Research Overview
My research focuses on the capture and subsequent access of activities, events, and
memories that occur in our everyday lives through learning, visiting places, doing
things and meeting people - in other words, living!
RESEARCH THEMES
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Electronic Classrooms Ubiquitous computing
enhances the learning environment & process.
Skill Acquisition Facilitating on-demand learning
of skills. What do you want to do today?
Everyday Capture Personal Video Capture
lets you never forget anything you've ever seen or heard.
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My previous work was with eClass [1], an automated classroom that records what
is said and presented, and generates a set of online notes from the captured materials.
Extensive real-world evaluation of eClass indicates that automated capture and access
in the college classroom is both effective and desired by students and
teachers [2].
Additionally, I believe that using capture and access to record or enrich
an experience is a general technique that can be applied across a wide variety of
domains. I am continuing to develop electronic classrooms, but I am also looking at
different kinds of learning: skill learning. I see capture and access enabling anyone
to learn a specific dance, juggling trick, or even playing a musical instrument like the
piano. In addition, I am also looking at how capture and access can simulate a
photographic memory, as well as create new types memories.
(more about capture and access)
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Methodology
Each project will follow the same methodology common to ubiquitous computing research: build, deploy, evaluate. Building is the necessary first step because these systems do not already exist. Deployment and everyday use is critical because it isn't until the systems have become "weaved into the fabric of our lives" that we can evaluate them reliably. The need for evaluation is obvious - how has the system altered a persons' routine or task - as often one cannot predict how these systems will end up being used. In turn, the evaluation prompts a new cycle of refinement, deployment, and evaluation.
Measurable outcomes are not just the systems or the publications associated with the research, but also how they offer insights into capture and access as a general field of research, and guidelines for interfaces with computer-augmented everyday objects. For example, how does one search through years of video to find an event? What if the years of video were simply just a recording of the person's life? The answers to such questions will contribute to the wider field of capture and access.
This research is supported through a Royal Society USA Research Fellowship.
- BROTHERTON, J. and ABOWD, G. 2002.
eClass.
Sixth chapter in The Digital
University: Building a Learning Community. Reza Hazemi, Stephen Hailes, and Steve
Wilbur (eds), Springer Verlag, 2002, pp.252, ISBN 185233-478-9.
- BROTHERTON, J. and ABOWD, G. 2004.
Lessons Learned from eClass: Assessing
Automated Capture and Access in the Classroom. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human
Interaction (ToCHI). To appear Spring/Summer 2004.
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