Louise Barkhuus
Research Interests: Summary
I am a research fellow at Glasgow University, where I have worked since January 2005. I am working on our new project involving fitness technologies and activity tracking, which focuses on how ubiquitous computing can be used to motivate people to become more active. I presented some of our work at UbiComp 2006 in Irvine. I also work with location-based games, based on the notion of ‘seamful’ design, and explore the use of entertainment media in the home, in particular TV and video. The work was published in CHI 2006 and we have an upcoming journal publication. Together with Jennifer Rode (UCI) and Genevieve Bell (Intel Research) I organized a workshop at CHI 2006. I gained my PhD, ‘The Context Gap: An Essential Challenge to Context-Aware Computing', from the IT University of Copenhagen in 2004. The context gap is the inherent gap between the human lived experience and the representation that technology can provide or measure by sensors or other types of input. I investigated the context gap through three empirical case studies and was shown to be very relevant to the analysis of context-aware computing. During my PhD, I conducted a case study in collaboration with Associate Professor Paul Dourish, at UC Irvine. I was affiliated to the department of Information and Computer Science, working on the project ‘Active Campus’ together with fellow researchers at UC San Diego. My research is within human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing. I study people's interaction with these technologies in real environments, and hope to inform developers and designers of new ways to design and use technology. I am interested in studying more subtle social interactions with state-of-the-art technologies such as larger ambient information displays or small tangible interfaces. My interests span from users’ interaction with very work focused technologies, to more leisure-oriented systems such as games and home-entertainment systems. |