UC San Diego

Sensors can provide massive amounts of data that can be used to inform individuals of their habits, histories, and provide insight into their personal behaviors. My research looks at expanding data usage beyond the individual, so that communities and relationships can benefit from these rich datasets. One of the big challenges in this space is to find a way to share automatically collected data in a meaningful way. Sharing automatically generated data is one of the few ways that technology can support true implicit interaction, yet it is easy for generated data to feel "spam-like'' to the recipient, leading quickly to frustration and the ignoring of messages. To shed light in this area I have conducted research in three projects; a qualitative study of how people use traditional physical artifacts to support connection, the design and deployment of CoupleVIBE a hands-free, eyes-free implicit mobile location sharing for couples, and CitiSense a mobile air- quality system for collection and sharing in communities