Haystack Blog

This year Wendy Mackay, Aurélien Tabard and I held a workshop for examining interaction challenges surrounding time, in particular time as a component of temporal data sets.  Our interest in this topic was brought about by the observation that low-cost storage, cheap sensing technologies, the Web and high speed networking have started to bring us vast quantities of rich temporal data — whether it is in “traditional” forms (such as audio or video), or “new” forms such as rich activity logs of people, places and things.  The availability of these volumes of new data present new opportunities but also pose interaction challenges that we wished to start to identify and address. From our CfP:

Is time just another attribute of data? Or is it something more? Time brings meaning to data, especially data about the real world. Time is also essential for understanding human activity and an essential element of design processes. Sometimes we address time explicitly, sometimes implicitly. It structures how people interact with computers, but is also a measurable effect of that interaction. The goal of this workshop is to explore human-computer interaction from a temporal perspective.

We were pleased that our workshop drew 35 participants with a variety of interests and backgrounds — from architects, interaction designers to data mining analysts, doctors, ubicomp researchers, and of course HCI researchers.  As can be seen in the workshop proceedings, our participants were interested in a number of different types of temporal data:

• Media: audio + video capture, manipulation, editing, sharing
• Personal health
• Personal information management
• Life logging (Personal activity data recording + Reflection)
• Air traffic control
• Financial data analysis
• Sensor networks
• Environmental impact monitoring
• Product research
• Software engineering

Despite the diversity, several common themes emerged.

The first was empowerment: the idea that accurate, low-cost-to-capture rich records of people’s everyday activities could thoroughly change the way we live.  Participants highlighted several creative examples of how such records of our lives could help us — in personal, social and work contexts.  For example, getting accurate records of one’s daily routines (such as exercise and diet) could let people identify ways to live healthier [a la Thomas Goertz's Decision Tree].  Or, to enable the hacking of social dynamics: for example, to analyze in situ or post-hoc repeated patterns of conflict in interactions with particular individuals so as to be able to better understand sources of stress related to collaboration.  Or, simply helping the user more easily retrieve and manage their personal information in an activity-centric manner than complements human episodic memory.

The essential challenge was the question of how to give individuals (just-plain-folks, end-users) access to this rich data about themselves in a way that they could easily analyze, understand, manage and use.  One participant commented that such information was “turning citizens into intelligence analysts — about their own lives”.  Intelligence analysts, of course, have extensive training in how to look at data; end-users don’t.

Another was the question of accountability, access, protection and privacy: we have never previously had access to accurate records about any aspects of our lives.  Once we have these records, what sort of implications will this have on our interactions with others? (e.g., ineffable records of where people were, how long they were there, what they did)  The process of scientific discovery, process/protocol and how this will impact how scientists work with one another? How will we control or grant others access to these records in a way that provides individuals privacy?  If individuals are employees/members of organizations, who “owns” the data about an individual’s activities at work, and what rights does the individual have towards accessing/ it and what rights does an individual have to their own activity records? Finally, after an individual departs (passes away or leaves an organization), how should such data be handled or retired? Who has rights to a deceased individual’s life log?

Other themes and topics of discussion included : the need for interfaces to help reconcile subjective/emotional memories of the past with “cold, hard lifelogs”, implicit versus explicit representations of time; e.g., different ways of portraying dynamic processes, and explanation facilities for time-dynamic pattern recognition.

Based on the strong interest from our workshop participants, we have decided to start a discussion group / online watering hole for us to further discuss some of the issues surrounding interaction with temporal data.  We welcome anyone interested (not only workshop participants) to join and post their thoughts, questions, projects and ideas:

• Temporal-Data @ groups.google.com – Temporal Data Google Group

With this google group we wish to continue our consolidated, cross-application domain discussion of interaction issues with the hopes of taming the complexities of our data rich environments.