Published papers

© 2017 Association for Computing Machinery. In a world moving towards ubiquitous computing, users are increasingly confronted with a tremendous amount of information proactively provided via notifications. Today, notifications are generated by a large number of applications and services, through multiple devices and screens in the users' environment. Thus, human's attention became a significant bottleneck. Further, the latest computing trends with emerging new devices including versatile IoT devices, and contexts, such as smart cities and vehicles, further amplify the challenges. For future computing systems, "attention management", including attention representation, sensing, prediction, analysis and adaptive behavior becomes crucial. Following last year's successful UbiTtention'16 workshop with more than 40 participants, the UbiTtention 2017 workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from academy and industry to explore the managements of human attention and notifications. The workshop considers versatile devices and smart situations to overcome information overload and overchoice.

© Copyright held by the owner/author(s). We propose a Meal Photo SNS (called HealthyStadium) for improving users' eating habits by mutually assessing each others' health. This application's method is to evaluates pictures of meals leads to the realization of sustainable journaling. In addition, we implement competitive awareness that motivates the users to improve their eating habits by allowing users to share their healthiness ranking amongst the users. Through our study, we confirmed that our system enables users to motivate for improving eating habits. Also we found the number of records is increased by our system.

© Copyright held by the owner/author(s). By enabling driver mode on a smartphone, the smartphone can autonomously detect driving activities and suppress any incoming notifications so that drivers can focus on their attention on driving activities. However, the current driving mode implementations are limited in the fact that they frequently misjudge driving activities and also only have the option of nullifying all incoming notifications. In this work we present an improvement to this design and propose two major improvements to the current driving mode implementations: the first to improve driving activity detection and the second to diversify the notification mechanisms when the user is detected to be driving. While the work is still at its preliminary stages, we foresee this work as a meaningful effort to initiate the design of smartphone notification systems more tailored to the users' needs.

This paper proposes a novel 'Application as a Sensor' (AaaS) approach for user attention status sensing in mobile and ubiquitous computing where user attends to ubicomp-related goal-directed tasks that usually involve in 'applications'. By using information in the application layer including application-specific knowledge on user's attention status while user manipulates applications on multiple mobile devices, the underlying system can sense user's current attention target and 'breakpoint' [1] that can be used for further attention-aware adaptation for maintaining user's productivity, in mobile devices, in real-time, without dedicated external psycho-physiological sensors. © 2014 IEEE.

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Focus, a system for effectively and efficiently reducing power consumption of OLED displays on smartphones. These displays, while becoming exceedingly common still consume significant power. The key idea of Focus is that we use the notion of saliency to save display power by dimming portions of the applications that are less important to the user. We envision Focus being especially useful during low battery situations when usability is less important than power savings. We tested Focus using 15 applications running on a Samsung Galaxy S III and show that it saves, on average, between 23 to 34% of the OLED display power with little impact on task completion times. Finally, we present the results of a user study, involving 30 participants that shows that Focus, even with its dimming behaviour, is still quite usable. Copyright © 2013 ACM.

This report describes an agent-assisted information browing system, lnforgent. The agent dispatched by the user moves tdwards the host which holds the desired data, and retrieves the informaiton from the host. Then on the same host, the agent probcesses the data and converts the data suitable for output. After the agent comes back with the processed data, it shows the output in desired way. By using this system, users can be unconscious of their computer resources and the type of the desired data, and can browse information with more flexibility.

This report describes an agent-assisted information browsing system, Inforgent. The agent dispatched by the user moves towards the host which holds the desired data, and retrieves the informaiton from the host. Then on the same host, the agent processes the data and converts the data suitable for output. After the agent comes back with the processed data, it shows the output in desired way. By using this system, users can be unconscious of their computer resources and the type of the desired data, and can browse information with more flexibility.

© 2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Today, many users of mobile devices are continuously confronted with a huge variety of information: notifications from Facebook, new application updates, won badges, or reminders. This leads to an information overload, which makes it hard to stay focused. This workshop will investigate approaches towards smart attention management systems. We will discuss the fundamental challenges of smart notifications and the design of proactive notification mechanisms. We invite submissions that focus on the understanding of users and their current, mobile information handling. We further appreciate contributions that propose design concepts for the interaction with smart attention management systems. The expected workshop outcome is a summary of emerging challenges in the design and development of smart attention management systems as well as approaches to address them.

© 2017 IEEE. Investigating users' interruptibility as an indicator of his/her attention status has been essential in recent pervasive computing where the users' attention resources get scarce against ever increasing amounts of information. In this paper, we address research problems related to the users' available interruptibility, their physical activities, and their current locations and situations. We propose the 'Interruptibility Map', a geographical tool for analyzing and visualizing the user's local interruptibility status in the context of smart city research. Our map describes where citizens are expected to feel more or less interruptive against notifications produced by computing devices, which are known to have negative effects on work productivity, emotion, and psychological state. We conducted a continuous analysis from our previous research and a new additional in-the-wild user study for 2 weeks with 29 participants to investigate the relationship between one's interruptibility and their locations and situations. As a highlight of our findings, we found certain pairs of user activity change and a location that showed better interruptibility to users, such as an activity change of 'when user's riding car(bus) stops' in the bus commute situation.