems must respect people's conception of physical space, make it easy to opt in or out, and benefit users as well as advertisers and other vendors.

Transparent displays can serve as an important collaborative medium supporting face-to-face interactions over a shared visual work surface. Such displays enhance workspace awareness: when a person is working on one side of a transparent display, the person on the other side can see the other's body, hand gestures, gaze and what he or she is actuall...

We designed and operationalized a greetings model for human robot interaction as a state machine, derived from a subset of social behaviors as detailed by Kendon's observations of greetings and augmented by Hall's proxemics theory. Our premise is that designing robot greetings on the social science of human greetings will make the robot's greeting...

Digital games are increasingly profiting from sensing technologies. However, their focus is mostly on sensing limb movements. We propose that sensing capabilities could also be used to engage players with proxemics: the interpersonal distance between players. We further add that wireless networks offer complementary distance zones for designers, of...

Proxemics theory explains peoples' use of interpersonal distances to mediate their social interactions with others. Within Ubicomp, proxemic interaction researchers argue that people have a similar social understanding of their spatial relations with nearby digital devices, which can be exploited to better facilitate seamless and natural interactio...

Displays are growing in size, and are increasingly deployed in semi-public and public areas. When people use these public displays to pursue personal work, they expose their activities and sensitive data to passers-by. In most cases, such shoulder-surfing by others is likely voyeuristic vs. a deliberate attempt to steal information. Even so, safegu...

When children go through a medical procedure (e.g. a blood draw), they often experience increased levels of anxiety and stress. We believe that having an empathetic robot companion during the procedure can help children cope with pain and improve their overall experience. The robot makes use of a set of behaviors derived from pain management litera...

When a person interacts with a display in an open area, sensitive information becomes visible to shoulder-surfing passers-by. While a person's body shields small displays, shielding is less effective as display area increases. To mitigate this problem, we sense spatial relationships between the passerby, person and display. Awareness of onlookers i...

When facing an avalanche, backcountry skiers need to work effectively both individually and as a group to rescue buried victims. If they don't, death is likely. One of the tools used by each person is a digital beacon that transmits an electromagnetic signal. If buried, others use their beacons to locate victims by searching for their signals, and...

In 1966, anthropologist Edward Hall coined the term "proxemics." Proxemics is an area of study that identifies the culturally dependent ways in which people use interpersonal distance to understand and mediate their interactions with others. Recent research has demonstrated the use of proxemics in human-computer interaction (HCI) for supporting use...

Always-on video provides rich levels of awareness for collaborators separated by distance, yet it has the potential to threaten privacy as sensitive details may be broadcast to others. This threat increases for telecommuters who work at home and connect to office-based colleagues using video. Our research addresses the problem of how to develop and...

In everyday office work, people smoothly use the space on their physical desks to work with documents of interest, and to keep tools and materials nearby for easy use. In contrast, the limited screen space of computer displays imposes interface constraints. Associated material is placed off-screen (i.e., temporarily hidden) and requires extra work...

Researchers have developed interaction concepts based on mobile projectors. Yet pursuing work in this area - particularly in building projector-based interactions techniques within an application - is cumbersome and time-consuming. To mitigate this problem, we contribute ProjectorKit, a flexible open-source toolkit that eases rapid prototyping mobi...

Collaborative modelling has become more important in the last few years, especially now that mobile devices show processing power to support 3D modelling in real-time. Current mobile networks, such as 3G and LTE, unfortunately are not as fast as traditional wired internet and have higher latency. The problem with collaborative modelling using trian...

There is a well-established culture of early prototyping when designing digital interactive systems, such as paper prototyping and wireframe methods. The culture of designing physical objects is somewhat different: early explorations of form is still prototyped via 2D sketches or renderings, but - mostly because of the construction effort involved...

Interactive vehicle windows can enrich the commuting experience by being informative and engaging, strengthening the connection between passengers and the outside world. We propose a preliminary interaction paradigm to allow rich and un-distracting interaction experience on vehicle side windows. Following this paradigm we present a prototype, the C...

Computing technologies continue to grow exponentially every day. However, appliances have become a class of technology that has remained stagnant through time. They are restricted by physical and cost limitations, while also aiming to provide with a lot of functionality. This leads to limited capabilities of input (through multiple buttons and comb...

Microseismic visualization systems present complex 3D data of small seismic events within oil reservoirs to allow experts to explore and interact with that data. Yet existing systems suffer several problems: 3D spatial navigation and orientation is difficult, and selecting 3D data is challenging due to the problems of occlusion and lack of depth pe...

Microseismic visualization systems present complex 3D data of small seismic events within oil reservoirs to allow experts to explore and interact with that data. Yet existing systems suffer several problems: 3D spatial navigation and orientation is difficult, and selecting 3D data is challenging due to the problems of occlusion and lack of depth pe...

Video conferencing commonly employs a video portal metaphor to connect individuals from remote spaces. In this work, we explore an alternate metaphor, a shared depth-mirror, where video images of two spaces are fused into a single shared, depth-corrected video space. We realize this metaphor in OneSpace, where the space respects virtual spatial rel...

This paper addresses the need of interpersonal privacy coordination mechanisms in the context of mediated communication, emphasizing the dialectic and dynamic nature of privacy. We contribute the Privacy Grounding Model—built upon the Common Ground theory—that describes how connected individuals create and adapt privacy borders dynamically and in a...

These projects were curated by two instructors at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås, Linda Worbin (textile design) and Clemens Thornquist (fashion design). All four projects were presented at Ambience'11, an international conference ...

The increasing number of digital devices in our environment enriches how we interact with digital content. Yet, cross-device information transfer -- which should be a common operation -- is surprisingly difficult. One has to know which devices can communicate, what information they contain, and how information can be exchanged. To mitigate this pro...