Overview

These days I spend most of my time thinking about the latest generation of mobile devices: how users engage with them, what problems they encounter, what opportunities they present to improve how users access and leverage information. As the manager of the mobile computing group at IBM Research - Almaden, I focus on understanding how to design effective mobile experiences in order to share that knowledge with IBM's product groups. I also work with my team to explore how mobile devices can enhance collaboration and both the ability to gather and access information. I also spend time thinking about how interfaces can and should change as we move away from working with a single computer and begin working with a variety of devices. While today's users already work with a variety of devices, there is little support for coordinating activities across those devices. In fact, most computers are completely unaware that a user might own other computers. As users employ more and more devices (desktops, laptops, tablets or slates, smartphones, etc.) we need to make it easier for users to coordinate their activities across them.

Current Projects

Triage and Capture: Rethinking Mobile Email I'm currently exploring how the latest generation of iPhone, Android, and other smartphones are changing user behaviors in order to understand how to improve existing mobile experience and design new ones. In addition to synthesizing general lessons about how to design effective mobile user experiences, I'm also exploring opportunities for new experiences. One of the projects we've been tackling is an effort to rethink mobile email based on our observations of mobile email users.

Previous Projects @ IBM

Personal Information Environments The pattern of how users interact with computers has changed over time. Users initially shared computers, but increasing capabilities and decreasing prices led to computers dedicated to a single user and the model of the "personal computer". As capabilities increase and prices decrease further, users are now starting to interact with a heterogeneous collection of computing devices (e.g. desktops, laptops, tablets, PDAs, mobile phones). Sample workspaces with multiple devices. Despite this latest change, the models of the shared and the personal computer still predominate today. A user purchasing a new computer can configure it with relative ease to serve as either a shared (e.g. among family members) or personal computer. However, current computing devices provide users with little or no support for interacting across a collection of multiple personal devices. The user of that new computer, for example, has no mechanism to inform it of the identities of the other computing devices he employs. We believe that computing devices need a new model that recognizes that users may employ multiple devices. We propose the model of a personal information environment (PIE) composed of multiple heterogeneous computing devices employed by the same user.

Previous Projects @ Georgia Tech

		Opportunistic Annexing Small, portable devices such as PDAs and cellular phones provide a convenient way for users to access data anytime and anywhere. Inherent to the portability of these devices are small displays and the limited input capabilities of pen input and phone keypads. To overcome these difficulties we propose a system which would allow small device users to opportunistically annex input and output devices that they encounter in their environment. Users could annex a keyboard to quickly type an email on their PDA or a monitor to view their calendar while talking on their cellular phone.
		DIAMOND Despite the increasing prevalence of physically proximate computing devices, current interfaces remain largely limited to single computing devices because of the prevailing assumption that interfaces can only draw on input and output (I/O) resources attached to the same device. That assumption has led previous research to emphasize transferring interaction to the computer with the best available I/O resources, but that approach introduces security and privacy risks. We propose to instead allow users to divide interfaces across multiple devices so that they can allocate functionality and information appropriate across trusted and untrusted devices. DIAMOND is a prototype framework that we are developing to support Dividing Interfaces Across Multiple Opportunistically aNnexed Devices.
		SEREFE At work and at play, people need access to the right information, and they frequently need to share that information with others. While current tools such as electronic mail and USB flash drives provide powerful mechanisms for managing and sharing information, they too often require that users anticipate what information they might share (e.g. so they have it on their flash drive) and when they might share it (e.g. so they bring the flash drive with them). These tools thus provide excellent support for planned sharing but inadequate support for serendipitously sharing digital information with others. SEREFE is a new architecture for SEREndipitous File Exchange that extends an instant messaging architecture to allow users to use any of their devices, including a cell phone, to share information stored on any of their devices with other users or to copy it to another of their devices.
		Translucent Computing Spyware, phishing, and malware are both a serious threat and a significant risk in part because of the emphasis in commercial operating systems on making computer systems more opaque: they have worked hard to hide the details of operation in the name of usability. While making computers more opaque is effective when they work exactly as desired, opacity is problematic when the actions of those computers can differ from their users' intentions. We propose translucent computing as an approach to improving computer security and user privacy by reducing the impact and incidence of spyware, phishing, and malware. Translucent computing emphasizes selectively presenting information about a computer's actions to its user to allow him to verify that those actions match his intentions.
		SWIMM SWIMM (SWimming In My Music) is a next-generation digital music player that provides adaptive music streams. A stream, while analogous to a radio station, draws from a user's digital music library, preferences expressed by the user, and the user's empirical listening habits to provide an unbounded stream of music customized to the user's tastes, even as those tastes evolve over time.