Tim Regan

Microsoft · Microsoft Research

In treating depression and anxiety, just over half of all clients respond. Monitoring and obtaining early client feedback can allow for rapidly adapted treatment delivery and improve outcomes. This study seeks to develop a state-of-the-art deep-learning framework for predicting clinical outcomes in internet-delivered Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (...

Importance The mechanisms by which engagement with internet-delivered psychological interventions are associated with depression and anxiety symptoms are unclear. Objective To identify behavior types based on how people engage with an internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy (iCBT) intervention for symptoms of depression and anxiety. Design, S...

There is a dearth of appropriate tools for young learners with mixed visual abilities to engage with computational learning. Addressing this gap, Torino is a physical programming language for teaching computational learning to children ages 7–11 regardless of level of vision. To create code, children connect physical instruction pods and tune their...

There is a dearth of appropriate tools for young learners with mixed visual abilities to engage with computational learning. Addressing this gap, we present Project Torino, a physical programming language for teaching computational learning to children ages 7-11 regardless of level of vision. To create code, children connect and manipulate tactile...

We present Project Zanzibar: a flexible mat that can locate, uniquely identify and communicate with tangible objects placed on its surface, as well as sense a user's touch and hover hand gestures. We describe the underlying technical contributions: efficient and localised Near Field Communication (NFC) over a large surface area; object tracking com...

We demonstrate Project Zanzibar, a flexible mat that locates, uniquely identifies, and communicates with tangible objects placed on its surface, as well as senses a user's touch and hover gestures. Zanzibar integrates efficient and localised Near Field Communication (NFC) over a large surface area; object tracking combining NFC signal strength and...

We present findings from a five-week deployment of voting technologies in a city neighbourhood. Drawing on Marres’ (2012) work on material participation and Massey’s (2005) conceptualisation of space as dynamic, we designed the deployment such that the technologies (which were situated in residents’ homes, on the street, and available online) would...

The motivations for collecting and the idiosyncrasies of physical and digital collections have been long studied. However, how they are presented in the digital space is an unresolved challenge. To help better understand this problem from a design perspective, we built Thinga.Me. Thinga.Me is a system which allows users to capture photographs of ph...

This paper argues that comics are a powerful and valuable medium for representing research through design. We review different formats for representing design including the academic paper, the photo-essay and the annotated portfolio. We argue that the comic book form can be better suited to representing various aspects of the design process includi...

Interactivity is a unique forum of the ACM CHI Conference that showcases hands-on demonstrations, novel interactive technologies, and artistic installations. At CHI 2015 in Seoul we hosted more than 30 exhibits, including an invited digital interactive art exhibit. Interactivity highlights the diverse group of computer scientists, sociologists, des...

We present findings from a year-long engagement with a street and its community. The work explores how the production and use of data is bound up with place, both in terms of physical and social geography. We detail three strands of the project. First, we consider how residents have sought to curate existing data about the street in the form of an...

We present two sets of ‘data technologies’ that we have designed to collect and display local data, both derived from our engagement with a community. The first, Bullfrog, is a bespoke voting device. The second, a series of physical charts, respond to the increasing sophistication of data visualisations by making playful use of pie charts and bar g...

Today thousands of artists, designers, and craftspeople turn to digital fabrication tools to invent and manufacture new forms. They use vector-graphics software to sketch models, laser-cutters to customize parts, and 3D printers to generate prototypes. However, how our experiences of expressivity, skill and value shift with these developments remai...

What does the abundance of data and proliferation of data-making methods mean for the ordinary person, the person on the street? And, what could they come to mean? In this paper, we present an overview of a year-long project to examine just such questions and complicate, in some ways, what it is to ask them. The project is a collective exercise in...

We present findings from a study of Tokens of Search, a system comprising physical RFID "tokens" that point to web content, and a wooden tray fixed to a small screen, which can be used to access that content. Three families lived with the system for a month, as an exploration of how tokens might be used as resources for practical action. Our findin...

We describe the design, implementation and deployment of Photobox, a domestic technology that prints four or five randomly selected photos from the owner's Flickr collection at random intervals each month. We deployed Photobox in three homes for fourteen months, to explore how the slow pace at which it operates could support experiences of anticipa...

Drawing on interviews with 12 software engineers, we investigate the relationship between developers and the tools they use to build code through the lens of craft. We analyze different conceptualizations of craft in accounts of software development, including craft as a process of building, craft as materiality, and craft as a community of practic...

In recent years the Web has evolved substantially, transforming from a place where we primarily find information to a place where we also leave, share and keep it. This presents a fresh set of challenges for the management of personal information, which include how to underpin greater awareness and more control over digital belongings and other per...

It has been argued that technologies for 'memory' should be designed to support creativity and meaning building, rather than the passive capture of cues for remembering [25]. We report findings from a study inspired by this insight, in which older people made personal digital timelines using a new tool called Project Greenwich. We explore how the c...

Web-based technologies are often built to capitalize on the flexibility and fluidity that is supported by the internet, with the value of 'access anywhere' underpinning a blurring of boundaries across home and work. Yet the home is well known in HCI to have a unique set of qualities that can use-fully be drawn upon when designing to support domesti...

DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) aims to 'open source', tinker and experiment with biology outside of professional settings. In this paper, we present the origins, practices, and challenges of DIYbio initiatives around the world. Our findings depict DIYbio as operating across intersections ('seams') between a range of stakeholders, materials and con...

We describe the design and implementation of Photobox, a device intended to be used over many years, which occasionally prints a randomly selected photo from the owner's Flickr collection inside of a wooden chest. We describe and reflect on how engaging in the design of this slow technology [5] led to some unexpected challenges and provoked us to r...

We present findings from the deployment of a mobile application, Take and Give, which allows users to place image files in a virtual folder or 'Pocket' on a mobile phone. This content can be viewed by a set of 'Buddies', who can, if they wish, attempt to take ownership of a file for themselves, following which they can keep it, delete it, or place...

Digitization, digital books, the web, social media, etc. all have the potential to change the way we read and write and indeed styles of reading and writing have changed. But we can also look at the ways in which such tools and possibilities have changed the way we write, produce, and read paper books. This position paper looks at the author's expe...

Serendipity is an engaging, deeply personal and even magical experience to some. While serendipity has been noted to arise during people's interactions with digital photos, we have yet to understand how this occurs or how it could be supported during-and-through the use of technology. Inspired by findings about serendipity arising from people's shu...

This paper introduces Improcess, a novel cross-disciplinary collaborative project focussed on the design and develop-ment of tools to structure the communication between per-former and musical process. We describe a 3-tiered archi-tecture centering around the notion of a Common Music Runtime, a shared platform on top of which inter-operating client...

This paper describes a collaboration between the University of Dundee and Microsoft Research in which product design and interaction design students were asked to design digital products for older users. The project offered an introduction to inclusive design for the students. Rather than approach this in terms of designing for the whole population...

This paper introduces Improcess, a novel cross-disciplinary collaborative project focussed on the design and development of tools to structure the communication between performer and musical process. We describe a 3-tiered architecture centering around the notion of a Common Music Runtime, a shared platform on top of which inter-operating client in...

Digital technologies have repeatedly redefined the paper world of books. Digital printing has overhauled the publishing processes, and the internet has revolutionized the way audiences and authors connect to share their enthusiasm and criticism. Now the digitization of books themselves, either for searching, browsing, and reading on a computer scre...

As more technologies enter the home, householders are burdened with the task of digital housekeeping-managing and sharing digital resources like bandwidth. In response to this, we created and evaluated a domestic tool for bandwidth management called Home Watcher. Our field trial showed that when resource contention amongst different household membe...

We present the results of a field trial in which a visual answer machine, the BubbleBoard, was deployed in five households. The aims of the trial were to create an improved answer machine, but also, and more interestingly, to encourage family members to appropriate it through the inclusion of open and playful design elements. Through making aspects...

In this paper, we report, first of all, the discovery of a particular kind of emerging social practice involving the exchange of multimedia content on mobiles that we label 'trafficking'. Second, the iteration of a design solution to extend these practices to include the trafficking of broadcast TV content 'segments'. Third, the implications this h...

In this paper we describe a field trial designed to investigate the potential of remote, situated messaging within the home. Five households used our "HomeNote" device for approximately a month. The results show a diversity of types of communication which highlight the role of messaging both to a household and to a place. It also shows the ways in...

In this paper, we report the findings of a literature review into the experience of and the prospects for mobile TV, in particular multimedia experiences enabled over mobile phone-type devices and networks. The review shows that there will be a niche market for broadcast 'TV content' but that, more interestingly, 'mobile TV' might consist of a new...

We present the Visual Decision Maker (VDM), an application that gives movie recommendations to groups of people sitting together. The VDM provides a TV like user experience: a stream of movie stills flows towards the center of the screen, and users press buttons on remote controls to vote on the currently selected movie. A collaborative filtering e...

In this paper we present a prototype instant messaging system that allows multiple simultaneous users to access their instant messaging whilst watching TV together in the same room.

Larger display surfaces are becoming increasingly available due to multi-monitor capability built into many systems, in addition to the rapid decrease in their costs. However, little is known about the performance benefits of using these larger surfaces compared to traditional single-monitor displays. In addition, it is not clear that current softw...

Larger display surfaces are becoming increasingly available due to multi-monitor capability built into many systems, in addition to the rapid decrease in their costs. However, little is known about the performance benefits of using these larger surfaces compared to traditional single-monitor displays. In addition, it is not clear that current softw...

Users' move from single to multiple monitors so that they can use more screen real estate. This increase enables them to keep a greater number of windows open and visible at the same time. But there is a cost: arranging a window takes far longer since there is more screen space to traverse and more relationships between windows to take into account...

Introduction Inhabited TV involves the public deployment of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) so that on-line audiences can participate in TV shows within shared virtual worlds. This extends traditional broadcast TV and more recent interactive TV by enabling social interaction among participants and by offering them new forms of control ove...

The aim of this study was to investigate how group membership in an online game affects online and offline social interaction. Our main questions were: 1. Do people in online groups socialize more online and offline than people not in groups? 2. Do people in online groups have a different attitude towards bad behavior online? We surveyed Asheron's...

Inhabited television combines collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) with broadcast television so that on-line audiences can participate in television shows within shared virtual worlds. We describe a series of experiments with inhabited television, beginning with the NOWninety6 poetry performance, The Mirror, and Heaven & Hell—Live. These early...

In this paper we describe and analyse the community building process for Ages of Avatar, a set of on-line Collaborative Virtual Environments created in Microsoft Virtual Worlds, which form part of an ongoing experiment in Inhabited Television, aiming to merge CVEs and broadcast media. We describe the means by which the CVEs were launched, promoted...

: Inhabited TV combines collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) with broadcast TV so that on-line audiences can participate in TV shows within shared virtual worlds. Three early experiments with inhabited TV raised fundamental questions concerning the extent to which it is possible to establish fast-pace social interaction within a CVE and produc...

This deliverable continues the story of our practical exploration of inhabited television following the Out of This World (OOTW) experiment that was described in the previous deliverable D7a.1, and presents an early snapshot of the progress made on a further public experiment with inhabited television that was provisionally entitled 2525 and is now...

ESPRIT-IV research action of the European Communities. eRENA is concerned with the development of electronic arenas for culture, art, performance and entertainment in which the general citizen of the European Community might actively participate supported by Virtual Reality (VR) technology is deployed to enable the citizen to participate within bro...

This chapter presents the development, broadcast and data associated with two experimental broadcasts, The Mirror and Heaven and Hell Live. Both the content and viewer participation are described. These inhabited TV experiments. which combined TV and the Internet, were broadcast virtual worlds, replete with TV celebrity appearances, which people co...

Abstract Living worlds are Shared Virtual Worlds based in VRML. At BT Labs we ran two experiments,with Sony and a production company,called Illuminations examining,the use of such worlds as television, so called Inhabited TV. This paper introduces the two experiments. Firstly The Mirror looked at running communities,in Shared VRML Worlds alongside...

A standard process algebra is extended by a new action σ which is meant to denote idling until the next clock cycle. A semantic theory based on testing is developed for the new language. This is characterised in terms of barbs, a variety of ready traces and also characterised as the initial theory generated by a set of equations.

The purpose of this paper is twofold; it introduces a timed extension to LOTOS based on the process algebra TPL and this language is used to describe a lip-synchronization algorithm. Firstly we will introduce the language via a discussion on why LOTOS should be extended with a notion of time followed by a brief overview of some issues which underli...

To examine the impacts of enhanced UI feedback on shoulder-to-shoulder computing, we conducted a study using a simple picture puzzle on a computer with one display, two mice, and one keyboard. After adding sound, color differentiation, status indicators, and a graphical history, the accuracy with which subjects reported the actions of the person si...

We present the Visual Decision Maker (VDM), an application that gives movie recommendations to groups of people sitting together. The VDM provides a TV like user experience: a stream of movie stills flows towards the center of the screen, and users press buttons on remote controls to vote on the currently selected movie. A collaborative filtering e...

The results of a study into co-located friends' use of paper for a text based and a graphics based task, are presented. The results illustrate how diverse such usage is, and we look at space, ownership, and roles to demonstrate this. The study shows that people will simultaneously input into the same text document or drawing surface when the techno...

The Raven architecture provides object replication for any object system that implements object properties and methods. In the current Windows Internet Explorer implementation, it is particularly tightly integrated with HTML, allowing simple, rapid development of multi-user applications in a web page. Raven uses an XML schema approach to describing...