Distributed Cognition in E-Inclusion

The digital divide describes the fact that the world can be divided into people who do and people who don't have access to - and the capability to use - modern information technology. E-inclusion is a social movement whose goal is to end this divide.The biggest hinderance for people who fail to utilize technology despite availability is the lack of literacy and the inconsistency that digital interfaces have with the socio-environment of the user. This research attempts to study the importance of ethnography and awareness of the context in which an illiterate or disabled individual responds to digital interfaces. The papers involved in this study range from current research in introducing technology in developing countries to the developement of context-aware tools that facilitate cognition and learning of new technology. The focus of this study it to understand existing approaches and discover opportunities where distributed cognition can be employed to facilite future research.

List of Papers

Pawar, U. S., Pal, J. (accepted, 2006). Multiple mice for computers in education in developing countries, IEEE/ACM Int’l Conf. on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, 2006.

Rangaswamy, N. and K. Toyama. (2005) Sociology of ICTs: the Myth of the Hybernating Village. HCI International 2005 (Las Vegas), July 2005.

Lieberman, H. and Selker, T. (2000). Out of context: Computer systems that adapt to, and learn from, context. IBM Systems Journal Vol. 39, Nos. 3 & 4, pp. 617-632.

Adams, R., Langdon, P. and Clarkson, P.J. (2002). A systematic basis for developing cognitive assessment methods for assistive technology. In -Keates, S., Langdon, P., Clarkson, P.J. and Robinson, P. (Eds.). 52-62. London: Springer Verlag.

Giovanni Moura de Holanda,Juliano Castilho Dall'Antonia (2006), An Approach for e-inclusion:Bringing illiterates and disabled people into play. Journal of Technology Management and Innovation

Gerhard Fischer, Ernesto Arias, Stefan Carmien, Hal Eden,Andrew Gorman, Shin’ichi Konomi, James Sullivan.(2004)Supporting Collaboration and Distributed Cognition in Context-Aware Pervasive Computing Environments. HCI Consortium "Computing Off the Desktop"

Medhi, I., Sagar, A. and Toyama K. (2006) Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (Berkeley, USA), May 2006

gWeather

Here you go!

gWeather

The component flow diagram from the presentation

The code currently works only for the locations of San Jose, San Fransisco, Beverly Hills, La Jolla and San Diego. Enter the zip code of every city in the location. Right now we are able to retrieve 3-day weather information. This will be updated to over a week's info. I'm planning to work on this through the summer and I'll keep my updates posted here!

will miss this course :-(

Progress

I am now able to parse hourly data comfortably! I have written a script to display weather icon and temperature in the "event box". Only work left is to loop the code for every event box*. I am also yet to write the function that takes the city name/zip code and retrieves the latitude and longitude co-ordinates. So far I have been hard-coding the values for eventbox and geographic co-ordinates. The dirty work is over but some fine-tuning is needed.

As we have already decided that we will display weather information for for events in "My Calendar", I don't have to worry about "Busy" event states, for which we won't get the event location.


*event box : the gCal element that presents the event details.

Theory of Design and My Dilemma!

I found this quote in Brian Sooy's Blog

"Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you've done, then they know exactly what they want, but it's not what you did."

In this project, I play the dual roles of both the developer and the user. As a user, I had high demands and expectations, for what the script should do! As the developer, I need to be more wary of the infinite loops that my code could get into! When I triumphantly managed to parse the XML from www.weather.com, and moved on to the next milestone, I realized that the XML that I parsed was utterly useless and I provided me only the current weather! Here is the link to a sample RSS feed (for La Jolla). What I need is hourly forecast and weather.com can only provide that in a dynamic wepage (link). I would then have to perform a series of getElementById() and compare the strings to the times I want. This becomes very complicated as the html elements I need do not have IDs.


An alternative source (provided by Kelly) is Weather.gov. This provides an Experimental National Digital Forecast Database XML, that can provide hourly information (in three hour blocks). The request/response process is made possible by the NDFD XML Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) server. The server is updated hourly. Hitch: One needs to provide the latitude and longitude co-ordinates of the location (not zipcode, not city name!). Fortunately for us, Geocode provides the latitude and longitude co-ordinates given the zipcode or city name.

NDFD XML contains forecasts for any combination of the following meteorological parameters, including Max/Min Temperature, 3 hourly Temperature etc. The NDFDgen() function is accessed by Client to retrieve the parameters and it requires some user supplied input such as Latitude, Longitude, Start and End-Time. However when I tested the function, it returned weather information for a date in 1970!

The National Weather Service has also announced that it would provide Rss feeds (making life easier for everyone!), but as luck would have it, it would be released on June 6th 2006, two days before our presentation!!


So now, I aim to spend a few more caffeine-stimuated hours tonight fixing this situation and hope that by dawn, I can provide and inter-connect between gCal supplied date and time information and weather.gov database. If this gets to work then I guess I'd just have to go to bed!

The Blank Keyboard!!

For those who type with their eyes' closed!!!

http://www.daskeyboard.com/

Project Updates

This is been a very progressive week. Plenty of coffee, late-nights, and more importantly: Learning!

1. RSS feeds from www.weather.com were parsed. These feeds were previously generated from a php scripts.
2. The xml file is accessed through Asynchonous requests (hence Ajax) such as http_request
3. XML processing using Javascript functions retrieves the specific strings
4. The string is further parsed to extract only the valuable data (i.e. date, weather)
   
5. The string is displayed a an element added to the calendar

To do:
1. Improve display of data
2. Design stylesheets for pop-ups

web 3.0?

Berners' Lee's comments on yet another .com boom. Only this time, its not a bubble.

Project Update. The Week after Sun God!

Its hard to imagine what web-developers would be doing without Firefox! The past week had some progress with the functionalities being documented. There was a brief discussion in the meeting today on how much of it we can complete. So now we have a set of minimum requirements that would established a proof of concept. Even if we are not able to incorporate "Weather collaboration" whereby locations across "My Calendars" and "Others Calendars" are displayes. We will be able to fullfil the requirements of "My Locations" i.e., weather for locations found in "My Calendars". Took me 2 days to complete the document, although it could have been done faster (Yeah if there wasn't Sun God!). Hoping Erics gets the documentation into the wiki!

This week, Eric and I aim to figure out how the "Weather Box" can be contained inside "Event Box", while Kelly and Karen play around with the side bars and menus. I hope no one figures out our "secret location" of our meeting spot and all the cool gadgets that we use to make our meetings more efficient! (wink wink!)

Its all about User Interface Baby!

Firefox is the best product of 2005, followed closely by Gmail! Here you go:
Best products of 2005
by PC World

Famous Non-Google, non-Yahoo Ajax apps!

Meebo!

• Browser-based IM client supporing AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber and GTalk
• Simple and useful
• Requires no downloads
  

Periodic Table of Elements

• For Chemistry students!
  

Del.icio.us Director

• Would have been our ambitious class-project if they didn't come up with it before!
  

Kiko

• A general purpose online calendar
• Elegant interface and design
• API coming soon

Backbase RSS Reader

• Still in demo, but nice

Backpack

• To-do list, organizer and project manager

Amazon Zuggest

Time-Tracker

• Personal Time-management tool
  

S.W.O.T Team

The jury has spoken and the verdict is out! We have finally nailed down our project plan: Simulate the Google Calendar with Weather Alerts. After careful consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of both our options (Del.icio.us & gCAL), we performed a very business-like S.W.O.T analysis on both cases. These were my conclusions:

Online Bookmark Managers

Strengths
1. Good Visual Design and Interactivity will make the project successful
2. Very user-oriented
3. Patrick LOVES the idea ;-)

Weaknesses
1. Stiff competition, with many people in and outside of class working on the idea
2. Lack of innovation in the idea: We aim to re-design the UI of an existing idea

Opportunities
1. Scope for understanding the nuances user-centered front-end and data-base heavy back-end.

Threats
1. Picking up several database technologies when we would rather focus on UI
2. People are already working on the idea in and outside of class

gCAL and Weather: SWOT!?

Strengths
1. Innovative and Exciting
2. Simulating the gCal interface is a valuble experience
3. Ajax style will be heavily used
4. Involves more Client-side design

Weaknesses
1. Working with the gCal API requires a lot of research
2. gCal is still in Beta Stage
3. The interface will only display the weather and would not enable the user to update events

Opportunities
1. We get to play around with gData
2. gWeather can be extended to provide RSS feeds to Google personalized homepage

Threats
1. Will be able to finish it on time?
2. Making the interface to look as close as possible to gCAL will be a challenge- as we would not like the user to get accustomed to two different designs

Homework III

Click Here for Homework 3

Need API?

Check this out!

Homework Two

Hello and welcome to my Homework! I resigned the CSS descriptions of my blog giving it a new look! Although I am not entirely satisfied with it, I think it was a good way to brush up on my CSS knowledge!

And I'm finally glad that my team issues are resolved! Go Wombats!!! (tentatively!)

Week Four- More Del-icio-us!!!

Given the growth of the web-surfing culture, the need for online bookmarking has increased. Websites such as del.icio.us and furlit.com cater to this need improving the surfing experience of millions of users. However it is our observation that their user-interface needs tremendous improvement. We have formulated the goals of our project by understanding the basic functionality of online bookmarking sites and the downsides of their user-interface.

Current Situation

Primary functionality of Online bookmarks Managers

• Allows users to save visited links on the go, by posting the links into their web-accounts
• Customizable tags to help u associate websites names with generic terms (such as email, movies, blogs etc)
• Provisions for sorting links based on frequency of a user's visit to the link
• Provides a count of people who have saved the same website (providing means to collaborate with people of common interests)
• Allows views of popular and recommendable tags to help discover websites catering to user's interests

Downside

• Lack of visualizations and other features that would help a user to identify bookmarks faster
• Tags can be ambiguous, when the user provides different names to bookmarks of the same "taggable" category
• Limits the number of sites that could be displayed in a page, requiring the user to navigate through several pages to find a bookmark to even the most visited sites
• Search provision is either unavailable or unsatisfactory
• Does not display or save images

Project Vision

The scope of the project is very large, with plenty of features that could be accomodated. However, through the course of this quarter, we aim to narrow down and implement the most significant design changes and functionalities. We have brainstormed many ideas, as mentioned below. In the next couple of weeks, we will improve on or eliminate some.

1. Our goal is to design the user-experience, targeting non-tech savvy web-surfers for whom convenience of use is a priority
2. The time spent by a user to identify the desired book-mark should be minimum (even across a potential of over hundreds of links)
3. Frequently visited sites must appear clearly\n
4. Provisions for searcing across the website
5. Track Freshness: User's favorite websites will be monitored for frequent updates and appropriately pop-up
6. More visualization
7. Provisions for saving personalized searches such as driving directions etc.\n
8. Provision for saving images and displaying them, possibly as a slide show\n
9. Come up with a name of our team and website!
10. Search provision is either unavailable or unsatisfactory
11. Does not display or save images

I have a Team

Team name: Haven't decided
Team-members:

Kelly Miyashiro Blog
Karen Au Blog
Eric Pan Blog
Divya Kumar Blog

Hurrah!

Irony

Writely

I love the idea of being able to use Word no matter where I am. I love Firefox so much that I want it to become my Desktop! It gets frustrating to have to email myself copies of my documents and files everytime I create/view one. Writely would solve this problem be providing online security to my documents. I could edit this blog and get it publish from Writely! Besides Google owns it now and I'm pretty sure the UI will be slick!

Week Two

Getting down to business...

Why do I need HTML?

• Documents of the World Wide Web called "webpages". No one connected to the internet can view these pages accurately without using a browser (although there are ways to route some data to a text-viewer that doesn't support GUI). Browsers understand a language called HTML. HTML is used to structure information.
• XHTML is easier to process and maintain. It combines HTML with stricter rules of XML

What about CSS?

• With Cascading Style Sheets, HTML code because much simpler. The persentational attributes of a webpage are written in a CSS file. Based on the type of display you wish (for visually-impaired or for the mobiles) an appropriate CSS file can be chosen.

Week One

Could people without technical expertise be isolated from the progress of the Digital Age, or could great technologies become disregarded as their efficacy is never understood by communities? It is in my opinion that civilizations should never be in a position of choice between the two formidable contentions. Technology is only a tool that enables individuals pursue their passions and livelihood with relative ease and smoothness. The creators of these tools often fail to see that not all share their credentials in understanding the purpose of their inventions. The field of Human Computer Interactions strives to ensure that neither the creators, nor the users need bridge the gap between the two worlds. Interaction Designers are responsible for it.

Through this course, I aim to garner the tools necessary to enhance the experience of a user in the World Wide Web. End-users must be abstracted from the nitty-gritty of programming. Programmers often fail to understand the nuances of web design that could improve the comfort-level a user needs in order to acquire information. Interaction Designers connect the goals of content providers and developers. They play the roles of a programmer, an artist and a manager.

I traversed through a brief history of the World Wide Web this week, and have noted many interesting facts on its evolution, based on some articles. I have summarized them below:

As We May Think

This visionary article by Dr.Vannevar Bush speaks on the impact of tools that could improve collaboration among scientists. The futuristic machine that he speaks of (Memex) sees its naissance in the era of electronic communications and storage we live in today.

Berners-Lee’s Original Proposal

Another inventive proposal, revolutionizing the idea and purpose of Internet, moving it from an isolated link of computers to an evolving network of information systems. He envisioned the usefulness of such a system that later became the World Wide Web.

How It All Started

A chronological representation of how the Internet was shaped from 1945 until 1995.

What is Web 2.0?

My personal favorite of the articles covered, “Web 2.0”, presents an overview of, well, Web 2.0 and its foster children, Google, Yahoo! etc. It compares and contrasts today’s version of WWW to the short-lived Web 1.0 of the “Netscape’ era. The survivors of Web 1.0 are the giants who have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence. This article often suggests that the style in which web-content is connected is similar to the association formed by synapses in the brain. This is the natural flow of information and intelligence. It justifies why Web 2.0 is more than just a meme and describes the phenomena that Google, Overture and other such web-based, service-oriented applications have demonstrated. Software is delivered to the user as a service and not as product. The rise of proprietary databases could result in the free database movement within the next decade. This article also discusses the business models of such services and concludes that we're entering an unprecedented period of user interface innovation, as web developers are finally able to build web applications as rich as local PC-based applications.

AJAX

I’m looking forward to using AJAX in my projects. Ajax isn’t something you can download. It’s an approach — a way of thinking about the architecture of web applications using certain technologies. A summary of AJAX is as follows: AJAX is short for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web. Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.