Alan F. Blackwell's research while affiliated with University of Cambridge and other places
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Publications (232)
A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-021-00545-y
Scene Walk is a video viewing technique suited to first-person video recorded from wearable cameras. It integrates a 2D video player and visualisation of the camera trajectory into a non-photorealistic partial rendering of the 3D environment as reconstructed from image content. Applications include forensic analysis of first-person video archives,...
Artificial intelligence research is seldom conducted ethnographically. Nevertheless, the field itself has a distinctive culture – an engineering imaginary within which ‘general intelligence’ is considered to be a phenomenon that can be both defined and tested by reference to some universal (probably mathematical) standard. This paper describes a re...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) research has always been embedded in complex networks of cultural imagination, corporate business, and sociopolitical power relations. The great majority of AI research around the world, and almost all commentary on that research, assumes that the imagination, business, and political systems of Western culture and the G...
Software requirements elicitation workshops often make use of a widely used and, on the surface, highly informal, notational medium: the sticky note. Often, in such workshops, facilitators and participants collaborate to construct “diagrams” made up of sticky notes. Methodologies have been developed that prescribe the way that diagram construction...
An unfortunate tendency in previous HCI research has been to give the impression that it aims to ‘fix the problem’ of human ageing, suggesting a ‘deficit’ model of ageing or a ‘prosthetic’ model of technology. We conducted diary-aided interviews to investigate how technology use is situated in active, healthy older adults’ meaningful participation...
Adopting a strong process perspective, this chapter seeks to problematize the way in which data are typically conceived in the information sciences and in contemporary organizational discourse. Drawing on evidence from an ongoing multidisciplinary study of data reuse in acute healthcare we argue that, contrary to the prevalent conception of data as...
We present Cuscus, a tool for data visualisation that is informed by ethnographic fieldwork across different professional sectors. Cuscus allows end-users to create novel visualisations by defining visual properties in a spreadsheet. We also report on user studies in the contexts of data journalism and business analytics, and discuss further extens...
This paper reflects on the evolution (past, present and future) of the ‘psychology of programming' over the 50 year period of this anniversary issue. The International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS) has been a key venue for much seminal work in this field, including its first foundations, and we review the changing research concerns seen...
Across the world, policy initiatives are being developed to engage children with computer programming and computational thinking. Diversity and inclusion has been a strong force in this agenda, but children with disabilities have largely been omitted from the conversation. Currently, there are no age appropriate tools for teaching programming conce...
Location sensing is a key enabling technology for Ubicomp to support contextual interaction. However, the laboratories where calibrated testing of location technologies is done are very different to the domestic situations where `context' is a problematic social construct. This study reports measurements of Bluetooth beacons, informed by laboratory...
Purpose: We explore the challenges of the secondary use of data in clinical information systems (CIS) which critical care units in the National Health Service (England) are facing. Methods: We conducted an online survey of Critical Care Units in England regarding their practices in collecting and using clinical information systems and data. Results...
Purpose:
We explore the challenges of the secondary use of data in clinical information systems which critical care units in the National Health Service (England) are facing.
Methods:
We conducted an online survey of critical care units in England regarding their practices in collecting and using clinical information systems and data.
Results:...
This paper describes a qualitative study of retirees' social and personal practices via digital music technologies in the context of community music. We conducted a diary study, and interviewed retired community musicians who are experiencing transition to retirement. Amongst challenges due to ageing and retirement, retirees participating in commun...
End-user developers are identified by their difference from (ordinary) developers. This difference is both a matter of definition, and an essential starting point for investigation. So the question arises how are they different? Since there are so many more non-developers in the world than developers, it seems likely that the differences among end-...
As computing technologies become ubiquitous in social life, social science increasingly becomes the study of those technosystems. Similarly, as technology corporations compete to design new ubicomp products, social science research is recruited as a design method. This paper presents an interpretive bricolage, exploring the relationship between soc...
Fact 1: A programming language is a way of saying what should happen. Fact 2: Most programming languages can only be understood by experts. This short chapter discusses the implications of those two facts, in the light of many other languages that have historically been used by experts to specify what should happen. The semiotic argument underlying...
Sonic Pi is a new open source software tool and platform originally developed for the Raspberry Pi computer, designed to enable school children to learn programming by creating music. In this article we share insights from a scoping study on the development of Sonic Pi and its use in educational partnerships. Our findings draw attention to the impo...
As computing technologies become ubiquitous in social life, social science increasingly becomes the study of those technosystems. Similarly, as technology corporations compete to design new ubicomp products, social science research is recruited as a design method. This paper presents an interpretive bricolage, exploring the relationship between soc...
The pace of engagement with new digital technologies in music education is proving to be slow. A key issue - and a major barrier to entry - is teacher skills and confidence to work with technology creatively. Following a concerted campaign from the technology industry, in spring 2013 the UK government agreed to introduce the subject of computing in...
Gatherminer is an interactive visual tool for analysing time series data with two key strengths. First, it facilitates bottom-up analysis, i.e., the detection of trends and patterns whose shapes are not known beforehand. Second, it integrates data mining algorithms to explain such patterns in terms of the time series’ metadata attributes – an extre...
How diverse are the ways that programming is done? While a variety of accounts exist, each appears in isolation, neither framed in terms of a distinct practice, nor as one of many such practices. In this work we explore accounts spanning software engineering, bricolage/tinkering, sketching, live coding, code-bending, and hacking. These practices of...
Data wrangling is the term used by data scientists for the work of re-organising data into a new structure, before work starts on reporting or analysis. We present a prototype that applies programming by example methods to data wrangling in spreadsheets. The Data Noodles system guides the user through constructing a simple example that illustrates...
The application of mobile computing is currently altering patterns of our behavior to a greater degree than perhaps any other invention. In combination with the introduction of power-efficient wireless communication technologies, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), designers are today increasingly empowered to shape the way we interact with our phy...
BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) is a new wireless communication technology that, thanks to reduced power consumption, promises to facilitate communication between computing devices and help us harness their power in environments and contexts previously untouched by information technology. Museums and other facilities housing various cultural content are...
BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) is a new wireless communication technology that, thanks to reduced power consumption, promises to facilitate communication between computing devices and help us harness their power in environments and contexts previously untouched by information technology. Museums and other facilities housing various cultural content are...
The application of mobile computing is currently altering patterns of our behavior to a greater degree than perhaps any other invention. In combination with the introduction of power efficient wireless communication technologies, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), designers are today increasingly empowered to shape the way we interact with our phy...
This paper describes an ethnography conducted to understand how people making the transitions to retirement engage in community music. We reflect on how people learn music and new technologies, how they interact, and what values they share within musical communities. We find that community music fosters social learning, and identify contexts in whi...
We present a live, multiple-representation novice environment for probabilistic programming based on the Infer.NET language. When compared to a text-only editor in a controlled experiment on 16 participants, our system showed a significant reduction in keystrokes during introductory probabilistic programming exercises, and subsequently, a significa...
Sonic Pi is a new open source software tool and platform originally developed for the Raspberry Pi computer, designed to enable school children to learn programming by creating music. In this article we share insights from a scoping study on the development of Sonic Pi and its use in educational partnerships. Our findings draw attention to the impo...
Much of our everyday interaction in the physical world is peripheral—many of the objects that reside on the periphery of our awareness also require or allow actions in the periphery of our attention, as we briefly touch, handle, move, or avoid them. When these objects are digitally augmented, computational operations extend beyond dedicated display...
Gatherminer is an interactive visual tool for analysing time series data with two key strengths. First, it facilitates bottom-up analysis, i.e., the detection of trends and patterns whose shapes are not known beforehand. Second, it integrates data mining algorithms to explain such patterns in terms of the time series? metadata attributes ? an extre...
Discussions between data analysts and colleagues or clients with no statistical background are difficult, as the analyst often has to teach and explain their statistical and domain knowledge. We investigate work practices of data analysts who collaborate with non-experts, and report findings regarding types of analysis, collaboration and availabili...
The key contribution of HCI research is the way it creates new relationships between disciplines, not as a discipline in itself. Diplomacy and personal skills are essential, as design insights and innovation often involve resistance and critique of mainstream computer science. Organizational sociologists have drawn attention to the bounded communit...
BrainCel is an interactive visual system for performing general-purpose machine learning in spreadsheets, building on end-user programming and interactive machine learning. BrainCel features multiple coordinated views of the model being built, explaining its current confidence in predictions as well as its coverage of the input domain, thus helping...
We explore the factors that determine whether individuals are likely to experience intrinsic motivation in end-user programming (EUP). We report two experiments: one that tests whether there are reliable psychometric constructs that describe different aspects of intrinsic motivation, and one that tests whether these constructs are successful in pre...
People retiring now differ greatly in knowledge, motivation, attitudes towards and use of digital music-related technologies to younger generations or their predecessors. This paper reviews the methods that have been used to investigate why people use music-related technologies, how they use them and why. Using a lens provided by social cognitive t...
Using a novel visualization and control interface – the Mephistophone – we explore the development of a user interface for acoustic visualization and analysis of bird calls. Our intention is to utilize embodied computation as an aid to acoustic cognition. The Mephistophone demonstrates ‘mixed initiative’ design, where humans and systems collaborate...
We compare some recent trends in mixed-initiative HCI and interactive electronic music, and consider what useful knowledge can be shared between them. We then present two novel principles for understanding the nature of this common trend: spacesofco − agency and dialecticalinteraction; and discuss some of the philosophical and technical challenges...
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Classic theories of user interaction have been framed in relation to symbolic models of planning and problem solving, responding in part to the cognitive theories associated with AI research. However, the behavior of modern machine-learning systems is determined by statistical models of the world rather than explic...
In recent years, a number of algorithms have been developed which provide fast approximate computations on large datasets. There is considerable interest in exploiting these techniques to render interactive visualisations of large datasets. Such interactions require careful consideration of the uncertainty arising from the approximations that these...
This study explores the use of natural language to give instructions that might be interpreted by Internet of Things (IoT) devices in a domestic 'smart home' environment. We start from the proposition that reminders can be considered as a type of end-user programming, in which the executed actions might be performed either by an automated agent or...
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702613.2732505
Children with autism spectrum condition (ASC) suffer from deficits or developmental delays in symbolic thinking. In particular, they are often found lacking in pretend play during early childhood. Researchers believe that they encounter difficulty in generating and maintaining mental representation of pretense coupled with the immediate reality. We...
We present "FingAR Puppet", an Augmented Reality (AR) system enhancing social pretend play by young children. Unlike goal-oriented AR systems that augment reality with informative instructions, FingAR Puppet helps children associate expressive interpretations with immediate reality. Empirical results show that FingAR Puppet promotes reasoning about...
We describe our view of visual analytics as a form of end-user programming that reduces expertise barriers to analytical tasks, and discuss two projects that aim to make analytical programming more visual.
Palimpsest is a novel purely-visual language intended to support exploratory live programming. It demonstrates a new paradigm for the visual representation of constraint programming that may be appropriate to future generations of keyboardless and touchscreen devices. The current application domain is that of creative image manipulation, although t...
Sonic Pi is a music live coding language that has been designed for educational use as a first programming language. However, it is not straightforward to achieve the necessary simplicity of a first language in a music live coding setting, for reasons largely related to the manipulation of time. The original version of Sonic Pi used a `sleep' funct...
The modern economy increasingly relies on exploratory data analysis. Much of this is dependent on data scientists - expert statisticians who process data using statistical tools and programming languages. Our goal is to offer some of this analytical power to end-users who have no statistical training through simple interaction techniques and metaph...
Information visualisation presents powerful techniques for data analytics. However, rendering visualisations of big datasets is impractical on commodity hardware. There is increasing interest in approaches where data sampling and probabilistic algorithms are used to support faster processing of large datasets. This approach to approximate computati...
There are two alternative display metaphors for Augmented Reality (AR) screens: a see-through window or a magic mirror. Commonly used by task-support AR applications, the see-through display has not been compared with the mirror display in terms of user's task performance, even though the “mirror” hardware is more accessible to general users. We co...
Lack of spontaneous pretend play is an early diagnostic indicator of autism spectrum conditions (ASC) along with impaired communication and social interaction. In a previous ISMAR poster [2] we proposed an Augmented Reality (AR) system to encourage pretend play, based on an analogy between imaginative interpretation of physical objects (pretense) a...
Domain Specific and Functional languages provide an excellent linguistic context for exploring new forms of music notation -- not just for formalising compositions but also for live interaction workflows. This experience report describes two novel live coding systems that employ code execution to modify live sounds and music. The first of these sys...
Pretend play is a symbolic activity in one's childhood which develops critical competences such as mental representation, linguistic expression and social knowledge. However, children with autism spectrum condition (ASC) are often found lacking in pretend play. Inspired by the analogy between pretend play and Augmented Reality (AR), both of which r...
Children with autism are often found to lack facility for pretend play. It is believed that this deficit is linked to linguistic, social and creativity competencies in autism. We observe that both Augmented Reality (AR) and pretend play involve processing of information that is coupled with real scenes while not necessarily being directly perceived...
There has been a rapid increase in research evaluating usability of Augmented Reality (AR) systems in recent years. Although
many different styles of evaluation are used, there is no clear consensus on the most relevant approaches. We report a review
of papers published in International Symposium of Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) proceedings i...
To complement studies on design sketching within particular phases of design processes in specific design domains, this paper analyzes descriptions of design processes given by designers from a wide variety of fields. This research forms part of a wider project on comparisons across design domains and draws attention to the many types and propertie...
This paper presents concepts, models, and empirical findings relating to liveness and flow in the user experience of systems mediated by notation. Results from an extensive two-year field study of over 1,000 sequencer and tracker users, combining interaction logging, user surveys, and a video study, are used to illustrate the properties of notation...
We are interested in creating novel representations of computation, so that people who are often excluded by traditional software development tools can access the power of computing. For example we work with artists who wish to use computational behaviours as an inspiration for dancers, or for sculpture, but lack the time or interest to engage with...
The ACM and IEEE are currently revising their joint Computer Curriculum. The purpose of this workshop is to discuss and formulate a context for the HCI component of the undergraduate curriculum in terms of the current teaching practices of HCI educators. The goals of the workshop are to provide rich methods for capturing pedagogical content knowled...
Performers often discuss the sound quality of a violin or the sound obtained by particular playing techniques, calling upon a diverse vocabulary. This study explores the verbal descriptions, made by performers, of the distinctive timbres of different violins. Sixty-one common descriptors were collected and then arranged by violinists on a map, so t...
We describe the Choreographic Language Agent, a programming environment designed for use by dancers and choreographers in the context of improvisatory composition methods. CLA provides a means for dancers to interact with a simple but powerful set of 3D geometric transforms, creating a wide variety of kinematic and dynamic configurations expressed...
We describe an approach to understanding the way in which people can use physical objects as if they were components of an abstract language. This arose from our study of common devices that cannot support direct manipulation, because users are controlling future operations such as VCR recording. We apply an adaptation of the Cognitive Dimensions o...
![Fig. 6. The Toped++ pattern editor [Scaffidi et al. 2008], allowing the...](profile/Margaret-Burnett-2/publication/220566620/figure/fig6/AS:667852562497539@1536239867349/The-Toped-pattern-editor-Scaffidi-et-al-2008-allowing-the-creation-of-string-data_Q320.jpg)
Most programs today are written not by professional software developers, but by people with expertise in other domains working towards goals for which they need computational support. For example, a teacher might write a grading spreadsheet to save time grading, or an interaction designer might use an interface builder to test some user interface d...
Hospital medicine necessitates that practitioners from many disciplines collaborate to care for patients with complex illnesses. Much emphasis is placed on multi-disciplinary interaction during the ward round to achieve collaboration, but it can still be difficult to attain. This paper looks at how electronic medical records affect multi-disciplina...
![Figure 7. The reViSiT Pro VSTi plugin [12], designed to run inside a...](profile/Chris-Nash-4/publication/266316584/figure/fig4/AS:669395349159948@1536607696718/The-reViSiT-Pro-VSTi-plugin-12-designed-to-run-inside-a-sequencer_Q320.jpg)
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...
![Fig. 6. The Toped++ pattern editor [Scaffidi et al. 2008], allowing the...](profile/Margaret-Burnett-2/publication/312210579/figure/fig5/AS:758103255556096@1557757309229/The-Toped-pattern-editor-Scaffidi-et-al-2008-allowing-the-creation-of-string-data_Q320.jpg)
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...
This contribution is part of a special issue on History and Human Nature, comprising an essay by G.E.R. Lloyd and fifteen invited responses.
The uptake of electronic records and information technology support in intensive care medicine has been slower than many people predicted. One of the engineering challenges to overcome has been the subtle, but important, variation in clinical practice in different units. A relatively recent innovation that addresses this challenge is practitioner-c...
Although topics such as fun, enjoyment, aesthetics, and experience are relatively new in HCI, long traditions of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences have examined them. Some have already been expressed in the appropriation of conceptualizations of experience in HCI research and practice. There is also a small but fast growing body of...
Gesture and Embodied Interaction is a five-month practice-led scoping project which explored motion capture development perspectives from artistic, technological and business innovation standpoints. It convened an interdisciplinary community from the arts, sciences and business studies, experienced in practice-driven collaborative research. Effort...
In recent years, the category of "practice-based research" has become an essential component of discourse around public funding and evaluation of the arts in British higher education. When included under the umbrella of public policy concerned with "the creative industries", technology researchers often find themselves collaborating with artists wh...
Abstract In recent years, the category of ?practice-based research? has become an essential component of discourse around public funding and evaluation of the arts in British higher education. When included under the umbrella of public policy concerned with ?the creative industries", technology researchers often find themselves collaborating with a...
and concrete because so much about software seems abstract. As a result, the adap- tation of pattern languages to software has lost the key con- tribution of Alexander's work, which was to focus attention onto the users. Software pat- terns, despite being inspired by Alexander's work, emphasize abstract descriptions of con- struction and of ornamen...
Artists use computers in many ways; technologists produce computerised tools of various kinds. The boundary where art meets technology is in creative tension between the needs and the understanding of the two camps. We report on the key questions raised at a meeting between philosophers, psychologists, artists, and technologists to negotiate this b...
This work explored how the perception of violin notes is influenced by the magnitude of the applied vibrato and by the level of damping of the violin resonance modes. Damping influences the "peakiness" of the frequency response, and vibrato interacts with this peakiness by producing fluctuations in spectral content as well as in frequency and ampli...
This paper reports a case study of a specific end-user programming context, in which an electronic patient record system was being customised by a healthcare professional. Our research involved making an unusual intervention, employing a professional programmer as a quasi-experimental participant, in order to explore and contrast the different ways...
In this paper we draw an analogy between musical systems and programming environments, concentrating on user experience associated with feedback and its implications for flow. We present a number of different analytical frames all of which, we suggest, influence the nature of this feedback and with it, the user experience. We introduce a new diagra...
This research is concerned with describing the experience of being a designer and doing design. Many case studies have described individual experiences, both of designers reflecting on their own work, and academic studies of expert design work as performed in a professional context. Such studies are an important component of design research, and pr...
We report a series of studies investigating the choices that users make between direct manipulation and abstract programming strategies when operating domestic appliances. We characterise these strategic choices in terms of the Attention Investment model of abstraction use. We then describe an experiment that investigates the estimation biases infl...
The contemporary practice of medicine, which is concerned both with national standards of audit and innovation through local
customisation, is a prime domain for end-user development. In this paper we describe four experiences of end-user development
in this domain that offer interesting empirical examples. We look at existing practices through con...
The majority of Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) consist of rigid objects that are either held in the hands, or arranged relative to each other on a horizontal or vertical surface. In this paper we consider the design space of TUIs that can be created by moving parts of an assembly relative to each other -- creating articulated tangible interfaces....
